This week on Babble: Melissa Rayworth's dispatch "The Sleepless Generation," about how today's parents are afraid of sleep-training (aka, Ferberizing, cry-it-outing) their children and how, as a result, a lot of kids aren't learning how to put themselves to sleep.

Her sidebar about why new parents are especially anxious about this time-honored method is kind of fascinating. Here are two of her five reasons why Gen-X parents are so reluctant to let their kids cry:

Nan Mooney wrote a piece for Babble this week about moving back home with her parents when she got pregnant. Only she's not a member of the Spears family. She's in her late thirties and a published author.

But she didn't have a partner or a child-friendly job, so she decided to give herself time to not have to worry about rent and her parents time with their new grandson.

The only problem: she started to feel like a teenager again, and not in the good way.

In a recent Babble article called "Where, Oh Where Is Superfudge?" Rachel Shukert compared today's children's books to the ones she grew up with. Gen-X books were about clever middle-class kids like Judy Blume's heroes. By contrast:

In the New Children's Literature it's the hapless middle-classes - the normal kids - who ruin the fun, through either graceless social-climbing or trenchantly decrying the excess and shallowness that make being wealthy so delicious, so desirable, so sympathetic.

She makes a pretty great case that kids' entertainment has become all about the rich and beautiful.

We just ran a story on Babble.com that tackles what for Generation X has become a taboo subject: discipline.

Kathryn J. Alexander's "The War on No: Is 'child-centered' parenting producing a generation of brats?" says that the emphasis in recent years on making children feel secure has had an unfortunate consequence: kids who have never heard the word "no," and so who are unprepared for the real, "no"-filled world.

She writes:

According to a very funny article by New York Times TV writer Virginia Heffernan, there is a warning on the new "Sesame Street: Old School" DVD that reads, "These early 'Sesame Street' episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child." Baffled, Heffernan writes:

At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. "What did they do to us?" asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar's depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn't exist.