By James J. Hamilton
Asking your Facebook friends to vote for your baby in a cute baby contest is bullshit.
Cute baby contests shouldn't be decided by how many Facebook friends the moms have, but by how objectively cute the babies are. Cute baby contests have absolutely no integrity these days. It's disgusting.
When someone I know posts on Facebook asking me to vote for their baby in a cute baby contest, I actually scroll through all the available babies and vote for the one that's legitimately the cutest.
I'm not going to vote for your baby just because I know you.
Believe me, I wouldn't be doing your baby any favors by helping it win a cute baby contest it doesn't deserve to win.
If you just hand your baby a bullshit cute baby contest victory and let it walk around thinking it's hot shit, your baby's going to grow up with an inflated ego and a huge sense of entitlement. It's not going to want to work for anything. Is that what you want?
If your baby had more people like me in its life—not pulling any punches, keeping it real, giving your baby some straight talk about how it looks like shit—maybe your baby would lay off the Happy Meals and start hitting the gym once in awhile. Then maybe by the time the Miss Junior Teen America pageant rolls around, the kid will be rocking a hard body and will be able to win something on merit.
Some of these cute baby contests dangle big prizes in your face, like $25K for the baby's college fund. You don't need that shit. If you don't encourage your baby to think it'll be able to coast through life being handed things because of its looks, it'll work hard in school and get academic scholarships. And it'll also work hard in college because it'll appreciate what it took to get there. Eighteen years from now, you know all these kids going to college on their cute baby contest winnings are just going to flunk out freshman year. They're going to party the whole time, do tons of drugs, and bang anyone who calls them cute. Is that what you want?
I didn't vote for your baby because I don't want it to grow up to be a stupid, drug-addled whore. You're welcome.