The Yale School of Law and Super-Parenting

In case you were feeling accomplished for having gotten the kids to school on time this morning, Heather Gerken has written nine YA vampire novels for her tween daughter.  Gerken reports that her daughter "was never impressed that I was working full time, part of a two-career household and still outpacing J.K. Rowling by a considerable margin."   My favorite line of the article: "The women [in the book] are ambitious and career-oriented, and some have the emotional I.Q. of a tree frog."

Gerken joins fellow Yalies Ian Ayres and Amy Chua in showing us the ways to channel our inner achievers into the more mundane joys of parenting.  Ayres promised his children a puppy if they wrote and published an article in an academic peer-reviewed journal.  Lo and behold, they did.  And now they have Cheby, named for the mathematician that discovered Chebychev‘s inequality.  In January we got an update from the Tiger Mother herself as her teenage daughters sleep past noon.  I appreciate the introspection in constructing a pretty incisive self-parody, but since her shtick is how extreme she's willing to be, self-parody and honest reportage are a little difficult to differentiate.