Do Parents Really Brag Too Much? Do you brag about your children? Holiday card season is over, but evidently the bragging continues. I have only one old friend who even skirts bragging in her annual letter, and as the updates always involve things like roping cattle and showing pigs, I think she can announce those victories as much as she wants. But bragging, writes my colleague Bruce Feiler, is the one parenting sin we're all, for the moment, united in condemning. He cites a half-dozen articles bemoaning the practice, before asking if really, couldn't it be O.K. if we bragged just a little? "Parenting is tough enough," he wrote, "can't you take a victory lap every now and then?" Maybe you can, if you follow Bruce's Rules for Better Bragging (not the real title of the article, but I like it): brag to your mother; brag to your friends only until their eyes glaze over; brag about the child, not your parenting skills; and above all, avoid the well-known Twitter failure, the #humblebrag (like this one, pulled by Babble: "Whenever I take my child anywhere, strangers always stop us to admire her. I can't even go grocery shopping in peace!"). But if the bragging around you has made your Facebook page feel like a festival of "Shiny Happy People" like that of Babble's Erin Loechner, who wrote "How Quitting Facebook Has Radically Altered My Self-Esteem," then maybe you need to play with your feed until you are seeing the posts of some different friends. Not to brag, but a scroll down my Facebook feed might reveal a vacation picture or two, but it is as likely to be a picture of a post-meltdown, ice-cream-covered toddler as it is a silhouette in the sunset. My Facebook friends get the flu and need us to send helpful, distracting Web sites with videos of puppies. (That's from the North Shore Animal League. Don't click unless you want a puppy.) They lament horrible book covers for female writers (even those no longer with us, like this Daisy Duke take on "Anne of Green Gables"). They advocate for teenagers in need of adoptive families. One describes the dogs who chase him on his UPS deliveries. Several others are dealing with serious illness and are not always in a perky, chipper way. Their water pipes break. They look for clothes and donations for a family whose house burned down last week. They mourn Ed Koch. Their cars break down (not as in "dang! need new windshield wiper fluid in the Hummer from all the bugs here in Palm Beach" either). And one, for years, posted an image of every horribly parked car in our little town that she saw. I'm not convinced that we're a nation of braggarts. I'd even say I'd like to see more of my friends take that victory lap Bruce described once in a while. Mine are so advanced, they do all the bragging for themselves.