NBC's Parenthood was never fair, but it was consistent. Not fair because, in its efforts to show an imperfect but strongly bonded family having very realistic problems and eventually solving them through the power of love and communication, it made real family life seem like a barren hellscape full of dysfunctional…

When Parenthood first started, it was an excellent show about complicated family relationships that rang true for many people. But now, many seasons later, (and with the addition of Ray Romano) it has become a sad sack of emotional garbage that not even Christina Braverman could love. I'm not sad it's ending, but the…

All parents lie. My parents, your parents, your grandparents, me, and, if you're a parent, you. This is not, as our teenage selves suspect, due to any malicious desire to manipulate and deceive. Lying to our children is a goodamn necessity to make every day existence not only a harmonious as possible, but bearable. To…

Attention, America: There is a very real network TV show called "Bet on Your Baby," where parents bet on what their babies will do. On television. For money. It's like one of Jack Donaghy's ideas escaped into the wild and began breeding with the late-afternoon lineup.

Rookie's Tavi Gevinson has been making an effort to get into acting and so far it seems to be going well. The prodigy starred alongside Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Enough Said, will appear on Broadway with Michael Cera in This Is Our Youth and is the special guest star on the season finale of Parenthood where she'll be…

If you're looking for an update on what the Friday Night Lights band Crucifictorious has been up to since the series ended in 2011, consider your curiosity mildly sated. The band has reunited on a mini webisode of Parenthood, which means — hooray! — that Crucifictorious stayed together even after Lance Landry went…

Over the weekend, a couple brought their eight month old child to Alinea, a Chicago restaurant headed by Chef Grant Achatz that has 3 Michelin stars. Alinea is considered one of the best restaurants in the country/world, and is heralded for its complex prix fixe tasting menu that runs over $200 and is purchased with…

Sorry in advance for what I'm about to do to you lovely people, but I can't be alone in these feelings anymore. Ariel Levy's essay in the latest issue of the New Yorker is devastating, grim, bleak, and... beautiful. And it's the best thing I've read, on the internet or elsewhere, in a long time.

Just a reminder: Parents, do NOT pretend that your kid has a life-threatening illness so that sympathetic do-gooders will send you megabucks and then you can buy a bunch of jet-skis. Or any personal watercraft. Don't do that. Please?

Great idea alert! New York City mayoral candidate Christine Quinn would like to make education affordable to all, and thus wants to give upper middle class Manhattan parents the right to take out subsidized loans in order to pay for their children's pre-kindergarten & oh my god what even is this dumb country we live…

Brush off those anti-abortion bingo cards you set aside after last month's election, because Texas Governor Rick Perry just spewed out an alarming yet depressingly predictable bevy of buzzwords during a press conference organized by Texas Right to Life at a crisis pregnancy center today. (In Perry's dream Texas, CPCs…

Do you remember the first time you learned what sex was? If you're anything like James Deen, Courtney Stodden, or the other notable folks we asked about that milestone discussion, your (well-meaning!) parents didn't offer that much help.

Jessica Valenti has a baby and a new book. And like any proud new book-parent, she's been promoting the book by pitching pieces to other news outlets about topics covered in the book. But one outlet in particular wasn't interested so much in her feminist take on society's depiction of pregnancy and parenthood.…

According to a new government report, American women, as a population, are not awesome at taking birth control. Okay, I'm not being fair — it's not American women in general who are bad, it's unmarried women who live with their significant others who are exceptionally not awesome at taking birth control. In fact, they…

For women who know deep down that they never want children, that hell no response to the thought of motherhood endures long after the echoes of a temper tantrum in the candy aisle at Target subside. But women who want to be sterilized often face obstacles that aren't present for other medical procedures — obnoxious,…

Pat your vagina on the back, ladies; a new report released today shows that the US birth rate is continuing to go down faster than a sorority girl in a tired sexist joke. But a reduction in birth rate isn't due to Operation Rescue nightmare-style use of abortion as birth control; rather, diligent use of contraception…

On a day when cultural conventions have forced us to laud fatherhood by purchasing something at Lowe's, it might be worth noting that more lucky kids than ever will only have to remember one of the parental holidays the evil greeting card conglomerates have foisted onto our Gregorian calendar. The Census Bureau…