UPDATE: Balloon Boy’s Family Facing Charges

Come on - you saw this coming, didn’t you? The parents of Balloon Boy (aka Falcon Heene - but Balloon Boy has such a better ring to it) will be facing charges.

This from the Sheriff who just the other day said the Heene’s emotions were real during the “ordeal” of watching their son float off in a weather balloon. Oh how the tables have turned. Continue reading »

Dad Shaves Shoplifting Daughter’s Head

Talk about extreme discipline. A Florida roofer has been arrested for shaving his daughter’s head as a punishment.

The girl, he said, shoplifted jewelry from Wal-Mart, then later used a Game Boy without permission. Continue reading »

Russian Mothers Auction Off Daughters’ Virginity

And you thought your mom was bad. A set of mothers have reportedly been detained by Moscow police for attempting to sell off their daughters’ virginity on the Internet.

The girls were only thirteen and sixteen, and the auction was doing brisk business before it was shut down.  Continue reading »

VIDEO: Mom Takes Kid For a Drag

It’s been three months since a mother was arrested for child abuse, but suddenly a video of her literally dragging her kid on a leash through a Verizon Wireless store has gone viral.

And people are still trying to defend her!

Take a gander at the video: 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 »

Mortifying Stories of Embarrassing Kids

They know your weaknesses.

Before you had kids you vowed you’d never become one of those people who always talked about your kids. Then you popped the little buggers out and realized your kids were the only thing you had to talk about since they were dominating your entire life. Wanna-be Hip Parents get around this two ways:

1) Drenching kid talk in snark,

“Man, my kid is such a butthole. And holy hell does he suck at Peek-a-Boo.”

2) Then there’s the crowd stories of shame and embarrassment, of which kids just happen to be a never ending fount. Everyone loves enjoying your misery, and in that spirit Parentdish put together a collection of the most embarrassing kid stories.
Continue reading »

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 »

Are You a Bad Parent? Blame the Economy

Now that the world’s finally caught up to what we at Babble already knew - namely that “bad” parenting doesn’t have to be all that bad - CNN is giving us a scapegoat.

It’s the economy, stupid! Continue reading »