In an enthrallingly smart, clear-headed essay in this week’s New Yorker, Jill Lepore slams the “bad parent” movement into historical context. 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 […]

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In this thoughtful video, one African-American expresses her conflicted feelings about names such as Bonquisha, Laquitta, and Dayquona—while ripping paper into shreds: Related Posts: • Perfect baby names: Eighmee. vs Amy • Which baby names ensure success? Ask Dr. Mehrabian! • Insider baby-naming secrets—part I

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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