Parenting is a rough gig. Hard work, bad hours, and no vacation days, sick days, or paydays. I have a lot of sympathy for parents, really. But there are some parenting habits that are just inexcusable.

1. Color-coding infants

Gender reveal parties are awfully trendy right now. For those of you that don’t know, gender reveal parties are parties at which expecting parents reveal the sex of their baby to their family and friends, usually through some cutesy means such as a hidden color inside a cake—blue for boys, pink for girls.

Post-gender-reveal-party, the color-coding doesn’t end. If you haven’t noticed, newborn and infant clothes come in a pretty strict binary selection of colors: pink and blue. Aside from the fact that this is a pretty weird way of ensuring even strangers can guess your baby’s genitals on sight, it enforces the gender binary and seems to completely ignore the possibility that a child might identify with any other gender than the one society has assigned it based on its body parts. Newsflash: the gender binary isn’t real, but trans people are. So maybe stop shoving your cissexual-normativity down your children’s throats.

2. Having too many children

I’ll put a little disclaimer here and admit that I don’t really understand why anyone would have even one child. Therefore, the fact that anyone would have multiple children by choice is baffling to me. I have so many questions. How do you keep up with them all? How do you give each of them as much nurturing and attention as they need? How do you afford it? How are you going to pay for college for all of them? How do you not tear your hair out when they’re all asking for different things at once?

Most importantly: why? Why do you need to have so many children? More specifically, why do you feel the need to procreate when there are hundreds of millions of children without parents in the world? How do you even justify it?

3. Hitting kids

Does...does this one really need an explanation? Really? Aside from the fact that hitting a tiny defenseless human is obviously not okay? Really?

Many studies have shown that spanking or hitting your children leads to an increase in aggressive behaviors, antisocial tendencies, and development of mental illness. For those of you who aren’t into science, here’s my personal anecdote: I was spanked as a child, and I can tell you with 100% confidence that the only thing it did was ruin my relationship with my parents, first making me fearful, and later resentful. It doesn’t work, and quite honestly, the fact that so many parents seem to have such an uncontrollable urge to hit their children when they mess up is terrifying.

4. Being dismissive

Being dismissive can take on a lot of different forms, from brushing off a child’s problems or concerns as a simple matter of immaturity to outright refusing to even listen to those concerns. This can be extremely damaging and make children feel as if they’re a burden or ungrateful because they aren’t perfectly happy and stable. There’s nothing worse than feeling like your own parents don’t understand or just don’t care about your problems, however minor they may be.

5. Being too hard on themselves

I’m often hard on parents because I see them making the same mistakes my parents did. But the thing is, parents make mistakes. I get that. Some mistakes are avoidable, but some just come with the territory. I’ve seen plenty of parents who beat themselves up over not taking their kids outside enough or not feeding them the “right” foods at every meal, blaming themselves for anything they might have done that might “ruin” their kids. If a parent is trying, genuinely trying, then they’re already leagues ahead of most parents, and they have every right to take pride in that.