Best Parents love the word “organic,” and will pay extravagant amounts for anything prefaced by this increasingly-suspicious marketing gimmick. That’s why we live in a world suddenly filled with organic food, organic clothing, organic toys, and now, the organic mattress. Truth is, organic mattresses have been around for centuries. But they used to be called “sleeping on the ground.” And where do you think they put Baby Jesus after birth, a Sealy Posturepedic?

But now the Best Parent is besieged with word that the traditional foam and spring mattresses they’ve been sleeping on for the past century are actually cesspools of toxic fumes and harmful petro-chemicals. Putting your child in traditional crib bedding? Ha! Might as well float little Moses in a plastic bucket across the Exxon Valdez oil spill. If you’re a proper Best Parent, you have probably already seen the names Dax and Greenforbaby on your Amex cards. As for everyone else? Good luck with the mattress cancer.

So take that, non-best parents putting your child on Tempur-pedics, futons, and memory foam! Best Parent children are sleeping easy tonight on organic wool and cotton, as they hear this latest Best Parent lullaby: “Rock a bye baby, in the treetop…which was grown pesticide-free and certified organic to the strictest USDA standards, thank you very much.”

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Best Parents have only one speed for their children: accelerated. And what better way to provide a head start on that rugrat race of life than teaching their newborns how to communicate in sign language — well before they can talk, walk, or even hold their own heads up for more than a few seconds at a time.

This is because the Best Parent is better than you. And they have the studies to prove it. But, the non-best parent asks, don’t these people realize that the average six-month old only really needs to express three things: “I’m hungry. I’m tired. I just pooped myself.” Beyond that, what kind of extended conversations do Best Parents expect to have with their infants? Perhaps a literary discussion of the underlying themes and metaphors of the latest pop-up book they’ve teethed on.

So take that, hearing impaired people of the world! Your once vital form of communication has been co-opted by the shameless and virulent ambitions of the gung-ho Best Parent attempting to fast-track their spawn. Just try to say that in sign language. You can’t. And that’s why the Best Parent is better than you.

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Public parks present a dilemma for the Best Parent: they are free, and anyone can go to them. Why is this so terrible? After all, the true Best Parent loves to publicly and self-consciously demonstrate their passion for diversity and community as much as possible, and a public park offers, well, a very public, community venue for this. On the downside, such arenas offer extremely limited opportunities for the Best Parent to spend unnecessary time and money to prove they are, once again, better than you.

Enter the Indoor Playground. No, we’re not talking about those greasy plastic habitrails in McDonalds that haven’t been cleaned since Mayor McCheese’s first term in office. The indoor playground the Best Parent patronizes charges an admission fee, offers costly educational classes, and often has the name play or gym in the title, as if they are toddler versions of high-end health clubs (which the Best Parent use to be quite fond of, prior to the body-image-blasting torpedo of childbirth).

How is it that one of the most basic joys of childhood – playing in the park – has been so brazenly packaged and commodified? Why is it that places like Gymboree offer extensive classes in such things as two way communication and motor planning, what many people use to refer to as walking and talking?

Because the Best Parent is not “most people.” Paying for so-called toddler gym teachers to instruct their children in how to play is not only important for the development of their child. It is essential for the development of the Best Parent, who must once again demonstrate how they care about their child more than you do.

So take that, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and outdoor loving children of all kinds! Best Parents everywhere are throwing in with a polyester Gymbo plush from Gymboree. Regardless of skin color, if children are not enjoying their youth on the nylon carpeting and petroleum-based playthings of an indoor gym, then their mater and paterfamilias are just are not Best Parent enough.

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