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A while back, I wrote a lit­tle bit on “par­en­tism,” which I defined as “con­sist­ing in dis­crim­i­nat­ing against peo­ple on account of their parental sta­tus, or in indi­vid­ual actions and atti­tudes or insti­tu­tional arrange­ments that favor per­sons of a par­tic­u­lar parental sta­tus unjustly.”

Here’s some evi­dence for the phe­nom­e­non: you can buy a box of kid para­pher­na­lia for the pur­pose of con­vinc­ing your cowork­ers that you have a kid and are there­fore enti­tled an impor­tant perk of par­ent­hood — skip­ping out of some work while look­ing sym­pa­thetic instead of like a deadbeat.

The ridicu­lous thing here is not that some­one sells this kit, or that peo­ple buy it. What’s ridicu­lous is that it is even needed in the first place. Some peo­ple value things other than spawn­ing. Shock­ing, I know. Please learn to respect this in the way that you want them to respect your life choices.

h/t bakadesuyo

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