This week’s Bunch Poll in the National Post

Ideas about fatherhood have changed pretty radically over the past few decades. Unless you live in the world of Real Housewives, dads are no longer the breadwinners who expect dinner to be ready when they step in the door after work. To use another TV analogy, it’s a progression from Mad Men’s Don Draper to Modern Family’s Phil Dunphy. So how do today’s dads feel they are different from their own fathers? We asked around to find out.

“It’s in the smallest moments that I realize how different, and how much the same, I am from my dad, as a dad. My daughter gets a splinter; I sit her down the same way my father did me, assemble the same tools, ape his bedside manner … and then fail to remove the sliver of wood from my her foot with calm expertise, as he would have. I think my generation has a deeper comfort with the language of emotion than our parents’ did -which is a great thing for our children -but also a greater resistance to fully embracing adulthood, which is what they’ll probably grow up to resent us for.”  Read more...

What we’re reading today:

1. Your dad is hipper than you, probably.

2. You know those iconic album covers featuring kids? Slate finds out what the Nevermind baby, the Notorious B.I.G. baby, Blind Melon’s bee girl and more are up nowadays.

3. Babies just know numbers.

4. Babble wonders whether a mom could have written Adam Mansbach’s Go the Fuck to Sleep. Well, why the fuck not? We don’t buy this “It’s OK for a dad to write a book like Go the Fuck to Sleep but not a mom. People think a clueless or inept dad is funny” bullshit. First off, we don’t think Mansbach comes off as clueless or inept, he comes off as an exhausted parent. Secondly, we think people are more accepting than Babble thinks of irreverent moms who own the crap out of not living up to June Cleaver expectations. Pregnant Chicken‘s Amy Morrison could have written GTFTS. Borrowing some Aaron Sorkin, if someone else was going to write GTFTS, they would have written GTFTS.  Read more...

Could there be a better voice to narrate Adam Mansbach’s hit book?

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Go The Fuck to Sleep, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson

This download is currently available for free. We suggest you download it. In fact, why don’t you check out a clip of it on Audible right now? (Maybe not if the kids/your coworkers are around and you don’t have headphones handy… unless you work in a Bunch HQ-like setting where listening to profane kids’ books is part of your job description.) But really, download it so that every time those kids won’t settle in for the night, you can put on  your ipod and commiserate with Mansbach. Oh, and check out the hardcover for Ricardo Cortés’ beautiful illustrations.

Images via Youtube and Amazon