When a female journalist of any distinction has kids, she faces a wrenching decision: return to writing about whatever she spent the first decade or two of her career writing about, or start dribbling out the sort of solipsistic inanities about having kids and living in the suburbs that so reliably bring home the page views for most major media outlets.

Post Metro columnist Petula Dvorak has been hailed by this newspaper for trying to “have it all,” so to speak, alternating columns on things that matter with columns on playing with kids in the snow, instilling healthy eating habits in kids at a young age, obsessively volunteering at kids’ schools, wondering if kids should really be denied the pleasure of being served chocolate milk at schools just because obsessive parents are so hellbent instilling healthy heating habits in their kids, wearing high heels despite being someone with kids and the attendant back pain and then suffering from bunions as a result, and a column I did not read but feel fairly confident mentioned “kids” headlined, “Blind devotion to pets not best course for all.” As with most decent journalists who allow their work to degenerate into easily-mocked childrearing porn, I intended to mock her long long ago, but since she didn’t appear to be an immediate threat to the country, she fell off my “priority” list.

Until today! Here’s how she starts:

There are many ways to kill a childhood.

War or a personal tragedy can fast-forward a child into adulthood. And so can the crushing reality of childhood poverty. Three in 10 living in the nation’s capital are feeling the weight of adult problems every day.

Those kids rarely have a carefree moment. The pressure of their situation squeezes them constantly, putting the joy of a simple exhale beyond their reach.

But wait a minute. Isn’t that almost exactly what we hear from many of their more privileged peers?

They describe a life in which they aren’t given the time to just go out back and play. They are crushed by their obligations and crippled by stress.

That was the theme in the “Race to Nowhere” documentary, screened last week in Bethesda by Walt Whitman High School’s “stressbusters committee.”

Someone put this lady on the Editorial Board!