The Perfect Baby Handbook » Observations

Perfect babies, perfect parents, and FAILure

dale — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 04:49:12 +0000

“My child must succeed! I will give her every opportunity to succeed! She will learn to write tricky words like ‘constitution’ in a lovely, calligraphic hand, but her vocabulary will never include ‘failure’!” It was such modest claims that inspired me to satirize competitive parenting in The Perfect Baby Handbook.

OOPS: Originally conceived as a guide to abstinence.

Now, it turns out, that while I was busy satirizing and you were trying not to be too easily satirized, the verb “fail” was turning into the noun “FAIL” (always capitalized) and becoming a cultural phenomenon.

Exhibit A: The website, FAILblog.org, launched in Jaunary, 2008, by the same ingeniously simplistic people who brought you LOLcats. FAILblog invites users to submit images of things that have been done badly, horribly, or disastrously. You might, for example, be able to spot a certain, subtle flaw in this book cover (right).

Exhibit B: This weekend, The New York Times magazine devotes an “On Language” column to the phenom, reporting that Americans are applying the “FAIL” concept to everything from CNN’s coverage of the Iraq protests to clumsy cows, from Bill Clinton to Amazon.com snafus. The recession, one observer tells the Times, has only fueled the temptation to see the world through FAIL-tinted glasses:

“It really started to take off when the financial industry decided to — ahem — fail…Talk about the perfect storm.” The fail meme met the financial crisis head on at a Senate hearing in September, when a demonstrator held up a sign reading “FAIL” behind Henry Paulson Jr., the former Treasury secretary, and Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve.

“Shut up, shut up!” you may be saying. “What about my baby?” Well, just make sure you don’t send him or her to this not-so-august institution:

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Why your baby will grow up to be a Scary Information Glutton

dale — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 03:59:53 +0000

Everyone loves a clairvoyant. Especially when she predicts the future with as much bluster and certainty as Penelope Trunk, who pens a syndicated business column called the “Brazen Careerist”—and focuses her forecasting on one’s own beloved child.

DECISIVE: "Hi Mommy, you're fired."

Trunk’s most recent projection, “What Generation Z will be like at work,” is irresistible. In a nutshell, it seems that your baby is going to grow up to terrify all of his or her older coworkers. Your child won’t be a team player, he’ll process information at “lightning speed,” and he’ll be busy swallowing “neuro-enhancers” (the successors to ADHD medication) that render him even more freakishly intelligent than you’d hoped.

Of course, Trunk’s take is a bit more nuanced than that, and stuffed with highly tempting, occasionally tangential links. For example:

For those of you who doubt the power of naming, check this out: If your name begins with a K you will strike out more often in baseball. If your name begins with a letter toward the end of the alphabet you could be economically penalized.

Don’t you want to know how an X name will lead to economic penalty? I did!

Until I discovered that the explanation is overly wonky and heavy on unzippy terms like “alphabetical discrimination.” That said, I did learn that children whose full names reduce down to “negative initials,” such as P.I.G. and B.U.M. are “especially likely to die from psychological causes, such as suicides and self-inflicted accidents.” Fun fact!

Admirably imperfect mom of the week: Stefanie Wilder-Taylor

dale — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 03:59:16 +0000

It’d hard to be funny when you’re hanging out with tiny people who see no compelling reason to avoid gaping pits, ravenous dingoes, speeding Camaros, and large houses made of gingerbread. The parenting experience more typically facilitates freaking out, not the writing of a bestselling humor book.

VISION QUEST: Stefanie's book

So when someone like the truly hilarious Stefanie Wilder-Taylor* can turn parenthood into two such volumes, Sippy Cups Are Not For Chardonnay and Naptime is the New Happy Hour, the conventional wisdom is: Keep churning out similar books whose titles allude to boozing—like Kindergarten Rhymes with Scotch-on-the-Rocksergarten—and try to cash in.

Stefanie didn’t take that route. Instead she wrote It’s Not Me, It’s You, a casually outrageous memoir of her wild-child, pre-marriage 20s and 30s. It basically challenges her fans to deal with her rougher edges and get past the notion that moms aren’t allowed to have a racy back-story or scandalous thoughts. Stefanie recounts distinctly un-maternal tales: her erstwhile fascination with strippers’ breasts, her unwitting misadventures with crack cocaine, and her bittersweet attempt to reunite with her estranged dad, a brilliant stand-up comic who’d devolved into a brilliant pothead.

It’s a brave, funny book. Comedy depends on honesty—for something to be funny, the truth must be in there, somewhere. But while comics like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin were recklessly candid, and Margaret Cho and Kathy Griffin push the confessional edge, most “mommy humorists” are honest only up to a certain, decorous, wholesome, ultimately boring point.

I particularly liked the chapter about Stefanie’s attempts to be a Big Sister, and the loathsome, lonely child with whom she’s paired. It’s funny, sad, compassionate, infuriating, did I mention funny, and very, very real.

*Full disclosure: Stefanie “blurbed” The Perfect Baby Handbook, and has given me great advice. And, irrelevantly, is pretty hot. And, no, that’s not her on the cover of her book.

The fate of Paris Michael Jackson—according to the world’s meanest astrologer

dale — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 03:59:53 +0000

So I just discovered that Michael Jackson’s daughter, Paris, was born on April 3. The good news: So was I; it’s a really nice birthday. The bad news: Someday, Paris is going to read about herself in The Secret Language of Birthdays, this infamously rude, famously “accurate,” best-selling astrology book—and find out that she’s “demanding, self-centered, and naive.”

PARIS: Star-crossed

April 3, according to author Gary Goldschneider, a Dutch stargazer and Yale-educated psychoanalyst, is “The Day of the Fulcrum.” If we take his word for it, Paris is fun-loving and good natured, but also “manages to be at the center of things,” and likes to order her environment and control those around her. Consequently, she detests being ignored!

Also, he specifies, as an April 3 creature, Michael Jackson’s daughter will get fat and develop crippling headaches.

Lucky Paris! Your future as an obese, migraine-afflicted, control freak who likes to be mobbed by the paparazzi awaits you.

It could be worse. This cruelly irresistible book claims that babies born on October 4th are incorrigible, headstrong, and foolhardy while July 22nd infants (“The Day of Occupational Fluctuations”) are unlucky and stressed-out.

Michael Jackson bleached his kid’s hair…both cruelly and cheesily!

dale — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:55:07 +0000

Newish photos of Michael Jackson’s children have revealed that the eldest—Michael Joseph Kingly Son of Jackson His Highness, Jr.—was, at one point, a cheap bottle blonde. Presumably not by choice. Although fresher scandals about Prince’s parentage, biological and otherwise, are arriving fast and furious, the hair thing has really touched a nerve among parents. Especially those who need to be outraged often enough to sustain a lively blog.

THREE FACES OF JR: It don't matter if you're white or really, really white.

Not that it’s loving to bleach a child’s hair to the point where he looks like Siegfried, Roy, or one of the Village of the Damned zombies (who, incidentally, wore wigs with built-in domes so they appeared to have extra-large brains).

INSPIRATION? Blondes have more fun, except when they're possessed.

But what’s really behind the revulsion and concern these photos have provoked? If it’s just the evidence of bad parenting (bleaching a child’s hair can, after all, burn her tender skin, compel her to yodel, lead people to conclude you’ve just kidnapped her and must disguise her, or cause allergic reactions; just ask Sasha Baron Cohen), is it really so shocking that someone known as Wacko might exercise poor judgment?

I think it goes deeper. I think these photos make all too vivid a broader problem: our tendency to “package” or perfect our children, while denying their natural selves: the occasionally messy, lazy selves who just want to play mindlessly now and then with uneducational materials like dirt.

As a helpful reminder to avoid imposng perfection on your child, you might want to buy this prieceless 1988 sculpture, “Michael Jackson and Bubbles,” by high-kitsch (and apparently clairvoyant) artist, Jeff Koons. And then you know, just keep it out in the mud room.

SUN-IN: Portrait of the artist as a young, racially ambiguous figurine.

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

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:

What do this notorious mom and this ambiguous rocker have in common?

dale — Sat, 30 May 2009 03:53:51 +0000

TWIN PEAKS: Sextuplet mom Kate Gosselin and American Idol Adam Lambert

Could it be their hair? I am currently working on an in-depth analysis of that baffling thing on top of sextuplet mom Kate Gosselin’s head (seriously; the website The Daily Beast has commissioned me to do so). I don’t follow Kate’s reality show, “Jon & Kate plus 8,” so I had to quickly familiarize myself with this tightly wound, excessively reproductive mother.

As I watched her berate someone-or-other on YouTube, it occurred to me that she and the far more amiable Adam Lambert of “American Idol” have the same hairdo. Which is to say, the same lesbian hairdo.

Except that, when you dye it vampiric black, it becomes an emo-kid hairdo.

Update: Eager for more insights into this overbearing-mom coif? For striking evidence that Kate also resembles a Chinese Crested dog—and much more—see the full slide show on The Daily Beast here.

The creepiest perfect babies in the world

dale — Thu, 21 May 2009 06:00:16 +0000

This adorable creature used to have a normal mouth. Then the Italian photography duo, Winkler+Noah revised her slightly to make a point about excessively motivated parenting with their latest art project, “The Puppet Show.”

The exhibition, featuring 30 photographs of similarly eery Charlie McCarthy kids, recently captivated Milan. In their statement, the photographers (whose real names are Romina Raffaelli and Stefano Marinui) pulled no punches, defining their focus as:

Children we ask too much of, to be perfect, like dolls. Children who have become the sons and daughters of…pretense and image…who are inevitably losing their naturalness.

The point, they’ve said (in mellifluous Italian words that often end in “i”) is to remind people that “the best present we can give to children is to let them be children.” And to keep them away from Winkler+Noah.

Related Post:
• Photographic proof: Imperfection is inevitable

The invisible babies of Los Angeles

dale — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:39:58 +0000

NOT AVAILABLE: Suri Cruise

As previously mentioned, Perfect Baby Handbook headquarters has temporarily relocated to Los Angeles. Silver Lake, to be exact. Though the staff and I had eagerly anticipated the opportunity to study L.A. perfect-baby culture in depth, so far we’ve spied only two infants. One was introduced to me as “very close to perfect.” And I couldn’t argue that this baby’s implausibly ample hair did conjure up a certain cover of Vanity Fair (right).

The other little one, encountered at a backyard barbecue, already had her own handbook (her dad designed The Hipster Handbook) and had eyes as hypnotically beautiful as a Siberian Husky.

I kept wondering where all the other L.A. babies were. Concealed behind a gate in Bel Air? Taking in an extremely introductory acting class at Stella Adler or Elizabeth Mestnik? Meeting with each other in secret Starbucks-For-Babies-Only?

Then I realized they were probably inside cars, which was anticlimactic.

P.S. A glamorous actress floating in the pool where I’m staying just gave me a baby-spotting tip: “Just walk around the Silver Lake Reservoir…they’re all there!”