Is such parenting becoming rarer? I recently heard of a college administrator who met with a student and her mother regarding plagiarism charges. Much to the administrator’s surprise, the mother calmly explained that the daughter should not be punished because … wait for it … it was the mother who had plagiarized when she did the child’s coursework for her.

I recently met the son and daughter-in-law of a rabbi. She is not Jewish. Because the marriage is interfaith, the father declined to officiate a Jewish wedding service solemnizing their union. How could he decline to perform other weddings on the grounds they violated his deeply held religious tenets but perform another simply because the couple asking for an exception was related to him by blood? I heard this story from the daughter-in-law, who was probably expecting me to denigrate the rabbi. But I didn’t. I thought it admirable that he stuck to his religious views. She and her husband did, too, and have a wonderful relationship with him.

Now let’s look at two stories featured in national newspapers this past weekend. The first appeared in the Washington Post:

Jeremiah Heaton was playing with his daughter in their Abingdon, Va., home last winter when she asked whether she could be a real princess. Heaton, a father of three who works in the mining industry, didn’t want to make any false promises to Emily, then 6, who was “big on being a princess.” But he still said yes.

So he did the completely normal thing American parents do these days. He found an unclaimed 800-square-mile patch of arid desert along the Sudanese border, planted an actual flag of his family’s design, named it the Kingdom of North Sudan, and declared himself king and Emily princess:

“I wanted to show my kids I will literally go to the ends of the earth to make their wishes and dreams come true,” Heaton said.

What a maroon, right? How could this be good for a child to think this is realistic behavior to expect from family or loved ones?

Over at the New York Times, we have a profile of a Methodist pastor who had similar sentiments. There we learn, in the gauzy language we’ve come to expect in mainstream media treatment of anything supportive of same-sex attraction and attendant sexual behavior, that Tim Schaefer was special:

His father, the Rev. Frank Schaefer, a United Methodist minister, thought of his eldest son as a miracle child, saved by some combination of medicine and prayer, saved for something special.

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