I can’t stop reading articles about helicopter parenting—perhaps because, like Noreen, I am a twentysomething whose parents never hovered. As a youngster, I didn’t wear a helmet when I rode my bike to school, and as a teenager, I never had a curfew. I put myself through a state university with a mix of scholarships and loans, so I didn’t even have extensive financial ties to the mothership. At college, I watched, amazed and not a little confused, as my classmates shared every detail with their parents. Each semester, registration for the following term’s classes opened up at midnight, and one girl was always on the phone at 11:59 p.m. with her father, who was armed with backup options in case the classes they had previously selected together were already filled.

But this sort of helicopter parenting seems slight compared with the hysterical examples we read about in trend pieces like the Harvard alumni magazine’s anecdote about a man who “received a call from his Harvard-freshman daughter who had taken the subway into Boston and wanted to know whether to go right or left at a downtown intersection. (He supplied the answer.)” Or the Boston Globe columnist who gapes at the gall of kids (including her own) today:

A 21-year-old daughter calls from the road: “Daddy, the oil light went on. What does that mean?’’ A son calls from the campus bookstore: “Mom, how do you write a check?’’

“What do you mean I have to have the car inspected? By whom? Why? I have to pay for it?’’

“What’s a change of address form? Where do you fill them out? Why do I need to do that? I don’t get any mail.’’

“What’s my health insurance card? I don’t know where it is, but the ER says I have to have one to get seen.’’

My first response is: “Well, who do you think raised these clingers?” If your darling children were too busy with their (parent-scheduled) activities to ever spend a boring Saturday morning waiting for the car to get inspected, how were they supposed to learn about that niggling detail of automobile ownership?

My second is: Where the hell are these kids? The tales in ineptitude come from the parents or, more frequently, the parents’ friends or griping college officials. They sound like the one-upping complaints shared over cocktails at a party, exaggerated for comic effect and oft-repeated. Are these tales of utter incompetence apocryphal? There's an air of plausible-sounding urban legend to many of them—and the fact that they're frequently secondhand, "I have a friend who ..." sort of things doesn't give me much confidence in their veracity.

I’d like to hear from a teen or twentysomething who will 'fess up to being so coddled that she called home to find out what to do after she put the wrong soap in the dishwasher. Did your parents cut your meat up until you were 16? Did you ever ask them to let you try to do things on your own, or were you happy to have someone call up your academic adviser when things weren’t going well? Do you think you’re crippled for life, or do you think you’re just using a good resource instead of trusting Google to tell you what questions to ask the plumber?

Tags: parenting; helicopter parenting; children

On Monday night, ABC announced the cast for the upcoming season of Dancing with the Stars—and among the slew of not-so-shocking D-list celebrities (Kate Gosselin and Shannen Doherty) came one surprise: ESPN reporter Erin Andrews. It’s not that she can’t dance—Andrews, now 31, was on the basketball dance team at the University of Florida from 1997 to 2000, according to her official ESPN bio. It’s just that if there were ever a time for the resident hottie of sportscasting not put on a sequined push-up bra and do splits on national TV, this would seem to be it.

Eight months ago a video of a nude Andrews getting ready in her hotel room—taken by a perv now on trial—surfaced on the Internet, followed by still frames in the New York Post. Overnight, she turned from hardworking reporter to locker room pin-up, and told Oprah she was afraid her career was over. A year earlier, Andrews was publicly flogged by fellow sports journalists for wearing what was described as a “skimpy” dress when covering a Chicago Cubs game.

So why, now that the press isn’t critiquing her hemline and Google searches for the “peephole” video are starting to cool off, would Andrews decide to throw on spandex on national TV? The decision makes me suspect that Andrews is getting ready to launch into the sphere of celebrity, and that it’s becoming a greater draw than her journalism. Andrews is pretty and likeable; she was voted Playboy’s Sexiest Sportscaster. And although she's far from an investigative journalist, she has held her own as a sideline reporter—a job that requires that she be taken seriously because she is, by definition, a source of information. But fair or not, there’s a difference between Andrews joining the Dancing with the Stars cast and a male sports journalist doing the same. If “Sports Guy” Bill Simmons did the jitterbug, we’d laugh. He’d write something funny and self-deprecating about the experience. We’d laugh some more. The whole song-and-dance would be one big joke. But for Andrews, who will be dancing alongside the likes of Pamela Anderson and a member of the Pussycat Dolls, this could push her into bimbo territory.

What do you think: Career booster or professional suicide?

Tags: dancing with the stars, erin andrews

Parenthood, which premiered on NBC last night, is sort of like HBO’s Tell Me You Love Me but focused on the kids—interwoven plots of the extended clan of Bravermans dealing with all the dilemmas we modern parents face (autism, private schools, sperm banks, etc.). The plots were just what you’d expect from a middlebrow network drama but one thing surprised me: The focus was mostly on the fathers.

Yes, there were the predictable mother stereotypes—the workaholic mom and the screw-up divorcee. But for the most part, they receded into the background as the men took center stage. The main drama revolves around Adam Braverman, who ping-pongs among the demands of his wife, father, and mildly autistic son. The show’s other anchor is his brother, Crosby, who represents the feckless, noncommittal beta male of the Judd Apatow school.

The show may not be interesting enough to make a cultural mark, but if it were, it would count as our era’s Murphy Brown moment, when a network’s major show about parenting hardly bothers with the moms.

Photograph of Peter Krause and Monica Potter by Jason Merritt/Getty Images Entertainment.

Tags: NBC's Parenthood. Adam Braverman, parenthood

Perhaps the desert sun has befuddled Maureen Dowd’s ability to skewer the lies and hypocrisy of the powerful. In a column from Saudi Arabia, she is spun by Prince Saud al-Faisal into buying the absurd line that Saudi Arabia is becoming more liberal, while Israel is moving toward theocratic oppression. This would be comic if it weren’t so sad that she has allowed the pages of the New York Times to advance Saudi Arabia’s agenda of delegitimizing Israel. Usually Dowd prides herself on detecting spin. Yet here was a Saudi prince getting her to do a little anti-Israel dance in service of making the kingdom look good. Is it really necessary to itemize the facts that prove Israel is a vibrant, fractious democracy in which women have full rights? And that Saudi Arabia is a dystopian nightmare of oppression and gender apartheid, which invests its oil fortune in madrassas around the world in order to spread its hatred of all who don’t follow its Wahhabist fundamentalism? Maureen, Muslim women citizens of Israel have more freedom and civil rights than could be imagined by females in Saudi Arabia. Take off the abaya and see reality.

Tags: maureen dowd, Saudi Arabia

Go to the Huffington Post, and you can vote on whether you think this video of 8-year-old Laura Fontana as a Baby Gaga singing “Bad Romance” on a Brazilian talent show is “amazing” or “creepy” or “both.” How about another vote: Go to YouTube and check out 4-year-old Shirley Temple in one of the “Baby Burlesks” that launched her career, called War Babies (1932), and decide which you think is more unsettling. Temple’s short is a parody of What Price Glory?, in which Shirley plays the Dolores del Rio character, Charmaine, wriggling shoulders and hips as she dances for a cafe crowd of GIs (in diapers), two of whom stake a leering claim to her.

In some ways, it’s an easy choice. Charmaine is wholesome compared to Lady Gaga, and Shirley is free of the weird make-up that turns Laura freakish. She also lacks Laura’s eerily mature singing voice. (Shirley has only a couple of lines of coy French, and the delivery is infantile.) And the spectacle of the live audience of adults watching Laura is part of what’s so disconcerting. Then again, just imagine the crew of Educational Studios, the producer of the Baby Burlesks, there on the set urging Shirley to vamp, teaching the little guys to leer, and getting her and her co-star to lock lips.

Don’t look to the mothers to help you decide how far, if at all, the 21st-century has fallen. On the sidelines, Laura’s mother is totally thrilled. Gertrude Temple, despite all her talk about protecting her daughter’s innocence, had no qualms either. At a screening of War Babies, Temple wrote in her memoir, she “kept whispering to me, ‘Do you see yourself, Presh? That’s you.’”

Tags: Baby Gaga, kid exploitation, Shirley Temple, talent show

Kim Brooks' piece at Salon praising the new emphasis on keeping pregnant women from getting fat—and lamenting her own pregnancy weight gain—left me sad. It was hard to put my finger on it. Was it that she called a size 10 "fat"? Was it that she was upset that she had "only" lost 25 of 40 intended pounds before she got pregnant again? (It seems to me more rational to want to get the pregnancies over with before really sweating that.) Was it that she considered the often disgustingly emaciated bodies that are held up in Hollywood a legitimate ideal, or that she unflinching admires women who wear a size 0? No, upon reading it a second time, what really depressed me was how Brooks eagerly beat herself up for enjoying the pleasure of food.

Brooks shames herself for loving family meals, the smell of baked bread, and the flavor of cheese. I don't consider that out of control; I consider that being human. But it's not so simple in our culture of excess, especially for women. One of the great pleasures of moving to New York has been shopping in stores that have fewer magazines aimed at women crowding up my visual space. This means fewer reminders of how my duty as a woman is to attend to the pleasures of others, while only enjoying my own as an afterthought or not at all. Rarely am I confronted with Cosmo magazine explaining 300 more ways to keep "him" interested, which has caused me to wonder why something women are supposed to work so hard at doesn't draw a paycheck (for most, anyway). And I'm even more relieved not to see magazines where half the headlines promise ever sweeter desserts and ever more enticing meals to serve your family, while the other half of the headlines offer diet tips so that you can better prepare yourself for the hard work of not eating any of the food you cook.

The kind of eating that Brooks describes that causes women to put on way more pregnancy weight than recommended doesn't sound like the eating of people who just love to eat. It sounds like the eating of women who've been deprived of the right to enjoy eating for so long they have no discernment at all—sucking down milkshakes, devouring entire pints of ice cream, vacuuming up white grains and pasta like they've never really been allowed to eat before. And in a sense, they haven't. Not without feeling guilty, and having their enjoyment of the food dramatically compromised by that. I'm inclined to think that binge eating isn't a matter of being a bad girl who likes food too much, but being a woman who hasn't been allowed to enjoy it and so goes a little nuts when given even the slightest permission.

Tags: baby weight, dieting, fatophobia, food

Sarah Palin appeared on Jay Leno's first show back on the Tonight Show after the much-publicized, months-long fight among Leno, NBC, and Conan O'Brien over hosting duties. Gawker's Maureen O'Connor does a good job of destroying Palin's continued claim that she is not heard by the mainstream media: "Recall that she is already a career talking head and capable of commanding interviews in any newspaper, TV show, or radio program in America. The only bigger platform would be to attach a megaphone to the moon and blanket the entire planet with her voice."

Though it is as absurd as it is for Palin to continue with this aggrieved act, her popularity with the growing Tea Party movement depends on her maintaining the farce. She claims, illogically, that she is going to continue to write notes on her hand during speeches—as she was mocked for doing during a Tea Party speech in February—because it gets the left "all wee-wee'd up." Yes, that's why the left gets mad at Palin, because she refuses to use an elitist teleprompter. Clip of Palin commisserating with Leno below.

Tags: lay leno, Sarah Palin, the tonight show

—Governor Paterson allegedly enlisted a friend and state worker, Deneane Brown, to make the assault accusations against his senior aide "go away." [New York Times]

—Julianna Smoot replaces Desirée Rogers as Obama's White House social secretary, swapping outsider cool for a woman experienced in "donor maintenance." [Washington Post]

—The most popular film on Hulu is a 1990 fantasy of prepubescent rape, A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell. [The Big Money]

—SNL will host a "Women in Comedy" special in April with Tina Fey, as well as Amy Poehler, Molly Shannon, and, maybe but not necessarily, Betty White. [Jezebel]

—A survey of men and women trying to avoid pregnancy found that 43 percent of men would be pleased by a surprise little tyke. Only 20 percent of women agreed. [Feministe]

Tags: amy poehler, betty white, Deneane Brown, Desiree Rogers, governor paterson, hulu, julianna smoot, Molly Shannon, Saturday Night Live, Tina Fey, unplanned pregnancy