I recently wondered how your average helicopter feels about being associated with pushy, interfering “helicopter parents.” Accordingly, I met with an RLC Bell 407—a masterpiece of aerospace technology—and made a few sensitive inquiries. Its response wasn’t pretty. Perfect Baby Handbook: When did you first hear the term “helicopter parent”? Bell 407: I don’t want to [...]

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If taken literally, the name of my book, The Perfect Baby Handbook: A Guide for Excessively Motivated Parents, might suggest that I endorse the aggressive perfecting of infants. I don’t. PBH is a deadpan critique of over-parenting—gentle comic relief for those who are raising children in the the midst of madness. Surprisingly, its publication has [...]

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Why has this dad paid to have his child’s unremarkable drawings inked on his forearm? According to an insufficiently incredulous report over at Strollerderby, he is participating in a new trend: Defacing your body to show how committed you are to parenting: Charming, sweet and whimsical, a tattoo of your kid’s self portraits is an [...]

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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 [...]

» Continue reading "How the New York Times envisions the “end of over-parenting”"

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 [...]

» Continue reading "What do this notorious mom and this ambiguous rocker have in common?"