Earning Your PhD in Parenting

Parenting 101: Always wash baby with the dinner dishes. This will save time and expense.

Ever read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell?  It's a very interesting read.  In a nutshell, to become the best at anything in this world, you need to devote about 10,000 hours (preferably over 10 years or less) to that particular skill set: ice hockey, piano, neurosurgery, basket weaving, you name it. 
That got me thinking about being the best mom. Really, you can say all that sappy baloney about all you need is love, but the truth is, first-born babies get dropped more, have worse diaper rash, probably get punished plenty more for things they didn't really do, and so forth. Oh boy, here comes the armada of data about birth order. First borns are more successful in life, right? (Read Dr. Kevin Lehman's Birth Order books)  So adversity breeds character and all that. So maybe being the best Mom or Dad is totally bogus.
Still, for the sake of argument, if you wanted to quantify parenting into a Bachelor's, Master's and Doctorate's, you could break it down by hours of experience.  Right off the bat, you figure that makes Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar the parenting equivalents of what Bill Gates is to computers.
To be realistic, I think you would have to consider a parent's time with each age group of children separately. Caring for a newborn, toddler, preschooler, elementary kids and teens all require different skill sets.  For example, once a baby is mobile, you probably spend 10% of your time changing diapers, 10% feeding, 10% bathing, 30% prying the child from your pant leg, and 40% of your efforts on making sure the child does not kill his or herself by eating a choking hazard, falling down a flight of stairs, or sticking a fork in some outlet.  This is vastly different from say the preschooler time period, where you might spend 10% of your day dealing with potty and feeding issues, 30% of your day engaged in a discussion with your child as to exactly how a dry kidney bean got so far up his or her nostril, and will this in fact facilitate a trip to the ER, and why again did he or she feel it necessary to put a bean up their nostril, and why we will never put a bean up our nose again, and then the other 60% of the time is spent in the ER waiting room.
Well, taking Malcolm Gladwell's perspective on things, I have had four babies in six years, whom I have cared for and nursed mostly around the clock. All my babies walked at ten months, so let's say I have spent roughly 12 hours a day times four babies times 300 days = 14,400 hours. I have earned my Doctorate in babies.  (Insert pomp and circumstance music please).
Unfortunately for my first grader, as she is my only elementary age child, and our homeschool year just started in mid-September, my education level is pitiful- 1 child times 30 days times 6 hours of schooling & direct interaction per day (got to include chores and whatever else)  leads to only a sad 180 hours.  That's the equivalent of one semester of college I suppose.  Just 9,820 hours left to become the best mom to elementary school kids. Wait, in that many hours my oldest will be 11, perhaps almost 12, and nearly a teenager. Then I will have to start working on my next degree, and since teenagers are known to interact with parents as minimally as possible, the outlook is bleak.  3 minutes per day x 1 child means it will take me 547 years to get to the 10,000 hour mark in teenager-dom.
What does this mean? NOBODY is an expert at teenagers.  That's our get out of parenting jail free card! So I guess we better get things right before our kids turn 13.
How do your hours and 'degrees' rank up?