The Perfect Baby Handbook » Mommy Guilt

The legend of the demonic, incompetent babysitter

dale — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 03:59:08 +0000

A SITTER OF BABIES: As depicted, non-evilly, by Norman Rockwell

If you’d somehow failed to notice that babysitters have a bad rep, this Salon.com interview with Miriam Forman-Brunell about her new social history, Babysitter: An American History, is a splendid reminder.

Forman-Brunell is a woman who has clearly spent days watching and re-watching When a Stranger Calls, the 1979 horror movie that she says represents a certain culmination of an urban myth known as “The Babysitter and the Maniac”:

[In this legend], the children are upstairs usually asleep, and the babysitter gets a phone call asking her if she’s checked the children. She gets that phone call three times. After the third time she calls up the police to trace the call. He calls back and they call her to tell her that the man is in the house and that she has to get out of the house immediately. What usually happens is that she runs upstairs and finds the kids have already been murdered.

…That story gets circulated very widely, from coast to coast during the 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Kids actually contribute to the spread of it at summer camps and they share it as a true story. And finally by the end of the 1970s it gets made into a movie, “When a Stranger Calls” [starring Carol Kane as the babysitter]…

When I saw this film, I was quite impressed both by Carol Kane ability to bug out her gigantic eyes to convey fear. Lacking Forman-Brunell’s awareness of babysitter urban myths, I was also blown away by the originality of the twist. The Call, you see, was not just any call….

Sgt. Sacker: Jill, this is sergeant Sacker. Listen to me. We’ve traced the call… it’s coming from inside the house. Now a squad car’s coming over there right now, just get out of that house!

From inside the house! This made quite an impression on me. Partly because my brother, sister, and I did not have a bug-eyed babysitter who might conceivably drift off and let a killer infiltrate our Pleasantview split-level. The stalwart Judy, a future doctor, was a formidable teen who popped popcorn in a iron skillet and rarely, if ever, chatted with seductive strangers on our wall-mounted phone. Many years later, after ensuring that we did not get murdered, she married a man named Wyman. And still dropped by every Christmas with a box of Black Magic chocolates.

You know, I never questioned the the idea of chocolates called Black Magic until now. Maybe Judy was not so benign after all?

Related Posts:
• New York Times book critic comes out as a “baby bulimic”
• Admirably imperfect mom of the week: Stefanie Wilder-Taylor
• The fate of Paris Michael Jackson, according to the world’s meanest astrologer

Every kid needs a Swiss Army Knife—or does she?

dale — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:00:49 +0000

Delightfully stressful scenario: Some 9-year-old who’s already drowning in possessions invites your kid to his or her birthday. You need an appropriate gift, but what? My friend Julie thought she had it nailed: A Swiss Army Knife! Classic, cunning, status-y, and besides, didn’t Angelina Jolie buy Maddox one?

Big mistake: The birthday child’s mother reacted poorly. Namely by glaring, sputtering, and insisting her offspring return the scandalously dangerous gift. See if you can guess which of the following models provoked such a reaction:

1. MY FIRST VICTORINOX by Victorinox Swiss Army, $23. The classic entry level knife, created for kids. As one Amazon.com reviewer raved: “After [my grandson] used the blade to open boxes the presents came in this Christmas, he went outside and used the saw on some small trees and bushes in the yard. Unfortunately most were ornamental. We are still happy with the purchase though. It is sturdy and with modicum of care will last him, I think, into adulthood.”

2. CYBERTOOL 34 by Victorinox 125th Anniversary Collection, $120. A more advanced model, it features a bottle opener, a wire stripper, a “sewing eye,” and, somewhat inappropriately, a corkscrew.

3. GIANT KNIFE by Wenger, $1400. While this compact two-pounder does suggest that the Swiss are crazy obsessive freaks who are too busy carving, jabbing, and unscrewing things to, say, read a book—and, thus, poor role models for a 9-year-old—it does features both a laser pointer and a flashlight.

The New Yorker decimates the “bad parent” stance

dale — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:56:49 +0000

In an enthrallingly smart, clear-headed essay in this week’s New Yorker, Jill Lepore slams the “bad parent” movement into historical context.

PERCEPTIVE: If not dressed appropriately for yoga class.

Lepore’s immediate target is the current bestseller Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace by Ayelet Waldman—the book that triggered a million mommy-blog posts in the dramedy vein (“Oh, thank you for inspiring me to confess my own failings over the next 4,000 words! I’m bad, too! LOL!”), followed by an inevitable backlash (“Hold on, isn’t this outpouring of amusing self-condemnation a bit narcissistic? Is anyone looking after the kids?”).

Lepore, a professor of American History at Harvard who seems almost bored by her own perceptiveness, pinpoints the paradox in Waldman’s book:

[She] insists that how any woman rears her kids is nobody’s never-you-mind. “Let’s all commit ourselves to the basic civility of minding our own business,” she writes. This puts a reader in a tight spot: can I or can I not skip the chapter in “Bad Mother” wherein our author confides her regret over her breasts’ lost buoyancy?

Lepore then shifts, with far more zeal, into her real mission: Tracing the self-conscious obsessiveness of today’s parents back to the 1926 launch of Parents’ magazine. Her dot-connecting is overlong, but brilliant and fascinating. You may want to be an inattentive parent long enough to read it. This bit, naturally, particularly intrigued me:

Middle-class mothers and fathers turned out to be a very well-defined consumer group, easily gulled into buying almost anything that might remedy their parental deficiencies. In 1938, Parents’ peddled a correspondence course: “Add Science to Love and Be a ‘Perfect Mother.’ ”

PS. Just how bad a mother is Waldman, a former lawyer? Her book’s Amazon sales ranking is unintentionally hilarious:

#1 in Books > Entertainment > Humor > Lawyers & Criminals

Five ways to render Violet Affleck harmless

dale — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:39:14 +0000

MOTHER AND MOB-INCITER: Jennifer and Violet in happier times.

Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck’s daughter’s mere existence is endangering her peers, it seems. Hoping to catch Jennifer and Violet, 3, in the scandalous act of going to school, paparazzi routinely mob the entrance of Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Nursery School—nearly trampling less newsworthy toddlers in the process, reported the Los Angeles Times today. Over thirty parents have formally freaked out.

In response, local Councilman Richard Bloom is proposing a “paparazzi-free buffer zone” around the school. Presumably, the goal-oriented hyenas tabloid photographers would be fined for crossing the line, but if that doesn’t work, here’s a few other suggestions Santa Monica authorities might want to consider:

1. Create a large pneumatic tube between the Affleck mansion and the nursery school’s foyer, allowing Jennifer to send Violet to class more discreetly inside a metal cylinder propelled by old tymey vacuum power. If Violet complains of motion sickness, relocate the school discreetly inside the Affleck mansion.

2. Use a Suri-Cruise Cyborg to temporarily disorient paparazzi.

3. Cancel classes until Violet has time to become an awkward, unfascinating adolescent.

4. Encourage all students, including Violet, to wear Violet Affleck masks, prompting paparazzi to flee in confusion.

5. Make the United States a paparazzi-free buffer zone, destroying tabloid magazines and trash TV as financial models, triggering total economic collapse, ruining Jennifer Garner’s and Ben Affleck’s careers, and leaving Violet’s peers to totter towards apocalypse in peace.

The seven ugliest birthday cakes in America

dale — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 03:54:35 +0000

While no few parents are perfect, most try their best, especially in areas such as birthday-cake baking where public failure is particularly awkward.

BAKE-OFF: Nothing says lovin' like something terrifying.

Just ask Guinever, a mommy blogger who inadvertently created this object (right) for her son’s fourth birthday. Allegedly a dinosaur, it looks more like a piece of half-digested asparagus. As she explains, she was the victim of internet fraud:

I followed some instructions online and it just didn’t turn out like the picture. If I recall, it was a line drawing, so maybe the person didn’t actually ever make it themselves. That would explain a lot.

Fortunately, four-year-olds on a sugar high can be remarkably generous when it comes to overlooking cake flaws. Guinever, however, was shaken. In the aftermath, she begged her blog’s readers to post their own cake catastrophes to put hers in perspective. None did.

And so, in the interest of restoring Guinever’s self-esteem, I have collected six other contenders for the title of “America’s ugliest birthday cake.” Which do you think achieves the highest standard of repulsiveness?

1. The Admittedly Ambiguous Grimace Cake

Note the array of question marks. The birthday child would be forgiven for wondering if this were, indeed, a cake, a frosted hatbox, or large quantity of poison. One of my consultants thinks this was an attempt to depict Batman's arch enemy, the Riddler.

2. The Depressed Mouse Cake

This mouse seems so dispirited by the prospect of turning three that she can't even drag herself across the cake to blow out the stupid candle. It is as if she were saying, "Oh, what's the point? Sooner or later, I'm going to find myself trapped in a dead-end job at some mouse-only accounting firm in Denver. If only this pink frosting were quicksand!"

3. The “Oh God, Who Gives a Shit” Cake

The cake gives off an air of neglect. The icing appears to have wilted and died, while those perky alphabet letters are in a state of complete denial. No child should be exposed to this neurotic cake.

4. The Cake with the Lazy Eye

This cake is creepy because you can't tell whether it's looking at you or not. It also has unusually prominent ears for a dessert.

5. The Ill-Advisedly Festive Spider Cake

While there's a certain artistry about the way the baker has used industrial power cords to simulate licorice, this arachnid seems to have eaten too much candy—egged on by his frat-boy spider friends—and then regurgitated it.

6. The Chunk of Prehistoric Tar Cake

At least this cake comes with narrative intrigue: How, exactly, was Dad to blame? By coating it with shoe polish? By gnawing off a corner? By running over it repeatedly with his SUV to drive the evil prehistoric spirits from it? We'll never know.

Black lady soberly laments “ghetto baby names”

dale — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:38:01 +0000

In this thoughtful video, one African-American expresses her conflicted feelings about names such as Bonquisha, Laquitta, and Dayquona—while ripping paper into shreds:

How the New York Times envisions the “end of over-parenting”

dale — Sun, 31 May 2009 03:53:11 +0000

Tensions are running high at Perfect Baby Handbook Worldwide Headquarters on Montague Street. It seems our services are no longer needed! At least according to this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, in which Lisa Belkin proclaims that the days of “helicoptering, smothering mothering…overly enmeshed parenting” or “get-them-into-Harvard-or-bust parenting” are numbered.

It seems as though the newest wave of mothers is saying no to prenatal Beethoven appreciation classes, homework tutors in kindergarten, or moving to a town near their child’s college campus so the darling can more easily have home-cooked meals.

This is how the Times chose to illustrate Belkin’s piece, which is entitled “Let the Kid Be.”

I somehow doubt that this illustration (a pigment ink print by art photographer Julie Blackmon) will reassure anxious parents. As you can see, this baby is devastated about missing out on prenatal Beethoven appreciation classes. And I’m not sure the parents in this scenario are truly “letting the kid be.”

It looks to me that they’ve deviously transformed themselves into large talking green butterflies so that they can continue to hover, rationalize their decision to deprive Baby of prenatal sonatas, and introduce new vocabulary words. I suspect their dialogue with their child is going something like this:

Butterfly Mommy: Don’t worry, mommy and daddy are right here, fluttering devotedly. We have not abandoned you!

Butterfly Daddy: That’s right. We just didn’t want the New York Times to know we were still oppressing you, because that’s “out.” So I’m posing as a butterfly, specifically an Ornithoptera Goliath Supermus…can you say “Ornithoptera Goliath Supermus”?

Butterfly Mommy: And I’m posing as—

Butterfly Daddy: Your mother is a gnat.

Butterfly Mommy: How dare you?!

Butterfly Daddy: God! Can’t you take a joke?

Why are toddlers’ lives so ceaselessly tragic?

dale — Mon, 18 May 2009 06:48:40 +0000

ALLEGEDLY DOOMED: Toddler

As someone who tries to keep abreast of infant current-events, I regularly check Google News for key words like “baby,” “parenting,” “tiny genius,” and “toddler.” Here’s one thing I’ve found: Nothing good ever happens to toddlers.

It’s like there’s some unwritten rule that journalists can only use the word “toddler” in tragic contexts. (Do your own search if you doubt.) And since, much like “apple cobbler” and “teeter-totter,” it’s not a word that lends itself to tragedy, reading 12 catastrophic toddler headlines in a row can get a bit surreal:

• Toddler Burned by Coffee at iHop
• Toddler Falls from Second Story Window
• Toddler Falls into Open Storm Drain
• Toddler Okay after Falling out of Car
• Toddler Found Wandering Alone
• Toddler Found Wandering at 1 a.m.
• Toddler Wanders into Path of Roller Coaster
• Bullet Shot Through Man’s Thigh, Hits Toddler
• Toddler Hit by Tram in Blackpool
• Toddlers who Dislike Spicy Food Racist, Says Report
• Could Fat Babies Mean Fat Toddlers?

It’s not all bad, though:

• Toddler Improves After Near-Drowning

Related Posts:
• Hot parenting trend: Death-defying child transportation
• Photographic proof: Imperfection is inevitable
• Inside the “bad parent” craze

Which baby names ensure success? Ask Dr. Mehrabian!

dale — Tue, 12 May 2009 23:20:10 +0000

A perfect baby name predestines success without giving off the stench of banality. At least, that was my theory when I began researching The Perfect Baby Handbook. But I needed proof. Luckily, I stumbled upon “Baby Name Report Card: Beneficial and Harmful Baby Names,” a qualitative analysis based on large-scale surveys conducted over 10 years by Dr. Albert Mehrabian, a professor emeritus at UCLA. (I realize this sounds fishy—me being a Dale Hrabi and him a Mehrabian—but I’m not making this up.)

HE THAT SHALL BE NAMED: Dr. Albert Mehrabian

The doctor was demanding $26 for his study (dated 2002), which seemed rip-offish. Still, as a journalist, I didn’t hesitate: What if my own name had been insidiously harming me all these years?

A convincingly nerdy looking CD arrived in the mail. Fascinating. Dr. Mehrabian’s team had asked people to rate thousands of names (from 0 to 100) on four scales: ethical/caring, popular/fun, successful, and masculine/feminine. I quickly located the data on “Dale.” Cringe: 50 on ethics? A bleak 43 on popular/fun, a measly 36 on the success scale and I can’t talk about the rest. In short, my parents predestined me to be a boring, androgynous failure with iffy morals.

Here’s the good news: I’m going to save you 26 bucks by revealing the top 10 most and least “successful” names for boys and girls circa 2002, according to Mehrabian and crew:

WINNER: "Jacqueline"

Top 10 Girl Names “That Connote a Successful Person”: 1. Jacqueline. 2. Morgan. 3. Elizabeth. 4. Katherine. 5. Victoria. 6. Lauraine. 7. Susan. 8. Catherine. 9. Kate. 10. Madeleine. Note: Madeleine and Morgan, both perceived as glory-bound, tanked on the popular/fun scale. And no, I can’t explain Lauraine.

Top 10 Girl Names That Connote Failure: 1. Wilma. 2. Weeza. 3. Virgie. 4. Trixie. 5. Tina. 6. Swoosie. 7. Suzee. 8. Soosie. 9. Sissy. 10. Mush. Note: Runners-up include Siouxsie, but not her Banshees.

WINNER? "Ross"

Top 10 Boy Names “That Connote a Successful Person”: 1. Steven. 2. Ross. 3. Christopher. 4. James. 5. Robert 6. David. 7. Kenneth. 8. Parker. 9. Thomas. 10. Madison. Note: The high ranking of “Madison” seems suspiciously 2002. Also: Ross? Did none of the survey takers watch “Friends”?

Top 10 Boy Names That Connote a Washed-up Loser: 1. Rufus. 2. Rude. 3. Butch. 4. Angel. 5. Alfie. 6. Garee (Gary). 7. Normee. 8. Bud. 9. Petie. 10. Phonso. Note: So if you really want to screw your kid, just name him “Rude Butch Angel.”

Perfect babydom slowly overtaking the Bay Area!

dale — Mon, 04 May 2009 03:37:25 +0000

Judging from Amy Graff’s hilariously frank observations on the SFGate’s blog, The Mommy Files, the Bay Area is fast approaching a perfection crisis. Apparently, the local demand for infant perfection is outstripping the supply, forcing left-leaning parents to resort to desperate measures: bragging, rationalizing, and meretricious hand-sterilizing.

DOLLED UP: Bay Area resident engages in gender-neutral play

In her lists, “Stuff S.F. Parents Like: Part I” and “Part II,” Graff reports on parents who appear to have studied The Perfect Baby Handbook—Ardent Liberals Edition a little too closely. Among their identifying behaviors:

Bragging about the diversity at their children’s schools “Over 60 percent of the kids at Emma’s school qualify for free or reduced lunch so I feel like she’s getting a ‘real’ experience.”

Buying their boys Barbies “I’m really trying to shelter him from gender stereotypes so he can become his own person.”

Sending their kids to public schools “We didn’t get into a school in San Francisco in Round I or Round II. In fact, we didn’t get into a school until 10 days after school started…but we absolutely LOVE our school.”

Bragging about their child’s friend who has two mommies or daddies. “We spent the weekend up in Tahoe with one of Lily’s best friends from preschool. You know her friend has two moms, and we all bonded over the weekend.”

Talking about their children’s friends’ rich parents. “We had a play date at their three-story house in PacHeights. I felt so uncomfortable there. I don’t think I’d want a big house. I much prefer our 1,000-square-feet in Noe Valley.”

Potty training their 1-year-olds “Do you even know how bad diapers are for the environment?”

(via Strollerderby)