Every Wednesday morning I receive an e-mail update from parentcenter.com. This was a site I joined when I was pregnant and was trying to quell my anxiety in my usual manner, by consuming as much information as possible. �Go to babycenter.com,� (parentcenter�s counterpart for parents of younger children or those contemplating the acquisition of some) a pregnant friend urged. �They have everything you need to know.

And, in fact, babycenter was an excellent source for all kinds of information. Parentcenter is quite different however. There are, indeed, advice-giving pages, but by the time you actually are responsible for the care and feeding of a toddler, you�re usually fleeing from too much advice, not looking for it. By then you�ve realized that it�s not about consuming information, digesting it and figuring out how to use it. By then you know that all good advice is completely contradictory with other good advice and all you can do is hope you know when you�re doing a good job.

Nevertheless, in the tradition of female-oriented publications of all kinds, advice must be sought and given. In the weekly email, the advice forum comes in the form of reader questions called �parenting dilemmas�. Each week a new dilemma appears and each week they run the question from the previous week along with answers sent in by reader moms. Occasionally the dilemmas are reassuring to me. Things like, �My five-year-old son still won�t use the potty. What am I doing wrong?� give me reassurance that things aren�t actually as bad in my house as they are in somebody else�s. The answers, however, are rarely useful and I stopped reading them long ago. In fact, the responses often border on insulting. While the questions are enough to reassure me, apparently others feel the need to make other parents feel worse in order to feel better about their own parenting methods.

Last week�s dilemma, however, demanded closer investigation: �My daughter freaks out when TV characters show up at birthday parties.� This was not a dilemma I identified with as a parent. This was one I identified with as a person. How weird was it to see Spongebob strolling up and giving me a hug at a shopping mall a couple of weeks ago? I mean, I don�t even know him. And wasn�t he just a couple of inches tall? Why is he now 7�2�? Get me the hell out of here! It doesn�t seem to me that there�s anything wrong with the kid. Maybe she�s just the only intelligent one in the room.

A few responses to the "dilemma" (paraphrased, but you can read the originals here):

�Isn�t that cute?�

�It�s your fault. You�re ruining your kid�s life by letting her watch TV.

�Tell her the characters are pretend.�

�Preschoolers are scared of everything.�

�Don�t let her go to those parties.�

There are a few others, but these cover most of them. Most responses include lengthy descriptions of the respondents� own children�s fears. Here are some of the things our children are afraid of:

Dora the Explorer

Barney (I�m a little scared of him too. I have a profound distrust of purple dinosaurs who tell me they love me before we�ve even been introduced)

Elmo

Blue (the dog from Blue�s Clues, not the color)

Monsters (quite reasonable)

Going down the drain with the bath water (Mr. Rogers can help with that one)

Butterflies

Clowns

Santa Claus

Parades

Any adults in costumes (Again, quite reasonable. In many cases, you should be very afraid. When I lived downtown, I would always cross the street to avoid a confrontation with the guy in the cheap gorilla suit hawking flyers for Gorilla Gym.)

Larry-Boy (A super-hero who happens to be a cucumber. Now that's my kind of superhero. Oh wait, we were talking about KIDS.)

Chuck E. Cheese

The Easter Bunny

The Seattle Mariners Moose

The UW Harry the Husky

Disney characters

Ronald McDonald

Everything

[Yesterday's entry was posted late. Click back if you missed my ramble on modernism and nationalism. No, really.]

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