Last weekend I was among a group of family members attending a memorial service held for my wife's late cousin. As the service was about to start, the officiator asked those of us in the audience to turn off our pagers and cell phones and assume a decorum suitable to the solemnity of the occasion.

As folks in the audience reached into purses and pockets to silence ring tones, he looked around the room and noted aloud that he didn't see any small children.

"But just in case I've missed them," the man said, "if a youngster starts to fuss, do the right thing and take them outside the room."

"Do the right thing." the man said. He made it sound so absolute and so simple and that appealed to me. So I made a mental note to myself to write today about how simple it is sometimes to just do the right thing.

It turns out that theme has eluded me.

When our children were young, my wife and I were quick to remove them from circumstances where they were disruptive, crying or annoying. As a result of that policy, my son Jeff and I spent a lot of quality time in the parking lots of churches, restaurants and the like. My wife Deb used to complain that we had too much fun off on those "time outs." She was probably right.

So when I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and this basic idea, I reasoned to myself that my wife and I always "did the right thing," at least when it came to silencing our children. I further reasoned that it's just not that hard of a task to accomplish.

On my way to self-righteous street I stumbled on several road bumps.

The first bump in the road to self-righteousness came when I considered my own Grandmother's plight. My Grandmother navigated life as a single parent from the time her two daughters were under the age of three. I don't know what her habit was when my Mom or Aunt fussed. All I know is that my Grandmother was the sole breadwinner, and that life was pretty grim and lonely.

I had to ask myself whether I would have wanted my own Grandmother sent shamed out the door if her children were fussing. Was that the right thing I was so enthusiastically applauding?

The late columnist Erma Bombeck once wrote about a situation she experienced in church. A child in the pew in front started to fuss and eventually turned around to look at Bombeck. Bombeck and the child exchanged smiles and a chance momentary connection until the glaring mother swatted the child, hissing him into submission.

Bombeck wrote of her rage in that moment when she witnessed innocence punished so unjustly and joy snuffed out quite capriciously. "All this," Bombeck wrote, in a place where inspiration and joy are sought.

The final bump in the path to the "right thing" came in a weekend report I heard on National Public Radio. That report examined a childrearing program in Harlem aimed at breaking the cycle of poverty experienced by generations of families in that community.

According to the commentator, children of poverty are disciplined by parents who often lack the tools to best accomplish the job. The submissive compliance that yelling and hitting produces in a child stifles the brainbuilding exercise that exploring and testing accomplishes. The quiet passive child is not necessarily the aim of child rearing.

"Do the right thing," the official charged us. How simple. How straightforward. I thought I knew right away what that meant.