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A new game for recovering hyperparents: bad dad one-upsmanship

It was, when she looks back on it, a fairly routine disaster, the sort of thing parents with small children experience all too often. One late Sunday night after a long brutal weekend with her three kids, Romi Lassally found herself in the dim hallway of her Pacific Palisades home, frazzled and exhausted and staring down into an extravagant splatter of her son’s vomit.

“I just couldn’t deal,” she says. “I left it there. I hoped the dog would eat it.”

When the dog failed to oblige, Ms. Lassally was left with a grisly cleanup job and the sinking feeling she’d sunk to a new maternal low. So she did what she often does when mortified: she picked up the phone and recounted the story to a girlfriend. “She was amused and disgusted,” she says. “And I felt better right away. And at that moment I knew I was on to something.”

That something was True Mom Confessions, an online posting board for mothers to share their most heinous mistakes, misdeeds and misgivings. Since launching in April, more than 100,000 women have contributed confessions, from one-line gripes about in-laws to intimate accounts of diminished sex lives.

“It turns out we’re all riddled with guilt and ambivalence and regret,” she says. “We’ve bottled this stuff up for too long. Now it’s time to unload.”

Parents are unloading like never before. Whether posting anonymous gripes in online confessionals, penning unvarnished “momoirs” or trading horror stories at backyard birthday parties, parents now find comfort and company in tales of their own negligence and stupidity. Bucking against the outsized expectations and intense perfectionism of their Hyperparent peers, these self-flagellating breeders bond over their most intimate parental humiliations.

Parenting books once dealt primarily in pastel-hued sentiment and motherly resolve. Today they’re filled with tales of overflowing diapers, supermarket tantrums and strained marriages, each a supposedly more intimate expose of the ugly underbelly of family life. The titles say it all: Mommies Who Drink, I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids, Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay.

Of course, there’s nothing new about books that claim to finally “tell the truth” about the grim realities of parenthood. From Betty Friedan to Erma Bombeck, writers have been blasting away at the idealized myth of motherhood for a generation or more. For her part, Ms. Lassally remembers being pregnant with her second child ten years ago and reading in Vicky Iovine’s The Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy about the possibility of growing hair on her nipples. “That was the moment,” she says. “I knew I wasn’t a freak.”

But what has so far been limited mostly to books by and for mothers has more recently expanded into an all-out, web-accelerated airing of grievances from both moms and dads. “Fathers came late to the party, but I think we’ve finally realized that there’s no real honor in decorum,” says writer Steve Almond, who chronicled his first paternal missteps in an essay titled “Ten Ways I Killed My Daughter Within Her First 72 Hours of Life,” which is included in his book Not That You Asked. “When we were growing up, our parents seemed to just deal and keep quiet. But we’ve got a confessional ethos that says, no, we need to talk about this stuff.”

This tell-all tic is hardly limited to self-deprecating authors; it now extends to the everyday chatter of parents. To wit: one recent bedtime, I caused a hysterical crying fit in my five-year-old daughter during an attempt to cure a case of the hiccups by leaping into her bedroom wearing a gorilla mask. Fearing I might have doomed my daughter to years of therapy, I retold the story at a barbeque a few days later. To my surprise, it prompted what can only be described as a game of Bad Dad One-Upsmanship. One dad got big laughs recounting how he nearly gave his daughter a concussion after carrying her on his shoulders through a doorway. Another confessed to leaving his toddler strapped in a car seat for two hours during a school basketball game.

All of which might only suggest that I travel in a particularly sloppy circle of mommies and daddies. But a quick online survey reveals a thriving community of parents who might not admit to such stupidity in person, but who have no trouble unburdening themselves virtually. On the new LA-based site Offsprung, users have posted stories about mistakenly dropping their kids, doping them with Benadryl and letting them “watch YouTube videos of airplanes taking off [for four days].” Over on the website Babble, one mom let readers in on her secret to maintaining composure with her irritable toddler: periodic time-outs to get stoned (“My son is none the wiser. All he knows is that his formerly stressed out mother is suddenly willing to hunker down on the rug to play Legos for an hour.”)

Amy Davis, a work-at-home mom from suburban Atlanta who posts regularly on Offsprung, says such admissions are part of a mass exercise in lowering expectations. “We’re sending a message that we don’t aspire to be perfect,” she says. “It’s like when we took a test in school and we told our friends, ‘Oh I bombed that test,’ even if we thought we did okay.”

The eagerness to tell all is most obviously a backlash against what many parents, particularly those in their late 30s and early 40s, view as the sugarcoated vision of family life they grew up with. “A lot of Gen X parents were raised with either the feminist notion that they could have it all, or that parenthood was their highest calling,” says Babble editor Ada Calhoun. “And they’re really shocked by how hard it is. As a sort of rebellion, they broadcast every bad thing.”

Ms. Calhoun estimates that 80 percent of the stories submitted to Babble are primarily negative, or at least unflattering. Which shouldn’t suggest that their authors are bad parents. “It’s my experience that the people writing about being a bad parent are usually pretty amazing,” she says. “They’re just very thoughtful and reflective and they find real value in sharing the bad stuff.”

Still, the negativity can get overwhelming. One of Ms. Calhoun’s colleagues at Babble, Gwen Watkins, was just entering the second trimester of her first pregnancy during a week in which online discussion was dominated by talk of projectile vomiting and marital strife. “Everywhere I turned all I heard about was how this was going to ruin my job prospects, my sex life, my body,” she says. “I started panicking.” It was only after posting a plea for encouragement to readers that Ms. Watkin’s worry eased. “People told me of course they love their kids, of course it’s all worth it. A lot of people said, ‘Huh, I thought that was obvious.’”

At worst, the warts-and-all disclosure can be a sly and insensitive shtick, a self-conscious exercise meant to make the storyteller feel better about their own failings (i.e. I may have terrified my daughter with a gorilla head, but at least I never had to smoke pot to appreciate the joy of Lego-building.) Elisha Cooper, a writer and illustrator who wrote about his first year of fatherhood in the book Crawling, says he’s an eager player of Bad Dad One-upmanship, even as he acknowledges that the motivations can get murky. “Sometimes it’s an attempt to gauge other people’s failures so we can say to ourselves, ‘thank God that’s not us,’” he says. “We want to know we’re all in the same boat – but we also want to know we’re on the drier part.”

Even so, Mr. Cooper welcomes the outpouring of insecurity, mostly because it affirms a truth he holds as self-evident: mainly, that the business of raising kids is messy, undignified and fraught with disaster. Or as he put it in Crawling, “so much of parenting has to do with failing. Why not remember the bad things? The first time the baby was dropped in the bath, the first time she choked on a prune. In short, why is everything supposed to be good?”

Why indeed? For her part, Ms. Lassally of True Mom Confessions says the current wave of complainers isn’t oblivious to the joys or rewards of parenthood, even if at the moment they much prefer kvetching. Beyond that, she says, even some of the most hair-raising confessions on her site are posted side by side with glimpses of unexpected hope. One mother recently confessed to kicking her son out of bed after three years of co-sleeping. “My confession,” she wrote, “is I miss my son.”

And that episode with the gorilla? My daughter may have been traumatized, but I’m here to tell you: she hasn’t had the hiccups since.