A 1922 cradle from the Museum of Modern Art's "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity." Would you put your kid to sleep in this? (Photograph courtesy of MoMA.)

As the Age of Toddling approaches, my wife and I have determined that our apartment is a deathtrap. The tall cabinet in which we store toys and baby blankets? The bottom door’s latch is a little stiff, and if our guy tugs on the handle hard enough, he’ll pull the whole thing over on himself. The vintage stereo cabinet with those nice crisp wedge-shaped edges? Uh. The Art Deco table with the mirrored top (unattached, held in place only by its own weight)? Don’t ask.  Plus dangling power cords, loose cables, and power strips tucked under everything.

When you think about it, the past 60 years’ worth of Good Design has often also been definitionally Bad For Babies. Yes, there is the blobjects trend, but the fact is that modernism has fundamentally been about hard edges and crisp corners, both of which are far from child-friendly. The designers at the Bauhaus did acknowledge that children exist, creating kids’ furnishings and toys, but those folks didn’t have the slightest notion of baby safety. (See photo at right. That’s a CRADLE, people. Presumably the weight of the baby keeps it from rolling over. Presumably.)

Not that I believe in endless practicality. A quick trip through the safety gear at Babies ‘R’ Us is, if you are at all design- inclined, a quick route to despair. Everything’s as clinically ugly as can be, and there’s just so much almond-colored plastic. Bifold-door finger-pinch guards. A rail for the front edge of your stove that looks like a deli sneeze guard. A strut to keep your child from pulling a flat-panel TV over onto him- or herself. Spend ten minutes in this aisle, and even if the aesthetics don’t depress you, you risk turning yourself clinically paranoid, spotting hazards at absolutely every turn, and uglying up your house accordingly.

As far as I know, there’s no home-furnishings designer who aims straight at the new-parent market, deliberately attempting to reconcile good lines with rubbery corners. Even Ikea, which has a whole big department devoted to kiddie furniture, seems to keep edges crisp and surfaces hard. Until that clever (and sure-to-be-a-success) business shows up in malls across America, you will find me finding me screwing that tall storage cabinet down with angle irons, griping all the while about what it’s doing to the floors. And wiping spitup off a (padded, soft-edged, entirely nonthreatening) Eames chair. We do what we can.

DadWagon is a family-friendly employer, so we are allowing all staff to spend the holiday weekend with their penniless families. This includes, but is not limited to, copy editor, senior editor, DARPA liaison officer, building security and janitorial staff, and Director of First Impressions.

Happy Holidays, be back with you on Monday.

I am an occasional contributor to the Harper’s Weekly Review, Harper’s Magazine’s online newsletter. The idea for the Weekly is that by aping the language of conventional reporting, in the hope of calling some attention to the hypocrisy of how reporting gets done (distorted third-hand news), the linguistic obfuscations involved (was Obama really “considering his options” in Afghanistan? I think not.), the silly redundancies of weird science (macaque study, anyone?), and if there’s any time left over, to report on the week’s events.

Here’s an example from this week’s installment, which was written by my brilliant colleague, Paul Ford, who should be famous (and kinda is):

Utah state senator and gay marriage opponent Chris Buttars said he would support some housing rights for gays but that he did not approve of gay and lesbian activism. “I don’t want them stuffing it down my throat all the time,” he said. “Certainly not in my kid’s face.” Martin Amis promised that his new novel would anger feminists, and the English town of Cockermouth was recovering from huge floods. A study found that 13 million American women go online each month to watch porn. A Nigerian man killed his two-year-old son for being an evil wizard, and was caught carrying the child’s corpse in a woven plastic “Ghana must go” bag; a wallaby brutalized a two-year-old girl in Australia.

Not exactly the news, right? But it’s all real, all reported, just distorted for humor, and to mess with the reader’s mind. I love the form and have been writing it since 2005.

One of the key ideas of the Weekly is to be as offensive as possible to as many people as possible, using the language of journalism as cover. There are no standards. We want the reader to be angry (at least I do).

And yet, once I had a baby, I did identify my personal red line: bad things happening to children. Prior to becoming a father, I had no trouble making this juxtaposition: “A sixty-year-old man was accused of biting a six-year-old boy’s genitals after the child refused to stop touching himself and an English woman capable of climaxing forty times per day was convicted of benefit fraud.”

Haha!

Once I had a kid, though, I found my capacity to even remotely picture in my mind a bad thing happening to any child anywhere was gone. Sad child on television? Change the channel. Starving kid in the paper? Read the sports section.

I make no pretense that is a good thing to do. It’s clearly sticking your head in the sand. Bad things happen to children, and the world should know about it. But making light of it to comment on reporting jargon didn’t work for me any more. At the same time, it always bothered me that I had become so unforgivably soft.

Not that I hold others to this high standard, mind you. Thus, hats off to Paul for penning what may be the most offensive and disturbing line in Weekly Review history:

A Detroit-area man, on learning that his 15-year-old son molested his three-year-old daughter, stripped the boy naked and took him outside; there, the boy fell to his knees, yelling “No, Daddy! No!” before his father shot him in the head.

Congratulations, Mr. Ford. You made me cry.

The subhed of this story tells you all you need to know: Father Calls Police When He Forgets Where He Parked His Son. That he left his 5-year-old kid in the cab of his 18-wheeler to go visit a strip club just makes the story sweeter.

Me, I prefer this version of trucker dads: