Wednesday link roundup: Bits related to kids and parenting

• This is a sad tribute to the state of modern America: Why I Didn't Help a Lost Girl. I suspect that fear of being branded a pervert probably keeps all sorts of men, parents or otherwise, from having meaningful interactions with the kids in their communities.
  
  
• The same sentiment is captured by this comic routine.
  
  
• Also bucking the received wisdom, 'Don't Talk to Strangers' is Dangerous Advice. It's more important to learn whom to avoid and whom to run toward in an emergency!
  
  
• From the Department of Snark comes this advice column exchange in which a single friend suspects that her stay-at-home-mom friend is just lounging around all day doing nothing. I have to say that I thought that the columnist's tone was not entirely out of line, although I will also admit that no amount of warning could have prepared me for how entirely a baby or small child can absorb all available time and energy from its caretakers.
  
  
• On the sublime parental artistry front, I offer this blog of baby daydreams as imagined (and made real) by the mother of a newborn; it's the cutest! But man! in those early days, nobody in my household was functional enough to even consider such an enterprise!
  
  
• And finally, from the Department of Entertaining Toddlers and Their Parents Too: Sesame Street makes a segment based on Mad Men. So right and so wrong...