This year, give the mother of your children a special gift—the gift of blame. Yes, how she treats the kids may (or may not!) screw them up for life. That’s according to the results coming out of USA Today Laboratories:
With Mother’s Day around the corner, new research is shedding some light on what happens when a parent — particularly the mother — gives more time or attention or privileges to one of the children. Past studies have found that less-favored siblings may suffer emotionally, with decreased self-esteem and behavioral problems in childhood, while adult children who were even slightly favored report higher well-being.
Clearly, this is groundbreaking science, and combined with last week’s revelation of the keys to good (and bad) fatherhood, it should provide great insight into how to fuck up our kids in new and interesting ways.
What USA Today fails to take into account is the fact that happy, well adjusted adults with “higher well-being” (whatever that is) are, in a word, lame. Nobody the least bit interesting has high well-being.
My kids might be screwed up, but at least they’ll be cool. In fact, now that I think about it, I think coolness is inversely proportional to good parenting. Take that, USA Today.