P.J. O'Rourke on Amy Chua

P.J. dissects Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and offers up the warm alternative vision of the Irish Setter Dad.

Hat tip: Nat Wilcox on Facebook

For the children ...

A particularly good Top 5 list from topfive.com today:

The Top 5 Worst-Selling Parenting Books

5> "Too Late for Birth Control, Too Early for Prison"

4> "Communicating With Your Rude, Thoughtless Little Pig Teenager" by Alec Baldwin

3> "DON'T PUT THAT IN YOUR-- Never Mind"

2> "NyQuil: The Sniffling, Sneezing, Coughing, Aching, Knocks-Your-Kids-Out-in-30-Seconds-Flat Wonder Drink"

and Topfive.com's Number 1 Worst-Selling Parenting Book...

1> "Mommy Cries Because You're Weird"

Parenting advice

The piece is called "How to Be a Happier Mom" but there is plenty here for fathers as well.

It seems like everyone I know is busy creating or obtaining new units of embodied human capital. My impression from a year of parenting is that it is very easy to get caught up in crazy notions regarding social norms around parenting. There is a sort of an upper middle class cult of the child that demands complete and utter submission of your life to the child's. Actually trying to do this leads, not at all surprisingly, only to misery.

Thus, this article's seemingly trivial advice: recognize and accept that sometimes kids are a pain in the behind, get enough sleep, do things for yourself, and so on, seems obvious but in fact given the dead weight of social norms, these things can be remarkably hard to do at all, let alone to do without constant guilt and worry. I think, though, that they are very much worth doing. In my view, a happy parent is the best parent, and happy parents are parents that still have lives separate from their children - not just work lives but lives with room for friends and movies and plays (and fooling around) as well.