Always with the writing about the hipster parents. And now David Brooks joins the fray. Brooks, New York Times Op-Ed columnist and great-grandfather of 10, addresses the usual list of problems with Babble, Alterna Dad, and Urban Baby. And like Time Magazine before him, calls out pretty little Girl's Gone Child writer and Babble contributor, Rebecca Woolf, who elicited a comparison to Erma Bombeck (we should all be so lucky!).
Brooks covers the usual complaints against the hipster parent set: failure to grow-up, worship of fashion and the icons of youth, and an inability to surrender to Barney. My response to David, and anyone else ranting and raving about Babble and all other supposedly hip parenting modalities of expression, is "turn away." If it bothers you so much, then just don't read it. On the other hand, most scrappy types enjoy a fight and I can certainly respect that.
Truthfully, I find major media covering non-vanilla parenting very heartening. If Babble hadn't come along when it did, I would have been forced to pillage and burn every copy of Parenting Magazine in every doctor's office around town. How many smiling, skinny, happily crafting and cooking suburban moms can one stand reading about before one is driven to heavy drugs? The nice thing about all this discussing of the hip parents, is it gives us a new scapegoat and something against which we can measure ourselves. And I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be compared to an angst-ridden hipster than a Prozac filled cheerful-head any day of the week.
