Say what you will about the state of the Los Angeles Times. At least it doesn’t hyper-document what new parenting trend is taking Mandeville Canyon by storm.

The New York Times insists the Next Big Thing for city residents (or at least those in the West 80s) is for parents to insist on bilingual babysitters, who speak anything but English to their doughy offspring. (Side note: I laughed out loud after overhearing one Westside dad at Starbucks a few days ago talking about the opposite dilemma. He was concerned that his son was spending so much time with the nanny and thus was acquiring a faint Guatemalan accent to certain English words.)

A Spanish speaker myself, I’m all for bilingualism/multiculturalism/United Colors of Benetton etc. Apparently that’s no longer enough, however. “Once you are trilingual,” one parent said in the story, “your brain can break down new languages that make it so much easier to learn your fourth, fifth and sixth languages.” Yes, how else can you expect your child to get into the Dalton School without fluency in Finnish? I also learned from the piece that there’s actually a book entitled “The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools” (Sandra Tsing Loh’s L.A. version of the guide is far more entertaining and probably just as effective).

True, parents here are often equally obsessed with getting their kids into the Center for Early Education or Harvard-Westlake. But how about we all take a step back and focus on other vital  issues of child socio-development as well—starting with kindness and compassion, perhaps? Let them practice their subjunctive French verb conjuction while planting a tree or raising money for Pakistani flood victims.  —Krista Jennings