The Perfect Baby Handbook » Trends

The perfect parent’s iPhone apps

dale — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:07:57 +0000

YAY: "Dad has an iPhone, is finally cool!"

Once, in an era known as pre-2007, you could raise children without an iPhone. This is no longer possible, implies Time magazine, with this list of hot iPhone apps for “new moms.”

The “BabyCam” app, which tops the list, solves a timeless problem:

Getting your baby to smile for the camera long enough to take a perfect picture can be a challenge. Using BabyCam’s sound button to play one of the app’s fifteen prerecorded noises—bells, drums, doorbells and songs including “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” helps.

For parents who prefer to snap an imperfect picture, there is also the “BabyPissOff” app. Use its sound buttons to play an arrangement of “Mary Had a Little Unsmiling Lamb” that’s heavy on blaring trumpets, shrill oboes, hisses, rattles, yelps, groans, keening, and a woman’s voice repeating, “Not in service. Please try your call again.”

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:

Related Posts:
• Family togetherness FAIL
• Babysitting FAIL
• Homophobia FAIL

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!

Family togetherness is a trend that makes you wear all-white and behave inappropriately

dale — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:58:08 +0000

If you haven’t quite decided what your favorite parenting trends of 2009 are quite yet, please keep an open mind. Surfnetparents.com would like to suggest this one, “Nature Vacations”:

Note the caption: Apparently, the crazy fad that’s leading American families to conduct public orgies on dude ranch holidays while wearing “innocent” white clothing never dies.

I’m confused. Why is this vacationing family behaving like drunken, bisexual sailors? Why are they all dry-humping each other? Furthermore, what happens when some easily shocked horse from a neighboring ranch trots up to that fence in the background and starts neighing in horror?

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this. Let’s see what a “nature vacation” actually involves:

Hitting up hot springs, seeing geysers, hiking to the top of high peaks…be trendy with the kids this year…[and enjoy] the satisfaction that comes from a day spent in fresh air, and invigorating exercise.

Hot? Geysers? Peaks? Satisfaction? This doesn’t sound entirely innocent. Still, let’s not judge. Let’s allow this hedonistic family to have their reckless, imbalanced, psychologically damaging fun. They will, of course, discover that there’s always a price to pay the morning after, as this video reveals:

Facebook updates about babies bring both joy and heavy sarcasm

dale — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:38:00 +0000

Witheringly funny website alert: If you haven’t visited STFU, Parents, a new blog which celebrates the peculiar inanities of parents’ Facebook updates, proceed with caution. It is a 100 percent sentimentality-free zone.

The site works like this: Someone submits a screen-shot of a gushy parent’s Facebook page to STFU, which posts the screen-shot and relishes it absurdities. Or, as in this case, its punishing monotony:

Thanks to Friend of Perfect Baby Handbook, Marjorie Ingall—mirthful, brainy mom of two—for suggesting the site.

Outraged mom reacts—sluggishly—to a 2001 teen trend

dale — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:51:55 +0000

Almost all parents excel when it comes to paranoia. For the few who don’t know how to freak out competently on their own, there are syndicated parenting columnists like Debra-Lynn B. Hook to give them a nudge. In a recent piece, Hook uncovers a trend so disturbing she can’t quite process it:

Co-ed sleepovers. I repeat: Teenage girls and teenage boys having a slumber party. Together. At the home of willing parents. Whaaaat?

CORRUPTING INFLUENCE: Sleeping bag.

As incomprehensible as this idea is, Hook—a Kent, OH-based journalist, mother, and African drumming enthusiast—can prove it’s really happening; she references a Time.com report which says the trend “been ’sweeping the teen circuit’ for several years.”

Problem is: The Time story in question was published in January, 2001. The so-called sweeping took place in the ’90s. Which isn’t to say Time’s coverage doesn’t merit attention. It’s actually quite funny: At one point, the writer suggests that parents who wish to host slutty sleepovers safely would be well-advised to invest in security systems. That way:

[Any teen] coming or going will set off [the] house alarm. For families without security systems, I suggest that a parent sleep on a cot or couch near the door.

Hook does cite some empirical evidence: Her own 16-year-old daughter, it seems, actually attended a boy/girl post-prom sleepover this May “in a buttercup yellow dress and just the tiniest bit of mascara.” The discovery of this event so stunned Hook she couldn’t quite process it:

“…one of the moms confirmed the kids’ after-party was at her house. The boy-girl after-party. The boy-girl SLEEPOVER after-party.”

In case you’re wondering. a Google search doesn’t exactly confirm that co-ed slumbering is back! and destroying the nation’s fabric. But maybe it is. I’ll do some more checking and see if I can find a 1972 Hartford Courier exclusive or maybe a mention in the 1897 Farmer’s Almanac. Please refrain from panic until we can sort this out.

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

The dark side of being “as cute as a button”

dale — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:50:52 +0000

Yesterday’s creepy encounter with TheCuteKid.com gave me the impression that Americans value Cuteness in their young above, well, everything—and that all kids naturally strive for it, too.

Then I saw this (circa 2007) local-news clip of Autumn Poovey, an Ohio high-school cheerleader who, as her puzzled mother says, “didn’t want to be cute anymore.” Autumn’s problem: chubby cheeks, often considered a benchmark of adorability. “With her pom-poms,” the sympathetic reporter notes, “Autumn also carried years of pain.”

Though no adolescent wants to get teased, “Poofy Poovey” does not seem like the most devastating slur. Still when your child comes to you pleading: “Mom, I just want my cheeks taken out. I want my cheeks gone!”—what can you do other than direct her to terrifying make-up contouring diagrams?

You could, I suppose, research the procedure—buccal fat pad extraction—and make sure your kid understands that cheek de-chubbifying, while perhaps flattering in the short term, can leave her looking gaunt and less than cheerful when her face inevitably thins out in her 20s.

Let’s hope Autumn is happy “looking older.” As for Dr. Jean Loftis, the expert who shows up at 1:34 in this clip and so routinely helps immature people alter their bodies (“Round Christmas time, I feel like Santa Claus”), you’ll be interested to know that she’s the author of The Smart Woman’s Guide to Plastic Surgery. If you’re interested, that is, in really misleadingly titled books.

The vast, bizarro world of “The Cute Kid” contest

dale — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 04:00:10 +0000

PANIC: "Mom, am I cute enough?"

Candid admission: Earlier tonight, I saw the horror movie Drag Me To Hell (a smartly cheesy film about a young mortgage-loan manager cursed by a bug-eyed gypsy). I’m a little jumpy, unhinged. But even if I’d been calmer when I stumbled on The 2009 Cute Kid of the Year website, I suspect it would have unnerved me.

In its own pastel way, this photo contest is freaking surreal.

It’s like discovering a vast underworld, entirely populated by parents who are compelled to confirm that their kids are “cute.” Marketably cute. Olive-Garden-commercial cute. And are gullible enough to pay $19.95 just to submit their child’s photo. (“Never use makeup on the child, natural is always better,” urges a veteran entrant.) It’s unclear whether the parents are operating under a gypsy curse.

TheCuteKid.com appears to be largely a scam, albeit one with credible “sponsors” such as Gerber and Parents Magazine. The site claims that “not only [modeling] agents, but casting directors” will scrutinize the photos and hints heavily that a trillion-dollar GapKids contract is a distinct possibility.

And don’t forget the Grand Prize—”a cash investment worth close to $25,000 towards college tuition*”—note the asterisk after the word “tuition.” The expected footnote, clarifying this diabolically vague phrase, is nowhere to be found.

I’m now officially obsessed with TheCuteKid.com, and its seventeen sub-categories (baby, toddler, “big kid,” pre-teen, multiples, etc.) and it endless array of large-eyed pixies and smoldering twins. It’s all so very fishy.

Obama tries desperately to get in on “bad parent” craze

dale — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 03:17:49 +0000

Item A: Confusing a trend with an authority figure, Babble.com’s Karen Bridson blogs about how the “bad mother” craze has cut her “a little slack” after seven years of pressure to “do everything perfectly.” She has never met a trend so thoughtful and lenient.

SCOUNDREL: Worst dad ever!

Item B: Just when she’s feeling pretty good about her new imperfection, President Obama tries to out-flaw her! In a new interview with Parade magazine, Obama says, “I know I have been an imperfect father. I know I have made mistakes,” adding, “If I could be anything, I’d be a good father.”

As the magazine’s cover photo reveals, he’s not kidding. Look how much those kids despise him. Malia (left) appears to be thinking: “God, Dad! You’re such an incompetent snuggler. Wipe that smug grin off your face!”—while little Sasha (left) is, like, “This horsey-ride sucks. This so-called father can’t even summon the energy to jostle his thighs now and then? How am I supposed to imagine that I’m trotting about on a Shetland pony? Also: Straighten your tie!”