Momlogic has you covered with this decision tree that walks you through all the important questions prospective parents face.

Like, “Are you grossed out by poo?” and “Do you like people barging in on you when you’re having sex?”

Any parent will get a laugh out of this funny chart, which really emphasises the gross, awkward, exhausting challenges of parenting.

I know when my childless friends ask me if they should procreate, I always say, “Only if you have to.”

By which I mean, if you’re toying with the idea of having a baby the same way you might toy with the idea of picking up a new hobby, you should probably skip it.

Parenting is the hardest thing I have ever done, and I suspect that is true for most people who do it. You should bet on it being the hardest thing you ever do. Even harder than you are imagining it being as I’m saying this.

If you’re planing to have a child because you know you want to raise a family and cannot possibly be fulfilled until you have your very own beloved babe puking down your cleavage at 2 a.m., by all means get knocked up as soon as possible. With that attitude you’ll be well equipped to weather the unique joys and strains of living with someone whose demands for attention and care will wash over you like the stream from a broken fire hydrant.

All joking aside, this chart set me wondering what considerations people do bear in mind when deciding to start a family. I didn’t so much plan my first pregnancy as wander blissfully into it. There was no pre-conception detox or careful financial plan; I didn’t choose “a good time”. I was in love, I wanted a baby, I went camping without any back-up birth control, and *voila* I became a mummy.

What did you think about when deciding to have your kids? Did you know you’d want children someday, or were you on the fence? If you were unsure, what pushed you into your decision?

Photo: Cclose Upp

Museum Says Member Cards Not Safe For Kids

What a good show.

Through all the tears (both mine, as a viewer, and the speakers in the Insight studio), Coping With A Baby is the best thing I’ve seen on Australian telly since The Librarians.

But it wasn’t a laugh. Far from it. Gripping? Yes. Poignant? Indeed. Will it strike a chord with many women – or, rather, people affected by depression – post-natal or peri-natal (during pregnancy)? You betcha.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when Dean told the tragic story of his wife, Lou, who, in the grip of a depression that was actually being treated, killed herself in a mother and baby unit.

And how inadequate does the Government’s proposed $85 million campaign and the ’screening questionnaire’ sound?

Listening to these brave men and women share their tales of depression at a time that, we’re told, should be among the happiest, most joyful in our whole lives, was heart-wrenching. It took us right back to the horrible feelings we’ve all felt at various different times before and after our children were born.

We sympathised 100% with the women going through this most painful, bleak and dark period – but also for the men who were caught in the crossfire of their partner’s illness, sucked into the slipstream of the sickness and rendered helpless. In true bloke-style, though, they all said they wanted to ‘fix’ the problem, provide a final solution – when all their partners wanted them to do was listen.

Just makes you realise that post- and peri-natal depression are so much more widespread than you might previously have thought – we are definitely not alone. And also, that quality, effective and easily-accessible help is badly, desperately needed.

If you didn’t catch the programme, take a butcher’s here. But if you did happen to see this brilliant Insight episode, do tell us what you thought in the comments boxes below.

And if you or someone close to you is suffering with depression, contact www.beyondblue.org.au

Well, no. No. Because, obviously, this is complete and utter bullshit. Real life bears little or no resemblance to the film version and that’s what’s wrong with it. Or is it? Maybe a great big whopping dose of fantasy and schmaltz is exactly what we all need to lighten us up. Especially when being a parent really starts to tear you a new one.

And so it is with this in mind that we challenge you to NOT raise a teensy smile at any of the moments in this trailer for that old Ron Howard film, Parenthood. Go on – we dare you. Leave your snide remarks and your cynicism and your best spew-stained work blouse by the door and enjoy. Just remember: it’s not a documentary, it’s fantasy!

But while their diva daughters are dressed to the nines, the mums of these girls are downright dowdy. Yoga pants. Ragged pony tails. Hoodies as far as the eye can see. And it begs the question: why are we dressing our girls — who will spend the day running and jumping and splashing through puddles — for a night on the town, and ourselves for, well, a day at the playground?

For starters, it seems we’ve come a long way since Osh Kosh. The children’s apparel industry has exploded in the last twenty years, offering more choices and styles than ever before. But more significantly, it has matured — at least when it comes to girl clothes. Dressing like mummy used to require either a Little House on the Prairie aesthetic (Laura Ashley), or a country club membership (Polo Ralph Lauren). But these days, you can find True Religion jeans, Marc Jacobs dresses and Uggs in itty-bitty toddler sizes, to say nothing of seventies rock band-themed T-shirts, matchstick cords or string bikinis. So dressing like mum has never been more possible. Or rather, like mum would dress — if she wasn’t wearing tracksuit pants.

Speaking of tracksuit pants: while kids’ fashion has matured, adult styles have regressed, as schlubby adult clothing has moved out of our closets and into the realm of socially acceptable streetwear. Blue jeans and T-shirts have become allowable in all but the most conservative of workplaces. Thongs and sneakers have migrated over from functional accessories to fashionable ones. And when was the last time you (or anyone you know) wore a pair of pantyhose?

As the mother of a son, I used to notice the frumpy mum/diva daughter display from the bemused vantage point of an outsider. After all, I had a boy. Dressing him was utterly meaningless. Everything he owned was a primary color, and featured a dog, a soccer ball or a dinosaur. There was no fashion divide between us. Side-by-side, in our sensible knits, we matched.

But when my daughter was born last winter, I was flummoxed. What would she wear? I’m not the girliest-girl on the block; I don’t like pink, I didn’t play with dolls as a kid and I’ve never even read Little Women. The simplest task of parenting — putting her in clothing — was somehow complicated. If I dressed her like a diva, I was undoubtedly giving in to someone else’s idea of girlness. But if I swore off pink, and simply recycled all of her brother’s baby clothes, wasn’t I pushing her into mine?

Most women opt for pink — and how. Hot pink bundler, pale pink blanket, pink and brown nappy bag, all surrounding the tiny pink face in the stroller. But as I began to realise as I searched for clothing for my daughter, the alternatives are just as narrow. Rocker denim, smart-mouthed t-shirts and black leggings seem to exist primarily to ward off the siren-like seductions of the Disney Princesses. But pink or punk, the message is the same: I am dressing you like the girl I want you to be.

Or maybe, like the girl I still want to be, but have given up on. Perhaps that is why so many of us are so dowdy; we’ve given our daughters the hard work of becoming the girls we still wish we could be. We dress them like dolls, laugh when they learn how to pronounce Chanel, post videos of them rocking out to Patti Smith on our Facebook profile. They become our tiny billboards, plastered with our projections of beauty or coolness or disaffection. Meanwhile, we knock around town in our pajamas. It’s the ultimate opt-out.

And clearly, it isn’t a function of time. Fashion, even on a miniature-scale, takes a few minutes. Choices have to be made. An outfit has to be assembled. But putting tights on your toddler and barrettes in her hair and matching those accessories to her skirt and sweater can’t possibly be less time consuming than applying a little powder to your face and tucking in your shirt. But given the choice, many women seem to spend their mornings styling their daughters — and then cramming their entire beauty regimen into the five minutes they have before their kid gets bored watching Dora.

I wonder if we don’t feel a tiny bit of freedom when we dress our girls. After all, their bodies are unfettered by curves, unblemished by stretch marks. And if you think your daughter looks better in clothing than you do, then perhaps dressing her is a more gratifying exercise than dressing yourself. Many of us are still middling in what we refer to as our transitional jeans, not quite the size or shape we used to be before we had kids. Maybe frumpy chic is a temporary wardrobe diversion until the day comes when we are able to morph back into our earlier, more fashion-forward selves.

To be sure, there are the practicalities involved in dressing up for a day of hanging out with your kids. I spend most of my day sitting on the floor, stomping through a sandpit or pushing a double stroller through a city of narrow spaces. So heels are out. So are low-rise jeans. And forget about wearing anything that isn’t machine-washable.

But there is danger in all this transference; by dressing them, and not ourselves, we are pushing onto them the burden of living up to someone else’s standard of acceptable appearances. No one says a word when a mum is dressed in an outfit hastily assembled from the laundry basket when we’re all dressed the same way. But we see a kid who was dressed without any clear intention — a little girl wearing mismatched yellow socks and purple sweatpants and a green hoodie — and snicker, “Did they dress that kid in the dark?” As our toddlers grow into little girls and then later, into young women, the disapproval that flashes across our faces and escapes under our breath will lodge in their minds. If were lucky, they will rebel against us. But if we are not, we may be raising a whole new generation of women who feel insecure about their bodies, hiding in plain sight in their own uniform of fleece and spandex.

I shudder at the thought of giving up my beat-up running sneakers and track pants. But perhaps a swipe of the mascara brush and a pair of dress flats might not be the worst thing in the world. Because if we continue to abdicate the part of ourselves that we lose in parenting — the free time to groom ourselves, to dress ourselves, to care as much about our own appearance as we do about that of our children — will we be able to get it back? Is there any guarantee, when our kids are older and dressing themselves, that we will return to the women we used to be?

They say they modelled the questions after Betty Friedan’s 1957 survey of Smith college alumni that became The Feminine Mystique, which I take to mean that they’re hoping this will generate book-worthy material. Combining two such hotly debated topics as parenting and sex ought to generate something interesting, and being a bit of a survey junkie, I happily filled it out.

As usual, I suggest you do too—even, or especially, if you don’t think you have anything interesting to say. Don’t let them get just the stories from the extremes.

It won’t take long. In fact, they’ve tried to keep it short and sweet and easy, enough so that I have a few qualms about the usefulness of what they are going to get: I’m kind of surprised, for example, given Baumgartner’s writings on bisexuality, that the survey neglects to ask for the gender of your co-parent if you have one (even though it carefully uses the term co-parent). Nor does it ask whether your co-parent is also your sexual partner, for that matter—it clearly assumes yes, though there are myriad situations in which that isn’t the case.

In fact, I just looked at it again, and it never asks for the gender of the respondent either! Wow. I’m going to guess that one at least is just a mistake. In the meantime, I suggest you note down these factoids in one of the text boxes—keep a research intern employed.

Photo CC Chris. Ed. W.

“Nothing like that happened to me,” she says, wrinkling her face. “I loved having babies.”

But her June Cleaver facade can’t fool me! Once again, I’ve been indulging in my newest guilty habit — reading parenting websites and “mum blogs” — despite being twenty-six years old, unmarried, and having no immediate plans for children. And now that I know the dark truths about pregnancy and parenthood, I’ve come to wonder if I might be better off raising guinea pigs than joining in this whole “cycle of life” thing.

Because I’ve got to say, it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.

A brief summary of what I’ve learned about procreation from reading magazines and websites:

First you get pregnant, after months or years of costly fertility treatments that involve needles the circumference of ballpoint pens but are necessary because you’ve dragged your (expensive, office-appropriate) heels past the peak fertility age of twenty-four. Once properly inseminated, you develop hyperemesis gravidarum and puke up every ounce of (caffeine-free) herbal tea you ingest until you need an IV, by which point you’ve lost your job and your will to live. And that’s before the sudden appearance of stretch marks, which you affectionately call “tiger stripes” because it looks like an enormous cat tried to claw its way up your torso to reach that Dorito you’re shoving in your mouth (Doritos, or grilled cheese sandwiches are the only food you can keep down; as a result you’ve gained forty kilos and kids on the street say, “Mummy, what is that thing?”).

Then comes the birth. If it’s in a hospital, it’s overmedicalised and impersonal and you’re pumped full of syntocin until the baby comes shooting out into the hand of a twenty-six-year-old resident who’s using the other hand to text on his iPhone. If it’s a homebirth, you discover while squatting in your birthing pool that contractions feel like being disemboweled with a hunting knife, but your Baba Yaga-like midwife won’t let you go to the hospital for an epidural, because epidurals cause autism and malaria. In either scenario, labour lasts at least ninety-four hours.

Once the baby’s here, you must spend between six months and eighteen years feeling like a terrible, horrible mother because you A) Can’t/don’t want to breastfeed (and formula is an UNNATURAL ARTIFICIAL CHEMICAL POISON!!!), B) Find changing nappies less fun than backpacking through Honduras and sleeping with Irish scuba instructors, or C) Occasionally consider popping your baby in the box outside Whole Foods so you can get some sleep and so your baby will be raised by the next person who comes for a newspaper, who probably has organic carrots in her shopping bag and would be a much better mother than you.

To save what’s left of your sanity, you write about your experiences on your new mummy blog. And oh, your blog commenters can sure relate! In fact, their stories are much worse than yours. They gained 120 kilos while pregnant and had to be taken to the birthing center on a flatbed truck. Their feet got so swollen they actually exploded, taking out the eye of their OB-GYN. They too planned a natural birth — ha! — but wound up screaming for not only an epidural but a dram of chloroform. Their baby once cried for seventy-seven hours straight, until their family was not only evicted but deported. Now they live in exile in France, where child-raising is much, much more evolved; every mother there is guaranteed by law a free nanny who’ll makes boeuf bourguignon for your enfants while you get your government-sponsored pedicure.

So here are your choices: 1) Move to France, 2) Get your tubes tied, or 3) Prepare to spend the rest of your life wiping diarrhea off your forehead and listening to something called “The Wiggles” on infinite repeat…

You might ask why I, a childless twenty-something, need to read these mummy confessionals — what the blog Jezebel delicately terms “torn-vag tell-alls.” Shouldn’t I be reading Cosmopolitan and focusing on Skill #3 on the “57 Ways to Drive Him Wild” list?

Well, as someone who hopes to have kids within the next, oh, decade or so, I’m curious for the glance into my own potential future that magazines provide. And beyond that, I like the candour and biting wit of mummy lit, a kind of dark honesty about everyday life that’s hard to find in mainstream non-motherhood-related publications. Even in this day and age, most women’s magazines are still all about how to be, or at least appear, perfect: “11 Perfect Swimsuits to Minimize Your Trouble Spots,” “701 Tips for the Perfect Summer Wedding,” ad nauseum. Blechh!

I appreciate that the current tell-it-like-it-is movement is a reaction to the kind of repressive feminine ideals that have dogged women since long before magazines were even invented. Still, sometimes all this honesty freaks me out. Did I really need to know what an umbilical hernia looks like, or hear about how mastitis feels like your breast is being chewed by a vole? Frankly, the whole motherhood thing seemed a lot more appealing back when all I saw was the US Weekly version — you know, the one in which Angelina Jolie totes a cherub straight out of a Renaissance painting on her slender, Versace-clad hip before handing it off to an adoring Brad so she can jet to Cambodia to shoot Tomb Raider 17.

I could just stop reading this stuff and stick to trash mags instead. But I won’t. Yeah, it might scare me off having kids, at least for a few years. But when I do, I’ll be confident that I’ve already heard the worst, that there will be no ugly surprises around the bend, that my experience can’t possibly be as terrifying as hers, or hers, or hers. Right? Right?