Parents These Days

Image source OMGG.com

With Mother’s Day this past weekend and Father’s Day next month, now’s the time to show your beloved parents how much they mean to you. Not only did they give you life, but they have made sacrifices for your well-being since the day you were born. With thoughts of my amazing parents in mind, I couldn’t help but notice some not-so-intelligent parental decisions making headlines recently. Whether or not you have children, I think you could get something out of these stories (even if it’s just amusement). Here are some tips for those that are, or wish to be, parents.

1. Don’t make a porno to get yourself out of debt
Oh, Octomom. Nadya Suleman became internationally known when, in 2009, she gave birth to octuplets via in vitro fertilization. She has been under scrutiny ever since, especially after reportedly telling InTouch magazine that she wishes she had not had her children (after insisting that all 6 leftover embryos from her previous IVF treatments be implanted). Oh yeah, she had six kids before the octuplets.

Anyway, Octomom has turned to Octo-porn to get out of up to $1 million in debt. This is after she told Showbiz Tonight that she “wouldn’t even kiss someone for money.” Guess the debt got to be a little too much for this one. I bet her kids are proud.

2. Don’t put your five year old in a tanning bed
This story has been on every news outlet in existence in the past week. Known as “tan mom” in the press, Patricia Krentcil was charged with child endangerment in her New Jersey town of Nutley after allegedly letting her five year old daughter use a tanning bed. She denies the claim, and so does her salon, but at least 64 New York-area tanning salons have banned her from utilizing their services, some even hanging “wanted-style posters” behind their counters.

Whether or not this woman put her kid in a tanning bed, I feel awful for her poor daughter, who has to look at this every day and call it “Mom.”

Image source News 12 NJ via  HLN TV

3. Don’t strap your children to the hood of your car for a beer run
Classic. Two drunken parents go on a packy run and strap their four children to the hood of the car with a tow strap. Totally fine, right? The kids apparently agreed to it because it “sounded like fun,” which is the obvious response of kids ages 4 through 7. Dad was arrested with a DUI and no one really knows what happened to mom. My question is how the heck they could see out of their windshield with four kids laying on the hood… but I guess this should not be my biggest concern.

4. Don’t hire a creepy clown to stalk your children for a birthday present
This attractive man below is named Dominic Deville.

Image source Clockworx via  Huffington Post

For a fee, Dominic will send your child creepy texts, phone calls and letters warning them that they will be attacked when they least expect it. This goes on for a week. Then, wearing his lovely clown garb pictured above, he will “attack” your child by smashing a cake into his victim’s face. Classy. But don’t worry, if your child gets too scared, he will stop when asked by the parents.

This is one of those times where I wonder what was going on in a person’s head for them to think of this “business” as a good idea. What worries me more is that there are parents out there that would subject their child to this. There’s a difference between a harmless scare (like a haunted house, for instance) and being hunted by a strange, unknown man for a week, waiting for an inevitable attack. That screams FUN to me!

5. Don’t impregnate Snooki
‘Nuff said.

Now go give your mom, dad, stepmom, stepdad, guardian (or whoever the hell raised you) a big-ass hug!

Posted by Erin

Jon + Kate Breed Hate

I hate reality TV. It gives me nose bleeds. But one show has managed to plague my life like an infectious disease. Wait for it…@plus8jonandkate. I’ve never subjected myself to an episode, nor visited their Web site, and have shunned reading anything about them to the best of my ability… yet I know more about the minutia of their purposeless lives than I do the current state of world affairs—and I’m well read. In an online exclusive, The Unreal Rise of Jon and Kate Gosselin, @vanityfairmag’s Nancy Jo Sales helped me figure it out: since March, these two money grubbing media whores (my words) have appeared on the cover of major celebrity weeklies more than 50 times—you know, the ones you mindlessly peruse while standing in line at the grocery store. Read Sales’ piece, it’s insightful.

I loathe the likes of Jon & Kate and other subpar Hollywood parents @sulemannadya and the Duggar family because they take what should otherwise be a heartwarming and exclusive experience and turn it into a means for personal gain (read money, more money, fame, tummy tucks, facelifts, cars, trainers, new homes, and more). To put it more bluntly, since when did such a basic human function become so media worthy? Prior to landing her reality star gig, Kate got her first taste of fame from the attention garnered when she appealed a Medicaid ruling that denied her family aid. That was when she had only two children. And before Nadya Suleman’s reprehensible birthing stunt earlier this year, she nurtured her six person brood through food stamps and supplemental security income. People, if you need—or have to hope for—a reality TV show to sustain your family, you should probably revisit your family planning scheme and keep your legs closed.

The Duggars are the worst offenders, in my opinion, because they “procreate-and-tell” under the banner of faith. If children are a gift from God, then treat them that way. You cannot possibly nurture each child with the love and attention required for healthy, well-rounded growth when you have so many that each of the younger children is assigned to an older child to help raise them. Money is simply not enough. Twenty biological children to one family in a world where there are countless children in need of good homes is irresponsible—on many levels. And at what point did you start feeling badly for Falcon Heene in the egregious balloon hoax his father implicated him in? Was it before or after he started throwing up on national TV? Maybe it was when he slipped in a family interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and said, “You guys said that … we did this for the show.”

Now, imagine a show where Phillip Garrido and his wife walk you through a day in the life of his 18-year-kidnapee Jaycee Duggard or Roman Polanksi pilots a show called The Real Great Escape: child porn and rape as art forms. Did you just throw up in your mouth a little? Well, there are many forms of child exploitation. And it’s time that we recognize that reality TV shows that voyeuristically follow young children during the most developmental years of their lives is exploitative. Maybe TLC can save the tanking show if they rename it to Kate Tells Jon She’s Late.

Posted by Elizabeth