On a normal weekday, after homework is done, he is permitted about an hour to an hour and a half of gaming. It’s usually around the time I’m making dinner, so I’ve become accustomed to hearing ghastly sounds bursting out of the computer speakers while I chop garlic or debone a chicken thigh. My son gets bored quickly, so a typical gaming stint will include demonic cackles from his Level 65 “World of Warcraft” Death Knight alternating with the drawn out howls of pain from battling soldiers in “Team Fortress II” — along with the assorted explosions, machine gun fusillades, shrieks and screams that make up the rest of the soundtrack of modern gaming violence.

My son is not unusual. Boys under 17 years old account for 18 percent of the overall market for videogames (more than double the market share of girls the same age), according to industry group Entertainment Software Association. 12-13 year-olds are the peak of that demographic — hours spent gaming decline for older teens, presumably because the opposite sex has become more interesting. Boys are especially drawn to violent games — far more so than girls. Ratings systems designed to shield minors from “adult” games are a joke. Most big game retailers have a policy against selling games rated "M" (for Mature) to children under 17, but at least one parent of your child’s friend will blithely ignore recommendations. It’s much easier to play a violent video game than get into an R-rated movie. One study published in The Journal of Adolescent Health found that in a sample of over 1000 children, 68 percent of the boys reported that they played at least one mature-rated game regularly.

Among my son’s peer group, there is no more popular way to pass the time than to gather in front of a console and start piling up the blood and gore.

The Case for Critical Thinking

Why does Eli love first-person shooter games where it’s kill or be killed, where your outlook on the world is framed by whatever weapon you happen to be wielding? Because, he says, it’s “fun!” Because it’s “exciting!” Because … and he imitates a paranoid, hopped-up combat fighter’s body language — muscles tensed, eyes flitting from side-to-side, anticipating danger from every angle — and leaves the rest unsaid: The virtual world gets the adrenaline going.

Dating back to their earliest toddler days, when my children — I have a 15-year-old daughter — first started reaching for the remote control and the mouse, I’ve been concerned about how good parenting and modern entertainment intersect. I’ve generally taken a pretty liberal approach — likely due to a combination of factors. My parents never banned anything — my father was a television critic and I have always been a voracious consumer of media of all kinds. Censoring my children’s media consumption felt hypocritical from day one. With the one major exception of sexually explicit material, and within the constraints of regularly enforced screen time limits (TV, games, Facebook all fitting under that one category), I’ve mostly let my children watch and play what they want, although I do make sure to keep an eye on whatever it is they are checking out. Even if I believed it was possible to successfully cordon off the forbidden (which I don’t), my basic position has been that I’d rather raise my kids to critically engage the world than attempt to shelter them from it.

In general, I’m not unhappy with the results. My daughter may have ended up watching more episodes of America’s Next Top Model than I am comfortable with, but she is also a third generation feminist and is able to balance that contradiction. And my son may leave a trail of virtual corpses (human, alien, and magical) behind him everywhere he games, he may devote an inordinate amount of brain power to the question of what type of battle-axe his latest barbarian giant should be packing, and he can talk your ears off discussing the varying merits of the newest handheld gaming devices (“I know my lore,” he once told me, when I expressed surprise at how far back his encyclopedic knowledge of the gaming industry went), but he is in general a sociable, friendly, enthusiastic kid, fully engaged with school. He likes to roughhouse with his friends but he’s never been in a fight. He’s just your typical sweetheart who has slaughtered millions.

When Videogames Become Too Realistic

So I think I’m doing something right. My sample of one declares that obsessive gaming, properly regulated, doesn’t lead immediately to social dysfunction — at least not yet. But even so, I feel a sense of disquiet at just how much his entire generation is drawn to the killing fields. Too much of their interaction with the world is mediated, too much of it is high-intensity adrenaline-revving virtual combat, too much of the real world seems boring and uneventful, compared to the gaming life. What happens when my boy leaves the nest? Will he disappear into a videogame vortex? I wonder where this is all headed, for the simple reason that games are just getting too compelling.

Computer gaming has been a part of growing up for at least 35 years now, dating back to Pong and PacMan. But we have never seen anything like the complexity, aesthetic power, narrative depth, realism, immersiveness and addictive potential of today’s games. In the game “Spore,” you can evolve your own life form from scratch into a space-faring civilisation (and choose whether to be warlike or peaceful.) One of 2009’s hits, “Assassin’s Creed 2,” places you on the canals of Renaissance era Venice — in a world as lush as any painted by Titian or Tintoretto. “World of Warcraft” draws you into a fantasy landscape so rich and deep and interactive that reading J. R. R. Tolkien feels like a pale simulacrum, a bowl of bran that can’t compete with a 12-course banquet.

And then there’s the blockbuster smash of 2009, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” which grossed $US550 million in revenue just five days after its November release, putting it on a par with the biggest Hollywood productions. “Modern Warfare 2” delivers a hyper-realistic commando-fighting experience merging amazing movie production values with a narrative of terrorism, global warfare and constant peril ripped directly from the latest headlines in Afghanistan, Moscow and Washington. Watching kids play it is not unlike imagining yourself inhabiting the TV series 24; That much realism gives me pause.

The real world has a harder and harder time competing with these marvels of simulation. If I didn’t impose screen-time limits, my son would play these games until he keeled over.

Handling the Skeptics

My ex-sister-in-law, a mother of three young boys, views violent games as an evil distillation of 10,000 years of male war-mongering and brutality; she is convinced, like many pundits and psychologists, that such games desensitise kids to violence. Almost every parent I know worries about this to some extent, even if they don’t go quite so far as to denounce all of human civilisation. At the other end of the spectrum stand eloquent gaming advocates like Steven Johnson, who provocatively argues that hours spent in virtual distraction can positively prepare kids to excel in an ADHD, relentlessly multitasking world. I can’t subscribe to either view. The data, to say the least, are inconclusive. Untangling cause and effect from socioeconomic status, family dynamics and genetic predisposition is no easy task.

But it seems undeniable that there are consequences to so many hours spent in immersive, interactive environments. So in the absence of knowing anything for sure, what are we supposed to do?

Teaching Real World Lessons Through Gaming

When my kids first started watching television, rather than try to avoid commercials, I asked them to ask themselves one question whenever an ad came on: What do they want me to buy? It became a game even kindergarteners could play: Deconstruct the media! And I tried, when possible, to experience the world with them, rather than from afar. A critical stance, I hoped, would arm them against media propaganda better than placing them in an isolation ward. But what this requires is active engagement on the part of the parent, too. You can’t just let the TV be a babysitter. So I didn’t stop my preteen daughter from watching America’s Next Top Model, but you can be sure there were plenty of conversations about how pop culture treats women’s bodies.

I’ve tried to continue the same policy of engagement with gaming. When my son spends an hour talking about an escapade in “World of Warcraft” or "Team Fortress II," I try to draw connections between virtual war and real war, without being heavy-handed. I check in on him while he’s playing — his computer is in the dining room between our kitchen and family room, so he is always part of the house dynamic, rather than squirreled away behind closed doors. If he is playing a game I’ve never seen before — because you can find almost anything on the Web — I want to know what he likes about it. And I’m not shy to tell him when I find something objectionable. Once I was alarmed to discover him playing a Web-accessible game that featured street-fighting hobos beating up on each other in a darkened alley. He thought it was funny; I thought it was disgusting. But rather than ban it, I wanted to make sure he understood why I thought it was mean. We launched into a mini discussion of why poverty and homelessness weren’t all giggles.

How much of it stuck? I have no idea. I never saw him play the game again. But I’m betting that this strategy will have a more effective long-term impact than a command-and-control approach.

One recent attempt to exert some level of editorial responsibility over gaming turned out to be an almost comic failure. I decided not to buy him “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” for his birthday last November because I was suspicious of its rah-rah nationalistic politics and disturbed by just how closely it looked like footage from Iraq or Chechnya. I didn’t want to be personally responsible for bringing it into the house. A few months later, half of his best friends had the game and his opportunities to play it seem unlimited.

Having the Videogame Conversation

Eli doesn’t particularly like it when I express my distaste for some aspect of his gaming life. I’m sure he isn’t looking forward to having his Modern Warfare gaming accompanied by my kibitzing on the ineffectiveness of torture or how Government policy in the Mideast helps to breed terrorism. But he does appreciate it when I take his world seriously. He enjoys the give and take. And he’s getting a big dose of my values, without my bashing them into his brain with a sledgehammer.

A few months ago, my ears perked up when I heard the voices of young men spewing out a wide range of homophobic, racist and misogynistic comments from the computer speakers. Eli was playing a game called "Team Fortress 2," another first-person shooter, but one in which you could hear the live comments of other human players currently logged in and playing on the same server.

My first impulse was to tell him he shouldn’t be playing a game frequented by such cretins. But I knew a teenager who lives at his mother’s house played the game regularly, and I could not control his exposure over there. One way or another, he was going to hear this crap. So I kept to my usual path. I asked him if he understood why I found their comments so objectionable. I made fun of the intelligence of his fellow gamers, suggesting, uncharitably, that they hadn’t been brought up very well. He got a sour look on his face, but eventually he admitted he didn’t particularly like hearing a lot of the commentary either. He couldn’t tell me exactly why, but I’d like to believe it was because he recognised at some level that this kind of crudity just wasn’t cool. We ultimately found out there was a way to mute individual players if you wanted to.

He still plays the game, but I’m pretty sure that when he’s out of my sight, when he’s older or when there is no one around to enforce any rules, he won’t go over to that dark side—or at least not too far. All the engagement, all the conversation, has, I think, helped him tell the difference between the gaming reality and how to behave in the offline world, how to treat people with respect.

I believe all this, even if one can never be totally sure what is going on in the inner recesses of your child’s heart and mind. And I know I’m taking a gamble, but all our bets on how to raise our children are gambles. There are no hard-and-fast rules guaranteeing success, especially in a world that changes as quickly as ours does. The best we can do is make it up as we go along, keep asking questions, keep watching and keep listening. If we stay in the game, we have a better chance of influencing how it all plays out.

“He’s so cute,” she says, touching my son’s curls. “Still not walking?” His chubby fingers clutch mine as he inches towards the swings, wobbly as a newborn foal.

“Oh, you know. He’s getting there,” I say, as if everyone walks around with a 13-kilo-toddler death-gripping their thumbs. As if on cue, Owen drops to his hands and knees and speeds off, slap-slap-slapping across the filthy playground flooring.

“He’s a big boy,” Playground Mommy says. “How old?”

“Thirteen months.”

“Thirteen months?!” she says, eyes wide. “He’s huge!”

That’s true… except for the “thirteen months” part. My son is actually seventeen months old, but you’ll never hear it from me, at least not at the playground.

Yes, I know it’s nuts. As a reasonably intelligent, Birkenstock wearing, “Every child develops differently” type of gal, I always assumed I’d be Captain Awesome when it came to raising my own kid. I pictured myself surrounded by a crew of happy, tow-headed tots, each secure in the knowledge that they were special Just The Way They Are. But all that flew out the window when faced with a gaggle of playground parents whose ten-month-olds were running laps around my older son.

At first I didn’t think too much of it. The babe had always been a little slow with the physical stuff, but I figured it was genetic. His dad and I veer toward the “readerly” side of the athletic spectrum, so it made sense that he’d rather thumb through Goodnight Moon than run a 5K. But then it started. The looks. The tsks. The well-meaning advice from people whose charges were walking — running! — at twelve or nine or even seven months.

Within weeks I’d heard it all: Buy him sturdier shoes. Buy him comfortable shoes. Make him walk everywhere. (He’s only crawling because you’re not putting your foot down.) Don’t let him watch television. Tempt him with treats. One ancient grandmother-type recommended that I tie a scarf under his armpits and march him around the playground like a puppet.

I’ve found myself considering it.

Still, my gut tells me he’s fine. I’ve done the reading; I know that boys tend to be slower with language and that taller children take longer to walk. At seventeen months — and thirty-six-inches tall — he’s as big as most three-year-olds, so it makes sense that his toddler brain would have trouble co-ordinating his preschool-sized parts. But just to be safe we went ahead and had him evaluated to make sure we weren’t missing any red flags. The physical therapist, a small woman with a reassuring smile, said that Owen was a little behind the curve, but physically and cognitively he was fine. Better than fine, even. Smart! Social! Wonderful in all the ways that warm a neurotic parent’s heart! The best thing I could do for Owen, she said, would be to put down the parenting magazines and let him develop on his own schedule. After all, nobody goes to college not knowing how to walk. I know she’s right, yet all it takes is one raised eyebrow on the playground to send me spiralling.

It started small, as most lies do. I’d round down his age down to the nearest month, shaving off a few precious developmental weeks. “Oh,” the parents would sigh, relief flooding their faces. “That makes more sense.” Gone were the furrowed brows and awkward talk of early intervention. Suddenly we could chat about normal things like nap schedules and vegetable aversion. I was happy. They were happy. And my son didn’t understand what I was saying so, hey, happy.

Of course I still have qualms. It doesn’t take an episode of Toddlers and Tiaras to know that it’s a slippery slope between fudging a few facts and turning into a full-fledged Freakmother. But some days saving face feels like the only way to keep my sanity. I know I’ll have to stop when he’s able to understand me, and that’s fine. Until then, telling a white lie every now and then to avoid an hour-long lecture on footwear seems small in the scheme of things. The less time I have to take to defend his (okay, our) honour, the more time we have for important things like playing chase. Even if it’s on all fours.

Pregnancy: Be freelance and have the kind of “catastrophic” insurance that covers something if you are hospitalised, but not sonograms, medicine or doctor visits. Have no end of small problems for which you have to see the doctor, including thinking you are leaking amniotic fluid in seventh month. (Turns out it’s urine, which is at first a relief and then disturbing in its own way). Spend a week believing you have gestational diabetes, but later it’s discovered that it was the glass of Sprite you drank just before the blood test.Bonding: Ask timidly if you are “allowed to breastfeed.”

Birth class: Attend with ex, who openly resents any homework and bolts before class is over each week to get a drink at neighborhood bar. Wonder if it would be more or less embarrassing to go alone.

Labour: Wake up feeling crampy and dig out yellow Wonderbra you’ve never worn before; don it. Go to hospital five hours later and immediately beg for an epidural. Get an epidural that pools so that your left hip is numb but everything else is in full bloom of pain. Make mental note that you don’t have pain relief, nor will you get credit for having a natural birth. Say to anyone near you, at first abashedly but with increasing volume and abandon, that you “really feel like” you have to “poo”. Although all other clothing has been removed, keep yellow Wonderbra on for entire labour and delivery.

Birth partner: Ex is there but leaves during transition to make phone calls. When he comes back, he takes one look at your vagina and blanches. Ex attempts to comfort you through contractions by trying to pash you; stands on IV.

Delivery: Scream bloodcurdling scream until son finally comes out. Baby is immediately whisked to neonatal intensive care unit. Head to hospital room and become the only person on the floor without a baby. Feel foolish.

Bonding, phase 1: Visit child in NICU but feel like interloper. Ask timidly if you are “allowed to breastfeed.” When son finally comes home (day four), experience feeding child as akin to placing a snapping turtle on your swollen, chapped nipples. Notice son has little pimples and have flashback to terrible high school years when you had ackers.

Bonding, phase 2: Son is now covered in white and red pustules and looks not unlike the Singing Detective. When people come to see him, blurt out, “Can you believe how bad he’s got baby acne?!” so that they know you know it’s there. Feel bad that this is the first thing you say about your child. Try to pump bottles so Baby Daddy can do four a.m. feedings, but “allow” the occasional bottle of formula (okay, use formula every night).

Co-parenting: Swing between smugness that you and baby’s father literally share the work and expense of childrearing, unlike most “real” couples you know, and blind rage that you have to parent with irrational man you broke up with two years ago. Wag finger in ex’s face and whisper sotto voce threats that you won’t follow through with.

Bedtime: As child grows older, have him on late schedule so he’ll sleep in the morning. By the time he is twelve months, his bedtime is ten p.m.; by eighteen months, it’s midnight. Keep this a secret from friends, relatives, and your own parents.

School: Take son to pre-school the day after he turns two. Sneak out of school, sniffling, when he isn’t looking because that’s your strategy when you leave him with babysitters. Walk home talking on mobile to sister about how son is in school and next thing you know you’ll be leaving him at Uni when other line beeps in. Learn that son is hysterically crying, “desperate,” as the teacher terms it, and that you are to pick him up immediately. At the pick-up, start to cry when teacher asks if you even said goodbye to son before leaving.

Psyche: Notice son winds his tresses in his fingers as he is falling asleep, plucking out many strands during each nap, creating small bald spot.

Food: Son appears to consume about a gallon of milk every day, eggs, and very little else. He asks for Tic Tacs and cough drops as a treat, demanding in a loud, rude voice, “Need Tic Tac! Need Tic Tac!” Try to resist giving child Tic Tacs or cough drops, as it seems weird and he’s crunching them and probably going to break one of his tiny teeth. Despite anorexic’s diet, son is extremely tall. Sometimes he will emerge from his bedroom chewing on something and when you inquire what, he’ll say, “hair.”

Psyche, part 2: Notice son gets up from a nap covered in strands of hair. Call pediatrician for advice. Pediatrician says to ignore that son is pulling out hair ritualistically, that son is soothing himself, like thumb-sucking. Ignore hair-pulling for one day and then take to whispering intensely to son not to pull his hair; you’ll give him cough drops if he’ll stop pulling hair. Please stop pulling hair.

Love: At son’s school, three weeks into the term, as you are fluffing his hair to obscure thinning areas, receive wet, mentholated kiss from balding two-year-old. Wince as heart nearly breaks from how lucky you are.

Photo courtesy Nathan Kendall

Straight from the Craigslist posting:

My deceased aunt gave my two kids a Cocker Spaniel a few months back. The dog has been a terror and become overwhelming for me. I am a single father raising two young children. I cannot face telling the kids that the dog must go. I have found a good home for the dog, and just need someone to transport the dog, and play the villain.

Said villian will play “dog walker” hired to walk Skittles. But the actor’s real job is to transport the pooch twenty minutes to her new family then hoof it back home with only a leash in hand.

Explains the dad:

The story will be that Skittles broke free of the leash and took off. At this point prepare for crying, things being thrown at you, and possibly cursing. My kids are young and dramatic, their girls.

Really, he concocted this whole scheme, willing to throw $US500 at it, and his kids are the dramatic ones?

The idea that Dad doesn’t want to be the villian is perfectly understandable- especially as a single parent when you don’t have anyone to share the burden of putting your foot down. But, you’d rather your kids think their precious Skittles is out starving to death or got hit by a car than tell them some nice mummy and daddy took him in?

Source: Examiner

While the bedrooms of the neighbour’s children just across the way are dark, save for a night light in the toddler’s room, my three-year-old is wide awake. She isn’t up past her bedtime. She doesn’t have one.

She has those important rituals of bedtime, sure. She is bathed by me or my husband almost every night, her delicate skin covered first in lotion and then a set of fleecy pajamas. We’ll generally settle in her bed to read stories, but sometimes in ours. She gets at least two books read every night — one per parent. On that, there is no negotiating.

What’s fluid is the time.

Our daughter goes to bed when we do. And so in the hours after my husband comes home from the office and I finish up my work-at-home writing, we spend our time together. We eat dinner together — even if it’s on the living room couch, with a dog staring hopefully at a butterfly-shaped plate set precariously on the edge of the coffee table.

We build pirate ships, and, yes, sometimes we watch TV while she reads herself Clifford the Big Red Dog books, upside down because they’re sillier that way, curled up against my side.

With two working parents, our days are hectic. Even on the days that I work at home, the house is loud — the radio blaring in one room, my daughter outfitting the dog with a set of bunny ears in the other. But we are, by nature, a boisterous and busy family. When night falls, the idea of hustling my daughter off to bed so I can be alone with my husband is a foreign concept to me — and to him.

And yet, many of my friends tell me how lucky they are. Their kids go to bed by seven p.m., and they have couple time after. They do the dishes with no children underfoot. Throw in a load of laundry. Watch their own, much trashier, TV.

Sounds nice — I guess. Except I also hear the wistfulness from other working parents — women and men — who would like more time to spend with their kids. If there’s a common theme among working parents it’s this — they yearn for extra hours to be tacked on to the day. Work is a necessary evil, but they don’t want it to come at the expense of being a good parent.

Or maybe it’s at the expense of watching their kids grow up? Because there’s nothing like seeing a child every day — seeing them in action, not cuddled in a bed for a quick good night kiss — to make you feel like you matter as much to them as they do to you.

That’s why there’s no bedtime in our household, why the seven o’clock hour does not turn our child into a screaming, writhing pumpkin who just wants another ten minutes to play with her toys or sit between Mummy and Daddy on the couch. We tried it a few times — the march upstairs to the bedroom, the tuck in, the request for water, the tuck in, the pleas to go potty again, the tuck in. Each night it would go on for an hour or two, her too keyed up for bed, us more exhausted by the minute.

Pretty quickly, we realised it wasn’t just a rule we didn’t like enforcing but one we saw no point in enforcing. If she was awake, why argue her into bed? Why spend our few hours together as a family every night manning our battle stations?

Commenting recently in the New York Times on the fact that President Barack and Michelle Obama enforce a strict eight p.m. bedtime for daughters Sasha and Malia, Dr. Judith Owens, who directs the Pediatric Sleep Disorders Clinic at Hasbro Children’s Hospital, says parents unfortunately misjudge the appropriate bedtime because they think their kids need less sleep than they do. Owens says just 2.5 percent of the population needs significantly less sleep than average, but 95 percent of the population wrongly thinks it’s in that 2.5 percent category.

But Dr. Perri Klass, who wrote the New York Times piece, points out that the sleep experts suggest “testing your routine by checking whether the child wakes spontaneously, alert and cheerful and ready for the day.”

Mine does.

In fact, she still rises earlier in the morning than I do — because she generally still falls asleep before either her father or me, him because he stays up to check out the sports scores, me because after a bedtime story, I pick up the latest novel off of my bedside table and spend at least an hour decompressing with some escapist trash.

But while the friends who brag that their children are off to bed by seven p.m. are the same mothers and fathers who make repeated requests to institute a mid-day nap just for parents, I am rarely wakened by an overeager toddler at five a.m. or even six a.m. She generally makes her appearance in our room just before the alarm goes off at seven — sometimes later, while we’re still pulling out clothes for the day. On weekends, when there is no work alarm, she may sleep as late as eight, a blissful lay-in for the whole family on a Saturday morning. By the time she’s ready to crawl out of bed, so are we.

To me, those extra morning hours in bed are nice. But they’re only the icing on the cake. Because some of the best parts of me — my undying love of the Rolling Stones, my penchant for fudge cookies — come from late nights long after my mother and brother were sleeping, when I sat in my insomniac dad’s home office. In between drafting invoices for his contracting business, we listened to classic rock and shared shortbread loaded with fudge.

I had no bedtime, but my father knew just where his child was at ten p.m. Even better — he knew who she was.

I first learned of this policy about a month before my due date, when my husband and I took a tour of the facility. The nurse showed us one of the post-delivery rooms, letting us marvel at just how un-hospital-like it seemed. And then, as we left the room, she gestured briskly at the hospital’s nursery: "But you and your babies hopefully won’t be seeing much of that. Our expectation is that babies will be sleeping beside their mums. The nursery is only used for babies experiencing medical complications."

At the time, this sounded great. After waiting nine-plus months to meet the baby of my dreams, why would I possibly want to ship him off to a sterile, fluorescent-lit nursery where I wouldn’t be able to stare into his eyes or caress his little hands or cuddle him against my chest? Provided the guy was in good health, why would I not want him beside me every moment of those first few days? In other words, our hospital’s rooming-in policy seemed like little more than common sense… until, that is, I gave birth.

I know that labour isn’t easy for anyone, and having talked to plenty of other mums about their experiences, I feel pretty lucky — no serious complications, no c-section, no back-labour, no tearing or vacuum extractions or other horror scenarios. I went into labour a little after midnight and thirty-two hours later: presto.

At the time of my first contraction, I was in good health and good spirits but not exactly well rested after three months of trying to sleep with what my midwife referred to as itty-bitty bladder syndrome. My first night of contractions was manageable, but sleepless (was I really going to doze off knowing I was having my baby?). The second night was relatively painless thanks to my epidural, but still sleepless, as I experienced the not-uncommon side effect of shaking and shivering through most of the night. So by the time I gave birth, I’d gone forty-eight hours without a wink.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: enter husband/ partner/ impregnator. And indeed, my husband was a superhero during those first post-birth days and weeks. The problem we faced was that, despite all those much-craved burgers and bowls of guacamole I consumed throughout my third trimester, our little guy was born absolutely famished and really psyched about this whole breastfeeding thing — as in, wanting to do it constantly.

And in addition to being famished, he was quite the moody newborn. Apparently, his thirty-two-hour entry into the world hadn’t tuckered him out one bit. Begin sleepless night numbers three and four.

Around my sixtieth waking hour, the flowery wallpaper and homey-style furniture of my birthing centre suite began to blur into the interior of a garish funhouse. At some point during our last night in our nursery-less hospital, a nurse who I remember only as having the face of an angel took pity on me, scooped up the baby and walked him around the halls, somehow keeping him quiet, while I slept. Maybe she rubbed whiskey on his gums. I didn’t know and frankly, I didn’t care. I collapsed into a coma-like state for a couple of blessed hours before the sun rose and it was time for our happy family to get ready to go home.

Promoted by the midwife/ doula/ home-birth-movement community, as well as the World Health Organization, the practice of newborns rooming-in has been widely embraced. It’s a pretty straightforward philosophy: newborns should be within arms-reach of their mothers whenever possible. They argue that separation between mother and child during these first few days can disrupt bonding, impede nursing, and force hospitals to take extensive security and identification precautions for infants who are shuttled back and forth between nursery and post-delivery rooms.

As a result, most hospitals now offer parents the choice of having their baby room with them or go to the nursery. And such a choice makes sense; many of the mums I know spoke glowingly about their rooming-in experiences — especially mums who had relatively short labours or sleepy babies who gave them the chance to recover from the not insignificant strains of childbirth. But other women — women who had marathon labours like mine, or difficult labours, women who bore fussy or hungry or colicky babies and then attempted to care for them through the night — found the experience torturous, or in many cases, simply impossible, and were grateful to be able to send the baby to the nursery for a night or two before going home.

Often, I find myself recalling with bitter amusement the tour guide’s explanation for our hospital’s policy: "We believe that new mothers actually sleep better with their babies close by."

Yes, this must be why enemy interrogators frequently use tape recordings of screaming infants as a form of low-grade torture, because the sound is just so soporific.

Could a more likely explanation be that rooming-in allows hospitals to cut down on staffing and other costs associated with running a nursery? It’s hard for me to accept that it’s really “better” for a woman who has been laboring for days, who perhaps hasn’t slept well in weeks, to be kept awake for an additional two nights and sent home with her new infant in a state of debilitating exhaustion.

The seriousness of this situation descended on me a couple of days after arriving home, when I felt a sore throat and muscle aches coming on, which I thought might be a flu. I completely broke down. I can’t do this, I thought. I haven’t slept in five nights. If I get sick, even a little, I won’t be able to take care of this baby. I phoned my mother, who’d been planning on flying in to visit a few days later. She answered the phone and I greeted her by repeating the same word again and again: Help, help, help.

I’m all for bonding. I’m all for women having the option of keeping their new babies beside them. Options are great. But so is rest and recovery. So is not being made to feel like a failed mother if you need to let someone else — say, a well-trained nurse — help care for your newborn while you regain the strength that labour saps.

That’s why, should I do it all again, I will deliver at a hospital where rooming-in is an option and not an expectation — where, should the need arise, I can stare into my new baby’s big beautiful eyes and caress his little hands all night long, in my dreams.

At first it was cute. When my twin daughters were three, I didn’t flinch at the thought of prancing down the street with one child clad in rainbow tights, a fuchsia tutu, a floppy blue sun hat, and yellow rubber boots. It was the perfect compliment to her sister’s look: orange shorts layered over purple floral pants, multi-coloured striped shirt beneath a shiny cartoon-cat patterned vest, and a red fleece Elmer Fudd-ish hat perched on her head. Like the cherry on top of a very nutty sundae. People on the street would smile, chuckle, and comment as our cute, kaleidoscopic spectacle paraded by. To be honest, I kinda got off on the attention. I was proud of my little girls for picking out those outlandish get-ups all by themselves, so I did nothing to discourage it. I may have even made suggestions from time to time. Hey, you know what would go great with that tiger costume and those ballet slippers? The red Elmer Fudd hat!

But now, my daughters are almost six. They go to a nice little public school in a nice little neighbourhood in our nice little city. And they stick out like a pair of kooky, sparkly, technicolor thumbs. Which has me seriously questioning my decision to give them free rein in their closets, and worrying that their clothing choices reflect badly on me. Now, as I dart down the street with my colorfully clashtastic kids looking like a posse of insane clowns, I worry what other mothers think. I worry that they are judging me, whispering that only an LSD-dropping social maladjust would allow her children to go out in public dressed like that. But I am not an LSD-dropping social maladjust. Haven’t been for quite some time. In fact, I spent the last six years cultivating the attitude that I was a far better parent than those whose murmurs I’m now suddenly paranoid about: those who forbade the public wearing of tutus with rubber boots. Those who confined their kids’ clothes to classic shades of tasteful, sophisticated and dull. Those whose children’s outfits failed to inspire seizures in epileptic bystanders. I didn’t shackle my children with the notion that clothing had to match. I didn’t push my kids to blend in with the sheepish crowd. I was too busy teaching them to be creative and carefree. To be individuals. And I was pretty damn smug about it.

See, I’m no clothes horse. I’m more like a clothes donkey. And ever since the thorough heckling I endured for the trendy red crushed velvet corset/coffin-lining/pirate shirt hybrid I wore in grade ten, I’ve avoided taking risks with my wardrobe. My outfit options fall into three categories: black hanging-around-the-house clothes, black going-out-in-public clothes, and crazy-things-I-bought-on-impulse-but-don’t-have-the-guts-to-actually-wear clothes. But I always wanted to be the girl who could pull off the tartan-mini-skirt-over- ripped-jeans look. Maybe with a purple cashmere sweater, a stripey knit scarf, peacock feather earrings, and a blue fedora. So, maybe by letting my kids continue to dress like the rainbow riot squad, I’ve been doing a little vicarious living. And maybe it’s time I stopped. Maybe I should put the tutus and wacky hats back in the dress-up trunk where they belong. Maybe I should sit my girls down and explain the importance of not wearing multi-colored horizontal and vertical stripes with polka-dots and jumbo floral prints. Maybe I should make some room in their closets for shades of tasteful, sophisticated — and yes, even dull — before my unsuspecting daughters and their fashion non-sense become targets of other kids’ cruelty and insecurity. But it might be too late for all that, as is evident by the conversations that ensue when I try to stage my little interventions.

Me: Here sweetheart, why don’t you try this sweater. It’s nice and soft and…

Neen: It’s brown.

Me: Yeah. Isn’t it pretty?

Neen: Brown is not in the rainbow.

Me: That’s okay. You can just try it…

Neen: No I can’t. Rainbows don’t wear brown.

Me: Okay. But it’s not like you have to wear every color of the rainbow all at once, right?

Neen: Yes I do. How can people know I’m a rainbow if I don’t wear all the colors?

Then she rolls her eyes at me like I’m crazy, and asks me where her red hat is. And instead of seizing this teachable moment to impress upon my daughter the value of dressing like a rational little human being, I’m the one who learns a lesson: you just can’t argue with a rainbow. So I try her twin sister. She’s a little less abstract. Less likely to turn this into a debate. Less prone to envisioning herself as an awe-inspiring, sky-spanning natural phenomenon.

Me: Hey, let’s just put these jeans on so we can—

Roo: No.

Me: But it’s time for school, so let’s just take off the tutu and put on some—

Roo: NO!

Me: But hon, tutus are for dress up, so it’s time to take the tutu off—

Roo: THEN I’LL JUST GO TO SCHOOL NUDIE! WITH MY BOOTS ON!

The tutu it is, then.

As it turns out, the “expert” advice was right on the money. Letting my kids pick their own clothes has given them control over their identities, and their choices are expressions of their budding personalities. They are boisterous, wacky, unpredictable, and colorful. The seeds of independence have been planted, and my daughters’ decision-making skills have flourished. They’ve drunk from the cup of freedom, the chalice of choice, and decided that it would make a great hat. Who am I to take that away from them because of my own ego?

Short of pinning them down and dressing them myself every day, or gutting their closets and replacing their wardrobes with nice neutral mix-and-match collections, there’s not much I can do. And I suppose there are worse things than going to school dressed like a rainbow, or a rubber-booted ballerina. Like going to school nudie. But while I’m busy rationalising my defeat, and rehearsing the humiliated smile I’ll need to flash at other mothers to convince them I am not a bad parent, my husband plays the glad game. “Maybe it’s for the best,” he says. “You know, like in nature. How bright colors warn other animals to stay away.” Because nothing screams, “Don’t mess with me! I’m dangerous and/or crazy!” like wearing an electric blue faux fur vest and pink leg warmers. Or maybe, like in nature, the vibrancy of my kids’ clothes and personalities will attract others of their own colorful kind.

Fast forward to 2009. The public Cult of the Good Mother has been replaced by the Cult of the Bad Mother, and everything has been turned on its head. Today, instead of magazines full of stories about maternal faultlessness, we have an entire media cottage industry focused on the myriad possibilities of maternal fault. In magazines and on blogs and TV sitcoms, those of us currently raising children vie to tell the most outrageous story of our own mothering failings; we yell at our children! We drink during playgroups! We feed our kids junk food! We use the TV as a babysitter! We admit that we love our husbands more than our offspring! We are Bad Mothers, aren’t we? Aren’t we?

Actually, we really aren’t; we’re simply imperfect mothers, just as the Good Mothers before us were. The only real difference between yesterday’s Good Mothers and today’s Bad Mothers is that we are now able and willing to tell the truth about what it’s like raise children, without leaving out the unpleasant parts. As women and as mothers, we’ve found our voices, and with the accessibility of online media, we have a ready platform and audience for dialogue. And now that it is now culturally acceptable to actually talk out loud about the harsher realities of motherhood — about how it’s sometimes mind-numbingly dull, can lead to depression, and can ruin our sex lives — it seems that we sort of can’t shut up about it.

I know I can’t. Why? Because I’ve discovered — along with an entire generation of mums like me — that being able to talk and write openly about my own parental screw-ups and shortcomings somehow makes mothering easier on a day-to-day basis. As war veterans can tell you, there is tremendous mental health value in being able to discuss the worst parts of a specific kind of experience with others who have shared that experience. It’s the same thing women discovered when they gathered in the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the late ’60s and early ’70s, where they found that openly expressing the unvarnished truth about previously taboo subjects like date rape and domestic violence and abortion was both healing and empowering.

Today, mothers get to be fallible human beings instead of artificial and saintly martyrs, and this is obviously a positive development. However, I have lately begun to wonder whether the constant, often ironic media use of the “Bad Parent” label for women who, say, fail to attend parent teacher association meetings regularly, or who feed their children Happy Meals instead of sit-down dinners doesn’t also cause unintentional harm.

I find myself asking whether we have we gone too far in de-stigmatizing parenting lapses. Because if everyone is a “Bad Parent,” then where is the line between reasonable and unreasonable maternal imperfection? Blog commenters forgive the mother who wittily posts about losing her temper and swatting her child in the grocery store. But does this mean we also forgive the mother who has no blog, but who loses it and swats her child really hard in the grocery store, leaving a nasty red mark? Because, after all, they are both simply being “bad parents.”

Last year, I blogged about how I forgot my baby after work one day, obliviously leaving her with the babysitter. Consumed with stress from my job that day, as well as the logistical headaches of remembering to pick up my three other children from their various afterschool activities, I completely failed to remember child #4 until my husband called to let me know that the sitter was trying to track me down to find out why I had never shown up. Luckily, the babysitter happens to be my mother-in-law, so my infant daughter was safe and sound. But the fact remains that I completely and totally forgot my own baby. Although I received a few comments on the blog post chastising me for my error, many who read my post sympathised with me, assuring me that it could happen to any busy mum. I confessed my “Bad Parent” sins and was absolved by my peers. The dialogue made me feel better about my mistake.

But should I feel better? Could a bigger helping of maternal guilt, spurred by negative judgment have served a higher purpose, preventing me from making the same mistake again? This is the question I found myself pondering after I read this story about how many parents each year forget their babies and toddlers in carseats, leaving their children to swelter or freeze to death in the parents’ cars — vehicles that are often parked right outside these busy parents’ offices. Most of these forgetful parents are criminally prosecuted, meaning they are clearly “bad parents” (surely being charged with murder takes you definitively into bad parent territory). After all, a terrible incident like this isn’t the stuff of which confessional mommyblog posts about parenting shortcomings are made.

But what about me? I forgot my baby, just like these other parents. I was no different in my actions; only the outcome was different — something for which I can assure you I frequently offer a private and heartfelt thank you to God. So where does my dangerous-mistake-with-lucky-outcome put me on the bad parent continuum? In hindsight, I am comfortable saying that I screwed up to such a degree that I deserved negative judgment, not affirmation or support. That day at least, I truly deserved the bad parent label — and not in any ironic way.

It is worth considering whether our ever-increasing media appetite for maternal imperfection might be leading us down a slippery slope of misplaced tolerance, where passing any sort of judgment against any sort of parenting — no matter how clearly unsatisfactory — ceases to exist. While excessive, unreasonable judgment of mothers might be wrong, so is the lack of cultural discernment that comes with approval of all parenting behavior as equally acceptable.

Additionally, we should be asking ourselves whether the ability to air our dirty parenting laundry without fear of judgment is simply a classist privilege, rather than representing any sort of meaningful change in attitudes toward all women. The mostly-white, mostly-college-educated mothers (like me) who pen “momoirs” about things like letting their third grader navigate public transportation sans adult supervision get appearances on talk shows. However, a poor, minority or immigrant mother who made the same parenting choice would more likely get a visit from Child Protective Services.

I plan to keep blogging about my own maternal failings. And I will continue to engage in the valuable dialogue of support and sharing with other mothers, both on- and offline. It’s a good thing. However, I hope we can soon find some balance between the extreme expressions of Good Motherhood and Bad Motherhood, because for most of us, most days, it’s somewhere in the middle.

Many years ago, before I had my own children, I was having coffee with my aunt when she confessed that she favoured one of her children over the other. Actually, it wasn’t really a confession — there was nothing guilty or secretive about it — it was more a statement of fact. I felt vindicated; here was an adult, a parent, admitting something I had always believed taboo. I confided that I had long suspected that my mother favoured my sister. My aunt, alas, didn’t disagree.

Now that I have kids, I find that favourites do exist, even at an early age. Of course, at this age the preference is more age-based than anything else: at the ripe old age of three, my son Declan is capable of carrying on a conversation and sharing a Frappucino, both activities I enjoy. Ronan, on the other hand, just shy of two, is capable of head-butting his cousins and throwing his food on the floor.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying that I love one of my kids more than the other, or that I’m likely to "accidentally" leave one at the petrol station. When Ronan wraps his grubby little arms around my neck, puts his head on my shoulder and sighs, “Mummy,” my heart actually hurts with love. But whether it’s age-based or personality driven, I’m sure that as my kids grow up I’ll like them in different ways.

And research confirms that I’m not alone. A 1997 Cornell University study found that 80 percent of older mums (anonymously) admitted to having a favourite child. The study also found that 60 percent of children could not identify who was their mother’s favoured child. So that’s some small comfort: we may have a favourite child, but we don’t let it show.

A recent thread on a parenting message board begins with the post, “I know, it’s taboo to admit. But do you have a favourite child?” The poster explains, “To me, it’s like any other relationship. I have a large group of friends and I love them all dearly, each in their own way for their own reason. But there are one or two who just click better with me. I can’t even place why. It just feels different.” The poster closes with, “Needless to say, I love ALL of my children,” which struck me as a little defensive.

When I asked other parents if they had a favourite child, many looked at me with a mix of shock and disgust. Some professed to having no partiality at all. Others claimed that preferences were situational. And then there were the really honest ones.

“ABSOLUTELY,” (her emphasis, not mine) wrote one friend in response to my email. “It was my middle son. We thought alike and loved to do things together.” She admitted, “I know he knows that he was the favourite but I doubt the other two knew.”

Another mother writes of her daughter, "I really feel like there is just a different connection there. It’s so strong. It’s just this amazing feeling." The same mother recalls her own mother’s favouritism: "I was never hurt over it. I’ve always understood that my mum loved me but just clicked with my brother."

So why are so many parents loathe to admit what one father calls “an obvious truth”? Because as parents, it’s hard for us to separate love from like. Admitting that your personality is more compatible with one of your kids than the other is by no means a reflection of love. But many people see it that way.

Stacy DeBroff, founder of momcentral.com, calls favouritism "somewhat inevitable." She explains, "As a parent, you find yourself drawn to a child who is most like you — traits that you can identify with and deeply empathisze with as you experience them yourself.” Though I have yet to see my own experiences reflected in my young children, save Declan’s fear of the dark and occasional bed-wetting, I do see this happening with my sister, whose six-year-old daughter is a carbon copy of herself at the same age. As such, she is dramatic and fiercely resentful of all the "little kids" in our communal household (that would be Declan and Ronan and her three younger siblings). Whereas I, a younger sibling myself, might have told her to suck it up (in nicer terms, of course), my sister, who was fiercely resentful of having to share a room with me at the same age, decided to convert a storage room into a bedroom for her oldest daughter. While my sister insists that she doesn’t favour any of her five children, clearly she feels a certain affinity for the daughter whose experiences most closely match her own.

For other parents, it’s the kids most like them who are the hardest to relate to. When we see our own flaws reflected in our children, it can be hard to tolerate. One mother confesses her preference for her daughter, going on to say, "[My son], well, I love him but, my God, does he ever get on my nerves. Apparently he’s just like me, and that’s the problem."

For many harried parents, the favoured child is simply the easiest one. As one friend joked, his favorite was "whichever one is most soundly asleep at the time." In response to the aforementioned bulletin board posting, one mother wrote, “Right now the baby is my favorite, but that’s b/c he can’t talk back to me and doesn’t dump his toys all over the floor. . .YET!!” Another mother confessed, “Heck, sometimes the best any of them can do is ‘least-annoying!’”

In some cases, the kids do the deciding for you. My three-year-old isn’t shy about voicing his preferences; when I ask him how much he loves me, he throws his arms open as wide as they can go; when my husband asks the same, Declan holds his thumb and forefinger a half-inch apart. And when two-year-old Ronan wakes up in the morning, it’s always with an ear-splitting “Daddy!”

But I’m sure this won’t always be the case. Just as my favorite will change as my sons grow up and develop their personalities, so too will theirs change as they reject conversations and Frappucinos for chess or football or whatever they choose to do. I expect that one day down the road, they will ask me which one I prefer. And I’ll borrow the line of this smart mother: "I will always love you both totally equally. But from time to time, I like one of you better than the other." And who might that be at any given moment? A good parent never tells.

“Er, no you didn’t,” I protest from my spot on the floor. Over on the couch, Bob shakes his head without looking up. I ignore this.

“Yes!” Noah repeats. “I did. I won!”

I call him back and point to my stack of cards. “You know how to count,” I say. “Though, actually, you don’t even need to. Look at how much bigger my pile is than yours.” He collapses down onto all fours and fingers the cardboard squares before mashing the lot together so that mine become his, and vice versa. “You’re getting closer, though,” I say. “I bet when we play again, you’ll beat me for sure.” Except he won’t. I win every time. As Bob is sure to tell me, it’s not hard to win at a mind game when your competition, on occasion, still pees next to, rather than into, the toilet.

To be clear, I’m not exactly the parent. Noah is my boyfriend’s son. But because Bob and I have been dating for nearly three years and live together — and I spend as much time with Noah as he does, which is nearly half the month — I am more than just “Daddy’s special friend.” When Noah relieves himself on his father’s bathroom cabinet, he relieves himself on my bathroom cabinet, too.

As Noah and I have discussed, I am not his mother. I don’t try to be. I don’t discipline him unless he’s harassing my cat or acting particularly mean (like the various times he’s cheered after learning I was not, in fact, coming sledding, or to the movies, or for a drive. This never seems to get old). And while I will let Noah take the prize in what I know he must view as the contest for his father’s attention, I will not forfeit, for forfeit’s sake, first place in Snakes and Ladders, Wii Ski, or Memory.

My firm stance on winning and losing is the closest I come to imposing values of any sort on this child who is not my own. Bob hasn’t yet bought in, sceptical of what he calls my shameless competitive nature and minimal innate parental wisdom. (“Look who’s acting like a four-year-old now,” he says, whenever I deprive his son of the belief that, at last, he’s emerged victorious from a game of Mario Cart. “No,” I tell him. “You actually came in twelfth.”) For his part, Bob practices a moderate halfsies approach to game-playing: Noah is guaranteed a win at least half the time.

But it’s not like I take my position cavalierly, or solely as a chance to clear the smug little grin from Noah’s face whenever he tries to put me in my place by declaring victory, actual or not. I think competition is important. Throwing the game in the kid’s favour is not a healthy way for him to learn about relating and playing well with others, and I’m not just talking about with me. As a child of divorce, Noah has suffered, sure. And with me in the picture, he’s getting less attention from his father than he’d get if I weren’t. But, I’d argue, indulging him in constant positivity now will hurt him even more in the long run. Already, Noah is a kid who gets his way more often than not, and I understand why his divorced parents might each be inclined to overcompensate.

That’s where I come in.

Growing up, I remember playing heated games of cards in my grandparents’ kitchen. My car dealer grandfather, the consummate salesman, wasn’t the sort to let a little pigtailed six-year-old get in the way of a win. “Dad,” my mother used to scold.

“Giacobbes play for blood!” he’d spit back, then wink, and we’d start up again — me, more determined than ever to beat my grandfather’s ass at Uno, like the little Italian warrior I was — or, at least, wanted to be. Victory earned, I came to figure, is far better and longer-lasting than victory handed over; a little edge never hurt anyone; hard work pays off, etc. I know that, on some level at least, Noah’s getting this. After all, no matter how many times he loses, he always comes back for another game.

I realise that I could be reinforcing Noah’s perception of me as the competition; by never letting him win, I’m always the one to beat. And while I certainly don’t want to set myself up as the evil stepmonster, I’m also reluctant to have Noah view me as some kiss-ass lady who’s playing nice in order to get cozy with his daddy. If I’ve learned one thing from living with a toddler it’s that they’re smarter than they let on. They know when you’ve thrown them the win, just as they can sense when you want them to like you. Neither does anything for their sense of self or their respect for the adult (especially if that respect is already tenuous).

When Noah wins on his own, however — and sometimes he does — it’s that much better. We celebrate. We high five. I encourage him to tell his father how severely he beat me. “I beat Alyssa, Daddy, I beat her!” he’ll say, doing that four-year-old dance of his, and for a moment I’ll be sad for this little boy who so desperately wants to show up the better in his father’s eyes. Of course, he always will. I know that, even if he doesn’t. And that’s a victory I’ll always let him have.