What do you call a dad who texts his kid 30 times a day and photographs each message?

Quite possibly "the winner" -- in divorce court.

Increasingly, courts are defining "good parenting" as "helicopter parenting," says Gaia Bernstein, a Seton Hall law professor who wrote "Over-Parenting" with Zvi Triger. Their paper looks at how divorce court judges are beginning to reward the parents who hover -- even smother -- the most. And parents are taking this to heart.

"We talked to attorneys and they describe this 'race for involvement' that's going on," says Bernstein. "So if somebody's about to get divorced and it's the parent who was less involved, the divorce attorney tells them, 'Now you have to get really, really involved. So you should get to know all the names of your children's teachers and friends and the parents of the friends, and coach their Little League, and attend Parent-and-Me classes if the child is young ...' "

Well, I'll be a monkey's ... playmate, I guess. Turns out a common primate pastime is for one gorilla to sneak up, hit another gorilla, then run and hide.

Which sounds extremely familiar.

Yes, scientists have come to the conclusion that gorillas play tag. They -- the humans, that is -- studied the game being played in six different gorilla colonies, which just goes to the desire to get out there and play is so deep, it's actually pre-human.

And yet, our kids aren't playing as much any more. Oh, they go to soccer clinics and karate class, and before that, they scramble under the parachute at Mommy and Me and You and Anyone Else with an Extra $360 to Spend on 12 weeks of Doing the Stuff Kids Used to Do at Home for Free class. But the time kids spend just goofing around is eroding, and that is a crisis right up there with the erosion of the rain forest, says Susan Linn, author of, "The Case for Make Believe."

In both instances, a crucial natural resource is disappearing.

Children dying in hot cars: Terrible.

Passersby calling the cops every time they see a kid waiting in a car: Also very bad.

Why? Why shouldn't we all be screaming at the moms and dads who leave their kids in the car while they pick up a pizza or drop off the dry cleaning? After all, that's what the advice-givers are saying to do. "Help us tell more people never to leave their children alone in a car -- even for a minute," begs one website.

Why isn't that a good idea?

What would you do if you saw a man hanging around the playground and he didn't have any kids there?

Well, soon that question may be moot. Miami Beach is just the latest locality considering legislation that would make 19 playgrounds "children's play areas" -- i.e., strictly off limits to any adult not accompanied by a kid. Laws like that are becoming more and more common, according to nonprofit playground promoting organization, KaBoom. But are they making our playgrounds -- and children -- any safer?

The opposite.

When art students Anna Brooks and Samantha Harvey asked if they could take some children's photos at a local school, they were told by the principal, fine. They could photograph one child, from behind.

Can't be too careful, right?

Wrong. We sure can be. We can be so careful that we warp what was a normal and wonderful part of life -- taking pictures of kids -- into something disgusting. Why has it become so dangerous, so dirty to take kiddie pics today?

We have come to equate child photos with child porn.

It's that knee-jerk, "Oh no, you may not take a child's picture!" reaction inspired the young ladies' next project, "Class Portraits" -- traditional class photos of real kids, with their backs turned to the camera. "We hope people will be amused by the pictures," Harvey told the British Journal of Photography. "But we also wanted to ... ask at what point will the photography of children be completely forbidden?"

MilkMakers, Milkin' Cookies -- these are two new-ish cookies created for breast-feeding moms. They're made from, among other things, oatmeal, yeast and flax seed, all long held to help boost milk production, and anecdotal evidence (well, people posting on breast-feeding blogs) seems to indicate they work. So more power to these little teats!

Er ... treats. That being said, I do have a couple of reservations:

First off, my cookie of choice while breast-feeding did not cost $44 for 30 of them, as do the MilkMakers. It was called the "Oreo," and it was available pretty much everywhere.

Furthermore, the blogs about the breast milk-boosting cookies are filled with chipper endorsements like, "And my husband loves them, too!"

OK, folks: Quiz time! What are the glaring problems with this letter to Annie's Mailbox -- and Annie's response?

"Dear Annie" (wrote a lady): Years ago people put little placards in their kids' windows so that firefighters could find them in the event of a fire. But then, she continued, these "proved dangerous because pedophiles also knew which bedrooms the children were in."

Americans oh-so-wisely scraped these pervert attractors (and potential child-savers) off their homes, the writer says. But now she sees a very similar problem with the little stick-figure decals that people put on the back of their cars. You know, the ones that show how many kids they've got, and which gender? "Yesterday, I saw a car with two soccer ball emblems in the back window, each with the name of one of two girls. I assume those two girls were their daughters. To me, this is as dangerous as the window placards because any pedophile could follow the car home and target the children in the future. Should I be concerned for these children?"

And she signed herself (perhaps anonymously, so the members of Pedophiles R Us could not immediately track her down for ruining their fun): "New York."

Want to keep your children safe? Teach them to talk to strangers.

Oh, sure, that's easy for me to say -- Ms. Free-Range Kids. But it's not just me. "We have been trying to debunk the myth of stranger danger," says Ernie Allen. He's the head of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the group that put the missing kids' pictures on the milk cartons (and got us all hysterical about stranger danger in the first place).

As Mr. Allen knows, most child abuse occurs at the hands of someone the child knows well -- a stepparent, a brother, a babysitter -- not a stranger. So we're already pointing kids in the wrong direction when we tell them that strangers are the big threat in town.

But another problem with "Stranger danger!" is that it teaches kids not to develop any common sense. Case in point:

Bend down!

That's the new rule at my kids' camp this summer: If a counselor feels like hugging a camper, the counselor must bend down to the child's level, so the child's face does not end up buried in his or her "groin."

Apparently, word of this got out (and what a word it was) because my tween-age boys came home gleefully yapping about groin this, groin that. That was some dinner conversation. "Please pass the groin ... er ... corn!"

But the bottom line? Hugs will never be the same. Now they are pervy things that disgusting adults do to children unless proper precautions are taken. Great.

On a sunny Saturday about a week ago, a healthy, leafy branch fell from a tree in Central Park and the unthinkable happened: It killed a 6-month-old girl who was in her mom's arms, just as the dad was about to take their picture. The mom was gravely injured. The dad is now taking the first steps toward filing a lawsuit.

Most likely it'll be against the city, the park, the maintenance crew, but it won't be against the real culprit, because it's a culprit we no longer acknowledge:

Fate.