Child Trader —
If you're tired of your kid, why not swap him or her for another?
Childtrader.com makes this possible. From the site:
Child Trader is now the nations 4th largest child exchange network and as such, has brought happiness to more than 1623 American households who otherwise had very few options in creating a more loving family and home life when realizing their child wasn’t the right fit for them.
Child Trader Child Exchange Network isn’t about not loving childing [sic]. Its about finding a family that can love them more.
Get started today with this exciting new way to love your children.
You can view the profiles of kids available for trade. For instance, Jacob (pictured) is described as, "Not a particularly impressive boy. He hasn’t much been into sports, but he does have a great smile and likes to sit around the house, so he is very quiet."
I'm willing to go out on a limb and declare this a hoax. I'm not even going to do any research into who the site is registered to, etc., because it's obviously a joke. In other words, you're stuck with your kids, even if you don't like them. It's not legal to swap them for another.
Links on the child trader site indicate it was created by the same person responsible for two other spoof sites:
medicaladoptions.com (adopt a kid who is a perfect match for an organ transplant you need), and
puppyprofits.com (make money from illegal dog fighting).
Childtrader.com does, at least, highlight that children aren't always a constant source of joy to their parents. It reminds me of
a study conducted in 1931 by Dr. Mandel Sherman of the Child Research Centre in Georgia. Sherman asked thirty-two parents to keep track in notebooks of all the ways their children annoyed them. He found that there were 2,124 ways in which children annoyed their parents. The most common source of annoyance was disobedience, but other annoyances included being too slow, too quick, and spending too much time primping.