Our little guy is just at the point (8 months old) where he is about to start picking up sociobehavioral cues, and my wife and I are mortified at what he’s going to see. Yes, we think of ourselves as fairly upstanding urban citizens. We live within our means, we don’t let the bathrooms get entirely disgusting before cleaning them, and we buy Greenmarket vegetables. But there are a few things that … well, they aren’t ideal. A few too many dinners (after the baby’s asleep) get eaten in front of the television instead of around the dinner table, for example.

So my wife and I are starting to agree that our soon-to-be-sentient tot is going to be our route to self-improvement. Because the one thing that’s less palatable than missing Mad Men is raising a kid who thinks dinnertime is TV time. Neither of us can tolerate that (and besides, schedule-shifting is why God created the DVR). As soon as he might pick up on what we’re doing … that’s when we stop doing it. For real, we promise — no ifs ands or buts.

This leaves us only with the bad behaviors we don’t recognize. And I’m sure he’ll home on those in no time at all.