Everyone agrees, babies nowadays are hopeless little wusses. Weak-willed, unfit and always bursting into attention-seeking tears, they're miles away from the tough toddlers our forefathers admired in the London slums of the 19th century.

In recent years, many coddling parents provide their babies with designer clothing, cutting-edge technology pram toys and feature-length visual stimulant DVDs with Hollywood production values.

But YOU don't want YOUR baby getting away with that kind of soft treatment. That's why I created BabyCamp™. A 12-month intensive boot camp for your baby designed to toughen up the little wretch with a good salty dose of reality.

Overview

Base BabyCamp™ is situated beneath the grilling sun in the middle of the Texas desert. The camp itself is a 128-cot military-style training program for infants under the age of 3 months.

Your recently born baby will be subjected to the harshest forms of fitness tuition and character building known to man, to stand them in good stead for the grim toughness and general awfulness of life.

If your baby isn't ready for long, gruelling days of correctional therapy, manual work and discipline training, then frankly what the bloody hell are they doing here. That's the attitude we expect from both you and your mewling, helpless little baby.

How We Run It

BabyCamp™ operates on a chain-of-command structure. At the top is myself, the BabyCamp™ Commandant. I've served in the US Army in nine wars. That's where I realised human nature has gone too soft in the last hundred years, and the only way to solve the problem is to run babies through boot camps.

Beneath me is our core training team of Drill Sergeants. I hand-picked each Sergeant from the US Army based on his unimpeachable history as a hardliner. Babies nowadays are so unfocussed and poorly disciplined, there's nothing for it but to have enormous, frightening men bellowing insults into their small, pudgy faces from dawn to midnight. Supernanny my ruddy red arse.

At the bottom of the chain, of course, are the cadets, i.e. your babies. However, don't think BabyCamp™ doesn't provide opportunities for advancement. If your baby can hack it, they may be promoted above their fellows to the rank of Corporal. It takes a towering mountain of leadership skills and countless hours of unforgiving work to rise to this rank, which is why most Corporals are at least 5 months old.

Drills and Activities

A Duty Day at BabyCamp™ comprises 20 hours of training and 4 of sleep. Even during rest periods, babies who have proven lazy or recalcitrant may be subject to punishments. These include doing dozens of push-ups using their muscle-less, chubby little arms.

The day is made up of a number of drills and activities. Babies must move between activities in a military manner, wheeling their own prams around the compound in formation. The program includes, but is not limited to, the following:

Mud crawl
Your tiny infant will grow considerably during their 12 months at BabyCamp™. At some point, they'll probably learn to crawl. We hasten this process by poking your baby's soft buttocks with cattle prods to force them through a one-mile stretch of stinking mud under rope netting.

Weight training
We place increasingly heavy toys in your baby's hands over a period of many weeks. Eventually, we expect babies to support a giant Lego castle weighing 50 pounds. Those who can't are taunted for their physical weediness.

Head hardening
Babies are renowned for having pathetically soft heads. By placing your baby on a high-protein, high-calcium diet of raw rump steaks marinated in thickened cream, we hope to harden its otherwise pliable little skull. Some extremely infirm babies have been known to acquire high blood pressure from eating in this way. In such a case, we consider that baby to have failed its medical and we drum it out of the camp in disgrace.

Desensitisation
Parents always say about those bloody Baby Mozart DVDs, "It's AMAZING how they hold my child's attention!" Well I believe babies' rapidly-forming brains should absorb hours of violence and gore. To stop your baby growing up into an over-emotional sponge cloth, we put him or her through a desensitisation program. Every afternoon we show cadets a classic horror film such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the volume cranked up to max. We even clip their delicate eyelids open so they can't look away, like the guy in A Clockwork Orange. In fact we often show them A Clockwork Orange.

Long-term activity: Wilderness survival
We divide babies up into squads of five, and deposit them in a remote area of Texan forest for six weeks. They are supplied with a basic toolkit for hunting and some medical supplies. It's true that in the first few years of BabyCamp™'s operations, we found this particular activity greatly reduced the number of graduating cadets at the end of the program, on account of their having been devoured by wolves or somehow failing to feed themselves in a nourishing enough manner to ensure continued existence. Fortunately the kinds of parents who submit their babies to this program consider their offspring's failure to survive a just punishment for spineless lack of character. Still, some complaints were received – you can't face a tough life ahead if you're not actually alive – so generally nowadays we return to the forest after ten minutes or so to rescue the prone infants. After which we shout at them for being scum of the earth.

What are you waiting for? Toughen up your wussy baby! Contact BabyCamp™ today!

By authority of Andrew Hansen
BabyCamp™ Commandant.