Baby Tranquilizers

A lot of parents really know how to take advantage of great parenting tools available for young children and teenagers. The steady rise in Ritalin prescriptions is a fine illustration of this. But did you know that there are also similarly great parenting tools now available for babies? No, you can't give Ritalin to a baby! That would be a waste of the popular tranquilizer, since babies do not have fully formed attention spans. Thus, they cannot really have Attention Deficit Disorder. Nor are babies socially developed enough to share and abuse the Ritalin with their friends at parties.

Luckily for new parents, there are a lot of quality baby tranquilizers available on the market. You don't even need a prescription for many of them. You can just buy them over the counter in Mexico, or online from Canada. But there are a few rules you must take heed of before you venture into the next generation of parenthood. Consider this a sort of primer for baby tranquilizers.

My first rule is to be wary of deceptive pharmaceutical advertising. You see all kinds of great new drugs advertised these days, from Baby Robitussin to Baby Valtrex and Baby Propecia. Who hasn't imagined that ubiquitous dancing baby surfing over hay fields on an intense Allegra-induced high? One particular advertisement that caught my attention was an ad for Celebrex. Not only were middle-aged women shown in some kind of outdoor environment, they also appeared to be doing Tai-Chi! I was immediately convinced that any future or imaginary baby of mine would have to be put on a steady and pervasive regimen of Celebrex. Much to my chagrin, I was later alerted in an online pediatric medicine chat room that Celebrex was actually some form of drug designed to relieve osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis pain. This is the kind of advertising smoke-and-mirrors routine that real parents need to be aware of. Even though Celebrex sounds exciting, it will not turn your baby into a party baby.

My second rule is to be careful about baby tranquilizer dosage. Babies typically cannot handle as many pharmaceuticals in one sitting as an adult can. Never measure out baby tranquilizers in the same ratio that you administer tranquilizers to yourself. A helpful anecdote is to think about a baby food to adult food ratio. An average adult can process a lot more food than an average baby can. One time I personally ate over 25 cans of Gerber brand strained carrots in one sitting. There's little to no chance that a baby could consume that same amount. Even if the baby was of a comparable physical stature to myself, babies usually don't have the mental capacity to consume liters of food without getting sidetracked at some point. That's one reason why you don't see babies competing in adult eating competitions. I'm sure there is a baby somewhere in Asia who can challenge in the Nathan's hotdog eating contest, but you have to remember that this hypothetical baby would be the exception to the typical adult-to-baby food ratio. Now we have established clear and empirical evidence that adults can usually eat more tranquilizers than babies can.

Although my mother is not an accredited expert on tranquilizers, she has a personal history that involves parenting. I asked her about my own baby tranquilizer regimen as an infant, and she informed me that my opiate of choice was a commonplace tool called a pacifier. I was not as familiar with the word "pacifier" or the root word "pacify" as I was with modern-day staples of our cultural lexicon, such as "Celebrex" and "Allegra." When I looked up the word "pacify" in the dictionary, I was surprised to learn that it meant "to restore to a tranquil state." It seems like old mom had found some crude form of a baby tranquilizer after all!

However, if you're still looking for real baby tranquilizers, I would suggest tracking down some Quaaludes. Apparently they were big in the '70s.