Frank Bruni doesn't understand why people take parenting so seriously and treat their kids so nicely

However, he's very upfront about how little he understands about parenting, so that's nice, I guess.  He leads off his article thusly:

MODERN parenting confuses me.  The vocabulary, for starters. 

Better write a whole article about it, then, so we can learn from your confusion.

Take the word “last.” Usually it means final. Last exit: there are none beyond it. Last rites: you’re toast. 

But the “last chance” for a 4-year-old to quit his screeching, lest he get a timeout? There are usually another seven or eight chances still to go, in a string of flaccid ultimatums: “Now this is your last chance.” “This is really your last chance.” “I’m giving you just one more chance. I’m not kidding.”

Frank is indeed quite confused by why parents would not be straightforward and punitive with their children.  "This is your fourth-to-last chance, Johnny.  Why aren't you better behaved?"

Of course you are, and your kids know it. They’re not idiots.

Already, we can see the source of Frank's confusion, because the thing is that kids most certainly are idiots.  They're impossible to reason with, think that $5 is a lot of money, and they like the dumbest TV shows.  This isn't meant to be a judgment of kids, because it's not really their fault.  They're just dumb, because they are children and not old enough to not be dumb yet.

But they’re also not adults, so why this whole school of thought that they should be treated as if they are, long before they can perform such basic tasks of civilization as driving, say, or decanting?

What is decanting?  Is it something that should be considered a basic task of civilization?
/consults dictionary
Oh.  I hate you more, now.

Why all the choices — “What would you like to wear?”— and all the negotiating and the painstakingly calibrated diplomacy? They’re toddlers, not Pakistan.

"Put on the fucking corduroys, Johnny.  I don't give a shit if they make you look dowdy." 

 I understand that you want them to adore you. But having them fear you is surely the saner strategy, not just for you and for them but for the rest of us and the future of the republic.

This is kind of fucked up.  It seems like you are advocating 1) not teaching children to think for themselves and 2) making sure they fear you because...otherwise it might be a little bit annoying to Frank Bruni (a.k.a. the future of the republic).

Seemingly everyone has parenting opinions, so I hereby present mine, which are those of someone who isn’t in fact a parent

So, someone who has only a passing awareness of the difficulties and joys of parenting, and might therefore not be best equipped to give out parenting opinions?

and maybe has a valuable distance and objectivity as a result.

Or that, yeah.  This inspires me to share my opinions on how to fight alligators--I don't have any experience, but my distance and objectivity will be invaluable to any potential alligator fighters.

Instead of the battle hymn of a tiger mother, it’s the baffled hymn of a cubless bystander, his thoughts turned toward children as the calendar reaches yet another holiday when we shower them with attention and chocolate. 

Aww, Frank!  Do you wish people gave you chocolate too?  And attention?  But mostly chocolate?

While I have no kids of my own,

Please, continue to emphasize how little experience you have in the subject you are advising us on.

I have many I can (and sometimes do) lease for the weekend:

Most people call it "babysitting".  Unless you're paying people so you can borrow their kids, which: Frank, are you paying people so you can borrow their kids? 

11 actual nieces and nephews, whom I’ll be with this Easter Sunday, and perhaps twice that number of honorary ones. I have put in my time around tots and teens, and enjoy them. 

"I spent a few hours with kids one time, so I've got a pretty good handle on this whole parenting thing."

I have seen my share of parenting, and am not certain what to make of it.

"I'm not certain what to make of it, so let me tell you what to make of it."

Just a few decades ago, parenting wasn’t even a proper verb or gerund. Now it’s a compound one. There’s of course helicopter parenting, which hovers, and “free range” parenting, which doesn’t, but only by principled choice. 

This may be true (though I tend to think people used the word "parenting" a few decades ago).  That said, this is just what the Internet has done to every subject--there's a community and a name for anything.  For example [ed.: this reference is extremely forced because the writer wanted to find a way to shoehorn it in], we have communities that are specific to subsets of adult men who like My Little Pony and are also in the military.  They are called FOBEquestria, apparently.  Returning to the matter at hand, yes, there are lots of types of parenting communities now, because people get a little crazy about things they are passionate about, and for some reason people care a lot about their stupid kids.

As the Me Generation spawned generations of mini-me’s, our rigorous self-fascination expanded to include the whole brood and philosophies about its proper care and feeding. 

It's really awful, the way people keep trying so hard to figure out how to care for and raise their children.

About the feeding: explain to me what’s gained by the voluminous discussions, within earshot of little Edwin or Edwina,

Please, don't name your child Edwina.  Edwin's not so hot either, actually.

of what he or she probably won’t eat or definitely won’t eat or must somehow be made to eat, perhaps with a bribe. Any food that lands on the table after that much tortured preamble is bound to be eyed with suspicion and ultimately spurned, in part because it has ceased to be a vessel of nutrition or an answer to hunger at that point. It has become a power struggle: the parents’ wishes versus the child’s defiance.

This seems like an absurd strawman, because most parents debate this sort of thing while their kid can't hear them because that's pretty obviously the better way to approach this issue.  Also, kids don't go on hunger strike because they're concerned about parental power struggles.  To reiterate from earlier, kids are not the smartest. 

And the battle seems to end one and only one way. With chicken fingers. 

You seem like you'd be a great babysitter--oh, excuse me, I meant great child-leaser.

I’M equally confounded by the all-encompassing praise. Not every kid is gifted at every endeavor, and I wonder about the wisdom of telling him or her that a bit of doggerel is Shakespearean or that a wan patch of warbling is an “American Idol” audition waiting to happen.

I'm guessing parents do this because the alternative is to say, "Johnny, good try on this poem, but it's fucking terrible.  Give up on writing forever."  As for the "American Idol" reference (topical!), most children are vastly superior to your average American Idol contestant.  Did you forget about this guy?  He's a professional in the field of being terrible at singing.

I wonder why everybody has to be a winner.  You can eliminate the valedictorians from high school but you can’t eliminate them from life, which metes out Super Bowl rings and stock options with an uneven hand, and is probably best tackled with some preparatory girding for that. Do today’s parents provide it?

If you don't repeatedly call your child a failure, how will they know how much of a failure they are later in life?  Preparation is key.

Parents routinely surrender control when they shouldn’t, replacing rules with requests, and children are expected to chart their own routes to good behavior, using the faulty GPS’s of their flowering consciences, I suppose. Families are run as democracies. Parents forget: in the political realm, you don’t get a say until you’re 18. There’s a reason for that. 

Where are these families that you keep talking about?  Not that families like this don't exist, but you just seem to be taking examples you saw one time and assuming that all families are like that.  As Frank Kotsonis put it, "the plural of anecdote is not data." [ed.: that quote was also pretty forced in].  Anyway, Bruni goes on to make a long-winded point about how kids pretty much are who they are and parenting generally doesn't change that, which seems to presume a whole hell of a lot of knowledge of childhood psychology that I don't think he has.  There's some value to reminding parents that not every decision is life or death, but Bruni's insistence on alternating dispensing advice with reminding us how very unqualified he is to dispense said advice is just weird.  It might be interesting to hear a parent discuss the benefits and risks of hands-off parenting--it's less interesting to hear some guy talk about how he saw kids and sometimes leases them and therefore has a firm grasp on the ins and outs of parenting.

Weather.com is pretty okay with doing whatever it takes to increase site traffic

Here are two of the stories currently on the front page of weather.com:

Romance is dead. Thanks, NOKIA

Alex Williams writes today in the New York Times that young people are continuing to have trouble with dating because they're all texting and gchatting and shit, and now the young people are growing up into confused twenty-somethings who don't get why "uwana d8 lol" isn't an appropriate method of courtship.  Mr. Williams, take it away:

MAYBE it was because they had met on OkCupid. But when the dark-eyed musician with artfully disheveled hair asked Shani Silver, a social media and blog manager in Philadelphia, out on a “date” Friday night, she was expecting at least a drink, one on one. 

Fair enough. 

“At 10 p.m., I hadn’t heard from him,” said Ms. Silver, 30, who wore her favorite skinny black jeans. Finally, at 10:30, he sent a text message. “Hey, I’m at Pub & Kitchen, want to meet up for a drink or whatever?” he wrote, before adding, “I’m here with a bunch of friends from college.” 

It sounds like the problem is less anything to do with OkCupid or people in general, and more that this one dude has no clue what the word "date" means.

Turned off, she fired back a text message, politely declining. But in retrospect, she might have adjusted her expectations. “The word ‘date’ should almost be stricken from the dictionary,” Ms. Silver said. “Dating culture has evolved to a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a cold war spy to interpret.”

Here, let me try!  He texted, “Hey, I’m at Pub & Kitchen, want to meet up for a drink or whatever?  I’m here with a bunch of friends from college.”  Let's apply the secret decoder ring:

Looks like what he was trying to communicate was “Hey, I’m at Pub & Kitchen, want to meet up for a drink or whatever?  I’m here with a bunch of friends from college.”  Don't feel bad--I do have this awesome decoder ring, so I'm basically a cold war spy.  Anyway, the problem here appears to still just be that this one dude doesn't know what a date is, or has some really weird ideas about group dating with his college friends, or he's a dark-eyed musician with disheveled hair and with that whole Twilight craze people are into that right now so he doesn't really have to put much effort into dating, you know?

“It’s one step below a date, and one step above a high-five,” she added. Dinner at a romantic new bistro? Forget it. Women in their 20s these days are lucky to get a last-minute text to tag along. Raised in the age of so-called “hookup culture,” millennials — who are reaching an age where they are starting to think about settling down — are subverting the rules of courtship. 

You guys, they're breaking the rules and it's changing everything.  As an aside, if you want to get dinner at a romantic new bistro, one good way to make that happen is ask someone "Do you want to get dinner at <name of romantic new bistro>?"  A less good way is to hope that they guess that you want to do that and then talk about how their code words are inscrutable.

Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, they rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other “non-dates” that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Hey, I'm 25 and I'm not confused at all!  I just go up to people and ask "Can I land you as my boyfriend or girlfriend?"  They're usually a bit unclear as to why I used the word "land" and said both boyfriend and girlfriend, and the response is pretty much the same every time.

“The new date is ‘hanging out,’ ” said Denise Hewett, 24, an associate television producer in Manhattan, who is currently developing a show about this frustrating new romantic landscape. As one male friend recently told her: “I don’t like to take girls out. I like to have them join in on what I’m doing — going to an event, a concert.”

You chose the strangest individuals to interview for this.  This guy legitimately can't be bothered to alter his own plans at all for a date?  This isn't a generational shift, it's just a lazy dude.

 For evidence, look no further than “Girls,” HBO’s cultural weather vane for urban 20-somethings, where none of the main characters paired off in a manner that might count as courtship even a decade ago. In Sunday’s opener for Season 2, Hannah (Lena Dunham) and Adam (Adam Driver), who last season forged a relationship by texting each other nude photos, are shown lying in bed, debating whether being each other’s “main hang” constitutes actual dating.

"For evidence, let's look at fictional television shows and see what characters on TV are doing."  If you did this a decade ago, you'd assume it was totally normal for people to gather in groups of six and frolic in public fountains.

The actors in the show seem to fare no better in real life, judging by a monologue by Zosia Mamet (who plays Shoshanna, the show’s token virgin, since deflowered) at a benefit last fall at Joe’s Pub in the East Village. Bemoaning an anything-goes dating culture, Ms. Mamet, 24, recalled an encounter with a boyfriend whose idea of a date was lounging in a hotel room while he “Lewis and Clarked” her body, then tried to stick her father, the playwright David Mamet, with the bill, according to a Huffington Post report.

The very strangest part of this whole paragraph is that this person has Huffington Post reporting on her dating experience in a hotel room.

Hookups may be fine for college students, but what about after, when they start to build an adult life? The problem is that “young people today don’t know how to get out of hookup culture,” Ms. Freitas said. In interviews with students, many graduating seniors did not know the first thing about the basic mechanics of a traditional date. “They’re wondering, ‘If you like someone, how would you walk up to them? What would you say?

"Hi.  How are you?" (IMPORTANT: let them answer that before you proceed)  "Not bad!  Want to go out sometime?"  This isn't that complicated.

What words would you use?’ ” Ms. Freitas said. 

This is just sad.  "What words would you use?"  The same damn ones you use the rest of the time.  There aren't special words for asking someone out, you just ask them.  Or, you could try Amy Poehler's approach, where you just go up to someone and act like you're dating them until they forget that you aren't.

That may explain why “dates” among 20-somethings resemble college hookups, only without the dorms. Lindsay, a 25-year-old online marketing manager in Manhattan, recalled a recent non-date that had all the elegance of a keg stand (her last name is not used here to avoid professional embarrassment).

After an evening when she exchanged flirtatious glances with a bouncer at a Williamsburg nightclub, the bouncer invited her and her friends back to his apartment for whiskey and boxed macaroni and cheese. When she agreed, he gamely hoisted her over his shoulders, and, she recalled, “carried me home, my girlfriends and his bros in tow, where we danced around a tiny apartment to some MGMT and Ratatat remixes.”

1.  When the bouncer from a nightclub asks you and your friends over for whiskey and mac and cheese, that is not a date or a "date" or anything of the sort.  Comparing this to your nostalgic view of dating in the past is pretty ridiculous, because as it happens people in the past also would go home with each other after being at nightclubs, so it's just a different thing that people still do and used to do, too.
2. Whiskey and mac and cheese sounds awful at first, but for some reason the more I think about it the more I want it.
3. Did he really carry her home?

Relationship experts point to technology as another factor in the upending of dating culture.

Traditional courtship — picking up the telephone and asking someone on a date — required courage, strategic planning and a considerable investment of ego (by telephone, rejection stings). Not so with texting, e-mail, Twitter or other forms of “asynchronous communication,” as techies call it. In the context of dating, it removes much of the need for charm; it’s more like dropping a line in the water and hoping for a nibble.

Hey, online rejection can hurt too!  One time someone just tweeted this picture to me as a response, and let me tell you, I was devastated.

“I’ve seen men put more effort into finding a movie to watch on Netflix Instant than composing a coherent message to ask a woman out,” said Anna Goldfarb, 34, an author and blogger in Moorestown, N.J. 

I mean, have you tried picking a movie on Netflix recently?  I watched Clueless one goddamn time and now all it recommends are 90s pseudo-comedy chick flicks.

A typical, annoying query is the last-minute: “Is anything fun going on tonight?” More annoying still are the men who simply ping, “Hey” or “ ’sup.”

Personally, I prefer an understated "WAZZZZZAAAAAA!!!"

“What does he think I’m doing?” she said. “I’m going to my friend’s house to drink cheap white wine and watch episodes of ‘Dance Moms’ on demand.”

What makes you think I wouldn't be interested in this?  WAZZZZZAAAAA!!!!!

Dodgy economic prospects facing millennials also help torpedo the old, formal dating rituals. Faced with a lingering recession, a stagnant job market, and mountains of student debt, many young people — particularly victims of the “mancession” — simply cannot afford to invest a fancy dinner or show in someone they may or may not click with.

If you're going to use words like "mancession", can you at least tell me what that is?  I had to spend five whole seconds Googling.

What, you thought I'd just tell you?  You can look it up the same way I did.

Further complicating matters is the changing economic power dynamic between the genders, as reflected by a number of studies in recent years, said Hanna Rosin, author of the recent book “The End of Men.”

A much-publicized study by Reach Advisors, a Boston-based market research group, found that the median income for young, single, childless women is higher than it is for men in many of the country’s biggest cities (though men still dominate the highest-income jobs, according to James Chung, the company’s president).  This may be one reason it is not uncommon to walk into the hottest new West Village bistro on a Saturday night and find five smartly dressed young women dining together — the nearest man the waiter. Income equality, or superiority, for women muddles the old, male-dominated dating structure.

So, earlier you were bemoaning the move away from "traditional" dating, and now you're saying that income equality is muddling the old dating structure which was dominated by men.  I'm not an expert at the transitive property, but I can sorta figure where this is headed.

“Maybe there’s still a sense of a man taking care of a woman, but our ideology is aligning with the reality of our finances,” Ms. Rosin said. As a man, you might “convince yourself that dating is passé, a relic of a paternalistic era, because you can’t afford to take a woman to a restaurant.”

Yep!  Men hate dating now because they can't afford it, and asking a woman to split the bill would just be the worst, right?  After all, it's not about getting to know someone--it's about making sure she knows how much cash you have, and if the answer is not much, what's the point?

Many young men these days have no experience in formal dating and feel the need to be faintly ironic about the process — “to ‘date’ in quotation marks” — because they are “worried that they might offend women by dating in an old-fashioned way,” Ms. Rosin said.

 If you're worried about offending someone, just do the same thing you were going to do, but do it ironically!  This is why hipsters are so universally loved.

An actual thing that is happening: Megadeth is upset with Men's Wearhouse

Dave Mustaine is the lead singer of Megadeth, the band known for hits such as ""Killing Is My Business..and Business Is Good", "Anarchy in the UK", and "Moto Psycho".  Dave has something to say to everyone about the pressing social issue of (shakes magic 8-ball)...not getting gift certificates delivered on time from Men's Wearhouse!  Serious business.

Droogies,

Hang on hang on pause.  So everyone is clear: Droogies is actually what Megadeth fans are called, I guess, and it's a term derived from what the main characters of "A Clockwork Orange" call themselves.  We are dealing with some intense folks at this time.

I know that not all of you have the kind of job that requires a suit, or wear a suit when you (if you) go to any kind of faith-based service, court date, wedding or funeral, but if you do…you are going to want to read this. You know me, I don’t complain much in writing, but I gotta get this off my chest.

Dave Mustaine doesn't often use his bully pulpit, so when he goes on Facebook to talk about serious things yall damn well better listen up.

A few days before Christmas I purchased a gift certificate from the Men’s Warehouse in Salt Lake City, Utah as a gift for our awesome tour manager Jim Carroccio. You know the Men’s Warehouse…the old geezer with the voice that sound like he has chain-smoked since he was a fetus; 

teehee he said fetus

the one that espouses, “I absolutely guarantee you’re gonna like the way you look,” or some manure like that, right?

Oooh, Dave's pulling out all of his SAT words for this and saying "manure" to avoid using profanity!  Sadly, I don't think the word "espouses" means what he thinks it means.

So close, Dave.

Well, I was talking to Jim today and wondering why he didn’t say anything (I think we all wonder sometimes when our loved ones or friends get gifts if they actually like them) 

OMG you guys, lead singers of thrash bands have the same holiday insecurities as us normal people!  I've personally managed to avoid this insecurity by only giving the most terrible, unlikable gifts possible so I never have to wonder if someone likes them.

and it turns out that they decided to hold my order, otherwise called by them as “pending,” and told no one. For almost 9 days now I have been waiting for delivery of this gift certificate, and I wouldn’t say anything because it IS the holidays, 

You clearly would say something!  You are saying it right now!  It's not even hypothetical! 

but these salesmen promised that they would GUARANTEE a two-day delivery of the certificate to Jim (it seems they throw this word GUARANTEE around quite a lot).

Salesmen, lying?  My word.  What will Jim, the tour manager for a thrash band, wear if he can't get his suit on time?

So, we called and asked what happened and they have no explanation whatsoever, they didn’t care, and when we asked if they were going to do anything to remedy this, they made no effort whatsoever for this mix-up…although they did promise me the same GUARANTEE that they gave me when I bought it; that is that they will send it “two-day delivery,” but I already was promised this. Maybe they mean 12 day delivery.

Dave, as the lead singer for a successful band, I'm guessing you don't deal with customer service at large companies often, but this is pretty common.  Cheer up, though--I got you a commemorative pillow to celebrate the occasion of you discovering this!

If a delay of several days is this bad for you, I can't even imagine the rude awakening your headed for when you want to dispute a cell phone bill.

I really think that it sucks when people make false claims, that they don’t care to make good on a problem that is clearly their fault, and with all of the “ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEE IT” crap I just had to say something. We are all living in very tight financial times right now, 

Are all of us living in hard times, Mr. My Band Has Sold A Whole Shit-ton of Albums?

and like I said, you may not wear a suit for your job or for an event or occasion, but if you do, I would strongly recommend you wear someone else’s suits. Go to Jos. A Bank instead. 

but but but what if Jos. A Bank lied to customers ever?  Would they also be worthy of the Dave Mustaine Megadeth Official Seal of Boycottery?

I for one, will never set foot in a Men’s Warehouse, even for shelter from a blizzard.

Way to take a brave stand, Dave.

Meanwhile, in Brazil

The New York Times reports, in a very serious tone, that in Brazil there are resorts specifically designed for having sex, which is a very serious topic that demands very serious coverage.

The establishment that opened here this year has features that demanding clients naturally expect from a love motel.  Heart-shaped ceiling mirror: check. Curtains drawn against the bright day: check. Red mattress: check.

Is there some sort of Zagat for love motels?  How do demanding clients look these things up?  I need to know because of...pure intellectual curiousity, or something.

To open the motel, the siblings leased a former children’s hospital in Gutierrez, a leafy area of Belo Horizonte.

I hope they put up some very clear signs so that people stopped bringing their injured children there.

“Mel gets agitated with so much stimulation, and needs to relax a bit,” Ms. Carvalho said. “Come to think of it, I need some peace and quiet as well.” 

This would be a little bit weird, except that I neglected to mention that Mel, like all other clients of this motel, is not a human.  He is a dog.  Therefore, it's actually a lot weird.  This is a motel for this guy

to meet up with this lady

so that they can do dog things to each other.  Oh, and it's not just dogs:

parts of the establishment cater to owners of cats, fish and rodents like the Mongolian gerbil

Fantastic.  I had to look up what a Mongolian gerbil is, and it is this:

Oh yeah, just like that

In all seriousness, I have absolutely no conception of how this whole thing would go down.  Do owners set up dates in advance?  Do you just kinda show up with your dog and wait for someone else with a dog to come over and say "hey, shall we have em go fuck somewhere?"  Do dogs, let alone Mongolian gerbils or fucking fish, need things like heart-shaped mirrors and red mattresses to get in the mood?  This article has answered none of my pressing questions about why there is a need for this establishment.