As their parents held them as infants, they may have wondered whether it was the baby or Windows 95 that had them more excited. (Class of 2017, #6)

Their parents may have watched The American Gladiators on TV the day they were born. (Class of 2012, #42)

Their parents may have dropped them in shock when they heard George Bush announce “tax revenue increases.” (Class of 2012, #8)

Their nervous new parents heard C. Everett Koop proclaim nicotine as addictive as heroin. (Class of 2009, #73)

Parents may have been reading The Bourne Supremacy or It as they rocked them in their cradles. (Class of 2008, #9)

Trivial Pursuit may have been played by their parents the night before they were born. (Class of 2006, #40)

The Beloit Mindset List authors have developed a nice little trope here portraying parents as distracted by things that happened when their children were born. These take the generic form of “students’ parents were doing/thinking about X on the day the students were born or shortly thereafter.” Shouldn’t these parents have been better preoccupied with the birth of their child rather than news items, trivia and pop culture?

As my colleague Disgruntled Prof mentioned earlier, the BML authors “have a bleak view of parenthood.” The list above shows us just how bleak. The worst is the parents being so upset by rising taxes that they dropped their newborns. I wonder what other news items caused them to drop their children that year?

The laziest item on the above list is #42 from the Class of 2012 as it takes the form “Their parents may have watched [insert any TV show from 1994] on TV the day they were born. Why not The Commish, M.A.N.T.I.S., Unsolved Mysteries, The X-Files, The Cosby Mysteries, or even The Simpsons reruns?

I’ll save the BML authors some time and generate a few for their Class of 2018 list:

• Their parents may have considered leaving them on the doorstep of a Manhattan brownstone after seeing a similar storyline on Law & Order.
• Their parents may have accidentally locked them in family’s bomb shelter while being distracted stockpiling cans of peas and bottled water in preparation for the Y2K apocalypse.
•  Their parents may have dropped them into a bowl of french onion dip at a Super Bowl party when Rams linebacker Mike Jones tackled Tennessee wide receiver Kevin Dyson on the one yard line to prevent a potential game-tying touchdown.
• Their parents may have been arrested for child neglect after forgetting to feed them because they were playing Mario Party 2 for 18 hours straight on their Nintendo 64.

Feel free to leave your own items for the list in the comments section.