pageantTo be honest, I actually have a pretty high threshold for people babbling about their kids.  I like kids, I used to work with them, and I genuinely find them fascinating and their parents’ sense of delight charming.  Kids are great.  I am interested in their first words, the playground throwdowns, and how their respective parents are tackling puberty issues.  I’m a good audience for kid stories in general.

What I have a lower tolerance for, however, is both the total overshare aspects of childrearing and the stupified superiority complexes exhibited by some parents, which is why I had to stay at work an hour late today to make up for the fact that I read every single entry in the STFU, Parents tumblr.  I was alerted to this blog courtesy of a Salon Broadsheet post, and it happily exceeded my expectations.

STFUParents is a lovingly-crafted wee gem that encapsulates (and takes to task) the smug and pedestrian tendencies exhibited by some folks the second they discover they’re about to birth their own “little miracle.”  Specifically targeting the mind-numbing and nausea-inducing Facebook updates people impose on their friends (and by friends I may mean people-they-have-not-actually-spoken-to-in-twenty-years) about their shitting, puking bundles of overachieving joy, STFUParents hilariously skewers obsessive parenthood, lack of awareness, and the self-satisfied “Supermom!”

What breed of parent are we talking about here?  Not necessarily the nice people you work with, who might bust out with a wry and exhausted anecdote about their firstborn teething.  Not your cool friends who have, yeah, experienced a life-changing event and share some of the joys and punishments with you, without losing their perspective or their ability to relate.  Rather, the blog tackles those folks who have taken the self-congratulatory and exclusive road by proclaiming things like:  “You can only relate if your (sic) a parent!!!! lol :).”  Or:  “Baby Cleopatra unleashed an atomic bomb today!!!  I didn’t know poo could explode out the back of the diaper and into the hair!  LMAO!!!”

Because those people?  Deserve to be skewered.  There is a socially-conscious line between celebrating your child’s accomplishments on the ballfield and at the science fair and posting TEN TIMES in two days about how ABSOLUTELY AMAZING your twelve-year-old is.  Also, at that point, your kid is old enough to potentially endure torment at his junior high about his mother’s wankfest of a FB page.

So, I encourage you to check out this blog, and leave your despairing or disparaging comments below.  If you want to leave a picture of your fetus giving me the finger in its ultrasound, that’s cool too.