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At some point in your life, someone who admires the Dresden Dolls and Angela Carter will probably tell you, with an air of revealing a shattering truth, that fairy-tales are not really for children, that the original fairy-tales, at least, are dark and bloody and perverse and disturbing and as unlike the charming yarns spun for children as Amanda Palmer and Angela Carter are from Hilary Duff and Gordon Korman.

It's also possible that someone you know will decide to tell you that all the nursery rhymes you learned as a kid were about either a) syphilis or b) the Black Death.

And of course, they're right. The stories and songs we use to entertain children are grounded in an awareness of nightmares and horrors. Magical fables and singable rhymes developed out of real-life catastrophes and plagues. How exciting it is to realize that our generation is also producing such rich fodder for future folklore!

Just this week, I heard about something that sounds like an actual horrible fairy-tale come to life and/or inspiration for a horrible fairy-tale still to be written. Katya Adler of the BBC reports that in Spain, over a period of forty-fifty years (from Franco to the 1990s), an estimated 300,000 children were stolen from their parents by doctors and nurses and nuns and priests and then sold to new families. The birth parents were told their children had died. Initially, babies were taken from ideologically unacceptable homes (i.e. homes that housed people who didn't like Franco) and given to Franco loyalists; later, babies were taken from morally unacceptable homes and redistributed to morally upstanding would-be parents; later still, babies were taken from poor people mostly because money could be made by selling them to rich people. 

Many of the graves of infants said to have died have since been discovered to contain stones or adult corpses.

The government, adhering to an amnesty law in place since the transition from Franco's regime, has refused to set up a formal inquiry into this clergy-backed child trafficking. 

It might not be reasonable to fear that malevolent fairy will snatch your child, but in pretty-near-contemporary Spain, it turns out it was completely reasonable to fear that a nun would steal your baby.

POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
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Unfortunately, circumstances have obliged me to revisit my conclusions of last week. I am often obliged to revisit my conclusions, as they are frequently wrong. Perhaps thinking about things more thoroughly or researching would help, but I avoid such activities on point of principle as they are hallmarks of Socialism.

At any rate, last week I concluded that gender equality would eventually be achieved at least in part through offensive bibs.  But recently, a news item reminded me that we still have a long way to go when it comes to degrading boys as much as girls.

Most episodes of Toddlers and Tiaras are remarkable for their awfulness and for helping you realize that, whatever you might think, your parents were classy and your youthful fashion sense sophisticated (and - full disclosure, I occasionally watch Toddlers and Tiaras. And Hoarders: Buried Alive. There's probably a German word for how they make me feel and why I keep watching them.). The show, though, has now lowered the bar of good taste to unprecedentedly low levels. 

Wendy Dickey, pageant mom and self-professed Good Christian Woman, dressed her 3-year-old up as Julia Robert's Pretty Woman prostitute character, clearly in a misguided attempt to illustrate some of the more obscure teachings of Christ. 

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I immediately tried to figure out what the boy-child equivalent would be. A pint-sized Joe Buck would probably go unrecognized by a pageant audience; My Own Private Idaho is most likely too private for the public Idaho and a reference to it would also perplex. And I don't remember The Basketball Diaries being a heart-warming crowd-pleaser or involving snooty retail salespeople getting their comeuppance. 

Really, a caring Christian mother looking for the male equivalent of Roberts' beloved movie prostitute would find herself at a loss. I guess she could always stick to the Pretty Woman theme instead, and dress her beloved Bentley or Ethan or Jayden up as a knee-high Richard Gere. My utopic vision of a future in which both and girls are equally objectified and in much the same way might never be realized, but I'm somewhat comforted by the prospect of toddler hookers and toddler johns.


Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.

POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.


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I got another write-in question. That's right. And this time it's from someone who is not in the least related to me. Not by blood, at least. It's a very sensible question about whether children should have friends.


The NYT helpfully informs me that "best friends" for children are, in fact, bad for them. Is this just more overprotection? I figured if anyone could see the downsides of having (or not having) a BFF, it's the Catastrophizer.

In "A Best Friend: You Must Be Kidding", Hilary Stout discusses opinions held by various professionals about whether children should develop close attachments to other children.

"I don't think it's particularly healthy for a child to rely on one friend," says Jay Jacobs, director of Timber Lake Camp in New York State. "If something goes awry, it can be devastating. It also limits a child's ability to explore other options in the world."

However, as Stout notes: "The last people who should be considered credible when it comes to childhood psychology are camp directors." No, she didn't say that. She said: "Many psychologists believe that close childhood friendships not only increase a child's self-esteem and confidence, but also help children develop the skills for healthy adult relationships - everything from empathy, the ability to listen and console, to the process of arguing and making up". 

So what should one do, or think behind other people's backs while they do?

1) If a child has a close friendship, it will undoubtedly end badly. Childhood friendships are grounded in things like a shared love of the colour orange or a shared hatred of the colour orange. When children grow older, and they will, they'll realize that friendship is more complicated. Based more on whether one likes or dislikes Wolf Blitzer, for example. Of course, the fact that the childhood friendship will inevitably end badly could be seen as a good thing: adult friendships are also inclined to end badly, or at least to become trapped in a defeated, passive-aggressive stalemate, so early experiences of interpersonal failure will prepare him or her for the interpersonal disappointments of later life. 

2) If a child has multiple, less serious friendships with other children, he or she will probably never develop whatever skills are necessary for forming and maintaining healthy, grown-up relationships. He or she will always be lonely in a crowd, overly thick-skinned (or overly thin-skinned) and sociopathic.

3) Don't get worked up. I can testify to the fact that this is not an either/or proposition: it is entirely possible to be a child and not form either one unhealthy, intense friendship or a number of superficial friendships. I'm sure it will bring you great comfort to know that it is likely that neither of these problems will ever be yours, nor those of any children of yours. 
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.

POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
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It turns out that Reader's Digest is more than just the equivalent of comic strips Cathy and Family Circus smushed together. It also has Ask Laskas. For some reason, I feel as though that should have an exclamation mark. Ask Laskas!


Some of my coworkers have decided that I am a horrible mother because my 21-year-old daughter still lives with me while she finishes school. These busybodies have no children of their own but comment liberally that they would kick their kids out at 18, it's the best thing for them, blah, blah, blah. I would rather not discuss my personal business with these folks, but every day they ask me if she has moved out. How do I answer? 
—Wish I'd Kept It to Myself


1) Are you sure THAT'S why they think you're a horrible mother? So many people assume they know their own flaws and that they're aware of why they repel people, but no amount of self-analysis can reveal the full extent of anyone's short-comings. Maybe you're just annoying.


2) I would like to congratulate you, because I sense that you are already on the path to becoming a catastrophizer. You state that your co-workers have decided you are a "horrible" mother. Have they told you this? I doubt it. You're assuming a couple of irritating criticisms mean a wholesale repudiation of your mothering. Bravo. 

3) Maybe they're right. I'm not saying they are, just that it's a possibility. Why haven't you considered that possibility? Just because people are frigid and childless doesn't mean they can't know better than you when it comes to your own offspring. Are you nervous about what you might find if you started digging around in there? Don't be! Every new revelation of failure will help you catastrophize with more gusto. 

4) Tell them she is forced to live with you because you gambled all her college rent money away on "the dogs." That will keep them busy talking to each other for a change. 

Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.

POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
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I have received my second reader question! From someone who is not in the least related to me! Read on:

Let's say you're the parent of a very successful catastrophizer--should you feel pride, because so much of you lives on in a new generation? Or sadness and regret because your offspring has arguably been infected by your own congenital and over-arching pessimism?

      - Anonynomous Individual Not 
        Responsible for Fathering the
        Catastrophizer

Before going any further with this answer, I should make one thing very clear: you should always feel sadness and regret. Very occasionally, you may allow yourself to feel pride, or joy, or elation, but only because those sensations will add a certain piquancy to your subsequent feelings of sadness and regret. Don't be concerned about having to force the return of the sadness and regret; they will come back without much prodding because life is full of things that cause them.

Feeling pride that part of you lives on in the next generation can quite easily be made to result in profound depression (although all things, obviously, can be made to result in profound depression). First of all, that pride is necessarily bound up in the fact that you yourself will die, a fact which is likely to be interpreted as a downer. The individual in whom your qualities (fine ones, I will admit) will live on will also die, possibly without issue. Even if that individual were to produce offspring, those offspring would eventually die, and so on. Even if you belonged to a family that regularly produced progeny, all of whom inherited your qualities, remember that the world itself will most likely shrivel up and disappear at some point in the vast expanse of future time. Your pride will, one way or another, be short-lived.

You should absolutely believe that it is because of your style of parenting/doomed genetic bequest that your child has developed catastrophizing tendencies, because as you've indicated, that line of thought will undoubtedly produce more sadness and regret. However, if you were lucky/unfortunate enough to produce an even vaguely observant child, that child, one way or another, would have grown up catastrophically. The beige and brown Ford Fairmont had nothing to do with it.

Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.

POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.

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