Check out

my friend Marco's fun but harrowing essay "On Torture and Parenting" (about training your six-month-old to fall asleep without parents in attendance) at n+1. Here's a taste: "If parenting, even responsible parenting, made me feel like a torturer, it wasn't exactly because I'm melodramatic or overwrought, but because the official torturers now conceive of themselves in the same terms as the parenting manuals. They, too, are technicians of the naked human personality. The 'Human Resource Exploitation Manual,' a formerly classified government document used to instruct 'anti-communist' Latin American security forces in the bad old 1980s, puts the theory of torture in terms that any reader of the 'Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child' can easily understand."