Balloon Boy Parents Expected to Plead Guilty

The balloon parents reportedly plan to plead guilty tomorrow morning on a variety of offenses linked to the hoax.

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Bad Dog = Bad Parent?

Every few months something crops up on the Internet linking the way people care for their pets to their would-be parenting skills. Everyone runs with it. We parents fight it. The cycle continues.

So what makes this one different?

Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax isn’t talking about neglectful dog owners who aren’t fit to raise a poodle - never mind a person. Continue reading »

They Say: Parenting Classes Work

We’ve all heard it :”You need a license to drive a car, but not to raise a kid –what’s up with that?” or some variation thereof.

Well, it’s not exactly parenting licensing, but a policy paper recently issued by the Brookings Institution looks at the success of of three similar parenting programs in helping to reduce child maltreatment, and found that all of them were effective in reducing families’ contacts with protective services, complaints from teachers, and child injuries. Continue reading »

Example of Bad Parenting: Man Bets Daughter in Card Game - Loses

Gamblers often lose their shirts in a card game, but one man in Eastern India lost more than the contents of his wallet. He bet and lost his daughter. Continue reading »

Would You Hire a $375/hour Parenting Coordinator?

Oh to be rich and not have to exert yourself on actually being, you know, a parent. You can always hire a parenting “coordinator” for $375 an hour and call yourself Anne Heche!

That’s the figure hopping around the net at the moment (I found it on SoSo Juicy, then our own Brett Singer wrote about it over at ParentDish), one apparently court-ordered, so I suppose we aren’t to blame Heche and her soon-t0-be ex.

And although they’re eminently fun to mock, this parenting coordinator gig sound fascinating. So I had to find out just what they’re there to do . . . and it sounds rather . . . wait for it . . . reasonable. Continue reading »

Toddler Found in Road, Mom at Bar

Another two-year-old was found wandering alone in the road, picked up by a random driver who called 911.  What with toddlers climbing through fence holes and escaping from older siblings, I’m starting to wonder if toddlers are really tiny little masterminds.  Or guinea pigs.

In any case, this poor little baby didn’t escape her safe home … she was abandoned in it by her mother, who decided to go to the bar and leave her home alone.

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Bad Dad Alert: Ryan O’Neil Hits on Tatum at Farrah’s Funeral

Truth is sometime stranger than fiction. Here’s the scene. The love of your life dies. In the midst of the funeral, right after a hearse takes your loved one’s casket away, what do you do? You hit on your daughter.

Now this is something that probably about 98.5% of mourners would not do. And if they did flirt with someone at their partner’s memorial - who turned out to be your kid - probably about 99.9% wouldn’t admit it. Ryan O’Neil? He went there and tells everyone all about it.

O’Neil told Vanity Fair (via Huffington Post) that, Continue reading »

Guess Who’s Behind the Lens of Child Porn?

By it’s very nature, the idea behind child pornography is chilling. So how does it get worse?

When statistics come out that point the finger for child porn straight at parents. In a Tampa Bay-based story about a series of parents arrested on child porn charges came this demoralizing statistic: Continue reading »

Video - Parent Tortures Kid With Shrimp

Let’s say you have a kid who is afraid of something that can’t hurt them. Like, say, a food. What do you do?

If you’re this person, you take a video of said child screaming while you dangle the food item in front of them. Then you post that video on YouTube.

Here you go:

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Hearing ‘worst mom ever’ stories help us feel better

I’ve been kind of intense all week blogging about mothering and equality issues, so now I want to lighten things up a little bit.
My last blog was about this new ‘bad mother’ trend and it inspired me to write today about what I playfully call the Bad Mother of the Year Award. So often other moms tell me stories that have them sick to their stomachs – stories about how they messed up and their child ended up in peril.
Now, before I go on to share some of these stories, I want to point out that I am doing it to make you feel better about whatever it is that you’ve done that still haunts you. And I tell these stories playfully in an effort to take the sting out of our mistakes, encourage us all to laugh them off and remember that we all have these moments, and our kids all survived. Continue reading »