It’s a widely known fact that parenting is extremely easy: simply hover constantly and micromanage every aspect of your children’s lives until their independence and resourcefulness are completely destroyed. Soon enough, the most skilled helicopters start to wonder, couldn’t I be ruining my children’s lives faster, more creatively, or more thoroughly? Starting today, show your parental love in other vehicle-specific, slightly wrong ways that will out-maneuver your underachieving helicopter friends and totally fuck up your kids forever.
Uber Parents
Be too readily available, allowing your children to summon you at any hour of the day or night, which will lead to unreasonable expectations and crushing disappointment in all their future relationships. Also, constantly offer your children plastic bottles of lukewarm water.
Google Street View Car Parents
Obsessively plan out every possible route your children’s lives could take. Try to conceal your complete disregard for privacy by blurring your children’s faces, ignoring the lifelong social problems blur-facedness is likely to cause them.
Grey Sedan Parents
Offer an unexceptional, healthy, moderate upbringing, thus boring the shit out of your kids. Their therapists can say things like, “I think we should set aside some time to work through what an oppressively ordinary childhood your grey sedan parents gave you.”
Unicycle Parents
Embarrass your children with quirky demonstrations of how interesting you are. For instance, try busking on weekends as a one-person multi-instrumental oompah band, leading your kids to rebel with normcore experimentation.
Gadgetmobile Parents
Transform into literally anything for your kids. Be so agile, resourceful, and flexible that you fail to provide the stable, reliable figure your children so desperately need.
Salt Truck Parents
One-up your snowplow parent friends! Not only clear away obstacles before your kids get to them, but also salt the path you’ve cleared for added safety. You can look forward to children who both lack coping skills and track crusty white stains onto the hardwood floors.
Ice Cream Truck Parents
What could be better than the delight on your children’s faces when you give them an ice cream cone? I’ll tell you: double down on this parental joy by only feeding them ice cream cones.
Flintstones Car Parents
Profoundly overdo it when limiting technology and teaching your children to be mindful of the environment. Organic food, limited screen time, cloth diapers—sure, that’s just entry-level bougie parenting. Do you have what it takes to convert bouncy seats and rocking horses into generators so your children can power your home with clean energy?
Drone Parents
Combine the hovering of helicopter parents with intrusive photo-taking and lethal force. When airstrikes murder all their competitors for lead in the school play, your children will never develop the capacity to accept rejection.
DeLorean Time Machine Parents
Force your children to travel back in time to correct critical decisions made during your teenage years, which will lead to inadvertent brushes with incest, gradual limb-by-limb disappearance, and a lifetime of trauma recovery.