Mothers have a wide variety of responsibilities. It's their job to carry their child in the womb, go through the extraordinary process of labor, feed the child, kiss its cuts and bruises, and represent the ideal of informed authority. It's also a mother's job to embarrass the hell out of the child with irreproachable good intentions. Our mothers wrap us in humiliating sweaters not because they want us to get mocked mercilessly on the playground, but because they want to make sure we're warm and the stresses of knowing that a semi-foreign entity grew ever larger and hungrier inside of them brought on the kind of mental disorder that makes those awful sweaters look good. By the same token, there's a kindly insanity behind the motherly drive to pair their children off with life mates. Sure, they do it because they want grandchildren but they also genuinely want their kids to be happy, to avoid being lonely and without help. For the first time in history, the Internet has a platform to automate our mothers' matchmaking tendencies. That platform is Date My Single Kid.

DMSK is the latest branch of a cluttered but not terrible site called Fab Over Fifty, a one-stop online magazine for women of a certain age. Well, at least stereotypical women of a certain age. DMSK gives FOF's readers a chance to advertise the assumed availability of their NMKWDTTATLLFAR (Non-Married Kid Who Doesn't Tell Them About Their Love Life For A Reason). All it takes is a quick registration period and a fairly straightforward profile creation to post your child's loneliness on the Internet where I'm sure nothing untoward will happen to them as a result. As far as I can tell no money changes hands in this entire process, which means two things. One, the intent behind DMSK is likely genuine and not just some way to con middle-aged women out of their disposable income, and two, that there will be next to no content filtration. It'll slowly but surely devolve into a craigslist-like collection of human misery because FOF won't have much incentive to spend time and resources on its maintenance. In the meantime, DMSK is going to be a font of hilarity.

Right off the bat (and I mean literally, the following is the very first Single Kid who popped up for me), the stereotypes abound. A New York woman posted her son's profile with the following message:

My handsome son is intelligent, caring, respectful and wonderful. Etan lives in Manhattan and is responsible, has a great job working in Finance and would like to move back home to LA with a Jewish girl sometime in the future. He loves sports, especially basketball and also loves spending time with his family and friends. His hobbies include barbequing, exercising and travel.

Yep. As if the incessant insistence of Jewish mothers all over America that their kids get a JDate account post haste wasn't enough, now they can log on to DMSK and basically cut out the middle man. I pray to the God who was bored enough to give my people such mothers that my own doesn't ever, ever find out about DMSK. Of course, the best stuff on the site is also the most creepy. The following is, by far, my favorite post:

Well she sings really good and she really wants to be a singer and she wants to be in a movie i really want to get her dreams come true !!! place help me !!!

This, oh readers, is an advertisement for a 14-year-old Bulgarian girl whose mother has accidentally listed her as a lesbian. I do not envy the slew of unpleasant emails this mother is going to get for listing her teenage daughter as eager to be in movies and totally into girl-on-girl action. That's chum in the water.

Amount of Time Likely to be Wasted: The profiles are pretty small but there are a lot of them, so figure an intermittent half hour over several coffee breaks.

Likelihood to Result in Arrest in Real Life: Moderate to high. It's the Internet, romance and family all thrown into a blender. It's either going to be an episode of Cops or a latter-day Greek tragedy.

MCDR: Resolve to avoid Internet dating for at least six months.

Internet Depth by Preposition: In. A classic case of something that is thoroughly Internet-y but has ambitions for the real world.