Our obsession with parenting

WORD HAS IT that there were 200 people lined up down at the church for parent ed signups early Saturday morning, with some of the younger, bubblier moms in line at 4:30 a.m.

“I got there at 6:30, and I was No. 99,” my wife says. “I just barely made it in.”

This seems like a lot of trouble for classes on raising children, especially since no one really knows anything about raising your particular children. Experienced parents know that each child is like a snowflake. You know, flaky.

“At 7, some of the younger dads showed up with coffee and doughnuts,” my wife reports.

“For you?”

“For their own wives,” she says. “It’s a different generation, I guess.”

Talk about flaky. I do a mental inventory of all the fathers I know. Bruce. Paul. Don. Steve. Not one of them would get up at 6:30 to take coffee and doughnuts to wives who woke up at 4:30 to sign up for parent ed class. Most wouldn’t wake up at 6:30 on a Saturday if their pajamas imploded and their abdomens caught fire. OK, maybe Don would.

But it’s a different generation, eager to be better than their parents were. It’s the underlying motivation for almost all parents: not repeating the mistakes their own folks made. To be more attentive. To be more involved.

Of course, there must be a point of diminishing returns. The more you do as parents, the less your kids need to do for themselves. Is there such a thing as overparenting? Are we raising a generation of children who will be babied until they’re 21? What then?

They’ll head out into a world where nobody worries over their every move or devotes their life to their overextended self-esteem.

What then? They’ll move back home again, that’s what. To the nest that never empties.

WANT SOME TIPS on parenting? Here’s all you need to know:

For children from newborn to age 2:

* Forget about it; they own you.

* Sleep whenever possible, preferably during staff meetings at work.

* Eat sparingly because you’ll gain 15 pounds just eating their leftover fries.

* Forget intimacy. Want affection? Buy a beagle.

Ages 3 to 5

* These years will pass like bad sushi. Enjoy every sticky moment.

* Maybe teach them to tie their shoes.

Ages 6 to 12

* Don’t let them run the house. Never. Ever. Monkeys don’t run the zoo. Kids don’t run the house.

* Be quietly relentless about rules and chores.

* Teach them to keep their bedrooms neat and not to let mold build up in their undershorts.

* Blame any character shortcoming on your in-laws.

* Get out alone with your spouse whenever possible -- preferably to France or Germany.

Ages 13 to 17

* Forget about it; they own you (again).

* Pray often.

* Drink accordingly.

THAT’S ABOUT ALL you need to know about parenting. It also helps to talk with other parents about problems they might be having with their children.

When you do this, other wives will occasionally forget themselves and gently touch your wrist while they try to make a point. This is what passes for sex in many suburbs.

Discussions with other parents are important too, because they’ll make you realize that you are not the only clueless couple with ungrateful psycho children who dress like belly dancers and don’t know the value of a buck.

“Suddenly my daughter’s a raving lunatic,” your friend will confide.

“So’s mine,” you’ll say.

Long pause.

“Wanna play golf Sunday?” your friend will ask.

“Sure,” you’ll say.

These frank conversations are reassuring, though not necessarily comforting. It is like being grounded in an airport during a winter storm; your only solace is that when you look around, thousands of others seem to have been there even longer than you.

Yet if you survive long enough, parenting can have its rewards. After a while, the children begin to come around again. At 18, you’ll start to have actual conversations with your child. By 19, there might be an occasional handshake.

Some parents have reported that by age 20, their children are behaving like reasonable people again and talking in a normal tone of voice. The topics will be abnormal, but at least the volume will be reasonable.

“We’re getting married,” your twentysomething child will say one day, in a voice sweet as maple syrup.

“No, you’re not,” you’ll say, with the calm of a soldier who’s seen every kind of battle.

The good news is that you’ll soon have grandchildren. Each one a snowflake.

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.