Read This, or Be the Worst Parent Ever

When
my wife was pregnant with our first child, I read every parenting and
pregnancy book I could get my hands on. Then I panicked.

“What to
Expect When You’re Expecting” warned me that maybe she wasn’t pregnant.
Maybe her frequent urination was caused by diabetes, and her uterus was
expanding simply because there was a tumor inside it.

“Healthy
Sleep Habits, Happy Child” warned me that if my baby fell asleep in the
stroller, I would have to stop walking in order to prevent something
called “motion sleep,” which was vastly inferior to the regular kind.
According to the book’s author Marc Weissbluth, “I think it is possible
that unhealthy sleep habits contribute to school-related problems such
as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and learning
disabilities.”

Mr. Weissbluth assured me that the cry-it-out
method was the most efficient path to good sleep habits. But “The No-Cry
Sleep Solution” warned me that cry-it-out would lead to “insensitivity
to your child’s feelings… setting up a pattern in babyhood that will
follow for the rest of your life in your relationship with your child.”

What was a new parent to do?

At
the time, my wife and I did the only thing we could: our best. We
pieced together our own approach based on our instincts, the experiences
of our friends and our parents, and whichever bits and pieces of expert
advice seemed the most reasonable.

As the months went by, and I
became a calmer and more experienced father, I started looking back on
that torrent of conflicting expert opinion with a new emotion: anger.
How dare those so-called experts bully parents into obedience?

If I
were a serious author, I would have channeled my anger into a Big
Serious Critique. But I’m a comedy writer, and so I decided to write a
parody.

Unfortunately, I soon ran into a problem. One of the few
hard-and-fast rules of comedy is, “You can’t parody a parody.” It’s like
making a Xerox of a Xerox. It just doesn’t work.

That makes the
parenting genre nearly parody-proof — because it already verges on
self-parody. If I wanted to take that bullying expert voice to its most
ludicrous extreme, could I come up with anything better than the
suggestion that letting your baby nap in a moving baby carriage could
cause permanent brain damage?

I was willing to try. I went back to
the parenting books that had driven me crazy, took the most outrageous
parts and tried to make them funny-outrageous instead of
painful-outrageous.

I took the “What to Expect” warnings about
other possible causes of pregnancy symptoms and made them just a bit
more over-the-top. If you have morning sickness, frequent urination and
strange food cravings, I wrote, that just proves you’ve got hysterical
pregnancy. And if you have all those things and a positive result on a
pregnancy test, it merely proves you have “hysterical pregnancy so
extreme, you have sucked the entire pharmaceutical industry into your
neurotic web of self-deception.”

I combined the pro- and
anti-crying-it-out arguments and turned them into this: “Crying it out
involves putting your baby in his crib, closing the nursery door, and
not opening it until morning. When you do return, you will either have a
happy and self-confident baby who has learned to sleep through the
night or a psychologically damaged future terrorist who will never sleep
again. (On the plus side, a nocturnal schedule is a significant career
advantage for terrorists, so your baby benefits either way.)”

The
“What to Expect” list of things to pack in your hospital bag stretches
across two pages. In addition to massage oils, baby’s first outfit and a
bottle of champagne, you’re supposed to bring “What to Expect When
You’re Expecting,” as well as “The What to Expect Pregnancy Organizer”
and “What to Expect the First Year.”

My list was more practical. I
suggested packing a toothbrush; baby’s first outfit; baby’s second
outfit, for when baby spits up over baby’s first outfit; baby’s third
through fortieth outfits; grappling hooks and rope to fasten yourself to
the ground in case a tornado pulls off the roof of the hospital; and
snacks.

I’m careful to remind my friends that my book is meant to
be ludicrous. But if the authors of “What to Expect When You’re
Expecting,” “The No-Cry Sleep Solution,” or “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy
Child” read it, I hope they take it seriously. I want them to feel
like failures for not bringing along their grappling hooks.