Watch the first few minutes of this video. You’ll get the point really quickly…

The scene at the beginning of the post is endemic of a huge problem with “adults” in the year 2007. Every single person who has a kid finds the need to constantly update the world on every time the kid eats, sleeps, or takes a crap.

I have a lot of friends who have kids, and I consider it a burden. Why? Because every time you go out with them you have to hear about how Cody, Shyler, Coral, or some other stupid-assed name they picked because it looked good in a Lord of the Rings book had their first piss, fingerpainting lesson, bike ride, etc. Don’t even attempt to ask these experts on child-rearing to have a conversation that doesn’t involve telling you how unbelievably awesome their child is because the conversation will, as it did in the video above, inevitably changes to “Speaking of mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, did I tell you that my Drew shaved the cat yesterday?”

I’m all for kids. I don’t blame them for their parents’ obsession with them. What I do blame their parents for, however, is their utter ability to have an adult conversation that doesn’t involve how to get the stains out that their little angel left on their shirt after breastfeeding from mom’s already overworked nipples.

Sorry, not interested folks.

Here’s a note to parents. Don’t tell us you want an adult conversation if your idea of an adult conversation involves talking about the effects of young Cassidy on your sex life. That’s not adult conversation in my book.

Take a read of this bit from an article I always keep handy because it pretty much sums up my feelings on the way parents have started acting in the last fifteen years (it could be longer; I’m just talking about the time since I started noticing these sorts of things)…

Today’s generation of children is the most closely observed, monitored, cherished and scheduled in our history. They are also the most praised. Families are smaller, and there are fewer children upon whom parents can beam their attention.

Today there are moms and dads who aren’t just parents — they believe in “parenting.” They read volumes and volumes about how to be good parents and view parenting as both an art and a science that must be studied and updated and practiced self-consciously. Letting children run around the neighborhood and be bored some of the time is anathema to them.

Many parents these days don’t expect their children to contribute much around the house, although they do expect them to achieve outside the house. They have strong beliefs about what makes children successful and happy-ever-after, and underpinning those beliefs is the concept that they — the parents — are all-important in this quest. Such parents believe that self-esteem is the key to lifetime success, and to this end they compliment their children a lot.

They are egalitarian, and they believe families should be democracies. Needless to say, they don’t give orders. They believe that children will do things when they are ready to. They ask their child politely if he or she will do something and are surprised and dismayed when the response is “no.”

It’s as if parents have rewritten the Fourth Commandment to read, “Honor thy children.”

As much as you may love your kids, please don’t constantly bore me with stories about them. One or two is okay, but frankly if your whole life involves what your oddly-named child did at school that day, and your first instinct is to introduce yourself as “Brecken’s Mommy” then you probably have an identity crisis you need to deal with before you can hang out with real-world adults.

Do yourself a favor… Iron those out, and then call me so we can talk about more than the difference between the Wiggles and Dora the Explorer.