There's More to Parenting than Parents, You Know

I already feel like a loser parent because I missed the boat on teaching my kids to read before they turn 6 months old, at least according to those effing commercials they run on Nickelodeon all the time.

You know, the ones where the smug happy mommy holds up an index card with a word like CAT or PIG or SUBJECTIVITY or HYPOGAMMAGLOBULINEMIA and the 36-week-old savant drools out the word.

Anyway, we already receive a number of parenting periodicals that I simply do not read, which isn't surprising because I finished reading What to Expect When You're Expecting just after Sasha's second birthday.

So I decided to catch up on my parenting learnin' by checking out the website of Parents. A glance at the homepage tells me the magazine should be called Parents With the Brains of Children, because they obviously write for an audience of morons. Behold this part of the homepage:

Clearly, none of this information is gonna help me get a step up on the other parents out there. In my house, the food pyramid is shaped like a vertical line: sometimes it's a pretzel stick, sometimes a Pop Ice, or a Gogurt or a fudge pop or a roll of Smarties or the middle finger that the kids metaphorically flip us every time we plop a dish of anything vaguely wholesome and unprocessed in front of their faces.

And none of those items are going to be listed on the helpful ingredients finder, unless a pretzel casserole is on the Parents menu.

We all know kids don't eat, but I have years to worry about their diets. I need info now — something that most other parents won't be reading.

So I checked out Pediatrics, which is apparently for pediatricians and what-not, so it's like getting inside information.

And look what I found:

Now that's what I'm talking about. Next time I have to endure a conversation with the other know-it-all daycare parents, I can just slip in, "Well, I'm not sure if you know this, but erythropoietin actually does improve neurologic outcomes in newborns with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy. Yeah, it turns out that repeated, low-dose, recombinant human erythropoietin treatment reduced the risk of disability for infants with moderate HIE, without apparent side effects."

Thank you so much, Doctors Zhu, Kang, Xu, Cheng, Zhang, Jia, Ji, Guo, Xiong, Simbruner, Blomgren, and Wang, for keeping me one step ahead!
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