Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs. Why not get comfortable with your ineptitude? Discover your unique parenting-failure style with this fun quiz:
1. Your eight-year-old has been watching chainsaw demonstrations on YouTube lately. You wake up one morning to a loud buzzing from the back yard, followed by a crash. Do you:
(a) Put an extra frozen waffle in the toaster—sounds like she’s working up an appetite.
(b) Performatively yell at her so that the neighbors can hear, but then, in private, praise her—those landscaping skills will pay for college.
(c) Chuckle into your cannabis-infused morning smoothie and turn up the volume on “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.”
2. You’re about to board a six-hour flight home from a family vacation, and your five-year-old, who just ate twelve very ripe plums, says his tummy hurts. Do you:
(a) Tape the lower half of his body into a duty-free bag and hope for the best.
(b) Take a business-class upgrade—the last one available—and wish your spouse good luck.
(c) Say, “What’s your name, young man? You’re a little young to be travelling alone!,” so that everyone can hear.
3. Your mother-in-law took your fourteen-year-old to see a foreign film. Over lunch at Olive Garden afterward, he wonders aloud about a specific sexual practice that a character in the movie refers to. Do you:
(a) Tell him to ask the server about it.
(b) Describe it, using breadsticks and onion rings as visual aids.
(c) Put on a Chappell Roan playlist and hope he figures it out.
4. Your sixth grader is doing makeup tutorials on Instagram that include shoplifting tips and savage descriptions of her science teacher’s appearance. Do you:
(a) Tell her to try harder next time—she didn’t even mention Mr. Welch’s hideous breath.
(b) Monetize her platform—you’ll need cash for bail one day.
(c) Explain that her glow definitely doesn’t come from within, and her frosted blush isn’t doing her any favors.
5. Your adult child is pregnant with her guru’s baby and asks to borrow ten thousand dollars so the two of them can start a colonic-hydrotherapy center together. Do you:
(a) Refuse—she’s been rejecting your guru’s advances for years, so this just feels rude.
(b) Explain that your long-distance fiancé, Stanislav, has all your money tied up in a bitcoin mine.
(c) Tell her you’ll send twenty thousand if she gives you the placenta to use in a facial. ♦
