The last thing the Best Parent wants is their well-appointed house to look like a childcare facility – even though they have children. But how do they avoid the pest-like infestation of plastic playthings that clutter up an otherwise-stylish home once the precious offspring is transferred from womb to Best Parent living space? For years, the Best Parent has studiously assembled their furnishings straight out of the pages of Elle Décor and Architectural Digest, only to suddenly be inflicted by plastic dining gear that looks liked it was crapped out of the wrong end of a fast food establishment’s anus. Attention, non-best parents: Fisher Price and Philippe Stark do NOT mix.

Even Best Parents realize their children need something safe and durable to sit on. Alas, it must also be pathologically stylish and cost at least triple the price of any common toy store child seat. As always, companies with Swedish-sounding names have the answer. If you thought “Ikea” after reading the word “Swedish” in that last sentence, you are obviously not a Best Parent. The real Best Parent only knows these names for their children’s seating requirements:
Stokke and Svan.

With Scandinavian curves and an environmentally-friendly beechwood finish that just screams “I care more about my children than you!” the Stokke and Svan are meant to sit at the end of the Best Parents’ costly dining table like a piece of stylish modern art… that just happens to hold a child…and is often smeared with mushed peas, crusty milk, and that dandruff-like grit that comes from crunched-up Cheerios. But at least it’s not a Graco!

So take that, non-best parents with nothing but sturdy and colorful plastic to feed their children in! The Best Parent has turned chow time into yet another expression of their outsized and over-priced personal style.

Now… if only Versace or Vera Wang would design a stylish drool bib, family dinner would finally be something to blog home about.

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Wine is not only the Best Parent’s beverage of choice, it is a central psychological nutrient in their daily life support system. The Best Parent knows raising children is extremely challenging, even with non-white nannies, and preschool after-care shouldering most of the burden. It is especially hard for the Best Parent, whose brain is constantly taxed by the arduous task of having to think of someone other than themselves. But the old-style, hard-liquor booze and pills that sustained many a Best Parent forebearer no longer seems appropriate in this era of clean living and positive lifestyle choices.

Hello vino! Mother’s Little Helper is now a finely-priced Merlot. Yes, wine is an alcoholic beverage that will reduce your mind to a euphoric tangle just as efficiently as shots of vodka and tequila, but it carries the Best Parent’s much sought-after imprimatur of class and taste. A carefully-chosen vintage (in other words, one based on price) is a Best Parent windfall. Once again, it allows them to prove how much better than you they are — all the while getting just as sloshed off their knockers as the homeless drunks they pass on their way to Trader Joe’s (to pick up more wine). Best Parents on wine are not alcoholics. They are bon vivants and connoisseurs!

More importantly, forget having Best Parents over for a children’s playdate with anything less than three bottles of Chardonnay or Cabernet. Sobriety is a Best Parent sin, and the penance is having to talk to other Best Parents. So keep the Metrokane Rabbit Ears ready to open another bottle of Shiraz, which, as the Best Parent will so pompously boast, is nothing more than a low-rent Syrah. “Ha-ha-ha,” the Best Parent slurs quietly to themselves. “Just try to make that kind of sophisticated distinction between Absolute and Ketel One!”

So take that, sober and responsible parents with frayed nerves unrelieved by the numbing intoxicants of fermented grapes. The Best Parent is seeing the world in the rich and powerful hues of Napa Valley Red, where even family life has a warm and welcoming glow.

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For the Best Parent, children’s books are the high-yield Vanguard mutual fund of the mind. The more you can invest in your child’s intellectual portfolio, the greater the returns will be. Thus, the Best Parent Ever believes their child can never have enough books, regardless of whether their children are actually able to read them or are merely using them as cardboard teething rings with type. There are not enough Pottery Barn bookcases in the world to hold all the picture books the Best Parent would like to buy as they turn their children’s bedrooms into toddler versions of the Royal Library of Alexandria, but with pop-up books and Touch and Feel tomes.

Why so many picture books? It is because the Best Parent believes their progeny will forgo plush playthings and plastic noise-making toys in order to bury their heads in the Lift and Look works of Softplay like Talmudic scholars unlocking the secrets of the universe. The knowledge they gain from Olivia the pig or Good Dog Carl will undoubtedly prepare them for a life of looking down scornfully at their non-best compatriots who had only the backs of cereal boxes to read while growing up.

Best Parents often scorn TV and comic books. But bind these same characters in a hard cover, and they’ll collect them with the same enthusiasm reserved for frequent flyer miles and Iphones. This is because these simple picture books and board books provide a DaVinci-Code-style roadmap to the secrets of Best Parent culture (if you haven’t noticed this yet, you’re just not Best Parent enough). After all, how many non-white characters do you really see in children’s books? Even Curious George ditched his African roots for some old white man in a yellow suit. In Where the Wild Things Are, does Maurice Sendak take us on a fantastic voyage to South Central L.A.? I don’t think so. And Where’s Waldo? Not in Detroit, that’s for sure.

True, The Cat in the Hat rhymes like a rapper, but he’s no MC Hammer or Fresh Prince. (Sorry. These are the best rap references for the Best Parent to recognize.) Children’s books have one simple goal — and it’s not teaching reading. It’s teaching young best saplings how to be the towering oaks of the future Best Parent community. Those are white oaks, by the way.

So take that, non-best parents waiting in line to see Horton Hears a Who. The Best Parent’s child has already read the book. And it was so much better than the movie, as it always is.

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