Diapers and sourdough pasta don't mix

Poor kids

Who needs a baby names book when you've got Facebook?

Every child should be able to trust that their parents have their interests at heart. That's kind of the point of being someone's guardian. But what happens when that trust is totally shattered by selfish and entitled parents? That's exactly what happened to u/Accomplished_Bar5656 , whose parents literally stole their two daughters' inheritance from their great aunt and used it to pay for their son's wedding instead. Because her family didn't value education for women, they took it upon themsel…

Potty training is an especially stressful part of parenting. You have to tell your kids over and over to communicate with you about when they have to go to the bathroom, and you have to learn how to gauge when they're on the brink of a full-tilt emergency. Even though it's hard at first, you don't have to worry about changing diapers and wiping bottoms anymore once it's done. Some kids take a while to catch onto the whole toilet thing, but when you're a parent, there's a ticking time bomb forci…

It's not necessarily uncommon for parents to offload certain responsibilities to their offspring, but it's important to ensure that these responsibilities are appropriate for a kid. When parents make one child responsible for their sibling, it can create an unfair and imbalanced dynamic that can lead to resentment and frustration. While it's totally natural for older siblings to help out and look after their younger siblings, it's important for parents to avoid overburdening one child at the ex…

Not the best parenting strategy

Can she not take the bus?

Babysitting kids can go two very different ways. Either the kids are totally cool, or they are absolute monsters that cannot be tamed. I was lucky that the kids I looked after were rad as hell when I was a teenage babysitter. Their parents were never too controlling, telling me that we could only do boring educational activities with the kids. I had the distinct pleasure of babysitting kids who were not toddlers, which definitely made my experience more enjoyable. Unfortunately, not everybody i…

It's time for us to face the facts: we give moms a lot of slack in this series. There are a lot of cringe mothers out in the world who detox their children from heavy metals and squirt breastmilk in their eyes when they get a stye. Even though they have some wacky ideas, they're not complete monsters. They're just women who've been sucked into a weird online subculture . It's easy to criticize mothers for a myriad of reasons. It's far too natural for us to fall into misogynistic thought pattern…

That's not a rainbow

Parents embarrass their kids all the time. It's a natural part of the parent-child relationship , and it's often completely unavoidable. Once a child becomes a tween, they can't stand to be seen with their parents in public. Tweens want their parents to drop them off at the mall far out of the view of any other tweens because having a mom is apparently extremely embarrassing. Tweens and teens don't want their parents to take pictures of them, be seen in public with them, or generally be around…

Like many other towns across the country, my hometown had an infamous mommy Facebook group . The group was a running joke at my high school because the mothers involved just didn't know how to behave themselves. They would constantly bicker with each other over everything and nothing at the same time. Popular topics of conversation were politics, religion, how evil doctors were, and their children's behavioral problems. The number of women who would divulge their children's medical history to a…

A big part of growing up is getting rejected from things. Whether it's a sports team or the top band, teenagers will inevitably be disappointed by rejection throughout their adolescence. My most devastating high-school rejection was from the elite group at my community theatre. I know, I'm really cool. I was in the Junior Varsity of musical theatre for three years before I finally got into the top group. The first two years in this group of self-proclaimed "rejects" were expected, but when I di…

Are these people for real?

As someone who does not have children (and will likely never have them) it's easy for me to laugh about certain aspects of parenting culture. Gender reveals are not only stupid but have proven to be deadly. Weekly and monthly photoshoots of babies seem, well, unnecessary to me. And then there's the whole referring to your kids age by month even when you can actually just say “he's four.” These habits have been ridiculed nearly to death, and frankly, the mockery is nearly boring. But every now a…