"Parents who constantly check and use smartphones and iPads around their children may be driving them into a lifelong dependency on TV and computer screens, according to a leading psychologist. Dr Aric Sigman said such 'passive parenting' in the face of the new media environment is actually a form of neglect. He will tell a group of Britain’s leading doctors today that the growing addiction could leave a generation suffering damage to the body as well as the brain." —This is just the way The Machines planned it, right?

Photo by Anatoliy Samara, via Shutterstock

Brace yourself. Caitlin Flanagan has an exceedingly perceptive and well-done essay in the Atlantic! Sure, there is a psychologically deep-seated and somewhat deranged whiff of/riff on gender essentialism (boys like Hunter Thompson and girls like Joan Didion!), but hey, that's at least a little true. For one thing, she draws well the obvious connections that Didion and John Gregory Dunne were the most extreme caricatures of their generation of parents (in short: rather terrible), the parents who made their childrens' generation into helicoptering nightmares.

1) A thick-chested man in tight striped Polo shirt and a woman in tennis whites are walking towards the pool. “They say that money can’t buy happiness,” the man says. “Well, I say, ‘I’m gonna try to find out!’” The woman swats at his arm. The man laughs, “HA HA HA HA HA.”

2) In the parking lot sits a white convertible Mustang painted with pinstripes and a large New York Yankees logo on the side. On the beach, a guest asks a longtime club member, “So who owns the Yankees Mustang? With the pinstripes?” “Oh, I don’t know,” says the longtime member. “But I’ve seen it here it [...]

Each time I visit Northern California, I remember how it's funny that I never seem to remember how beautiful it is when I'm not there. This happened again last week, when I went there with with my wife and my kid over spring break.

From time to time, we offer free editorial space to common folk with something to say. Today's topic for discussion concerns the issue of parenting, a subject that has been in the news lately.

Nobody wonders how Minnesota parents raise such stereotypically stereotypical kids. They never wonder what these parents do to produce so many nice children or what it's like inside a nice family. Well, I can tell them anyway, because I've done it. If it's not too much trouble and you have a minute, here are some things my daughters, Jenny and Cristi, were never allowed to do:

• Skip doing their homework • Put their [...]

Disclosure! I will begin by stating that, at the age 31, I currently have no children. Which, in and of itself, will be a driver for many parents to click the "BACK" button on their browsers while muttering that I have nothing resembling a fucking clue about this topic. Click away, self-righteous parents! No doubt you have a poop-flinging banshee destroying your living room at this very moment. Go handle your business. No hard feelings.

Despite not having children, I think about them. A lot. In recent years, the full teeming strength of my biology has been consumed with a single, driving goal: to produce babies. And now that [...]

"Recently, I found out my 13-year-old son had been visiting glove fetish Web sites with pornographic glove pictures." Is it great that the Internet gives us glove fetish websites for our children? Or is it a bad thing? I do not know. Neither does the advice columnist to whom this (rather overparenting) parent turned, but that's par for the course-she comes down awfully hard on the side of "no one will ever love this person with a glove fetish"! This seems really unfair, given that Fits Like A Glove, the gay glove fetish group, just had a super-fun outing to Six Flags!

Surprising news! "HuffPost Parents," formerly known as "ParentLode," after the Times' blog MotherLode, which disapproved far beyond the point of cease and desist, will now be known as… Parentry. (It could have been worse.)

Please make a note of it.

This coming weekend, the New York Times magazine looks at our children and what private and charter schools are doing for/to them! It raises so many questions for those of us who are concerned about our babies and if they will go to top-tier colleges after top-tier primary and secondary education, which is something you really do worry about especially if you're dropping half a million on K-12 and then having to make a sizable donation to an Ivy League to make sure that little Crayson, Effexor and Randomly get to go to the right college! Here's the top ten questions that a parent may form whilst reading [...]

Yesterday morning we woke up here on Earth and got dressed for church. Our youngest daughter, who is in year two of a dogged princess phase, wanted to wear a particularly awful pair of costume shoes, hot pink heels with little tufts of fur at the toes. “I think you should wear other shoes,” I told her.

“Mommy said I can wear these!”

“It’s true, I did,” Alia said.

“I just don’t think she should wear h-o-o-k-e-r shoes to church,” I groused.

“I’m trying not to fight with her about this on weekends,” Alia said.

“I know, I know.”

“It’s not the end of the world," she said.

“Animals should be treated the same as you would a kid. Would you want someone just to walk up and skin your kid? Hell no!” —New PETA spokesperson Waka Flocka Flame comes down somewhere in between "Tiger Mother" and "helicopter parenting."

"For those of us who don’t do it, parenting is a bit of a mystery. A strange, magical, glamorous mystery that we imagine is bedevilled by all sorts of complex and exciting challenges. What a mind-blowing experience it must be to manufacture another human being and steer him into the world, we think.

Which is why it was such a disappointment looking after a friend’s teenager for a week. I now realise that parenting involves only two things: persuading a child to eat and persuading a child to put on a coat."

Good Lord.

The kids have drunk all the Scotch!

Or was it us, and I just didn't realize?

… I don't even know anybody who drinks Scotch.

Except the kids, apparently!

On a Sunday last fall, I was working downstairs with the space heater on and the office doors closed when the phone rang. The caller ID read DAN KOIS, which meant that it was my wife, upstairs, calling our home phone from my cell phone. As is often the case on weekends, we were trading carefully-negotiated Work Periods. I was writing while she looked after the children; later, I would take the kids while she worked. Later still, we would maybe eat dinner together and then put the kids in the bath.

I answered the phone. In the background I could hear crying. Alia said, "You have to come [...]

When a kiddy-fiddler commandeers your cul-de-sac: "C. has a problem perhaps too serious to be called a quandary. A few months ago, she says, her family received a flier from the local sheriff. A registered sex offender was moving to her street of small, single-family homes. Hers is a long street, though, and she expected the offender to be some distance away and easily avoidable. Instead, he bought the house next door." What to do, what to do? The answer is simple, really: just move to Manhattan.

"Imagine if this were written about Jews, blacks, Muslims or Latinos…" —Everybody needs to shut the f**k up about Go the F**k to Sleep right f**king now.

"Now my kids are feeling concerned that the world is going to end and they aren’t ready." —There is nowhere to which the Times parenting blog won't go.

"The sleepover, along with its cousin the slumber party, raises a whole array of emotional issues for children and parents." —Wow, the crazed helicopter-parenting generation has crawled so far inside its own ass that it can no longer make sense of anything.

"I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal-as we are!" -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Some years back, my daughter wanted to attend a mommy-and-me girls' reading group with her best friend, and I said okay, fine. It emerged that this was a "women of color" mommy-and-me girls' reading group. I'm kind of honorary "of color," because I am Cuban, though loads of my milk-white relations were born in Spain. I've often thought how [...]

Big news! Coming in Monday's New York magazine! A plot twist in the long-established narrative of New York City rich people parenting! The Misery of the American Parent, by Jennifer Senior "Social-science researchers keep coming to the same conclusion: having children makes adults unhappy. Why? Maybe it's because American parents are demanding more of themselves than ever before. Or maybe it's because we've forgotten what 'happiness' actually means. A look at why parents hate parenting."