So, according to New York magazine, a local woman has quit her job and, with her husband earning a "low-six-figure income," she has decided to raise children and not work at all! What an amazing specimen. But this isn't your grandparents' housewifery. "This is not the retreat from high-pressure workplaces of a previous generation but rather a more active awakening to the virtues of the way things used to be," claims New York magazine, discussing how said lady rubs her husband's feet when he comes home. ("Active awakening"! I'm really stuck on that language. I think it says that on a package of live yeast in my refrigerator? Also: [...]

"Parenting style and childhood temperament might play roles in shaping one's political mindset, new research suggests. Specifically, kids who have fearful temperaments and are raised by parents who value obedience are more likely to endorse conservative ideologies as young adults, the study found."

Once a month I get together with half a dozen moms from Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. We call ourselves Hookers, Sluts and Drug Addicts. They dubbed me a Hooker because I wear tight clothes and smile a lot. Sally, a stay-at-home mom of boys, is a Slut, because she’s always touching her body. The Drug Addict is a therapist who can drink a bottle of Cabernet in one sitting. (All names and some details have been changed so I don’t lose more friends than I already have.) Some work and some don’t. The working ones complain about their jobs and the non-working ones complain about their husbands. We go [...]

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."

Devices like iPhones have a unique name, a string that is usually called a "universally unique identifier." That the word "unique" doesn't ever need any modifier is, I guess, beside the point. It's not just unique, it's unique in the whooooole universe. Sometimes they call it a globally unique identifier. Heh. Anyway, a UUID is 32 characters and four hyphens. There are, according to the math whizzes on Wikipedia, 39 digits in the number representing 32 possible combinations of letters and numbers. That's a really big number, more than there are people, for sure.

This is a helpful thing, for obvious reasons. Wouldn't it be amazing if every human had [...]

At least she will have a book she can bring to the psychiatrist later on.

I don't know, this use of the word "haters" seems like a bit of a stretch.

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.

"For the first time in Barbie’s more than 50-year history, Mattel is introducing a Barbie construction set that underscores a huge shift in the marketplace. Fathers are doing more of the family shopping just as girls are being encouraged more than ever by hypervigilant parents to play with toys (as boys already do) that develop math and science skills early on."

"The Munich Oktoberfest may be heading for a new beer-guzzling record this year after 3.6 million liters were downed in the first week alone. But the number of people passing out or losing their children is up as well."

"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.