Ever the media-savvy businessman, Joe Simpson has publicly responded to the same rumors we hear about him every week (he’s a creepy control-freak), and his defense isn’t helping. “The media says that I try to plan everything,” Joe says. “If I had half of the power they give me…” Um, then what? Do we want to know?
Parents magazine may have called out Jennifer Lopez's People spread for showcasing her death trap of a nursery, but who's going to call out Parenting magazine for cutting off a baby's legs? [PSD]
Guitar Hero III is already ruining the music industry, and now it has also ruined Christmas for one Canadian dope fiend/curious teenager
After catching his 15 year-old kid smoking pot with his “delinquent friends," a father in Montreal sold his son’s copy of Guitar Hero III on eBay for $9,100 to punish him.
This is just the kind of story that gets parents thinking they can control over their kids’ lives. Add this to the list of reasons we have a disregard for Christmas, right behind our Jewish heritage.
Many of us (ourselves included!) have shelved the possibility of having kids until some distant, unforeseeable future when we're suddenly transformed from immature borderline alcoholics to surprisingly functional adults with longterm career aspirations, non-messy apartments and, potentially, significant others. Which is why we were alarmed to hear about the growing phenomenon of women who become grandmothers before they reach the age of thirty.
Like 29 year-old Leticia Magee, who (as our friends at Stereohyped put it) "had her daughter when she was 13, and the girl, now 15, has just given birth to a baby boy, who will hopefully be taught the virtues of condoms by age 7." [QCTimes]
Apparently, it's the constant moving around, traveling to exotic vacation spots and ownership of numerous multimillion dollar abodes that's disruptive to the Pitt-Jolie clan.
And totally not the incessant unsubstantiated claims that their parents are breaking up, the swarms of paparazzi who follow them everywhere they go or the overzealous celebrity weekly reporters who camp outside their (multiple!) homes, shove cameras in their faces, and ask them inherently offensive questions like, "Doesn't it scare you that Mommy and Daddy aren't married?"
Sigh. If only crappy parents Brad and Angie could settle down in, say, Malibu, stop spending so much time lavishing the kids with gratuitous attention, taking them on exciting family field trips and sending them to prestigious New York private schools and just let them fend for themselves, enjoy peaceful (albeit circuitous) drives in the neighborhood and more or less get adjusted to their domestic environment.
You know, because that's obviously worked out so well for Britney Spears and her offspring…
Although we can’t seem to shake the nasty habit of writing in the royal we, occasionally one of our editors decides to shake off the cloak of anonymity to write a short, pithy statement long, rambling diatribe about a topic of their choice. Today, Debbie Newman is that editor.
When reading this week's Sunday Styles, we couldn't help but notice New York Times reporter Mayrav Saar's insightful/disturbing piece about an emerging breed of teenage paparazzi and the unfit parents who enable them. Being awkward, introspective types, we've taken the liberty of preemptively injecting ourselves into these parents' mindsets. Our objective? To figure out what rationalizations will justify allowing your child to shun boring things like "high school," "prom" and "normal adolescence" in favor of the glitz and glamour inherent to stalking celebrities in exchange for monetary compensation.
Our theories, after the jump.
As native New Yorkers with overbearing Jewish parents, we sometimes forgot that some of you may not have passive-aggressive disputes with your so-called loved ones on a near daily basis. So this is for those of you feeling somewhat Mom-deprived these days. It just may just tide you over until Thanksgiving day, when your mom inevitably taps you on the shoulder and says, "Honey, are you sure you really need that second piece of pumpkin pie?"
And speaking of amazing parenting, how about "Scary Spice" Melanie Brown? After months of dragging Eddie Murphy through the mud for abandoning his precious unborn child, Mel B. shows her own commitment to childrearing by thrusting the unexpected bundle of joy upon the unsuspecting housekeeper and treating herself to a four-day elopement joyride. [Stereohyped]
We're not quite sure how to handle the launch of True Mom Confessions, one of those pre-fab websites that takes the novelty of PostSecret, the opportunism of UrbanBaby, and the earnestness of HuffPo's celebration of mothers. The site – which features quick blurb-y thought posts from women we're going to assume have birthed children – is something we'd expect from Babble.
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We all know parents are just a bunch of big, silly, worrywarts.
They worry needlessly, constantly and unwaveringly, from the trivial ("did you get your homework done?") to the mundane ("bring a sweater, it could get chilly later") to the generally invasive ("are your friend's parents going be there?")
And, in addition to being overprotective, neurotic and hopelessly embarrassing, parents are also invariably missing the point.
Like, for instance, when they insist on an early curfew but allow their daughters to attend the "cool girls" (read underage drinkers') slumber party. Or when they freak out about MySpace and The Real World instead of worrying whether their kids are having unprotected sex or boozing in between classes.
U.S. parents are more worried about the amount of time their kids spend watching television or meeting friends on Internet social networks than about sex or alcohol abuse, according to a new study.
Some 57 percent of 1,138 U.S. parents surveyed were either very concerned or strongly concerned about children spending too much of their time with different media outlets. By comparison, about 45 percent of parents said they were as concerned about their kids engaging in sex or using alcohol.
Concerns over their children struggling in school or developing a weight problem also ranked higher, at 55 percent and 46 percent of respondents, than sexual activity or alcohol use.
So, to recap, your parents would rather you were fat, slutty coke whores than MySpace-using, fake news-watching honor roll students.
Which means Paris Hilton's posse has FINALLY done something right!
Taking a page from this week's New York magazine: If UrbanBaby.com is a site for gauche mothers to bicker about their bratty kids and drinking habits, and if UrbanDaddy.com is a site for ex-frat guys with Wall Street pay stubs and an affinity for bottle service, it's a shame UrbanMommy.com is just a parked webpage instead of a site for Upper East Side bachelors who want to fuck their mothers.
Editorial Director
