The Complete Idiot’s Guides to Parenting

I was searching for a parenting book through my local libray’s online catalog.  Couldn’t find it so I did a general “parenting” search.  Here are a few of the notable books that are available:

• Now I know why tigers eat their young : surviving a new generation of teenagers
• How to raise kids you want to keep
• Even June Cleaver would forget the juice box : cut yourself some slack (and still raise great kids) in the age of extreme parenting
• Parenting, Inc. : how we are sold on $800 strollers, fetal education, baby sign language, sleeping coaches, toddler couture, and diaper wipe warmers–and what it means for our children 
• Didn’t I feed you yesterday? : a mother’s guide to sanity in stilettos
• 13 is the new 18– and other things my children taught me (while I was having a nervous breakdown being their mother)
• Raising the perfect child through guilt and manipulation
• The public school parent’s guide to success : how to beat private school and homeschooling
• The Tao of poop : keeping your sanity (and your soul) while raising a baby
• A chicken’s guide to talking turkey with your kids about sex
• Harried with children
• The epidemic : the rot of American culture, absentee and permissive parenting, and the resultant plague of joyless, selfish children
• Toilet trained for Yale : adventures in twenty-first-century parenting

I’ll just let these titles stand alone.  There were also 12 million books on depression/anxiety in children and raising children after divorce. 

I have a funny story about The Epidemic:  rot of American culture book.  Scott was in a wedding and the bride had arranged for us to stay in the home of a family member.  We’d never met these folks.  They were concerned that we were co-sleeping with Norah.  Even if we didn’t routinely co-sleep, I would not have put my one year old in a room by herself (especially next door to an adult man I’d never met).  And before we retired for the evening, these kind folks asked many pointed questions about our parenting.  The next morning, after the family left for the day, we found a copy of this book left on the breakfast table.  The book had much to say about attachment parenting.  You know, basically, attachment parenting is responsible for the rot of American culture.