Hello I am going to apply for Adsense for my upcoming parenting site as soon as I put up some more content on the site. A lot of the articles I intend to write use parables to drive home certain points. For example, my first article 'Of Parenting and Piloting' demonstrates the similarities between being guiding kids and planes. I want to make sure the ads I get are geared toward my parenting theme, and not about airplanes! Will I have an option to do this? Otherwise, I will get lots of irrelevant ads, and Adsense may not make sense for my site. Thanks!
As far as I know, you can ban sites from showing ads on your site, but you can't choose what ads you want.
You can't control it directly. By controlling where you place the ad you have some level of control but it is still contextual and Google's algorithms determine the context Also, you can give hints to google so it knows what section of content should drive the ads. Look here from more details on section targeting: https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=23168&topic=371
If you wanted to target the term "parenting" You can change the title of your page to parenting, make sure any pictures in your page have their alt tags labelled "parenting" And add a header ( ex: <h1>Parenting</h1>). These will help target your google ads more.
I think as long as most of your keywords and titles are related to parenting as well as the content you shouldn't have a problem even if plane comes up a few times. When you first install the code give it a couple of days so it has time to properly index your site. Initially your ads may appear irrelevant, don't worry about it.