Parenting And The Moral Superiority Index

The following is a guest post by my husband. He wishes to state for the record that he does not actually “post”, nor does he “blog”, nor does he type (if he doesn’t have to). He is, however, hilarious, and he dictated the following “post”. Any and all typos are attributable to me.

The Moral Superiority Index. Are you not aware of this metric? This is the metric by which all parents are judged (by other parents). As I explain in my seminal work, “Moral Superiority and You: Why I Am Morally Superior To You”, this is a floating index which, through multi-variant analysis, and a variety of other statistical methods to which I am entirely oblivious, I can pretty much do whatever I want, as long as I compare myself to something you did that is worse. I can thus prove myself morally superior to you. 

Kindly do not look at this graph too closely. My husband has informed me it's not entirely accurate. I was just excited that I figured out how to make a graph on Power Point, but I was too lazy to figure out how to make it do exactly what I wanted. Whatever. It makes me feel smart.

For instance, when I dress my child in clothes that are clearly clashing and too small, I feel like I am doing something wrong. But the moral superiority index dictates that when a picture of your child appears on Facebook equally ill-attired, I am morally superior to you because I did not post a picture of my inappropriately attired child on a public forum, and I did not thus ruin their hopes at the 2027 presidential 

election. I retain moral superiority. 

Example 2: I feed my child sweetened applesauce, while you feed your child unsweetened applesauce. My moral superiority numbers decline. But it was an accident in that I thought I had purchased unsweetened applesauce.  Moral superiority numbers increase somewhat however, not knowing what you are feeding your child causes a dip in the index. Fortunately, due to the fact that my applesauce was organic and yours was…well…not, numbers again return to their pre-applesauce incident level. 

The moral superiority index is a convenient method for assessing one’s parenting abilities relative to others. Unfortunately it does not work as an internal quality control by which I can become a better parent. It only serves to decrease my overall parametric guilt levels (I do not know what parametric means.) So, in our modern world of Twitter, Pinterest, and dependence on oil, what does the Moral Superiority Index do for you?