Coach-ching! Moms only buy advice they like
By Beth Teitell
Tuesday, April 5, 2005

As if more proof were needed that this generation of parents has gone loopy in the child-rearing department, here comes news that a new profession is booming: the parent coach.

Hey, why call your mom when a pro can tell you how to get Junior to eat his greens - for a mere $75 or so an hour.

OK, I can understand why you might not want to go crying to your own flesh-and-blood - but who wants to waste good money having a few questions about tantrums answered when the same cash could fund your escape from the scene?

``Seventy five dollars buys a lot of babysitting,'' one mom noted. ``By the time you came home, the kids might even be asleep.''

It's tempting, of course, to blame parent coaches for preying on a vulnerable sleep-deprived population, but we have only ourselves to blame. Not only have we raised kids who are too sophisticated to be cowed by the age-old parenting threats, but we've set the bar for our behavior extremely high.

As one mom put it: ``You can't tell a modern kid she'll harm her vision if she doesn't eat her carrots. That's classified as `abuse' now.''

Although news stories abound of parents getting helpful assistance from parenting coaches, the mothers I spoke to said there's no way they'd use one.

Well - unless the parent coach would broaden his or her mandate to also discuss pets, in-laws or spouses: ``If a parent coach could mediate between me and my husband I might be willing to pay,'' one mom told me.

She and her husband disagree over how to put their 15-month-old to sleep at night - she thinks the girl needs to learn to fall asleep on her own, while dad wants to rock her to bed.

``I want someone who's going to come down on my side,'' the mother explained, getting more and more interested in the whole notion of a neutral professional - who would support her position.

``How much would it cost?'' she asked. ``Would it be like a psychic hotline, where it's $12.95 for the first minute and then goes down?

Actually, maybe the coaches and psychics could merge - I see a well-behaved child in your future .