I have, in the past, argued that the United States is not an especially good place to be a parent. Leave policies at both the government and the corporate level are laughable by the standards of any other developed nation. I could spend hours summing up the ways in which we're failing to measure up to the rest of the world; fortunately, two professors have already done the hard work in this thoughtful (if not entirely surprising) brief (boiled down from this report) from the New America Foundation.

The take-away message is unambiguous: the US trails the rest of the world in leave policy and preschool quality and opportunity, and our parents and kids are worse off for it.

Publications like this make me sad, more than anything, because no one in any particular place of power seems to be listening. The authors suggest an annual investment of between 1 percent and 1.5 percent of GDP -- a staggering $100 billion to $150 billion a year -- to bring this country in line with the global trend setters. But such ambition verges on the ridiculous in a country where congresswoman Lynn Woolsey's modest and thoughtful "Balancing Act" is consigned to irrelevance.

Also: Hogan Hilling flagged this story from the L.A. Daily News about Boot Camp for New Dads. Hogan was upset that the author (who has a 15-month-old of his own) decided to define parenthood mostly as cleaning up poop. I have to back Hogan on this one. Being a parent requires a lot of skills and a fundamental change in world view. The diapers are the easy part. But you'd never know it from the piece.

Finally: At-Home Dad has more on the Verizon decision to yank its doofus dad commercial, and he manages to highlight *another* dumb commercial for a phone company. It raised the question of why the one Verizon ad seemed to stir such deep passion, while dozens of other escaped notice. I wonder if it's that the Verizon ad bordered on drama. Will we tolerate doofus dads only if the ad goes for yuks?