Guess what? They do know. You’re going to be the boss or the mom or the dad whether you’re good or bad at your job. The kids or workers may be pushing your buttons, but you can say, “You are pushing my buttons, and I want you to please stop it!” Or you can recognize that that’s what’s happening and take a break and try to get over it.

The same thing goes for pets. I’m a huge dog lover. I grew up with wirehair terriers, an English setter, and the aforementioned sad-sack basset hound, Brandy.

I love a mutt. I tend to look at purebreds these days a little differently than I used to. They seem to have so many health problems, and then the vet just says, “It’s in the breed.” It’s like royalty who used to inbreed and whose progeny ended up with three eyes.

Anyway, when babies cry on the plane, I never think it suggests bad parenting. But when dogs bark constantly, I tend to think it’s bad dog-raising.

I live next door to a loud West Highland terrier that barks all the time. Luckily, I can’t hear it through the wall, but I can from the hallway. That to me doesn’t seem like a happy animal.

I blamed my sister and her husband for the fact that their yellow Lab barked all the time and couldn’t even sit on command. I had sessions with the dog whenever I was there to try to teach her tricks, but I didn’t visit frequently enough for the training to stick. Ultimately, I realized the dog was in fact quite smart. Her attitude was, I’m not going to sit if I don’t have to!

When I was a child, we had an English setter that was a real handful. She ran away all the time and would occasionally bite my sister or me. One Thanksgiving Day, my grandmother was stirring gravy, my mother was basting the turkey, and my sister and I were ambling around the kitchen. The dog was missing yet again. Then, suddenly, the dog burst through the screen door with a rabbit carcass and proudly used it to knock over everything in the room.

“Aw,” I said. “Look, she’s brought food for Thanksgiving!” I was very little.

Does anyone remember Barbara Woodhouse’s 1982 book No Bad Dogs: The Woodhouse Way?We bought it to help us with our terrier Raffles. Within an hour of the book’s purchase it had been devoured—by the dog.

When I was a child, I took Brandy for obedience training. She was great through the entire thing, but on the day of the exam she sat down and would not budge. I yanked at her so hard I pulled her collar off. Still, she wouldn’t take the exam, and we failed. That meant we couldn’t get the certificate of completion, and I really wanted it, because both our names were on it and I wanted proof that I’d worked hard. So I took her back and did the whole thing again. Once more, she was brilliant all the way through, and then, at the exam, she sat down and wouldn’t show her stuff.

Well, I bawled my eyes out from disappointment, but eventually I came to realize that she just liked the social activity of it all. Dumb like a fox, she thought: If I keep failing it, he’ll keep bringing me back!Well, twice was enough for me. And the truth is, she was impeccably behaved when she wasn’t being tested, so obedience school wasn’t a waste, even if I didn’t get that piece of paper.

Some people tell me I would be a good parent because I am able to stay so calm even when designers are behaving like sugared-up toddlers all around me. I’m always flattered when people say that to me, especially because I love children, and I like to imagine I’d be good at raising them. But maybe it only seems that way because I’m not actually a parent. With my students, I could walk away and go home at the end of the night to my own cozy apartment. Everyone’s a great parent if they don’t have kids.

I do feel very protective of children, though, and frequently fear for young people I encounter with parents who tolerate—or, more often, model—insane behavior.

The scariest instance of this was one day when I saw a mother literally putting her children’s lives at risk.

I left my dentist’s office in New York’s Greenwich Village and walked west to Sixth Avenue. I waited at a red light as cars passed along. At the corner beside me was a woman with two small children, one of whom was in a stroller. To my shock and horror, the woman entered the path of moving traffic using the child’s stroller as a battering ram with the full intention of crossing the street no matter what.

The older child, her daughter of about four, was by her side, but the onslaught of traffic clearly frightened the little girl to a point of total paralysis. She stood in the middle of the street while a car screeched to a halt a mere foot from her. Her mother, now successfully across the street, returned to her, yanking the now sobbing child by the arm, yelling, “When the sign says ‘Don’t Walk,’ it means run!”

I was shaken by the incident and felt bad that I hadn’t done anything to stop it. Should I have run to the child’s rescue? Should I have scolded the mother?

As a nonparent myself, I never want to assume I know better than a child’s own mother or father, but sometimes even those of us without kids can identify dangerous behavior. The parents I have relayed this story to agree that it seems pretty psychotic. They also typically enjoy the following story, about the ultimate in permissive parenting.

I was walking home on Broadway from the Ninety-sixth Street subway station. It was one of those rare summer nights in the city when the temperature is bearable, the humidity low, and sweet air wafts in from Central and Riverside parks.

All the restaurants with sidewalk tables were full and boisterous. Everyone was happy to escape air-conditioning.

A few blocks from my apartment, I saw a young boy of three or four walk up to a table of al fresco diners. He greedily grabbed some pasta with red sauce off one stunned woman’s plate and proceeded to eat it with both hands.

The boy’s mother spoke to her son about the incident, but not with the admonition that I was expecting, which would have gone something like this: “Stop! What are you doing? That is not your food! Apologize to these diners at once. You are in trouble, young man!”

Instead, she took a napkin from an empty table, wiped his hands, and said, “Darling, if you like that, then we’ll go inside and get some to take home.” She never even acknowledged the diners!

Every time I walk by that restaurant, I wonder, Where are that mother and son right now? I would say this child was doomed to grow up to be a social outcast, but it’s altogether possible he will grow up to be a star. I see a lot of similarly terrible behavior on sets.

A celebrity who shall remain nameless announces to an underling, “I’d like a Diet Coke. I want a twelve-ounce glass and five ice cubes, each no bigger than three-quarters of an inch in length.” Once the Diet Coke arrives, the celebrity says, “These ice cubes are at least an inch, and I count six. This is unacceptable.” And fling!He throws the drink across the room.

In academia, too, you see this kind of outrageous behavior. I knew a dean who had soup delivered to his office. I once saw him bring a spoonful up to his mouth, scream, “This soup isn’t hot enough!” and hurl the container across his office onto a wall, which I noticed already had stains on it.

Is this really happening?I thought. But I was glad I saw it, because if someone had told me the story, I would say it couldn’t possibly be true.

What enables this kind of behavior? What allows people to think that they are permitted to behave that way?

Don’t even get me started on Isaac Mizrahi. In my view, he’s one of the world’s biggest divas.

One time, Isaac threw a fit about a security guard from the second-floor showroom at Liz Claiborne Inc.’s Times Square offices. Why, you may ask? Was he stealing? Harassing guests? Showing up late? No, he was wearing brown.