Remember those "May the 4th" jokes today, dads!

There is no group of people more unfairly scrutinized online than parents. Okay, maybe that's not 100% true, but I am baffled by the comments on nearly every parenting video I see on reels and TikTok. No matter what a parent does, no matter how normal their video is, some weirdos in the comments will pick apart and criticize them for no reason. I know this isn't wholly a problem of the internet. People have been giving parents unsolicited advice since man developed the ability to speak. The iss…

Twenty years ago, parenting books used to be where it was at. Parents who had a million questions about how they should raise their kids didn't go around posting about it on their MySpace pages. They went to Borders, Books A Million, and other now-defunct stores and bought a bunch of books about it! While not all parenting books are written by experts, they're at least a bit more inherently trustworthy than strangers on the internet . When I was a kid, all of the adults in my life told me to be…

One of the most challenging parts of being a parent is the lack of sleep . Kids wear you down to the point of exhaustion and keep you up at night worrying about them. It's an incredibly unfair catch-22 of the human experience. My poor mother has been unable to sleep since I was born, and I wish I hadn't done that to her. I'm a sprite 23-year-old baby, so naturally, I've never had any problem with sleeping. I just know that if and when I pop a child out of my body, I'm going to stay up all night…

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…

It's difficult to keep the magic of the Easter Bunny alive for your kids. Santa is relatively easy because you can meet a man at a shopping mall that will convincingly portray him. The Tooth Fairy is simple: your kid never sees her unless you mess up or they're a super light sleeper. The Easter Bunny is a hard sell because it's unclear what form he takes. Is he a normal rabbit? Is he one of those scary bunnies in fursuits? Is he a horrifying anthropomorphic half-man, half-rabbit that will haunt…

There is an epidemic sweeping our nation right now. It's hard for me to articulate this without getting emotional, but the store Target is selling shirts for toddlers with rainbows on them. This is a national emergency and needs to be addressed by the leaders of this great nation sooner rather than later. I'm making a jokey joke here, but there are a lot of people out there who think boys wearing shirts with rainbows is the end of the world. I remember when I was a kid, people tried to decrease…

As a thirty-something with no kids but a wealth of cats, I might complain, but I have it pretty easy. Despite the incessant vet bills, taking care of a cat is a lot easier and somehow a lot cheaper than raising a human child. A friend of mine shared an alarming statistic with her Instagram friends recently - the lifetime cost of raising a child here in the United States, as of 2022, is estimated at a whopping $272,049. That's a staggering number, one that makes me feel like I'm definitely never…

One of the most complex parts of parenting is deciding when a kid is old enough for certain things. When I was a kid, it was a lot easier to keep kids away from inappropriate content. Elementary school children were not running around with iPads because they hadn't been invented yet. It was normal for kids not to go on the internet for anything other than Club Penguin . While it wasn't the wild west, it was still hard for parents to control what we watched once we became tweens. I watched all 1…

Parenting Facebook groups have obsessions with the many "natural remedies" they think will cure all childhood ailments. My favorite supposed cure-all miracle is breastmilk. For some reason, crunchy moms think that breastmilk can do anything. I will give credit where credit is due: breastmilk offers babies essential nutrients they can't get anywhere else. Unfortunately, breast milk does not cure ear infections. You cannot squirt breastmilk in a blind man's eye and make him see again. Breastmilk…

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…

Why do so many young parents want their kids to have unique names ? Do they know that having a unique name doesn't make them a unique person? I'm lucky enough to have a name unique enough that I never have to go by my last initial but normal enough that I've never been bullied for my name. That is the ideal sweet spot for names IMHO. Sometimes, your kid gets bullied for their name because of things out of your control. I would never begrudge somebody naming their daughter Isis or Katrina before…

One of the most popular stereotypes about parents is that once someone has kids, something shifts in their brain that makes them feel like the most esoteric person alive. 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 of us on the receiving end of this smug, I kind of get it. I cannot imagi…

Tell me if you've heard this one: "I'm going to have kids early so I can enjoy my 40s and 50s." Or what about this one: "I'm going to wait until I'm 30 to have a kid so I can enjoy my twenties." These lines of reasoning are predicated on the notion that having kids is not enjoyable and is something you want to be relieved of eventually or postpone. I have little qualification to speak on this: I am not a parent, and who knows what the future of parenthood will look like for me. But I hope that…

Back to school! Again!

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