Parenting is tough. What might seem like a mundane little parenting mistake to a parent could very well negatively affect a child's behavior for years to come. Not gonna lie, when I read u/tycjy 's post inquiring whether he was an a-hole for secretly eating cupcakes before his 10-year-old daughter could get to the frosting, I thought, “what's the big deal?” But what do I know? I've not yet been blessed with the miracle of children. Plenty of parents didn't hesitate to critique OP's parenting sk…

Sometimes you just have to allow your child to wreck the place so you can get a moment—don't worry, every parent has done it.

If you don't have a list on your phone with potential baby names for your future children, what are you even doing? At press time, I am kind of ambivalent about whether I want to have kids, but so help me God, if I come upon a child, I have the perfect name waiting in the woodwork. Having baby names with no intention of having children is kind of like wanting to get married because you want to throw a party. It's all of the fun with none of the hassle. Anyone who has actually raised a child kno…

The lie continues

You survived thanksgiving and deserve all the memes for it.

Happy Thanksgiving, parents! Today might not be the most leisurely parenting day of the year, but I believe you all will get through it. You're about to enter prime “threatening your kids with Santa” season, and I support you all the way. Nothing will whip a kid into shape better than their fear of the naughty list.

Family secrets are hit or miss. You can either discover something super rad about the people you see during Christmas and Thanksgiving or realize that they really are horrible people deep down. When you're a kid, every piece of new information you learn about your extended family feels like a long-hidden family secret. Even if this is not true by definition, I believe that anything once unknown to you that you learn about your family counts as a family secret. My grandma worked for a TV station…

A guilty pleasure not many of us are ready to admit we have.

Not to brag, but my parents are extremely rad. I know that not everyone has great relationships with their parents and that some of the readers of this piece might be orphans, but I, for one, am in neither of those camps. My dad is literally one of the funniest people I know. He is a master songwriter and has been singing and writing his original jingles for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I used to wake up at 5:30 in the morning to sit at the breakfast table and read the funnies w…

Good parenting etiquette definitely includes being able to laugh at parenting things.

One of the most prominent stereotypes about parents is that once someone has kids, something shifts in their brain that makes them feel like the most esoteric bearer of ancient, once unknown knowledge. They smugly remark on how different the world looks now that they've got kids, implying that they've got something far more important in their lives than anything a childless person could be doing. Although I understand how annoying this can be for those on the receiving end of these takes, I kin…

So evil

“Since he's retired he hasn't had very much engineering to do… so he booby traps the packages…”

Don't stress—your kids will still love you even after you secretly throw away some of their art.

Halloween is a difficult time to be a parent. One week, your kid wants to be a princess. The next week, they want to be a witch. By the time you get close to the 31st, they've come up with an idea for a costume so niche there is no way Spirit Halloween can provide it. Being a parent on Halloween is a difficult balance because you remember what it's like to be a kid on Halloween. You remember the struggle of your parents making you wear a winter coat over your costume, rendering the costume func…

Maybe it's the Australian accent