Due to my studies I also know alot about child development but I don't think that is going to make me a better parent.
This got me thinking. I don't think my research prior or since DS's birth makes me a 'better parent' than someone else is to their child, I think it makes me a better parent to my own child. It also helps me be the parent I want to be, because I decided what kind of parent I wanted to be already - not wanting to try a bit of everything, because I knew that certain contemporary parenting techniques and ideas did not gel with the kind of parent I wanted to provide for my child, nor gel with my ideas of the kind of kid I wanted to produce.
So, I think that where I do find myself evaluating the merits of someone else's parenting, it's not so much in terms of "my parenting is better", it's in terms of realising that watching some parents reinforces that my parenting is more respectful of the child as a person (rather than a chattel or ball of flesh designed to interrupt my life), and I find myself more patient because I do have that academic awareness of physiological and cognitive development, the knowledge of the importance of touch and emotional availability of the primary caregiver and a more receptive ear to the voice of intuition than a lot of other parents I see around me.
In this way I 'judge', not in the way that I think parents 'should' do what I do, because a) I don't 'should', and b) I would like them to just get in touch with love and compassion to parent their children, not copy what I do, because that is just as disconnected as following conventional, one-size fits all parenting advice (or worse still, practicing maladaptive patterns copied from their own parents). If there's one 'should' I use, it's that parents 'should' employ utmost love and compassion in all dealings with their children. That's the 'right' starting point, as far as I'm concerned!