8 Parents to Make You Feel Better About Yourself

1. The Balloon Boy’s Parents: Not only did Richard and Mayumi Heene think they could get away with claiming their son flew away in a home-made balloon, but they also named him Falcon. The irony is tragic.

2. Jon Gosselin: He has been called many things, but few more accurate than bad parent, Hollywood Gossip writes, “there are many, many reasons one could cite for this. Picking out a particularly obvious one, The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is pointing a finger at the dad of eight for having his little ones on his ATV.” Also topping my list, exposing his 8 children to his infidelity and to Kate’s haircut.

3. Michael Lohan: It’s one thing to blog about your children’s potty training gone bad, nose picking and bad eating habits, but it’s an entirely different thing to release secretly recorded phone calls about your daughter’s cutting, secret love affairs and stints in rehab. {They are entirely different, right??}

4. Octomom: Eight babies plus six children minus financial independence equals one hot mess. Minus the hot.

5. Ryan O’Neal: There’s nothing like hitting on your own daughter to ruin a good funeral. “I had just put the casket in the hearse and I was watching it drive away when a beautiful blond woman comes up and embraces me,” O’Neal told Vanity Fair in an August interview. “I said to her, ‘You have a drink on you? You have a car?’ She said, ‘Daddy, it’s me — Tatum!’ I was just trying to be funny with a strange Swedish woman, and it’s my daughter. It’s so sick.” Why, yes. Yes, it is.

6. John Phillips: Makes Ryan O’Neal look like Father of the Year.

7. Joe Jackson: Not only did he sue his dead son’s estate for an allowance, but he also fathered the freakiest attention whoring family in show business.

8. Heidi Klum: Maybe not a parenting failure for her, but for all of us. Because, really, it’s just not cool to look like she did weeks after having a fourth child.