The Perfect Baby Blog

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

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

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. […]

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Child (nearly) arrested for being a child

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

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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The new status symbol for doormat parents: Embarrassing tattoos

Monday, June 1st, 2009

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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How the New York Times envisions the “end of over-parenting”

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

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 […]

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By the way, your fetus has to be a competent poet

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

You’d think that here at Perfect Baby Handbook HQ on Montague Street, we’d know everything about baby-shower culture by now. We don’t (though we’re quite versed on the new Star Trek movie and can attest that the design of Old Spock’s parka is cool). Take the “baby poem” tradition. Apparently, a short piece of verse—in […]

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