Today was PJ day in our house, when we let the kids wear pajamas all day, no matter how silly it looks, what we do or where we go.

Honestly, there've been a lot of PJ days lately, what with the end of summer camp and school not having started yet. So many, in fact, that family members stopping by for a visit know what it is.

"Oh, it's PJ day," they'll say. "Again."

Yep, it's PJ day, again, and so I took them to the grocery store in 80-degree weather in long-sleeved pajamas. As soon as they were in the shopping cart, I stuffed video games in their hands. Blissfully we meandered, me examining cherries and half-price brie to my heart's content and them doing whatever kids do when they're playing Minecraft.

I'm sure I looked to outsiders like the model of a modern permissive parent, for whom anything goes.

But I find that the older I've gotten, the less I care what others think.

My childless (they might say "child-free") siblings will sometimes comment about how different it was when we were kids, how much children now rule the house.

I'd do things differently, they're thinking.

I don't blame them. Before I had kids, I judged, too.

I have a vivid memory of watching my friend making chicken nuggets for her kids' dinner and thinking, My kids are going to eat exactly what I eat. I'm not making two meals.

I've been punished for that with a child who's underweight and so picky he regularly will turn down ice cream. We were at a birthday party recently and the host asked him if he'd like a slice of cake.

"What kind of cake is it?" he asked suspiciously.

It's CAKE CAKE, I wanted to scream, remembering how overjoyed I was as a child to be offered anything approaching dessert.

But things are different now.

And different isn't always bad.

Yes, our kids aren't as scared of their parents as I was. My parents loved us, but I remember picking switches off a bush in front of our house and walking every day past a belt that hung on a nail over the wall.

The threat created children who were deferential to their parents, never confronting them in any serious regard. But it also made us sneaky, and though my brothers and I were probably better at hiding our bad behavior than the kids of softer parents were, we made plenty of mistakes, both big and small. And I remember grown-ups rarely considering children's feelings as all that important.

But we were allowed as adults to make our own choices about our relationships and careers, which, in turn, probably seemed to my grandparents offensively permissive. They, after all, grew up in poverty in Greece and had a childrearing philosophy that involved rigid discipline and near-total control of their kids' lives, even when they were grown up. My grandparents, I would imagine, also made choices the previous generation would have judged.

And so it goes, on and on.

If we did it differently, or are certain we would, then we judge.

It's caused by our instinct for self-protection, in a way. For if we did wrong as parents or wrong was done to us, then much is called into question. That's why parents are so eager to tell you the right way to feed a baby, to change a diaper, to potty train a toddler: By the right way, they mean "the way I did it."

I try to remember that, when I get judging looks or comments about how I parent.

You may not have done it this way, I think, but that's how I'm doing it.

And, in our house, we like PJ day. You're free to do it another way.

But really, you don't know what you're missing.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

Photo credit: Tim Mossholder at Unsplash