This Essay Will Help Your Kid Get Ahead

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That said, these parental advisories also seem to tap into an even broader need for meaning. Their elevated aims and empty jargon bring to mind the corporate-mission-statement craze of the '90s, when companies composed pithy statements of purpose that were so generic and laden with buzzwords (Optimizing! Adaptive! Empowering!) as to lose all meaning. Even now one drugmaker aspires "to provide society with superior products and services by developing innovations and solutions that improve the quality of life and satisfy customer needs, and to provide employees with meaningful work and advancement opportunities, and investors with a superior rate of return." At the risk of sounding obtuse, isn't that the mission of every company? I mean, what firm has as its raison d'être "to provide shoddy products and poor service while ticking off customers, treating employees like dirt and impoverishing investors?"

But in the soulless chaos of modernity, it's not enough for someone to do a good job developing/manufacturing/hawking pharmaceuticals--or to be a productive member of society more broadly. Many of us need the deep, underlying purpose of our daily toil spelled out in fancy-pants terms. Why then should parenting be any different? When handing our child a paint set, we want to know we're doing something grander than simply keeping her occupied until dinner. (Expressive planning! Original art!) And since so much of child rearing involves playing the same games, singing the same songs and answering the same questions until your brain goes soft, it's arguably even more important for parents to be reassured that seemingly trivial activities serve a higher calling.

Then again, maybe we're just desperate to find an upside to those blue and red paint spots all over the living-room carpet. •