Today we're running a few pieces on the "Bad Parent" front — an interview with Home Game's Michael Lewis; our very own Bad Parent Matrix, with apologies to New York magazine; and a wise essay by one of our beloved writers, Katie Allison Granju on the problem with the "cult of the bad mother" — so we thought we'd answer a question we get a lot: Why is the "Bad Parent" column called that? Are we really calling these writers (or anyone who does what they do) bad parents?
We launched Babble.com in December 2006 with the goal of providing new parents like us with a magazine that was smart and funny, honest and original — in short, like nothing we were finding as we sought catharsis and reassurance during pregnancy and early parenthood. In service to this idea, one of the first regular columns we launched with was called "Bad Parent."
The first "Bad Parent," by Jennifer Baumgardner, was called "How to Do Everything Wrong." It was like ten Bad Parents rolled into one (sample line: "Pregnancy: Spend a week believing you have gestational diabetes, but later it's discovered that it was the glass of Mountain Dew you drank just before the blood test"). It cracked us all up, and made us tear up at the end, when Jennifer disclosed that in spite of all her supposedly terrible choices, she had a wonderful, healthy, sane child whom she loved and who loved her.
As the months went by, we started to see that our "Bad Parent" columns got more traffic and more comments than anything else. Sometimes, the stories inspire condemnation: "Call CPS on this woman!" Sometimes praise: "I wish I had the courage to try this." Sometimes sympathy: "Hang in there." And always plenty of identifications: "OMG, I do this too!!!"
It turned out we'd identified the one thing all parents need a steady dose of, more than advice about teething, more than a shower, sometimes even more than a full night's sleep: evidence that they are not nearly as bad as they think they are, and that there are plenty of people out there just as conflicted.