Failure to bear children by a certain age pretty much revokes your privilege to criticize how other people are raising theirs.

But I will simply relay an experience at a St. Louis salad buffet last week.

There was a married couple with two daughters, one about 3 and the other probably 8. The 3-year-old stood shrieking in the middle of the buffet while Mom tried to speak to her slowly and rationally.

"Nona, they have salad ... pizza ... noodles ... or fruit," she said. "Which of those do you want?"

"HAMBURGER!!!"

"Nona, they have salad ... pizza ... noodles ... or fruit ..."

And so on.

Thank heavens The Other Half chose the table right next to theirs or I might have enjoyed my meal. When the 3-year-old refused to slide over or off the bench so her mother could sit down, Mom actually climbed over her daughter, strategically balancing a plateful of salad.

Later, I heard the parents talking.

"Did you hear that marvelous piece on NPR about women in Chechnya?" Dad asked Mom.

There's the problem. Parents whose children can be commanded to scoot over on the bench are not discussing National Public Radio over salad. They're discussing the household bills over Quarter Pounders with cheese.

At least, that's what my folks used to do. They also practiced what I call "creative parenting." As an adult, I remember it from my own childhood, see it a lot today and admire its practitioners. I've compiled a few examples which I'll one day publish in a book titled "Reproduction Is Easy. Raising Kids Is Hard."

Here's an example:

My mother used to constantly nag us to get our shoes out of the living room and put them in our closets. With five kids at home, the living room usually looked like some sort of disorganized Payless outlet.

"If I see those shoes in the living room again, I am going to throw them into the street," Mom warned.

Yeah, right, I thought -- until I returned home from school to see a couple pairs at the end of the driveway. Imagine the thrill of picking them up in front of the neighborhood girls.

Another favorite: When I came home from Sikeston Junior High crying that a certain boy in school made fun of me, she said, "You'd better get used to it, because the world is full of Chris Clarks!"

(The name wasn't really Chris Clark. I just know that stuff gets around, and I don't want the real boy to think I've spent the last 19 years obsessing about his remarks when I only spent 10 years doing so. Then I got some therapy.)

Mom was right. The world is full of Chris Clarks. And she'd get the award for the best creative parenting statement if it weren't for my friend Linda, who calmly tells her daughter, "Suck it up -- it's a man's world."

I know a man whose son kept coming home after curfew because he was out cruising Broadway in Cape Girardeau. On a Saturday night years ago, when the teenage rubberneckers were bumper to bumper on that famed Cape Girardeau strip, that father dropped his 16-year-old off at the west end of Capaha Park and told him to walk the length of Broadway and then home.

When the teen attempted to trim off some distance by cutting through the park, there was his dad parked on West End Boulevard, waiting. The boy was dropped back off at the starting point.

And then there's my co-worker whose 12-year-old son was spending his first summer without a baby sitter. He called the office one afternoon. Here's her end of the conversation:

"Who wants to come over? ... Is he alone? ... For how long? ... Hmmm ... OK, but if you two break anything, I'm killing you, understand?"

Parents like these deserve as many free Quarter Pounders as they can eat.

Heidi Hall is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.