Breaking Down a Real Lemon

Imagine the following scenario:

A father and his five-year-old daughter head out to a basketball court at the local playground. He carries his regulation ball on his hip. She rolls her kid-sized version in front of her, occasionally kicking it to keep it moving. When they reach the court, the father shoots a couple of shots while his daughter proceeds to dribble her ball around the court with two hands. After a few minutes, the daughter says,

“Look Daddy.”

When he looks her direction she begins awkwardly batting at her ball with just her right hand, managing to dribble it four times before it gets away from her. After corralling the ball, she looks up proudly at her father. He smiles quietly back at her. Then he leans forward slightly and dribbles his own ball effortlessly back and forth between his legs.

“Neat,” says the little girl.

A few minutes later, the little girl runs over to the basket and stands directly underneath the net. Imitating the players she has seen playing on television, she starts jumping up towards the hoop, stretching her arms high above her head.

“Look Daddy, I can almost touch it,” she says.

Her father with the same bemused smile as before walks over to where she is standing. Then taking a large hop from just behind her gives the net a hard swat.

“Whoa,” says the little girl with a touch of awe.

Another few minutes pass, and now the little girl is standing at the free throw line. She bounces the ball a couple of times and takes a long look at the rim. Then with a hand on each side of the ball, she lowers it slowly down between her knees and sweeps it up into the air. Somehow the ball makes it up on top of the rim where it bounces twice and slips down through the mesh of the net.

“Yes!” shouts the little girl. “Look Daddy, I made one.”

Once again the father flashes that smile. Then he walks over to the top of the key, bounces his ball a couple of times, and nonchalantly puts up a jumpshot. The ball travels a perfect arc and drops down through the net without touching the rim.

“Wow, I wish I could do that,” says the little girl

*****

Now, what do you think about this father? He seems like a bit of an asshole, doesn’t he? I mean, every time his daughter shows him something, he proceeds to do the same thing only higher, farther, or with more complexity. While he doesn’t go about this in a taunting way, these actions serve no real purpose but to diminish the achievements that his daughter has so proudly shown him. It’s not very supportive nor a particularly good example for how to build healthy relationships.

So, why is it that so many people love a children's book in which a parent is celebrated for acting in exactly the same way as our imaginary father on the basketball court?

The book I’m referring to is Sam McBratney’s Guess How Much I Love You. In it, two rabbits – an adult and a child – engage in a game of one-upmanship in their quest to say how much they love each other. The game begins with the little rabbit telling the big rabbit “Guess how much I love you.” The little rabbit then stretches his arms out wide and says “This much.” The big rabbit smiles, and, doing the same thing with his arms, says “Well I love you this much.” They then proceed in back and forth fashion through raised arms, extended legs, jumps, etc. until the little rabbit begins to fall asleep. At this point, the little rabbit presents his final claim: “I love you all the way up to the moon.” The big rabbit ultimately concludes the book by replying: “I love you all the way up to the moon – and back.”

According to the publisher this book has sold over 15 million copies and is published in 37 languages. The children's book review publication Booklist gave it a starred review and said about the book, “There’s not a wrong note in this tender tale.” Internet reviewers on Google love it (see these reviews)
Am I the only one who thinks the adult rabbit, like the father in the scenario I laid out at the beginning of this post, is a bit of an asshole? Aren’t the adult rabbit’s constant moves to up the ante on the little rabbit evidence of an ego that’s out of whack? Even when channeled through professions of love, this kind of behavior doesn’t feel particularly tender to me. In fact, it seems to me that the adult rabbit’s answer to the question of how much love it has for the little rabbit should be, “Not enough to restrain myself from besting your every move.”

Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens in children's books all the time. (The young ape who throws a temper tantrum and gets what he wants in Jez Alborough’s Yes and the often blatantly antagonizing antics of Ian Falconer’s Olivia the pig are just two more examples.) The supposition of cuteness or silliness comes to excuse behavior in characters that we would find annoying, irritating, or downright intolerable in our own children or others with whom we live.

As a parent, I work very hard to model the behaviors that I want my children to emulate. This makes it incredibly frustrating to start reading a book with them and find that the very actions I am teaching them not to do are being celebrated as funny, amusing, or loving in the words and pictures of the book in my hand. It makes me wonder how many of these authors have children of their own.

*****

This is the point in the post where the polemicist, having defined his target and explained the reasons for his outrage, makes some call to action – a boycott, a letter campaign, a new series of children's books. Unfortunately, I can’t do that. You see, I still have a copy of Guess How Much I Love You on our bookshelf. My mother gave it to me while I was in college and as such I have some sentimental attachment to it. In addition, I have come to find some value in having it around. As I sit and read through it with Polly and Pip, I get to engage them in a discussion about a complex social interaction and the types of reactions it generates. I get the opportunity to talk about the adult rabbit’s constant one-upmanship and why someone might find this annoying or disagreeable. I get to present Pip and Polly with alternative choices that both the adult rabbit and the little rabbit could have made to get the same point across. I get to add some texture and depth to the examples I try to present them every day.

As such, while I would never be inclined to give “Guess How Much I Love You” as a gift to anyone and I frequently wonder what kids learn as they read it, I am glad to have it on my bookshelf. Sometimes it takes seeing some of the wrong ways of doing something to make the right ways make sense.


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Interested in stories about our family or just some thoughts about being a parent in this day and age?

Take a look at my blog at http://www.postindustrialparenthood.blogspot.com/.

There's a new post every Thursday.

Revolutionary questions

About two weeks ago, Pip dug out from the far end of our bookshelf two children’s biographies that had belonged to me as a kid and had somehow managed to survive all my subsequent moves and book purges. One recounted the life of Thomas Jefferson. The other was about Benjamin Franklin. Re-reading these books for the first time in about two decades, while popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were toppling dictatorial governments in the background, made me very aware of the almost magical ease with which the transition from revolution to stable democratic governance occurs in America’s founding mythology. This awareness made me question whether this mythology will ultimately do my children a disservice. Will it lead them to expect at an intuitive level that any dramatic break from established patterns will resolve itself neatly and in a way that is universally good? And, as such, will this expectation lead them towards a naive embrace of revolutionary change at the expense of careful and programmatic efforts (such as happened with the Bush-Rumsfeld strategy for creating a democratic Iraq)? My own experience makes me think that this is not a totally ridiculous question.

*****

First let me explain why I use the term ‘mythology’ instead of ‘history.’ Usually the term ‘mythology’ is used to describe the stories of gods and heroes told in times or places where the explanations of science do not predominate. What is sometimes lost in the retelling of the tales of Hercules or Prometheus or Beowulf is how these stories functioned in their time to explain how the world came to be what it is and why certain practices or institutions or values were important. Myths are mechanisms for transmitting cultural knowledge across generations. The ‘truth’ of a myth lies not in the factuality of the characters and places and dates it contains but in the themes and relations that play out within it.

When mythology is understood in this way, the only difference between it and history is the historian’s claim that the events described “really happened.” At her core the historian is a story-teller. She takes details gleaned from various sources and spins a narrative thread of power, destiny, hubris or luck that pulls those details together and makes them comprehensible. It is this thread that is the critical element of the knowledge or meaning we seek to gain from history. While I am not suggesting that the facts are irrelevant, a focus on the factuality of a historian’s account can often distract our attention from the work that the account’s narrative thread performs. Mythology brings no such distraction.

The power of this narrative thread is even more significant when it comes to presenting history to children. We talk to kids about basic facts and important people in order to give them a foundational understanding of a historical event. Not only do these necessary simplifications demand a strong narrative to make them understandable (and interesting), they also blur facts that may complicate or confuse that narrative. As a result of this blurring, historical figures in children’s books are usually not real people. Instead they represent clearly defined values or ideas that support the direction of the narrative. In many respects, this makes stories told about, for example, the Founding Fathers very close in form to ones told about the gods and goddesses of Mt. Olympus.

*****
I spent some time as a child idolizing America’s Founding Fathers. This was in part because I have a genealogical relationship with one and in part because I lived in southern Virginia where, if you want to, you can feel a strong residue of the American Revolution and the early years of the United States all over the place. I certainly did. I learned early on that the state motto, “Sic Semper Tyrannis” or “thus always to tyrants,” was adopted as a direct challenge to King George III and the British Parliament. I was very proud that Virginians wrote the Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson), commanded the Continental Army (George Washington), and crafted the Bill of Rights (James Madison). I enjoyed visiting places like Monticello (the home of Thomas Jefferson), Mt. Vernon (the home of George Washington), Red Hill (the home of Patrick Henry), Colonial Williamsburg, and Yorktown because they gave me the sense that the place where I lived was critically important to the very beginnings of my country’s existence.

All this exposure to America’s founding mythology made me particularly open to consuming any story that included the possibility of a democratic revolution. I have eagerly watched the fall of the Berlin Wall, the events of Tiananmen Square, Yeltsin’s rise in Russia, protests in Iran, independence in East Timor, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the democracy protests in Georgia and Ukraine, and the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt with an almost naïve sense that history is being made in the most positive of ways. While I know my history well enough to understand that the reality of these situations is complex and difficult, the mythological narrative of the American Revolution that I learned as a child still inclines me to believe in the idea that these events will ultimately enable people to gain their “inalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

*****

The power of this mythology is also such that the critical documents of America’s founding – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights – sit in my mind in much the same way as they do in the National Archives: side by side. These are some of the narrative high points of America’s founding myth and their cohesion within this myth make it difficult to remember that the Declaration and the Constitution were separated by 11 years and the Bill of Rights was added another four years after that. I often forget that the Constitution was at least a second try at forming a functional government and, even after its ratification, was by no means a guaranteed success. These complications don’t fit into the narrative thread that I originally learned.

But what if they did? What would it mean if the National Archives displayed the Articles of Confederation in between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? What would it mean if we added a person like Daniel Shays – the Revolutionary War veteran and debt-ridden farmer from Massachusetts whose rebellion laid bare the impotence of the national government under the Articles of Confederation – to the pantheon of the Founding Fathers? What would it mean if those books Pip pulled from the shelf mentioned the uncertainty, turmoil, and failure of the United States in the first years after the revolution? Would he react differently than I do to stories of revolution? Would he sense a little less magical destiny and a little more struggle and trial in the core of his American identity?

I don’t know, but I want to give something like this a try. The practices that this kind of struggle demands – experimentation, negotiation, perseverance – represent qualities I want my children to embrace in both their politics and their personal lives. It will serve them much better than the aura of predestined greatness that pervades the current version of America’s founding mythology.

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Interested in stories about our family or just some thoughts about being a parent in this day and age?

Take a look at my blog at http://www.postindustrialparenthood.blogspot.com/

There's a new post every Thursday.

Can Same-Sex Marriage Save Straight Marriage from Itself?

Last week, I published an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle about the Proposition 8 ruling. It's nice and short and topical, and I hope you'll go check it out and send it to friends and family who might benefit from reading it. However, that op-ed is derived from a much longer essay, which will appear in the anthology Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood, forthcoming in September 2011. I'm publishing that longer piece here, slightly updated, just because I can:

* * *

I was never a great friend of marriage. When I was growing up in a series of east coast and Midwestern suburbs in the 1970s and 80s, the institution of marriage seemed more like a gory roadside smash-up than the loving union of one man and one woman. And as I spent junior high school witnessing the disintegration of my family and of many of the families around me, I was also discovering that boys were boys and girls were girls, and boys who acted like girls were faggots.

You see, when I was a kid in Saginaw, Michigan, I made a horrible mistake: I chose to play the flute in my school band. I was the only boy to do so. And at first, I was just awful. There were twelve chairs, and for the first half of the first year, I was dead last. The girl flutists ignored me. The all-male drum section made it their habit to inflict on me the full range of junior-high-school torments, from tripping me up in gym class to writing “faggot” on my locker in magic marker to straight-up beat-downs. But I persisted in blowing the flute, that silvery phallus.

Do I sound like a rebel? A gender nonconformist? Don’t be too impressed. I just never got the memo. Eric Roeder would call my friend Jim Petee a “fag” and Jim would say, “I’m not a fag! Your’re a fag!” Then Eric would give Jim a push into the locker, and that would be that. But when Eric Roeder called me a fag, I would just shrug. What’s a fag? I wondered. I had no idea. I was just a kid, and so was Eric Roeder; I don’t think he really knew what a fag was either. I still got pushed into the locker, but, unlike Jim, I just didn’t see the problem with the whole “fag” thing.

And yet an undeniable menace lurked inside the word. Being called a “fag” meant that you were weak, an easy target….in short, a girl. But the word’s true menace, I now realize, arose from its inchoate intimation of sex. Real sex. Fucking. It was more than an insult. “Jerk” was an insult. “Fag” was a cage that boys built around other boys, one that was intended to stand between the alleged fag and true manhood. A boy in the cage would never be permitted to experience the glories of fucking. Instead, he would be fucked. Like a girl. My mistake, my fatal blind spot, was that I didn’t see the cage being built. I just wanted to play the flute; I liked the way it sounded and looked. In my 6th-grade naiveté, I didn’t realize that it was a girl’s instrument and that boys of my age should not play with girly things.

When I finally started to see the bars that divided me from everyone else, I fought back in two ways. First, I started to furiously practice the flute, two to three hours a day. And so one fateful Monday I zoomed past all the girls from last chair to first, and I held that first chair for the rest of my time in the band.

At roughly the same time, I challenged one of the asshole drummers to a fight. I went down in a hail of fists, of course. The next time someone called me a faggot, I threw myself into him as well, arms flailing. I lost that fight, too. In fact, I lost every single battle I was in that year—perhaps twelve in all. Of course I lost: I was a skinny kid who weighed in at a lower class than my opponents.

But ultimately, I won the war. Eric Roeder called me over to his kettledrum one day, like Fonzie calling Potsie and Richie into the bathroom that served as his “office.”

“Jeremy,” he said. “Why are you always trying to fight me?”

“Because you hassle me all the time,” I said, perhaps a bit sullenly.

“So you’re just trying to stand up for yourself?” he said, surprised, as though the idea had just come to him that I might try to do this.

“Yeah,” I said, dumbfounded. “Of course.”

“OK,” he said. “Let’s not fight.” There was no handshake and we certainly never became friends; this is not an after-school special. But after that terse little interaction, the bullying evaporated.

It wasn’t just the boys who seemed to gain new respect for me; my fellow flutists finally noticed me, and started talking to me. Michelle Gase, on whom I had a huge crush, even invited me over to her house. I didn’t know what to do once I got there, but the journey of one thousand miles begins, my friends, with a single step.

Perhaps it goes without saying that I didn’t stop being a geek: the following year, when my friend Colleen communicated my romantic interest directly to Michelle, Michelle reportedly laughed out loud, an event from which I am still recovering. But I had found a comfortable niche in the junior-high-school (and later high-school) social ecology, and it was a niche in which I could thrive on my own terms.

Do you see the lesson I learned, the one that every American boy must learn? The formula is simple: a) dominate the girls and b) fight other boys. It’s never good for a boy to do a girly thing, but, if you must, you had better be better at it than any girl, and you had better be willing to punch any boy in the face who says that doing it makes you a girl. This formula worked for me, I am sorry to report. It’s worked for millions of American men of my generation. And even as we’re were being trained to fear the queer, we were at the same time watching heterosexuality, in the form of our parents’ marriages, disintegrate before our very eyes.

My own parents are now divorced, of course, as are virtually all the parents I knew growing up, as are the parents of the mother of my child. Thus it should not surprise anyone that marriage did not seem very desirable to us. Olli and I got together in 1994, lived and traveled together for years, moved to the Mission in San Francisco together in 2000. But in all those years, we never married. We didn’t consciously reject marriage, mind you. It just didn’t mean very much to us.

When Mayor Gavin Newsom—for whom I did not vote—legalized same-sex marriage in San Francisco in February 2004, I was entirely a bystander. Yet I was still moved by the spectacle of beaming gay and lesbian couples lining up in front of the San Francisco City Hall, sometimes hemmed in on all sides by unpleasant people with ugly signs. Walking by City Hall one afternoon on my way to the library, I saw two slim women dressed in white, sitting on the grass, their hands folded on each other’s laps, their foreheads touching. I assumed that they had just been married. For the rest of the day I felt strangely peaceful, perhaps even slightly stoned.

My son was born—after a 60-minute labor!—in July 2004. And in the months that followed, my resistance to marriage started to melt away. Yes, both Olli and I thought marriage would be convenient, now that we were parents. But in my eyes at least, it was also true that San Francisco’s season of same-sex weddings had raised the value of marriage. I remembered that couple in white, sitting in the grass; perhaps I hoped marriage would give me the peace it seemed to give them.

Of course, not everything changed; we still stubbornly rejected the trappings of a traditional wedding. We slunk off to City Hall, our baby son in arms, and “eloped,” to use a quaint old word. The judge was a trim, diminutive, mannish woman of late middle years, and her eyes held a reassuring twinkle that said to me, Hey, I’m not taking this too seriously either. I didn’t tell my parents; we hardly told anyone. A year later my mother visited and accidentally saw our marriage certificate hanging in the back of my closet. “What?!” she cried. “You got married and didn’t tell me?”

She was furious; I just shrugged. It was as though I was thirteen and she had discovered a Playboy magazine hidden in my closet.

Marriage didn’t much change anything in my life or the way I felt about myself and the world, but parenthood certainly had. By the fall of 2005, our old life had been wrapped up in a dirty diaper and tossed in the trash. There were no more evenings in the Make-Out Room shooting pool and drinking margaritas and dancing and then crawling over to the Latin American for shots and then perhaps to the Elbo Room to see bands with names like Double-Jointed Donkey Dick or Death Valley High.

Instead, I worked part-time and took care of my infant son Liko for most of the day while Olli was at her job. In sunny, desperate playgrounds I taught Liko to walk, his little fists clenched around my aching forefingers. Pushing a swing, I’d eye the mothers and they eyed me, or so I imagined. I was typically the only father. The moms seldom spoke to me and I was frankly afraid of them. I feared—it sounds ridiculous to admit—that if I initiated a real conversation, they’d think I was hitting on them. Deep in my bones, I felt that I didn’t belong on weekday playgrounds. Not just because I was a dad; I didn’t even feel like a parent, not then. I felt like a spy, an interloper, an anthropologist studying a lost tribe of stroller-pushing urban nomads.

By this time we lived on the border between Noe Valley and the Castro, a mad scientist’s laboratory of new family forms, whose representative on the city’s Board of Supervisors is a gay man who co-parents a biological child with his lesbian best friend. But at first I didn’t realize how many of the other parents on the playground were gay and lesbian; despite the fact I had had many queer friends, at this time I still assumed breeding was what straight people did. And I remember the first time I met Jackie and her smiley toddler Ezra; beckoned by her friendly smile, she was one of the first stay-at-home moms I decided to talk to. Later I saw Ezra with a woman named Jessica, and I thought she was his babysitter.

Wrong. Jessica was one mommy and Jackie was the other. Fortunately, I figured this out before my new friends discovered my ignorance. In time, I met many other families, both gay and straight, and we formed a new kind of child-centered community, one I never expected to have. After we became close, Jessica (the non-biological mother) told me that it drove her crazy when people assumed she was the nanny, which put her constantly in the position of having to explain her relationship to her own family. Embarrassed, I didn’t tell her about my early assumption, and I still haven’t told her.

When the California Supreme Court approved same-sex marriage on May 15, 2008, Jackie and Jessica just knew, as soon as they heard, that they would marry. At the wedding, Jackie wore black and she smiled in a way that seemed simultaneously bright and distant; Jessica, who had been stressed for weeks about the wedding, held her face very still, as if afraid that the wrong emotion would slip out. The ceremony was conducted by their close friends Laura and Peter, who is Ezra’s biological father and someone Jackie and Jessica consider to be a member of the family.

“I now pronounce you happily married,” said Peter, and the two women kissed.

For Jessica’s parents, their daughter’s marriage was an intensely meaningful event. “It was wonderful to see Jessica so dressed up and looking so beautiful,” said Jessica’s mother Elizabeth. “I was just so happy for them.” Every member of Jackie and Jessica’s circle of friends and family that I interviewed felt the same way: It made us happy to see our friends marry. That’s a commonplace feeling at weddings, but, of course, not everyone in America has the right to a legal marriage. Their wedding was extraordinary because it came to us all as a gift we never expected.

Not everyone accepted the gift. I know of several same-sex weddings depopulated by the neutron bomb of homophobia. When Angela and Mary (not their real names) wed, Angela's mother Shirley refused to attend on vaguely religious grounds. I’ve met Shirley many times: She’s a frail, sweet, slightly foggy old woman who seems to have had a hard life. The year before the wedding, she had to stay with Angela and Mary for months while recovering from a serious illness, a period that was a financial and emotional burden for Mary, who is the breadwinner of the family. As the months wore on, Shirley witnessed the daily accumulation of caring acts that forms a family; but despite depending on this family structure in her return to health, Shirley never accepted the relationship.

Shortly after the wedding, Angela, Mary, and their girl Suzie visited Shirley in the small town where Angela grew up.

“So, do we look like a married couple?” joked Mary when they arrived.

“No,” replied Shirley, her voice flat. “One of you would have to be a man.”

On November 4, 2008, Californians voted to amend the state’s constitution to define marriage as between “one man and one woman,” thus throwing the marriages of my friends into a legal limbo. I haven’t asked, but I assume that Shirley was one of the millions of Californians who voted to ban same-sex marriage. Most people of her generation, it later turned out, voted for Proposition 8; most people my age (and even more younger than me) voted against it. Most people in rural areas voted for it; most people in cities voted against.

“I was very disappointed when Prop 8 passed,” Jessica’s mother told me. “Jessica was depending on being able to live a legal married life with Jackie, and Prop 8 was so upsetting. But somehow I don’t think it’s over yet. I think it’s just going to take awhile for this culture to get used to the idea.”

She's right. Nationally, Prop 8 turned out to be only a setback: Within a year, Iowa, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire—largely rural and suburban states—all legalized same-sex marriage, joining Connecticut and Massachusetts. At this writing, Prop 8 is getting struck down or propped up every few months, as legal teams exchange blows in the courts.

But at this stage in the game, there is little doubt (at least in my mind) that marriage will ultimately open up to include people of the same sex, and that this evolutionary advance will affect every area of family law and every nook and cranny of community life. If gay men can now get married in Iowa, nothing can stop it. It’s like a strapping, corn-fed freight train, roaring wholesomely past the amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties on its way to the coastal American Sodoms. It’s Iowa that is delivering same-sex marriage to San Francisco and New York, not the other way around. The old American image of the family is being carried away; a new one is coming over the horizon, but we’re not there yet. The journey is changing us—all of us, Red and Blue alike—in ways that no one could anticipate.

As Exhibit A, I submit myself: Watching the battle for same-sex marriage unfold in San Francisco taught me, after a lifetime of ambivalence, that marriage might actually be worth defending. It might strike some folks as ironic that I needed a lesbian wedding to teach me that, but that’s the nature of institutional renewal: Just as the black voting rights struggles of the 1960s taught previously apathetic young whites the worth of voting and civic participation, so this new civil rights struggle has something to teach us all about the value of commitment and family.

Or at least, it had something to teach me. Look, I know lots of people reading this essay think marriage is oppressive patriarchal bullshit; others might think marriage is heterosexually sacred. I’m not actually trying to convince you of anything. Instead I’m trying to describe why the struggle for same-sex marriage has been meaningful for me and for so many people in my community. The changes go much deeper than marriage: Remember how I had assumed that Jessica was the nanny? Despite being as gay-friendly as straight people come, I still had a picture in my mind of a mother and a father. That picture is gone, friends, and it’s not coming back. This isn’t just happening in San Francisco. It’s happening all over the country.

I agree with conservatives who say that childhood is what is at stake in the same-sex marriage debates. But while they see gay and lesbian couples as the threat, to me the threat comes from bullies like Eric Roeder. My greatest fear as a father is that my son will face the same ferocious teasing and fighting I did. Worse than that, I fear that he will embrace the same solutions I did, and that he will stand back and watch other boys be teased and beaten up. That’s not the world I want him to live in; that’s not the person I want him to be. From that perspective, this change that we are all going through feels like a race against time. I want the world to be entirely different by the time my son turns twelve, though I know that’s impossible. I want him to be freer than I was; I want us all to be free.

Have Families Become More Resilient?

I am spending today at Design 4 Resilience at the Berkeley Hub (watch the livestreaming here)—and so I’m thinking a lot about resilience. Specifically, family resilience.

My book The Daddy Shift is about how families have evolved so that both moms and dads have capacities for both breadwinning and caregiving. This is a radical departure in the history of the American family, where men traditionally specialized in providing and women specialized in care.

As a result, men had lots of economic and political power and women had relatively little; women developed powerful communication and emotional skills while men’s development in these areas was stunted. (Naturally, the full picture is more complicated than that…but you’ll just have to read the book if you want to understand more.) If a father died or abandoned his family, his wife and children would fall into poverty; if the mother disappeared, the children would quite often be separated from the father, to be cared for by female relatives or, in certain cases, an orphanage.

We’ve tended to view the rise of women’s public power through a profeminist lens—in other words, through the lens of fairness and equality for women. This is the lens I use in The Daddy Shift. However, in the course of my research I discovered that there is another lens through which we can view the recent evolution of the American family, that of resilience.

When reporters ask me why stay-at-home dads have emerged over the past two decades, I always reply that a) women went to work; and b) lifetime employment went away. The former trend reinforced the latter. Employers feel no loyalty to employees; in fact, disloyalty is rewarded—when companies lay off employees or managers fire people deemed nonperformers (e.g., a new mother putting in too much “facetime” at home and not enough at work), their value in the marketplace can rise. My grandfather had the same job for forty years, driving a crane at a quarry; over the past eighteen years of my working life, I have had more jobs than I can count, including two stints as a freelancer. We Americans now live in a culture of mobile, mercenary instability, and many of us are proud of it.

As a result of this growing mobility and instability, sole male breadwinners lost a tremendous amount of economic ground; today, for the first time in Western history, women as a group are more educated than men and women are on the verge of passing men in the workforce. Men lost the ability to reliably support families. And families, I discovered, have responded by diversifying. Men have developed emotional and interpersonal skills; women have gone to school and to work.

You can see this illustrated in Corbyn Hightower’s Shareable.net diary of her family’s efforts to survive the Great Recession. Corbyn and her husband started off as a dual-income family; her husband became a stay-at-home dad after their third child was born. Then Corbyn was laid off and her husband went back to work, albeit at a low-paying job.

This is a family facing a terrible economic crisis, but Corbyn’s diary simultaneously reveals a tremendous amount of stubborn resilience. Theirs is a family that embodies many of the characteristics of resilient systems, from redundancy to flexibility to transformability. You can also see this dynamic at work in the two-decade story of Anita and Brad, which Shareable.net published on Thursday. These resilient characteristics are not confined to Blue State families; as I document in The Daddy Shift, religious, conservative families are also adopting flexible gender roles.

So far, I’ve talked about family resilience in the context of the lone American families; mothers and fathers in isolation, modifying their nuclear family structure in order to cope with economic shock. But some families are also responding by trying to embed their nuclear unit in larger communities—extended family or urban tribes. In fact, Corbyn’s family moved from Texas to California to be close to the co-mother of her first child (Corbyn is bisexual)—in effect, the family now has three parents, which some research suggests is the ideal number of caregivers.

Like the growth of family egalitarianism and diversity, this is a phenomenon that crosses political boundaries—cultural conservatives have built church, family, and neighborhood networks to nurture their idea of the traditional family while Blue State progressives have engaged in secular versions of the same project.

In this regard, families, both Red and Blue, are trying to build their resilience to trying to rebuild much older family forms that are more networked, more modular, more redundant, more diversified, more shareable.

But the history behind these efforts is extremely problematic. The “traditional family” imagined by conservatives is oppressively patriarchal—it is other things as well, but in general the traditional family movement is focused on putting heterosexual men at the top of a familial, social, and economic pyramid.

More politically left-wing and communal efforts to reshape the family have been equally screwed up. As I write in The Daddy Shift:

Take the kibbutz movement. Early Jewish settlers in Palestine made children a communal responsibility. Babies slept outside the home, side by side in dormitories.

“This experiment failed the test of reality,” writes Israeli sleep researcher Avi Sadeh. In a study that compared a kibbutz that still kept this “children’s house” sleeping arrangement with other kibbutzim in which babies and young children slept in their parents’ homes, researchers found that “children who slept in their parents’ houses tended to have longer continuous periods of sleep than those in communal sleeping situations on the kibbutz.” They also found “that the kibbutz children’s sleep improved greatly after moving to family sleeping arrangement.” As a result of this dynamic, kibbutz children’s houses declined and have almost disappeared.

Despite such failures, explicitly utopian experiments persist today: in a 2006 New York magazine article, Annalee Newitz profiles a one-hundred-person commune on Staten Island....

“Our cars are a perfect example of socialism,” says a founder. “Nobody owns them, so we treat them like shit.” If children are defined as a collective responsibility, will they be treated like cars on a commune?

Movements to reshape the family along communal lines—which quite often sought to separate children from biological or adopted parents (largely on feminist grounds)—missed something important, something that decades of psychological research have established beyond a shadow of a doubt: children need to feel safe and protected by their caregivers, and that is what builds their resilience, their ability to overcome challenges and bounce back from disasters. Secure attachments to parents give kids a model for caring relationships that they can later apply in adulthood.

To many people, this will sound like common sense, but "common sense" is a construction, not a given. Many of us have reached a place where people (both academics and regular folks, using different languages), are acknowledging the importance of both the parent-child bond and of extended networks to fostering resilient families, along egalitarian lines. But as I write, this is a theory for most people, not a reality. Establishing psychological attachment and egalitarian relationships is hard, but achievable within individual lives; re-designing our environment so that men and women are more equal and families are more networked and nurtured is, to say the least, a much longer-term process.

A few weeks ago, I was discussing the ideas of robot designer Rodney Brooks with the science-fiction novelist Paolo Bacigalupi: Brooks argues that resilient robotic systems are small, fast, networked, and numerous, individually dumb but collectively smart. I told Paolo that this is an interesting model for how humans are facing social change right now, each one of us groping across a strange landscape, each of us discovering a piece and communicating what we are learning through the Internet.

“Yes,” Paolo replied, “but you have to get the human robots to care about each other.”

Robots can be programmed to “care,” in the sense that you can create communication protocols for them. Humans learn to care, developing a theory of mind and a sense of empathy as they grow. Designer George Kembel, I just learned here at Design 4 Resilience, has argued that empathy, which he defines as the ability to perceive and meet latent needs, is an essential building block for resilience (see video at bottom).

But it seems to me that resilience thinkers rarely stress this critical idea. Can we design our society so that we are more likely to care about each other? I think so. But no master designer will be able to do it. This is a design that we collaboratively create as we go, through an accumulation of acts and decisions. You can start right now.

Originally published today on Shareable.net.

Raise My Taxes!

This morning I attended part of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board meeting, where they were considering a proposal to increase fares and cut service--again.

Anyone who rides the Muni (SF's public transit system) knows that the situation on the buses and trains has been catastrophically deteriorating. An analysis by Streetsblog of daily Muni performance in the past month "shows Muni has been missing 80 percent more runs compared to June [of last year], mostly due to a freeze on overtime." Eighty percent--that's on top of a series of service cuts. These budget cuts and missed runs translate into genuine misery on the buses, as I can tell you from first-hand experience. Many people I know are driving more, thereby increasing San Francisco's carbon footprint.

Meanwhile, City College of San Francisco has cancelled all of its summer classes--which is preventing my wife from finishing her early childhood education certificate--and the public school system is trying to slash $113 million from its budget by the fall--when my son will be entering kindergarten. Those are just examples of the cuts my family is directly facing; many people--seniors, the unemployed, the uninsured, to name a few--are faring much worse.

Most people reading this don't live in San Francisco, but I'll bet that your town is facing similar issues. Times are tight, and our quality of life is taking a hit. Across the board, around the country, cities and states are cutting shareable resources like transit, parks, schools, and libraries, at just the moment people are relying on them more than ever.

But not everyone is taking the same hit. People can buy their way out of the shared transit crisis by purchasing a private car or driving their car more often; people can buy their way out of the shared education crisis by sending their kids to private schools. Despite our fairly hardcore commitment to public transportation and public education, even my family has applied to private schools and, incredibly, I have considered getting a car.

It goes without saying that economic crises can drive people apart, atomizing individuals, destroying communities, and widening social divisions. Today, we're seeing that happen. But there's a flip side as well: As my great-grandfather was fond of pointing out about his experience during the Great Depression, economic crises also compel people to share more of their stuff and their lives. There are ways to help each other through this crisis that are entrepreneurial, DIY, and community-oriented, and we're seeing hundreds of projects spring up to meet community needs.

But my opinion is that it can't stop with individual, DIY solutions, which are mostly about day-to-day survival. Shareable transit like buses, light rail, and commuter rail take many more cars off the road than do carpooling and carsharing services. The research unequivocally shows that targeted public investments in education and health care do more to remedy inequality than individual charity ever does.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we Americans are stumbling into a suburban cul-de-sac (a Catalan phrase that means "bottom of the bag," by the way) beset by environmental collapse, ignorance and isolation, and mindless violence, both real and imagined. Decades of tax-cutting and deregulation have undermined the commons, the resources that we share. As Jay Walljasper writes on Shareable:

Unfortunately, taxes are rarely discussed today as part of the common good. Right-wingers scream bloody murder any time a tax increase is even mentioned, stirring up talk radio mobs that equate any form of government action as folly or tyranny, while liberals largely duck the issue out of fear.

It’s high time to reframe the debate about taxes, before the infrastructure and social fabric of our communities starts to deteriorate right before our eyes.

Taxes should be viewed as a commons, a cooperative effort to take care and improve the things that belong to all of us. If you add up the huge contribution that good schools, police protection, parks, public health measures, libraries etc. make in our lives, it’s easy to see that the money we pay in taxes is the best bargain in town.

I just did my taxes last week; I had to do them early, in order to apply for financial aid to private schools. As someone with substantial freelance income, I sign a big check over to the government. It hurts, but it doesn't hurt as much seeing my son's prospects for a good school devastated. It doesn't hurt as much as seeing people on the streets and children falling between the cracks of the health system. It doesn't hurt as much as seeing the Arctic ice melt and our natural resources squandered. I viscerally hate paying taxes, but I also hate waiting an hour for the bus.

Part of the problem with taxes, I suspect, is that we often pay them in such a large chunk--we don't fret nearly as much about putting thirty dollars of gas in a tank or paying two dollars for a bus ride. And according to a new analysis by the Victoria Policy Institute, Raise My Taxes, Please! Evaluating Household Savings From High Quality Public Transit Service, paying those taxes for shared infrastructure, as opposed to paying for lots of privately provided services, saves us money as individuals and as a group:

Providing high quality public transit service typically requires about $268 in annual subsidies and $108 in additional fares per capita, but reduces vehicle, parking and road costs an average of $1,040 per capita. For an average household this works out to $775 annually in additional public transit expenses and $2,350 in vehicle, parking and roadway savings, or $1,575 in overall net savings, in addition to other benefits including congestion reductions, reduced traffic accidents, pollution emission reductions, improved mobility for non-drivers, and improved public fitness and health. Physically and economically disadvantaged people tend to enjoy particularly large savings and benefits since they rely on alternative modes and are price sensitive.

That seems sensible, doesn't it? But we live in a country that has been shaped by three decades of revolt against the common good, most prominently expressed as a revolt against taxes. Private enterprise has supposed to fill the gaps, but the results are in, and corporations have failed to deliver. Refusing to share has made us poor. Today, we need a pro-tax, pro-public sector revolt, people speaking up for the commons, contributing to the commons. We need it right now.

If you do live in San Francisco and you depend on shared transportation, please consider signing up for the effort to launch a Muni riders' union.

Originally published on Shareable.net.

Nick Clegg is right

It's a new media trend: Since 80 percent of people laid off in the recession have been guys, pundits and journalists are asking themselves if this will cause men to do more at home. More women as breadwinners and more men at home is "a thought to file under 'let's try to find a silver lining,' " writes Lisa Belkin at the New York Times. Slate's Emily Bazelon takes a dimmer view, imagining "a family with a husband rattling around the house, unemployed and unsettled about it, while his wife keeps working but brings home a paycheck that's less than half the income the two of them used to make together."

Over in the United Kingdom--which is experiencing the same kind of downturn as we are here--Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg triggered a firestorm of criticism for suggesting that men losing jobs should "re-invent" themselves as stay-at-home dads, and "that unemployment could have a 'liberating effect' on outdated views about what was men's work." He's been accused of emasculating British industrial workers.

Perhaps Clegg, a politician, might be criticized for having a politically tin ear, but he's absolutely correct: economic downturns can open up new possibilities for men, and this recession is likely to have a huge effect on gender relations.

During the Great Depression, unemployment would utterly destroy men, because their entire identities were based on their jobs and their ability to support families. At the same time, however, widespread unemployment had the ironic effect of allowing more caring and cooperative conceptions of fatherhood to gain a hearing. According to a study by historian Ralph LaRossa and colleagues, more books and magazine articles in the Great Depression promoted the idea of the "New Father" than at any other time before or since. "Measuring virality and manliness in ways that were independent of whether one had a job [served] to counterbalance the emasculating effects of the Depression," writes LaRossa.

And as more men were tossed out of work, more women found jobs. The number of married women working outside the home almost tripled from 1900 to the middle of the Depression; women zoomed from being less than 3 percent of clerical workers at the end of the 19th century to being more than half in the Depression. Incomes rose accordingly.

Women's employment and incomes continued to grow throughout the 40s and, yes, even the 50s--and expanded straight through the 70s and 80s, when men's economic prospects started to dim. It's no accident that the hero of the 1982 film Mr. Mom--which marked the film debut of the stay-at-home dad--was a laid-off autoworker named Jack. Had Mr. Mom been made in the 1930s, it would have been a tear-jerking melodrama: Jack would have sunk into alcoholism and domestic violence while his wife endured the humiliation of employment.

But a lot had changed in America in the decades between the Great Depression and Mr. Mom. Ultimately, Jack masters househusbandry while his wife becomes a successful ad executive. When their identities as breadwinners are destroyed by economic instability, argues Mr. Mom, men must do exactly what Nick Clegg suggests, and reinvent themselves as caregivers. Moreover, the film suggests that men ought to support their wives' career aspirations, a startling departure from the past.

In the face of today's financial disasters, women are economically stronger than ever and men's identities are much more diverse. Since 1965, according to several empirical studies, men's time with children has tripled. Since 1995, it has doubled. So has the number of stay-at-home dads. Researchers are finding that even low-income and chronically unemployed men are finding meaning and satisfaction in taking care of kids--whereas in the past, they would consciously reject those roles. As motherhood has shifted to include careers, the definition of fatherhood has shifted from pure breadwinning to one that encompasses both breadwinning and caregiving.

A bad economy is bad for mothers, fathers, and children--and, indeed, everyone. None of us can wave a magic wand and bring our jobs and a healthy economy back; for many of us, life is about to become very hard. But the history of the American family teaches us that we can grow stronger in the places where we have been broken. The key, research reveals, is for mothers and fathers to cultivate loving relationships with each other, and to prize time with children. That can be hard to do when you don't know how you're going to pay the mortgage, and yet we are even worse off when we lose each other as well as the house. No one gets paid for sniping at his or her spouse.

When journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates (author of the remarkable memoir The Beautiful Struggle) was laid off from Time magazine in 2007, he became a stay-at-home dad. "You know, getting laid off is always a difficult thing, but it gave me back time with my son," Ta-Nehisi told me in an interview for my forthcoming book, The Daddy Shift. "That's absolutely huge. I guess not making much money would trouble me, if I felt I wasn't a very good father. If you are a man who thinks that what you bring to a relationship is economic power and that's it, then I guess that would trouble you."

America can learn from Ta-Nehisi. Couples that can support each other and focus on care survive recessions; couples that don't--who allow stress and despair to take over their family lives--break apart. I would argue that the role reversals American families are experiencing can be a source of strength, and an evolutionary adaptation to a global economy that is intrinsically unstable and technology-based. When the right values are in place, families can survive economic downturns intact, and sometimes even thrive.

Does concerted cultivation produce selfish children?

Last month, I posted an essay about Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers: The Story of Success that provoked a lively discussion. Gladwell argues that early cultivation (such as actively managing a child's education and providing her with a range of experiences and learning opportunities) is crucial to later success in life. It also helps quite a lot, he argues, to help children learn to speak up for themselves and confidently interact with adults.

While Gladwell is guilty of a certain amount of reductionism and success-worship, his argument, in my view, is ultimately a hopeful and egalitarian one: success is the product of environment more than anything else, and we can help all children to succeed by equalizing their opportunities in life. We can do this by providing early childhood education and well-funded public school systems, as well as universal health care, among other programs.

However, some readers seemed to feel that active cultivation of a child's education and talent "ultimately produces selfish, self-absorbed adults who are out of touch with most of humanity," as one commentator put it.

In the minds of these readers, "concerted cultivation" is the equivalent of the dreaded "helicopter parenting," wherein privileged moms and dads over-schedule their kids and push them to succeed at the expense of empathy and social intelligence.

But that doesn't follow at all, and I actually think this belief misses something important about why inequality continues to grow in America.

It may very well be the case the middle- and upper-class children are more prone to be "selfish" and "self-absorbed"--although, honestly, I've seen those qualities, as well as others like kindness and understanding, pop up among members of virtually every social class. My instinct is that belief in the inhumanity of educated or affluent people is the product of resentment or self-hatred, not observation.

But we're not really talking here about affluence. We're talking about access to opportunity (which in our culture comes with affluence). The fact remains that early education and attention to a child's well-being leads to many good outcomes in life, and also for society. Some of these are material--more income and wealth--but some are not, including increased likelihood that they will get married and stay married, and stay out of jail. These are empirical facts. And it's a fact that when children's health and educational needs aren't met, inequality grows, and bad things happen. Really bad things: rising crime rates and incarceration, declining innovation, and shorter lives, to name a few.

What happens when societies make comprehensive commitments to the health and education of children--in other words, when concerted cultivation becomes public policy? Take a look at this graph:

Source: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/

The huge difference in child poverty rates between the United States and almost everywhere else in the developed world, especially Northern European countries, is not accidental. It's the product of decades of diverging social policies, as well as different philosophies of education. In the twenty-first century, it's better to be educated than not, cosmopolitan instead of provincial. It's better to read books instead of watching TV, and to learn more than one language, and to be active instead of passive. It's better when governments rely on science instead of superstition to make policy, and it's better for them to be secular instead of religious. This is not an issue of rich vs. poor, a binary that excludes most people. Instead it pits social development against neglect and underdevelopment.

I'm not a relativist. I think embracing these values, as individuals and a society, will give my son a better life, and a better life to all children. That some people might think I'm a snob for saying that education is good and ignorance is bad just illustrates how frighteningly neurotic some parts of America have become.

And I think that adopting these policies will actually decrease the hyperventilating anxiety I described in my original post, which causes, for example, some parents (of all social classes, not just the most privileged) to hold their kids back a year so that they can beat out other kids in academics and athletics, which becomes a kind of vicious cycle as others try to keep up. Creating a situation of functionality and equality will reduce the craziness we see in places like San Francisco, where parents fear (with cause) that their kids' life chances will diminish if they end up in the wrong school--because, quite simply, a majority of schools will be right.

To put it a different way, let's stop blaming parents (and teachers) for struggling to make the best of the system. Instead, let's change the system. And part of that entails pushing the tax structure in a more progressive direction and the social structure so that kids of all social classes have the same opportunities.

Liberal and conservative alike, we Americans too often forget that our children are the poorest in the developed world. Liberals and progressives blame conservative social policies, but as the comments at Daddy Dialectic reveal, there's enough blame to go around. (One commentator suggested--tongue in cheek?--Maoist concentration camps as a solution to privileged obliviousness. But, Daisy, trust me on this: concentration camps do not increase the amount of empathy in the world.) While we've wasted time worrying about strawmen--like, for example, "helicopter parents"--and deriding education, we've neglected our school system to the point where many districts are on the brink of disaster, and some are disasters. More than just time, we are wasting talent and lives, and there's no excuse for it.

(Incidentally, if you'd like to read a superb overview of what public policies have fueled America's rising rate of child poverty and Europe's falling rate, see Jody Heymann's 2006 book, Forgotten Families.)

The Failure of Success

I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success while at the same time applying to kindergartens for Liko. It’s an interesting juxtaposition.

The message of Gladwell’s book is simple: Success is the product of environment plus practice plus accidents of birth; intrinsic talent is a factor—mostly because it allows a person to take advantage of whatever opportunities arise—but not the most important one, not even close.

In one chapter, Gladwell explores a classic study by sociologist Annette Lareau of childrearing in working-class with middle- and upper-class homes (“less-educated” and “more-educated” might be a better characterization). By following twelve families closely for long periods of time, Lareau found that “there were two parenting ‘philosophies,' and they divided almost perfectly along class lines.”

The working-class parents followed a path of what Lareau calls “natural growth”—meaning that children are generally left to their own devices, and parents did not attempt to manage their education. This, writes Lareau, produced children who were more independent and better behaved, but also (paradoxically?) more passive, especially in the face of authority. (This is just a thumbnail; you'll need to read Gladwell's book or Lareau's study for details.)

By contrast, the educated parents adapted a policy of “concerted cultivation.” They actively identified weaknesses to correct and strengths to develop in their children; heavily scheduled their time with classes in music, art, etc.; and intensively managed their formal education.

Most importantly for Gladwell’s purposes, these parents taught their children how to ask questions, interact with authority figures in ways that asserted some degree of control, and express opinions. This produces a sense of entitlement, which Lareau neutrally defines as the ability to act as though they had a right to pursue their individual interests and speak up for themselves in institutional settings.

These observations feel true to my experience. I’ve heard teacher-friends describe similar patterns, I’ve seen it in my own family, and I’m seeing it play out in the murderous world of applying for kindergarten in San Francisco, which is like an arms race.

One example: Liko attends a preschool that is heavily slanted toward educated middle- and upper-class parents. (Education aside, we are not those parents, by the way; Liko wouldn’t go there if my wife hadn’t worked at the school and if we weren’t receiving financial aid. Those were opportunities of which we took advantage.)

Concerted cultivation is institutionalized: teachers report weekly on the kid’s activities (with photos!), there are regular parent-teacher meetings tracking the child’s development; school time is scheduled with art, gym, and so on; and it is normal for the kids (including Liko) to go from school to after-school enrichment classes.

This isn’t the case in all preschools. I have a friend who works as a teacher at a preschool that caters to low-income families. There, says my friend, there is no parent involvement, no reporting, very little structure, and no enrichment. The parents drop the kids off, they play for much of the day, and the parents pick them up. This is more akin to daycare, not preschool, which is the more common arrangement for working parents.

Put aside, for the moment, moral and political judgments, and look at the situation coldly. Guess which group is going to be better prepared to enter kindergarten? (I'm not saying that your kid will never get into Harvard if she doesn't attend a good preschool; I'm saying that every educational opportunity increases the likelihood of advancement.)

In addition, the kids at Liko’s preschool are sorted into classes by birth date, so that in Liko’s class most are born in the summer. And here, we’ve discovered something interesting: It appears that most of the kids, especially the boys, are not going to kindergarten next year. They’ll attend pre-K and enter kindergarten when they are six.

Why? Because it will give them a developmental advantage in both academics and athletics. Holding your child back once entailed a stigma; no more. Now, it’s a status symbol.

Are we, Liko’s parents, above all this? Of course not. We feel intense pressure to follow the norms that we see around us, and we are also considering sending Liko to kindergarten when he is six—mostly because I shudder to think of Liko, down the road, sharing a school locker room with boys who are up to a year older than he is. Our decision will be based on a) whether or not he gets into a good school next year; and b) where his teachers say he stands developmentally.

You might think this educational arms race would actually come to nothing, just a lot of overeducated “helicopter parents” wasting their time and turning their kids into neurotic whiners. You can probably point to lots of people, perhaps even yourself, whose parents followed the “natural growth” path and “turned out just fine.”

But one of the interesting things about Gladwell’s book is how decisive concerted cultivation seems to be when it comes to later success in life; through many examples, Gladwell shows how the difference between the successful and not-successful is early cultivation and opportunity. This is confirmed by quite a bit of research, and it’s how social class plays out in America.

My own upbringing was a transitional one from working to middle class, with elements of both natural growth and concerted cultivation. I never went to preschool and time in my childhood was never all that structured. As I approached adolescence and we moved to progressively larger school systems, opportunities began to appear.

At one point I was tested as part of a program called the Midwest Talent Search, which ultimately led to me being able to attend a special summer writing program at Northwestern University. I remember that period as revelatory; for the first time, I was among kids my age who were interested in books and ideas, and I had sympathetic teachers. I’m grateful for that little sliver of freedom and exploration, which decisively shaped my life, but I also think that I would have benefited from having had more opportunities like it.

Of course, one can reject the very concept of “success,” and, indeed, there is a parental counterculture that simply opts out of the arms race, sometimes through homeschooling; we know some folks who are following this path. It’s one I’m reluctant to embrace.

It’s plausible to me that a parent could replicate the advantages that children get through educational institutions—for example, exposing kids to cultural diversity through participation in church activities. But my real problem with homeschooling as a movement is that it’s not a solution to inequality of opportunity in our society. In fact, I’d wager that homeschooling, if implemented on a wider scale, would dramatically exacerbate inequalities. (It’s worth noting that the superrich have always homeschooled; an acquaintance of mine makes her living as a private tutor for one such family, a name you’ve heard.)

And so I am disinclined, as a parent, to apologize for participating in the system and taking advantage of whatever opportunities come my son’s way. As I see it, the problem is not that parents are pursuing what is best for their kids on the terms our society offers. Instead, the problem is with a system that so unevenly distributes opportunity.

It doesn’t have to be this way: There are countries all over the world where kids all receive the same early childhood education, and parents’ education and income levels are much less important in shaping the life chances of their children. Believe it or not, the U.S. actually ranks quite low in social mobility, when compared to Canada and Western Europe.

Gladwell’s book is not a story about the triumph of middle-class values, nor is about how wonderfully accomplished wealthy people are. Instead, his story of success is a story of luck. We in America have fooled ourselves into believing the rich deserve everything they have. And if you are not Bill Gates, says a certain strain of American thinking, you are a failure.

No: As Outliers makes clear, Bill Gates (one of Gladwell’s case studies) is just a lucky bastard. Talented, sure—but no more talented than many of the people who work for him. My grandfather had somewhat less in the way of luck; his success consisted of holding the same stable job for 40 years and putting food on the table every day. His children never starved: That’s success. We have to measure our lives against the opportunities we have been given. And the only moral response to the absence of luck is compassion, toward oneself and others.

On the other hand, feeling guilty about one’s privilege is not helpful; your guilty feelings don’t make one damn bit of difference for low-income families. To really make a difference, middle- and upper-income parents need to pay their fair share of taxes and vote for politicians who are going to allocate funds to early childhood education, health care, and programs that help all kids fulfill their potential. I am writing this on the eve of inauguration day: Let’s hope President Obama leads the way.

The Longest War

A reader responds to Andrew Sullivan.

Earlier this week, in your post “The Top Ten Reasons Conservatives Should Vote For Obama”, you wrote under Point 4: “A truce in the culture war. Obama takes us past the debilitating boomer warfare that has raged since the 1960s. Nothing has distorted our politics so gravely; nothing has made a rational politics more elusive.”

On the one hand I agree with you; on the other hand, you don't go nearly far enough. An Obama presidency means much more than a truce in the 60’s culture war. It means the end of a much older and more terrible war, in which the 60's was merely one battle: the American Civil War. That is what is at stake here.

The Civil War was fought from Sumter to Appomattox, from April 12, 1861, to April 9, 1865. But the roots of the war predated 1861, and the consequences lived on long after 1865. In reality the Civil War never ended, it just shifted from a military to a culture war - the same culture war that is still going on today....

The 1960’s was part of that larger war, marking the struggle to end Jim Crow, the century-long regime of American apartheid (Vietnam was, in my opinion, related but secondary). The end of apartheid was a second humiliating defeat for the forces of the conservative "South" at the hands of the liberal "North", and it subsequently gave rise to those decades of distorted and irrational politics you so deplore, as the reactionary and fundamentalist forces regrouped and mounted yet another rearguard insurrection against their liberal "oppressors", culminating in their partial ascension to power under Bush...

So let's be clear - it is not "boomer warfare" which has distorted our politics, or made rational politics so elusive since the 60's: it is something far deeper, something far older, something which has been with us from the beginning in this country, and which we in turn brought with us from the Old World; something which in fact traces back to the very origin of humanity - spiritually, psychologically, politically, evolutionarily. That depth is what gives the American story its pathos and its importance. That is why the world watches us: to see if we can work it out - to see if there is hope.

Seems like a stretch? Check out these three maps.

This one represents the pattern of support for McCain (red) and Obama (blue):


[Source: FiveThirtyEight]

Compare that to a map of the two sides of the American Civil War:



And here's the 2004 electoral map:



All three maps also closely reflect population density, a big topic I tackle in this sprawling 2006 essay on anti-urban politics in America.

Infidelity: Brought to you by the Internet (thanks a lot, Al Gore!)

New studies reveal that "younger women appear to be cheating on their spouses nearly as often as men."

How many are we talking about? "University of Washington researchers have found that the lifetime rate of infidelity for men over 60 increased to 28 percent in 2006, up from 20 percent in 1991. For women over 60, the increase is more striking: to 15 percent, up from 5 percent in 1991."

In other words, almost three out of ten men have cheated on their wives by the time they hit 60; meanwhile, 1.5 women out of ten have cheated on their husbands. Another survey shows that in any given year, 12 percent of men and 7 percent of women say they have had sex with someone who isn't their spouse. Which sounds about right. For the youngest cohort of happily marrieds, women and men have achieved rough equality when it comes to deceiving their spouses.

Why the increases for both men and women?

Personally, I have no idea, but researchers advance a number of theories. On the female side, it is likely that more women are just more likely to report infidelity--but it's also the case that contemporary women, who spend less time with young children, just have more opportunities to cheat.

In the past, said Helen E. Fisher, research professor of anthropology at Rutgers, men have wanted to think women don’t cheat, and women have wanted men to think they don’t cheat, "and therefore the sexes have been playing a little psychological game with each other."

On a practical level, being universally charged with care of young children also pretty much zeroed out opportunities for extracurricular sex for the moms. (As most caregivers of preschoolers know all too well, the Little Children scenario, in which a stay-at-home dad and stay-at-home mom get it on while their respective kids nap every day at the exact same time, is very unlikely.)

And as women gain more personal freedom and sexual mores loosen, more women are fessing up to infidelity. It's probably not a coincidence that in urban areas the youngest group of husbands and wives also earn more or less the same amounts of money.

These days, "married women are more likely to spend late hours at the office and travel on business. And even for women who stay home, cellphones, e-mail and instant messaging appear to be allowing them to form more intimate relationships." One Atlanta psychiatrist who specializes in family crisis and couples therapy told the New York Times "he has noticed more women talking about affairs centered on 'electronic' contact."

Technology might also be driving male infidelity. Researchers blame the widespread availability of pornography on the Internet, which is known to affect sexual behavior, as well as the invention of Viagra, which essentially makes sex outside of marriage possible for senior citizens.

OK then. People are cheating more, or at least becoming more likely to cop to it. And this activity is being facilitated by technology.

But what's interesting about these studies is that it appears to still be the case that most people, a two thirds majority, don't ever cheat. That goes for men (who are still vastly more likely to admit that they do it) as well as women. You'd expect that over the course of a lifetime most baby boomers (because that's the group we're talking about here) would have dallied at some point--but empirically it appears that they have not.

I've often thought that the stereotypical notion that men think with their sexual organs (and its corollary, that women never do) is fundamentally flawed; this usually goes hand in hand with the idea that men are by nature emotionally stunted.

Of course, men have rich emotional lives and their relationships with women are more than just sexual. Quite a few studies of womanizing husbands suggest that it is emotional, not just sexual, craving that motivated them to cheat. (I'm not suggesting anything about the maturity of these emotional needs; that's a separate issue.)

I think few people would dispute that men are, in general, more consistently horny than women. That makes a certain amount of biological sense: men are constantly producing sperm but women's hormonal cycles make proneness to arousal more periodic.

However, as I think most wives (secretly?) realize, the vast majority of men deal with this mismatch through covert masturbation, not cheating. Frankly, it's a complementary part of married life for men, and not a few women.

Neither sex is a slave to its biology; our bodies may provide the raw material, as it were, but morality, emotion, and imagination (which allows us to imagine long-term consequences) play much stronger roles in regulating our day-to-day behavior than biological drives ever will.

The shelter of each other

Shortly after I started working full time again, Liko and I developed a tradition: On certain Sundays we take the F train downtown and we spend the afternoon watching hockey or figure skating, playing on the playground, going to museums, eating.

This past Sunday I took him ice skating. We had tried it about a year ago and I had concluded that it was too early. But on Sunday he took right to the ice, and we skated around and around the rink, holding hands, and neither of us could stop smiling.

Later we went to the playground and Liko hooked up with two little girls, twins, about six years old.

"Did you guys go ice skating?" he asked.

They nodded.

"Did you see me? I was really good!"

They laughed, as they should have, and ran to the slide. Liko chased them.

Later we rode the merry go round and I watched his face and I thought, I'm happy.

That night I put him to bed. "I love you, Dada," he said as he nodded off.

Then on Monday I read that the House voted to reject the $700 billion bailout package. Today I read that the war in Iraq continues to go badly; we're now losing the war in Afghanistan. An internal Justice Department investigation has concluded that White House fired federal prosecutors for political reasons, while a former CIA official pleads guilty to fraud--just two examples, plucked at random from today's headlines, of the ideological corruption that now seems to permeate American institutions.

The word I keep hearing in all these articles, the common thread that connects all these scandals, is "trust"--it seems that we no longer have enough it. People don't trust banks, banks don't trust each other, and neither trusts our political leaders or judicial system.

I'm not a sky-is-falling kind of guy; I tend to see history as the story of progress, and I have a great deal of faith in the creativity, decency, and resilience of human beings.

But the signs and portents are not good; it is now very likely that America is about to enter a full-blown crisis, one that will unfold on every level: spiritual, psychological, philosophical, financial, political, and military. Every institution will be affected, and so will every person.

Am I being melodramatic? I really don't think so. America could plausibly pull out of its nosedive, but at a certain point you have to admit, if only to yourself, that we are going to crash.

Journalists keep raising the specter of the Great Depression, but we're not going to see history repeat itself; America is a different place than it was in the 1930s or, for that matter, the 1960s, two previous crisis points. The next decade will be as different from those two decades as they were from each other.

In retrospect, both the 30s and the 60s were bridges; the Depression and New Deal completed the modernization of America, readying us for the role we occupied in the second half of that century; the 60s laid the foundation for the values we have needed in the twenty first century: diversity, tolerance, cosmopolitanism.

It's conceivable that the next decade will also be a bridge, though where it's going, I have no idea. At the moment, it seems that we are on the now-proverbial "bridge to nowhere," built by nihilists, but I don't want to believe that.

I can't; I'm a dad. For me, for all of us responsible for nurturing life, nihilism is not an option. "When I travel alone far from home, I think of my children's faces to calm myself down," writes Mary Pipher in her 1996 book The Shelter of Each Other. "Those faces are my mandalas. They comfort and secure me. The faces of those we love are the first, the primal, mandalas for us all."

Now I'm thinking of Liko's face, and of my wife's, faces I trust. They comfort me, but they also remind me to try to do the right thing, to be my best self, to try to be a hero, not a villain. We're walking on the bridge together. We all are, I think.

everyday parenting

As a way to announce the imminent arrival of rad dad 11, I present to you the intro to rad dad 10...get ready...

I have to share something. I feel like such a fake, a phony. Like I'm the last person who should be writing for a zine like rad dad. Let me explain. About a month before Mother's Day, Ariel Gore, editor and founder of Hip Mama, emailed me and asked if I'd be willing to read at their Mother's Day Extravaganza. I was honored; of course, I would. This is what I had been hoping for all along: recognition for rad dad in the radical parenting community and a chance to gain exposure for the zine and for all the amazing writers and stories I have had the chance to work with.

Nothing could stop me. I was now officially super rad dad editor.

And then my son's counselor called. He wasn't going to pass high school, she said, unless we did an intervention, unless we corrected his behavior. Now. Immediately. Tomas, she demanded, you gotta do something.

It seems I hadn't done enough. I had been harboring that fear all along. Had I let him down? Had I hid behind a veneer of trusting his "choices" when in reality I was just in denial, just at a loss for what to do? And instead of sitting with those questions, contemplating ways to approach him, I did the worst possible thing after hearing his counselor's pleas; I got hella angry with my son. Not a good approach, about as successful as parenting by denial. When I confronted him about his progress report, which for every class including PE was listed as F, he looked me straight in the eye and said: Don't worry dad; I got it under control. Like a cartoon, I looked down at the progress report: F, F, F, F, F and back up to him, down, back, down, back over and over again. Who was this kid?

Basically he's been a normal teenager. Yes, we've gone through some difficult teen years, the not coming home, the walking in after school drunk, the hoarding of every glass and bath towel in his room as if he were the only one who needed to drink or shower. But through these years, I've also seen glimpses of what he will become: the way kids look up to him and the way he gives them such respect, the times he connects with his sisters when he doesn't know we are listening in the next room, the way he plays with our pet chickens.

So how do I explain the situation he was in? Can a rad dad raise a high school failure? Not a dropout, mind you, but someone who failed his classes when many of his teachers bent over backwards for him. He was given opportunity after opportunity, second chance after second chance.

But it gets worse; as we get closer to my departure for what I'm thinking is my big coming out party, my day in the sun, his monthly court date arrives for his probation hearing. Oh, did I fail to mention also that he has been on probation for the past two years? Each time I take him to court, which, of course, is peopled with nothing but kids of color and blatantly class targeted, I can't help but get livid at my son as the Judge reads off: his attendance (I didn't know you could miss over 100 days in a semester), his straight Fs, his unfinished hours of community service, his failed drug tests. It just never ends, and I feel so angry that he hasn't dealt with it. Because one day the Judge is gonna do something, I warn him.

Well, just as I'm about to leave, that's what happens. My son is sentenced to Juvenile Hall for the weekend. My weekend. I just couldn't, and still can't, get over the irony; the universe must be trying to tell me something.

You can talk all you want about how you would like to parent, what you think is valuable, what the implications of your parental choices might be, but all that theory, all that shit, flies out the window when you're faced with the power and pain of parenting in the moment. You are on your own when they're hurt. When they're dealing with their disappointment in the world. Or in you. When they step further and further away from you. Moments like these aren't talked about in books or zines; there are no answers found by doing readings in front of other people or participating in Mother's Day Extravaganzas. In fact, all that stuff just seems silly. Instead, what you discover in those moments is your capacity to love unconditionally, to forgive and forget, to be gentle, to put things in perspective. But it's not easy; it's ugly and hard, and it hurts.

I finally decided to skip the event because too much was happening, but my partner convinced and reassured me that I should still go, that it would be alright, that staying was not gonna change what had happened. So come Friday morning before I'm supposed to fly to Portland and my son is supposed to check in to the Alameda County Juvenile facility (after school, of course), we meet up in my living room. I hug my boy goodbye. I tell him I love him, I trust him, I have faith in him even if the world doesn't seem to, even if he doesn't believe in himself, even unfortunately when I too often act like I don't.

I do. This is hard, I say. But you can do this. You can.

He nods his head, says thanks, and saunters off to school like it ain't no thang.

That weekend was a profound awakening in many ways for me (and for him, I believe); hearing his mother describe how they took him away, how she watched him being searched before they shut the doors behind him and also hearing inspiring stories of creating a free school in Portland, gathering with a ton of parents to share a little bit of rad dad with them, sharing my feelings of failure with old and new friends in the middle of the afternoon, considering how to expand rad dad into a larger format, more inclusive magazine, and finally flying home to hear stories of my babies' mama spending Mother's Day contentedly gardening with our daughters and eventually leaving to bring our son home from Juvie.

Parenting is so much more than something we should celebrate on a day or with an event, so much more than feeling good at times or bad. Or like a phony. Or like a failure. It's an adventure, it's unknowable, fluid, never static, ever evolving. It's work. And, it's what matters most. Happy parenting to everyone out there, holdin' it down and keeping it real.

I believe in you. I do.

This is hard at times. But we can do this. We can.

10 questions on profeminist fatherhood

Yesterday I posted a list of questions about feminism and fatherhood that were adapted from "10 questions on feminist motherhood," posed by Australian feminist mommy blogger Blue Milk. I promised that I would try to answer them. Here it goes:

1. How would you describe your feminism in one sentence? When did you become profeminist? Was it before or after you became a father?

On its most personal level, feminism is a reminder to me to do my utmost to treat the women in my life with respect, something I admit often falls to the wayside in the heat of an argument—more on that, below.

On a more abstract level, I think feminism reminds me of how my individual decisions have political and social dimensions—and how political events and social trends shape my individual decisions. 

In short, the personal is political!

When did I come to think that feminism was a good idea?

I have always felt like an outsider when in the company of guys, though I’m more or less straight and no one has ever described me as “feminine.” I just felt like every other guy had learned a secret handshake that I never did.

As a result, I have always felt instinctively sympathetic to other outsiders, including girls who weren’t girly enough. This laid the emotional and social foundation that made me open to learning more about feminism when I got to college.

In my sophomore year, a male friend asked me to get involved with a “Men for Choice” group he was starting, which evolved into a guy’s auxiliary for our campus NOW chapter. As the years went by, my activism deepened and branched out into other issues, but pro-choice activism was definitely the gateway.

During college, I also read my way through the feminist canon, starting with The Second Sex and concluding with a great deal of feminist literary theory which now makes me yawn with boredom. These ideas played a decisive role in shaping the way I see the world.

2. What has surprised you most about fatherhood?

My answers to this question and the next one are long. Stick with me, or just skim to the end. Frankly, I prefer that you skim.

After college, I put my profeminism on cruise control. I was in a stable, monogamous relationship and in my work with various progressive nonprofits, I usually had solid, respectful relationships with female co-workers. I watched guy co-workers get into trouble for sexist remarks or actions (inadvertent and otherwise), but that never happened to me and my policy was to duck and cover if it turned into a major issue.

Every once in a while, a female co-worker would even go out of her way to tell me how refreshingly non-sexist I was—“When Jeremy talks to me, he never looks at my breasts,” said one person, whose breasts I did, in fact, secretly glance at once or twice.

These pats on the head were always reassuring and contributed to a decade-long mood of complacency about gender issues. Throughout my twenties and early thirties, I played it safe, and I just never faced any personal challenges to my profeminism. As a result, I don’t think I grew very much when it came to my views on women, men, and gender politics. I figured it was enough for me to avoid acting like an obvious jerk.

Then I became a dad. And I was shocked by the degree to which my now-habitual commitment to feminist values was put to the test. In fact, habits went out the window; everything took conscious effort, as if I’d had an intellectual and emotional stroke and needed to learn how to walk and talk all over again.

I’m not even sure where to start in talking about this—I just wrote an entire book that was partially on this topic and I find it hard to boil it all down into a short answer to a question. It’s also hard to talk about because it’s so very intimate, and involves my wife’s choices as well as my own—something I’m reluctant to discuss in public. For this reason, the reader will have to accept a certain degree of vagueness.

I’ll put it this way: As soon as we became parents, I think the power in our relationship started to inexorably tilt in my direction, as perhaps it always did. Even when I took time off of paid work to serve as my son’s primary caregiver, the tilt continued. It didn’t seem, and still doesn’t seem, to matter what I want or decide—I just keep growing more powerful in the relationship.

What do I mean by power? In this context, we might say it’s the ability to do and say what we want and need to do or say. From this perspective, we’ve both lost power: Parenthood constrains our choices in countless ways, which I don’t think I need to explain to other parents.

But there is no question, absolutely none, that my wife has lost more power than I have. This won’t surprise moms who are reading this, but it certainly surprised me.

The biggest reason for this, I would say, is that I have simply not been as absorbed by the physical and emotional demands of caregiving, even when I was primary caregiver; and at this writing, I am the one who is making most of the money and feels most driven to advance in my so-called career.

Though I have faced setbacks, right at this moment I have achieved, or will soon achieve, many of my well-defined personal and professional goals, thus giving me a sense of efficacy and thus power. At the same time, my wife has struggled more to figure what she wants out of life and how to get it. (Here’s something I’ve learned: Having goals is a form of power; having a plan to pursue them is a form of power; accomplishing goals adds to your personal power. If these are just illusions, there’s power in them.)

This might change in the long run, of course. In fact, I’m counting on it. I’ve experienced setbacks in the past and I will surely experience more of them, and my wife, I hope, will surge ahead. The trick, as with all partnerships, is to avoid experiencing setbacks at the same time! Right now, however, I’m worried: I see a discrepancy growing between us in the context of parenthood, and I fear that it might turn into a lifelong pattern. In earlier stages of our lives, a situation like this wasn’t as weighty; hardly noticeable, in fact. Today, it feels very perilous. And that surprises me.

Mind you, I have been vastly more involved with care than many other fathers and I have explicitly designed my work situation to be flexible. And yet it is still the case—this is the important thing, the most important thing that needs to be said—that parenthood has fueled my own power and diminished my wife’s--or, to put it a different way, constrained her ability to make choices.

3. How have your profeminist values changed over time? What is the impact of fatherhood on your profeminism?

Think about the implications: If a guy like me—who has every good intention and a history of profeminist activism, and who even served a stint as a stay-at-home dad—is failing at the task for forging a perfectly egalitarian family, then what does that tell us about the prospects of wider social change?

Some people reading this probably think they have this one all figured out. They’ll say I was naïve for ever even imagining that equality in one family was possible—what we need, they’ll argue, is nothing less than the overthrow of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Only after the revolution can our piddling interpersonal relationships be lastingly altered.

You might not know people who believe this, but I do. Before becoming a father, I was one of those people.

And so I never thought utopia in one family was possible; I was really just trying to muddle through, as I still am. Here’s the thing: Most of the people I’m talking about aren’t parents—and the ones who are, are not what I would call dedicated parents. In fact, too often left-wing activists and leaders neglect their family responsibilities, especially the guys.

Am I judging them? Sure, a bit—the fathers, anyway—but mainly as a warning to myself and others. They’re workaholics in the service of social change, as I once was, and I suspect that they will regret the things they missed just as much as their corporate counterparts.

As a result, the problems parents face are all very abstract to them. They don’t see, they can’t, how vital and immediate it is for heterosexual couples to establishing a domestic division of labor that makes both parties happy. They have no idea—I had no idea, before becoming a parent—how difficult and urgent it is for fathers and mothers to figure this one out.

It’s all very well to talk about universal health care and parental leave and so on—but who will take the baby to the doctor? What do you say when a breastfeeding mother just wants to stay home and take care of her baby? Do you condemn her, as some have done, for being insufficiently feminist? Or do you say society and the economy made her do it, thereby denying the importance of her perception of what she needs and what the baby needs?

And what about the fathers? Are their feelings and needs irrelevant? What happens when a father yearns to stay home with his child, but can’t, because his wife wants to be the one to do that and he has to earn the money? Or what if he does stay home, and spends his days feeling like a fish out of water? No social movement can help him; feminism can tell him that he’s doing the right thing—God knows, nothing else in our culture will—but that won't matter much to the average stay-at-home dad. He mainly needs a supportive community as well as role models. 

Here’s something I think progressive feminist folks need to understand in a deep way: Parents aren’t soldiers. We don’t take marching orders. And none of us is a general. You can’t tell your partner what she should want out of life, even, perhaps especially, when her decisions make you more powerful in the relationship. You can’t control the way the world thinks of you, and you don’t get to say what social and economic conditions you’ll face as a parent. This breeds feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, anger.

At the end of the day, your main task is to survive and support your family and raise happy children; how you respond to the things you can’t control reveals a great deal about your character, some of it good and some of it bad. You might discover (have you noticed my retreat to the safety of the second person?) a capacity for sacrifice and care that you never knew was there.

On the flip side, the dark one, you might also find yourself erupting with petty rage and misdirected resentment, eruptions that frighten you, your child, and your partner. In those scary moments, when our worst emotions take over and drive our ideals and aspirations over a cliff, it is easiest of all for both fathers and mothers to fall back on traditional patterns of dominance and submission.

What does that have to do with feminism? Everything, and nothing.

Pledging allegiance to feminist ideals doesn’t make you a good person or a good parent or a good partner, but it might remind you of the power you have—we always have power, if only over ourselves—and the need to restrain that power or share it with other people. It can also remind fathers of something that I think is crucial: There are alternatives; you do have choices, and your choices matter. You don’t have to be the man your father was; you don't have to be the idiots we see on TV; you can be a new kind of man, and you can help your sons become that kind of man.

4. What makes your fathering profeminist? How does your approach differ from an anti-feminist father’s? How does feminism impact upon your parenting?

At the start, I saw participating in infant care as being the most important thing I could do to make my fathering profeminist, and maybe that was correct—it had the merit of being a pretty straightforward mission. I did my best.

And that’s a fundamentally different framework than the one an anti-feminist or non-feminist father brings to fatherhood—for the best of them, fatherhood involves an uncomplicated commitment to breadwinning above all else, which, whatever its shortcomings, is definitely an important role to fulfill; for the worst of them, fatherhood becomes another opportunity to dominate women and expand their egos.

On this front, I don’t sell myself or profeminist fathers short: A commitment to care is crucial, and makes a real difference for mothers and children. A person who denigrates such efforts, on feminist or antifeminist grounds, is not helping families.

I also think a commitment to profeminist fathering leads in a very direct way to supporting profeminist public policies: antidiscrimination policies, subidized daycare and preschool, universal health care, paid parental leave, and so on. Enacting these policies will provide a nurturing context for our personal decisions and make profeminist fathering more likely to flourish. That's another difference between a consciously profeminist and a non-feminist father: There's a political dimension to your fathering that, I think, must be expressed through voting, activism, writing, and, ultimately, public policy.

5. When have you felt compromised as a profeminist father? Do you ever feel you’ve failed as a profeminist father?

At this point, I’m compromised every freaking day; I fail every single day. This is not false modesty. The commitment to infant care was straightforward, though in retrospect I see those halcyon days as a simpler time. As the years have gone by, I’ve fallen further and further short of my ideals, and profeminist fathering has started to look increasingly complicated to me.

I confess that I feel really quite lost when it comes to applying profeminist values to my relationships with my wife and my son as they are right now. From that perspective, this is an awkward time for me to tackle these ten questions—I’m struggling toward the answers, but don’t yet have good ones, and it’s possible that I never will.

For example, I’m struggling to figure out ways to raise my son in non-sexist environment, to free him from gender roles (or at least teach him to play with those roles instead of locking into them), to see women and men as equal. Again, our efforts are crashing up against the larger culture, and I find myself fretting much more than I would like about the possibility that Liko will be too different from other kids.

For instance, he likes to wear dresses to birthday parties, and we let him. The other parents, even here in San Francisco, raise their eyebrows, and I wonder what they’re thinking, and if we’ll be invited to next year’s birthday party, and I wonder how that will affect Liko. And I feel ashamed and cowardly for wondering. I know I'm not the first, but that's cold comfort.

And then there’s my relationship with my wife—what does it mean to be a profeminist co-parent? What can I do to support her freedom and happiness? Again, in talking about this, I run up against the limits of our privacy. I can only admit here that I struggle with this on a daily basis, and, right now, we both lose more often than we win. This might be the natural condition of the profeminist father.

6. When has identifying as a profeminist father been difficult? Why?

I’ve gotten some shit from the outside world, but I can deal with that. The difficulties I face are internal, and stem primarily from feeling like a hypocrite, when the state of my family falls short of my ideals.

7. Parenthood involves sacrifice, and mothers must typically make more sacrifices than fathers. How do you reconcile that with being profeminist?

I can’t right now. I’ll have to get back to you on that.

8. If you have a partner, how does your partner feel about your profeminist fatherhood? What is the impact of your commitment to feminism on your partner and your relationship?

You know, I have no idea how my wife feels about this and I don’t care to speculate in public. It has shaped our relationship in positive ways that I don’t think we always appreciate. Taking the long view, feminism has made it possible for our relationship to have more freedom and flexibility than couples in previous eras could have. In the short run, it has driven me to try to be as involved as possible in care and housework. I can describe my intentions; it’s not for me to say how successful I’ve been in meeting my own standards.

9. If you and your partner practice attachment parenting--such as bed sharing or positive discipline--what challenges, if any, does this pose for your commitment to feminism, and how have you tried to resolve them?

One word: breastfeeding. Nothing has done more to inhibit my involvement with caring for my son. For years—literally, years—Liko couldn’t fall asleep without the breast and would grow more irritable the longer he was separated from it. We both had to struggle—and I struggled hard, believe me, and so did he—for us to develop a direct, day-in-day-out relationship that was not mediated by the breast. I’ll say that the struggle was worth it—over time we’ve developed a close relationship that exists on its own terms. Attachment parenting has been good for our family, but it took longer for Liko and me to find that attachment than it did for him and his mother.

10. Do you feel feminism has failed fathers and, if so, how? Personally, what do you think feminism has given fathers?

“Feminism” is, of course, not monolithic.

I would say that individual feminist thinkers and leaders have certainly failed fathers, in the sense that they have behaved as though fathers don’t matter or don’t exist or can only serve a purely oppressive role within the family. Another group of feminists has actually attacked the emergence of caregiving dads—I submit Linda Hirshman as an example.

But I would describe those two groups as a minority; I think a majority of feminists can foresee a positive role for fathers and, indeed, desperately want to see fatherhood redefined in a positive and progressive way. I don’t think feminism has offered a well-articulated vision of fatherhood, but that’s OK: It really falls to fathers to redefine fatherhood.

This is the great thing that feminism has given fathers: Its success has triggered culture-wide dialogs among men about what a good father should be and do. Feminists themselves are not always comfortable with these arguments, and certainly there has been much to criticize.

But, as an old Bolshevik once said, revolutions don’t happen in velvet boxes. They’re messy, contradictory, sometimes downright revolting—but usually also thrilling and necessary. Women have been rising for over a century, and only recently have men started to really change in response. From that perspective, it’s an exciting time.

This leads me to another thing (returning to the topic of the second question) that has surprised me about fatherhood and feminism: In a perverse way, fatherhood has strengthened my commitment to feminism. By revealing the limits of my good intentions and scope of action, fatherhood has pushed me to seek new answers to feminist questions I thought I had answered in my early twenties, on both personal and political levels.

Fatherhood has also reminded me, in a visceral way, of the inequalities that persist between men and women, and, in particular, the burdens carried by mothers. Those burdens and inequalities shape and poison our most intimate relationships whether we want them to or not.

Here again, feminism is useful for fathers and mothers: It gives us perspective, or it should.

It’s easy to be overcome by day-to-day difficulties and despair of the possibility of changing the balance of power between men and women. But if we lift our eyes and look at the sweep of the past through feminism’s eyes, we can see that the balance of power has changed, on this and many other fronts. History doesn’t stop just because we personally feel stuck. If we look at the lives of the people who came before us, we see that our actions in the present do matter, both our individual choices and the act of speaking out in public.

Finally, returning to question three, fatherhood has changed my relationship with feminism in one other way: If I speak out now, it is with a lot more sadness and less righteousness than I did when I was a college student. At this point, I’ve failed so many times that I can hardly denounce others for their imperfections.

But I still feel like we as fathers need to speak out, even if it’s just to friends or through blogs with a few hundred readers. The alternative is silence—but worse than that, meaninglessness. If I’m going to fail, the failure has to mean something. It has to be recorded (if only for myself), examined, put to use, leveraged, transmuted. Feminism gives us a way to do that, to transform our private pains into social change.