Like synchronized dancers, Time and Newsweek weigh in this week on parenting, each with a cover story designed to feed the angst of every mother and father — and sell a few extra copies in the process. Newsweek fronts “The Myth of the Perfect Mother,” and Time offers a package, “What Teachers Hate about Parents.” (Subscription required.)

Newsweek’s Judith Warner, mom and author, writes of “women who had surrendered their better selves — and their sanity — to motherhood. Women who pulled all-nighters hand-painting paper plates for a class party. Who obsessed over the most minute details of playground politics. Who — like myself — appeared to be sleep-walking through life in a state of quiet panic.”

All around me, the expert advice on baby care, whether it came from the What to Expect books or the legions of “specialists” hawking videos, computer software, smart baby toys or audiotapes to advance brain development, was unanimous: Read! Talk! Sing! And so I talked and I read and I sang and made up stories and did funny voices and narrated car rides … until one day, when my daughter was about four, I realized that I had turned into a human television set, so filled with 24-hour children’s programming that I had no thoughts left of my own.

And just in case you think Mommy Madness (or Daddy Madness) ends when little Chloe or Zeke heads off to school, forget it. That’s when the going gets really intense, writes Time’s Nancy Gibbs (subscription required).

Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top.

Gibbs provides a “taxonomy of parents behaving badly,” that includes “the hovering parent, the aggressive advocate, the public defenders and the culture warriors.”

But for obsessing over loved ones, New York dog owners are in a league of their own. That’s the only explanation for the new magazine The New York Dog, now in its third issue. While the magazine (subscription required) is not available outside of the city, the Washington Post’s Peter Carlson today provides the rest of us with a glimpse of what we’re missing. Writes Carlson:

After all, you’ve got to love a mag that publishes stories titled “Dogs on Atkins!” and “You’ve got pee-mail!” and “Are mutts the new black?”

—Susan Q. Stranahan

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Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.