Bad Mommy!!!

Have you seen the latest commercial for PediaSure Sidekicks? I'd like to sidekick whoever wrote that insulting piece of crap! Aside from the fact that the hucksters at Abbott, who own PediaSure, are trying to get us to buy an overpriced liquid nutritional supplement for healthy children (this is a different product than the therapeutic PediaSure that is used for medical conditions), they decided that the best way to market this totally unnecessary bilge water was to trash mothers.

How many times do we have to see this tactic? If you're a good mother, you'll buy Product X for your child. Bad mothers don't care enough to buy it or buy the cheap, generic knock-off. "Choosy mothers choose Jiff." I use Skippy peanut butter; what does that make me? Some sort of negligent, alcoholic who doesn't care if my kid eats the dog food off the floor?

The PediaSure Sidekicks commercial begins with a mom telling her daughter, "Gotta be on your game today, honey!" Gee, way to put some pressure on the kid, mom! She's getting ready for a youth soccer game, not the World Cup! But you know how soccer parents can be! Gotta start them young; scholarships could be at stake! Then we see little Brittany killing the competition on the soccer field while Mom cheers her on. Good Mom! You must have given her PediaSure Sidekicks (and those steroids probably didn't hurt either!) Now we see Bad Mom, who looks rather distressed and asks whether little Tyler (love these suburban, middle class names!) looks a little slow. Well, no shit Sherlock! Poor Tyler has turned into a container of french fries! Hard to run like that! Bad Mom fesses up to feeding Tyler FAST FOOD before the game (gasp of horror!) Good Mom says, (looking very pleased with herself) "Well, kids are what they eat." Here's where I think Bad Mom should punch Good Mom in the face and say, "Eat my fist, you sanctimonious bitch!" but alas, that doesn't happen. We get blah, blah, blah about PediaSure's vitamins and protein.

What kind of moron thought that this commercial would help sell their product? Furthermore, what kind of person would buy this product after the company so blatantly insults women and their childrearing skills? I'm so freakin' sick of women being portrayed as either catty, uppity know-it-alls or dumbass, abusiveness whores. The truth is that most of us are doing the best we can, and we all have our good days and our bad days. We all know our kids should be eating healthy, nutritional meals. We also know that sometimes a trip through the drive-through is the best we can do on an overscheduled day. Give us a friggin' break!

And that donut goalie at the end of the commercial just makes me hungry! If her mom had fed her a Cinnabon or even a jelly donut instead, she could've blocked that shot. No hole!