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jobs should "re-invent" themselves as stay-at-home dads, and "that unemployment could have a 'liberating effect' on outdated views about what was men's work."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.

Do Men Get Pregnant, Too?

And so here is the product of my collaboration with Texas-based DadLabs--I supplied the idea and the framework; they made it manly and amusing (e.g., "your balls are falling off"):



Yes, I know I look and sound like a dork. I prefer to hide behind words: This research is reported in my book, The Daddy Shift, due out June 2009.

Thanks to my pal Axel for providing his living room and equipment!

Open 24 Hours

OK, immature as it is, I'm really enjoying DadLabs, which is a good thing, because I collaborated with them to create a segment on the hormonal changes men experience when they become fathers, out soon. Stay tuned.

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.)

Kierkegaard for Babies

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love TV

It was a bitterly cold winter afternoon. 4PM and already dark. I was tired, and dreading the 2 hour stretch that yawned before me, from the end of Spot's afternoon nap, to Spot's Mom coming home from work a little after six.

It is a bleak stretch of time, bleak in my mind like the glare of sodium vapor street lamps over a frozen, salt-crusted alley.

I looked down at my hand. It held the remote. I looked at the TV. It was dark. I thought about my options.

Option A: Don't Turn On the TV. I knew what was in store without it. Some time in the kitchen, sitting at the counter and moving the cereal boxes around; maybe I would do some dishes. Then some time on the couch, reading that week's favorite clutch of books five times; then maybe I'd do a few loads of laundry. Then perhaps back to the kitchen to supervise the unpacking of all the drawers and the arrangement of their contents on the dining room table; punctuated with occasional collapses onto the floor in a hysterical fit of tears.

For two years, we banned the TV, and I made no use of the baby sitter's best friend. Instead, I was the TV. I took Spot on walks when the weather was nice. We went to the park, to the art center, to the cafe. We stayed inside and read when it was cold, and we played with blocks and pegs and balls and boats. We wrestled, chowed down, and stacked a whole lot of stuff.

Sometimes, when I was just too tired or sick, I would simply lie down and sleep while Spot clambered over me. But I never turned on the TV.

Until the other day, after the two year moratorium expired, and I chose Option B: Turn On the TV. I raised the remote and hit the "on" button.

Without a word, summoned like a zombie to a shopping mall full of screaming people, Spot calmly crawled up onto the couch and sat under my arm, all agitation drained from his limbs, his eyes wide and his heart slowed. He sat in a perfect "L" position, legs straight out in front of him on the flabby sofa, hands at his sides, giant floppy fleece slippers outlined against the blue glow of the TV screen. Spot hadn't been beside me this still, this close, for this long since he was a newborn.

For no particular reason, on came The Manchurian Candidate, followed by an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. There are some violent scenes in The Manchurian Candidate -- a movie, coincidentally, about hypnosis -- and I was too slow with the remote to prevent Spot from seeing the scene where one dude takes a pistol and blows the head off another dude.

Whoops! That was bad!

But nothing happened. No crying, no physical jolt, no worried look up to Dad for reassurance. I don't think Spot can tell the difference between a man getting his head blown with off with a revolver and Barney getting hit in the head with a soccer ball. But Spot can tell you if there's a BALL involved.

Spot engages with television on an extremely concrete basis. Of the many levels of narrative meaning that criss cross and overlap in any movie or TV show, Spot is most interested in the level of the Household Noun.

Pay no attention to the photon torpedoes, to Wharf's head, to Riker's beer gut, or any of the funky aliens. What Spot will share his appreciation for are all the BALLS that come out of nowhere. There are also lots of STARS, maybe a MOON or two, some NIGHT, and the people wearing HATS which are sometimes hard to tell from their HEADS. There are also sometimes PURPLE PEOPLE.



There are also many things that don't appear in Star Trek, but Spot points these out too, because it is not their fault that these things have been excluded from Star Trek. Among them are PUPPIES, BARNS, and BEARS. Neither were POTTY, PEE-PEE, and BULB identifiable, and there seem to be no STAIRS on the Starship Enterprise.

So that was the end of our two-year moratorium on TV. Some gratuitous violence, some cheesy yet oddly uplifting syndicated sci-fi, and about two thirds of the way through it Spot turns over and starts pointing at the parts of my face. Glasses, nose, ears.

"Spot, Picard just ordered a saucer separation. Dude, you NEVER see this ... it's very rare. Chill out for a sec."

So Spot does me a favor and sticks around for the saucer separation, which oddly enough gives me chills, and then mom comes up the stairs like she does every night. Time's up! My household hobbit swings his slippered feet off the couch. Whatever Spot thought of what we were watching, clearly he thought it had gone on too long. It was time to show mom the various projects he had left in different stages of completion.

Sinking ever deeper into the flabby sofa cushion, I took a deep breath, and changed the channel.

[You can also read this on Dad's Book of Days]

Don't try this at home

See more funny videos and Funny Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Stand by your woman

Mothering reports on an important new study:

The best chance of forming a long lasting relationship with an unmarried father and building the foundations for a stable family life are the critical months of pregnancy, says new research from the University of Maryland. Marriage itself is not a guarantee, the study adds.

"Unmarried dads are less likely to drift away if they are involved with their partner during this vital period when a family can begin to bond," says University of Maryland human development professor Natasha J. Cabrera, the principal investigator and a researcher at the school's Maryland Population Research Center.

The study, published in the December Journal of Marriage and Family, is the first to explain the importance of the prenatal period in the formation of non-traditional family patterns. The researchers analyzed data drawn from an ongoing project—The Fragile Families Child Wellbeing Study—which mostly involved unmarried couples, a total of 1,686 couples in all (www.fragilefamilies.princeton.edu)

In their analysis, Cabrera and her colleague, Jay Fagan at Temple University, found that fathers involved during pregnancy were significantly more likely to remain involved in raising their child at three-years-old.

"The unmarried father is much more likely either to maintain or move into a more committed relationship if he's involved before the birth, and that's the critical difference," Cabrera says. "As you might expect, research has consistently shown that creating a stable home life predicts whether a father will be an active participant in raising the child, but what we've learned here is that the prenatal months are when that kind of family structure is most likely to coalesce."

The study found that marital status is not a critical predictor of a father's involvement. "It is the decision that couples make to strengthen commitment and move in together that is important, rather than marital status per se," Cabrera said. "You don't need much imagination to see that a live-in dad is likely to be more involved in child care and family life. It's the personal investment in the child's and the mother's future that counts the most, not the paperwork."

For more on the science of father involvement, see this July post.

Plug plug

Like most yahoos with a blog, I gets lots of emails from random people plugging this or that product or resource. I always check them out, though most turn out to be irrelevant to what we do here at Daddy Dialectic. Recently, however, I've gotten word about some sites that I like.

Earlier this week I got an email from DadLabs. At first, I was skeptical. Then I watched the videos, like the one above, and they turned out to be hilarious, and even sorta useful. So check out DadLabs.

I also got a note from Paul Banas, a dad whom I knew from my son's preschool. What I didn't realize, however, is that Paul has launched a site for dads called GreatDad, which is a kind of straight-faced counterpart to DadLabs.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to mention that Daddy Dialectic's Chicago Pop is launching a personal blog, Bookish Dad. Finally, I also got a note from a new site called Trekaroo, which seems like it could be a useful resource if you're traveling with kids.

Feel free to plug your own or other people's projects in a comment!

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.

Raymond Proulx, 1923-2009

My grandfather died this week. The following is adapted from the first chapter of The Daddy Shift, for which I had interviewed him.

My great-grandfather was born in rural Quebec, Canada. At the age of twelve, he immigrated with his widowed mother and four sisters to Lowell, Massachusetts, and all of them started work in the city’s textile mills.

In Lowell, my great-grandfather married and had thirteen children. My grandfather, Raymond Proulx, was born in 1923. Starting at the age of eight, my grandfather worked side-by-side with his father at home, tending the garden that helped feed them and taking care of the pigs, chickens, and cows they kept.

I asked my grandfather what lessons he learned from his father. He replied: “You do what you have to, and if you don’t, you don’t eat.” Their relationship was not an intimate one. Discipline was strict and enforced with the back of a hand.

At fifteen, my grandfather found a job in a slaughterhouse butchering cows. He quit school and never went back. In 1945, he was drafted and served in World War II. In 1946, he married my grandmother and started work at a quarry—a job he would hold for the next forty years.

“My wife was so poor,” he said. “They didn’t have nothing. I took her out of poverty when I married her. At the quarry, I got fifty cents an hour, working like a horse. There wasn’t a union, we just worked. If you asked for a raise, you’d get four cents.”

A year later my mother was born; my two uncles both came within the following decade. “It was my wife’s responsibility to take care of the kids, and I used to go to work,” said my grandfather.

He told me that he wanted to play a role in their development—which he defined as making “sure they do what they’re supposed to do”—but the main measure of his success consisted of going to the quarry every day and putting a roof over their heads. “I used to go to work, come home. I didn’t drink at all. I didn’t spend my money foolishly. Everything went to feed the kids and the clothes.”

I never heard any of his children say otherwise; my mother says that she often saw my grandfather work seven days a week, for up to 12 hours a day. By the standards of his time and social class, my grandfather was an excellent father. He had been a soldier and a breadwinner and those were the two things he was proudest of. I had always had the impression that he defined those two roles by duty, modesty, and steadfastness.

His sacrifices were enormous, but my grandmother, Cecile Proulx, seemed almost crushed by the burdens of her life. I can’t include her voice here—she died years ago—but I have pictures and memories of a woman who seemed to be always battling against herself and the world, her lips set, her eyes fearful.

“She worked for me,” said my grandfather of his wife. “I always said, You work for me. She took care of the kids and I took care of the money; I brought it home, so she would have enough.” When I asked him if he faced any challenges in raising the kids, he replied: “I never did. My wife took care of all that. She brought the kids up.”

In reading through my college journals, I am surprised to see many small reminisces about my grandfather—though I didn’t see him more than twice during my undergraduate years, his appearances in my journals outnumber those about both my parents. In one entry, I recall an incident when he had accidentally killed a man at the quarry and we found him at the kitchen table, head in his hands; on another page, I describe a bicycle he built for me, “the best bike I ever had, the fastest in the neighborhood.”

We were never close. Why did I write about him so often? I think in many ways I was haunted by how different he seemed to be from me; I was quite simply incredulous that we were related. He apparently represented some rough masculine quality that I never had and didn’t want, but which still held the same attraction that the image of Havana seemed to have for the second-generation Cuban-Americans that I knew in my Miami high school. My friends had no desire to go back to Cuba—they felt their families led freer, richer lives in Miami—but they still romanticized Havana’s shark-finned cars and crumbling buildings, which cast a long shadow over their lives. My family had not crossed an ocean strait, but in many ways I was just as far away from my grandparents.

My grandfather died on January 7, 2009. Raymond Proulx didn’t want a funeral; the family isn’t having one.

Santa Witch!

Scrooge Loose!

Liko and I love Gumby, although when was a kid it creeped me out.

Chrismahanukwanzukah Daddy Books

I'll be taking the rest of December off from blogging, but just in time for the holidays, I'm posting a revised, updated version my list of children's books that depict men as caregivers (originally written back in June). If you're looking for books to buy, you might also take a look at my family's list of most-loved children's books. Have a nice Chrismahanukwanzukah! See you in January!

It's an empirical fact that fathers are comparatively rare in children's books — when economist David A. Anderson and psychologist Mykol Hamilton studied 200 children's books in 2005, they found that fathers appeared about half as often as mothers. Mothers were ten times more likely to be depicted taking care of babies than fathers and twice as likely to be seen nurturing older children.

No surprise there, of course. Moms are still the ones most likely to be taking care of kids and there’s no point in nursing a sense of grievance over the invisibility of fathers in children’s books.

But where does that leave families who don't fit the traditional mold? And how does that help parents who want to provide caring role models to their sons?

There are books out there, few and far between, that depict dads as co-parents and primary caregivers. In an effort to find them, I consulted bookstores in San Francisco as well as my local children’s librarian.

My list is not exhaustive; these are only the ones I can recommend, and there are many titles I found online that I wasn’t able to read in real life. And because these kinds of books are so rare, I’m willing to bet that there are plenty out there that few people know about.

I look forward to reading your own suggestions!

My list is arranged according to target age, from youngest to oldest:

Mama’s Home! By Paul Vos Benkowski, illustrated by Jennifer Herbert (Chronicle Books, 2004; ages 1-3): I bought this board book, which tells the story of a stay-at-home dad and toddler waiting for mom to come home from work, for Liko when I was taking care of him. It turned out to be a genuine comfort for him to read (over and over!) in the hour before his own mom came home from work, and he delighted in the simple, fanciful storyline: “Is that Mama? / No, that’s not Mama….that’s just a pirate ship.” Strongly recommended.

Kisses for Daddy, by Frances Watts and David Legge (Little Hare Books, 2005; for ages 1-5, I’d say): This is a simple, lightweight picture book with bears, whose title pretty much says it all.

When Bunny Grows Up, by Patricia and Richard Scarry (Golden Books, 1998; ages 1-5): Baby bunny's family tries to guess what he will be when he grows up--a fireman? a lion tamer? a train conductor? Nuts to all that. Baby bunny wants to be a full-time daddy when he grows up. Originally published in 1955, When Bunny Grows Up was way ahead of its time, and it's perfect for families with a stay-at-home dad.

The Complete Adventures of Curious George, by Margaret and H.A. Rey (Houghton Mifflin, 1941-1966; ages 1-5): Is the Man with the Yellow Hat the equivalent of George’s father? If not that, I’m not sure what he is.

Daddy’s Lullaby, by Tony Bradman, illustrated by Jason Cockcroft (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2001; ages 2-5): Dad comes home late from work and sings a lullaby to his baby. A very tender book, which shows a working Dad in a caring role.

My Dad, by Anthony Browne (FSG, 2000; ages 2-5): With one or two lines of text per page, the goofy pictures dominate. Dad (in a bathrobe, PJs, and slippers) engages in various fantastical adventures, from jumping over the moon to singing opera with Pavarotti. Silly and sweet.

A Father’s Song, by Janet Lawler, paintings by Lucy Corvino (Sterling, 2006; ages 3-6): A simple, somewhat solemn verse story about a father and son’s day in the park, beautifully illustrated.

Mama’s Coming Home, by Kate Banks, pictures by Tomek Bogacki (FSG, 2003; ages 3-6): Similar to Mama’s Home (above), a solid and heartfelt portrait of a reverse-traditional family in action. Dad and the kids clean up, cook dinner, and set the table, as a parallel narrative shows Mom trudging through sleeting rain and New York subway stations on her way home from work. Especially recommended.

Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, by Mo Willems (Hyperion, 2004; ages 2-6): Why is this story such an instant classic? There's something about Willems's tone, pacing, and combination of words and pictures that kids think is tons of fun, and I confess this is one of the books I most look forward to reading to Liko. Don't miss the sequel, Knuffle Bunny Too. Willems's daughter shares a name with the protagonist of his books, and these stories feel like mini-memoirs, depicting a dad who shares life with his growing little girl.

Daddy Calls Me Man, by Angela Johnson, paintings by Rhonda Mitchell (Orchard Books, 1997; ages 3-6): Dad doesn’t actually appear until near the end. And yet I think every previous page points to that moment, as a little boy paints a picture of everything that’s most important to him.

Papa, Do You Love Me? By Barbara M. Joosse, illustrated by Barbara Lavallee (Chronicle Books, 2005; ages 3-6): A father in a Kenyan village tells his son how much he loves him. This is a lovely book; the images in the words might be even more evocative than those in the pictures.

Tell Me One Thing, Dad, by Tom Pow, illustrated by Ian Andrew (Candlewick Press, 2004; ages 3-7): Dad reads Molly a story, but she’s not sleepy yet. She asks to hear one thing he knows about polar bears, crocodiles, and so on; at the end, Molly tells Dad things that she knows about him. This is a gentle, beautifully written, unusually paced, and interestingly illustrated story.

Horton Hatches the Egg, by Dr. Seuss (Random House, 1940; ages 3-7): You probably already know that Dr. Seuss was a genius. Not just a genius, but probably one of the most successful progressive writers of his day. From environmental responsibility (The Lorax) to anti-racism (Sneetches & Other Stories) to resistance to tyranny (Yertle the Turtle & Other Stories), Dr. Seuss could tackle any topic, no matter how terrible, and teach children something about how the world really works in ways that are inspiring and fun. In Horton Hatches the Egg, Dr. Seuss gives us an elephant hero who hatches himself an elephant-bird baby--and in the process, gives children an archetypal model of male caregiving.

And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, illustrated by Henry Cole (Simon & Schuster, 2005; ages 3-7): This picture book tells the somewhat-true story of Roy and Silo, two boy penguins in Central Park Zoo who shacked up together and adopted a baby penguin of their own, named Tango. And Tango Makes Three isn’t a boring “message” book that tries to teach your kids to be tolerant. It’s genuinely fun for kids to read. Gay dads might also want to check out Daddy’s Roommate, by Michael Willhoite.

A Father Like That, by Charlotte Zolotow, illustrated by LeUyen Pham (HarperCollins, 2008; ages 3-7): This picture book is actually about a boy who doesn’t have a father, but fantasizes about all the things they’d do together if Dad was around. In the end, his mom assures the boy that while he might never have the dad he wants, he could grow up to be the father he imagines. Yes, it’s somewhat depressing, and yet I think this could be a great Father’s Day gift for boys who really don’t have a dad in the picture. Single moms raising boys, take note.

Finally, for older kids, I’d like to mention Danny, Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl, illustrated by Quentin Blake (Knopf, 1975; ages 8-12): “When I was four months old, my mother died suddenly and my father was left to look after me all by himself,” says the narrator, Danny. “There was just the two of us, my father and me.” This is a beautifully told, amusingly imaginative, politically radical, and profoundly emotional tale of a son’s devotion to his father and a father’s devotion to his son. I read this out loud to my 3 year old. He followed the story and liked the characters and incidents, especially the bit when 9-year-old Danny drives a car. However, the plot is driven by the father’s desire to poach a rich man’s pheasants, which was too far outside of Liko’s experience for him to find it interesting. But this book is an outlaw classic that older kids (boys especially) may find evocative and thrilling.

Enforcing heterosexuality

Two brothers were attacked, and one killed, when a SUV full of homophobes saw them walking arm in arm:

[Jose] Sucuzhanay (suh-KOO-chen-eye) and his brother Romel, 38, were walking arm-in-arm after a night out when a sport utility vehicle pulled up near them at a Brooklyn stoplight, police said.

Witnesses said they heard the men in the car shouting anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs at the brothers. The attackers jumped out of the car and smashed a beer bottle over Jose Sucuzhanay’s head, hit him in the head with an aluminum baseball bat and kicked him, police said. Romel Sucuzhanay was able to get away; the attackers drove off after he returned and said he had called police, authorities said.

Alas, A Blog comments:

This reminds me of stories my father tells of when he used to walk arm-in-arm with a blind friend of his, and people would shout epithets at them out of car windows.

Both of these would, of course, be equally reprehensible if they involved actual gay couples. (In my father’s case, I think the harassment would be much more reprehensible if it had involved an actual gay couple, because my father and his friend could laugh off the insults in a way that would have been more difficult if the insults had functioned, as intended, as a way of reinforcing second-class status based on sexual orientation.) However, situations like these do remind me of something else that strikes me as important: Occasionally, I see discussions cropping up about why many men in America often aren’t physically affectionate with their each other. Well. There you go. A man’s being physically affectionate with a brother, or a male friend, isn’t just a violation of taboos about showing femininity. It’s assuming a risk of harassment and violence.

The lives of gay men are more affected by this, of course, in shocking and horrible ways. But the enforcement of masculinity and heterosexuality is bad for many men, gay and straight.

"Fail to walk the air"

Something really freaking smart from Ta-Nahesi Coates:

In the arena of racial progress, I know of only a few more destructive forces, than the black pathology disciples, the coterie of writers, editors, scholars and pundits who see black folks mainly as pure-bred descendants of slaves, and the worse end of a gaggle of socio-economic data. This isn't a left-right deal. The theory of the black automaton programmed simply by oppression, on the left, or dysfunctional culture, on the right, leaves no room for Rakim, for Zora Neal Hurston, for my woman's clear, beautiful skin, for actual humanity.

This is why neither lefties nor righties can get a handle on this blacks and gay marriage thing. Instead of asking how groups who've been oppressed have traditionally behaved toward other groups under duress, they posit a black version of the madonna/whore complex, in which blacks are supposed to be this font of American liberalism, and are ripped when we don't live up to that standard. It's a trip. This country was built by white people fleeing oppression. Yet to hear these fools tell it, you'd think that experience stopped them from slaughtering the Indians and enslaving blacks.

And therein is the ultimate upshot of reducing black humanity--it ultimately reduces white humanity. It pretends that whites are always perfectly rational, and that their interactions with race aren't complicated and contradictory. Dig's Arana implicit proposition, for instance, that there is some pure strain monoracial strain of black--or even white--and how it basically eradicates one of the great unspoken crimes of slavery and Jim Crow--the widespread rape of black women. Once you understand your own fraility, your own contradictory nature, once you understand (to take it back to Baraka) that you yourself are beautiful though you "sometimes fail to walk the air," once you get your own flawed genius, you'll understand ours. Because in the end, there is no fundamental difference.

Supremes uphold rights of lesbian moms

Good news from bad:

The U.S. Supreme Court has let stand a ruling that Virginia must enforce a Vermont court order awarding child-visitation rights to a mother's former lesbian partner.

The high court Monday declined to hear the case of Lisa Miller, who claimed that the Virginia Supreme Court improperly ignored a state law and constitutional amendment that prohibit same-sex unions and the recognition of such arrangements from other states.

The decision let stand a victory for Janet Jenkins, who has been fighting for visitation rights since the dissolution of the civil union she and Miller obtained in Vermont in 2000. Miller gave birth to the daughter, Isabella, in 2002, and the child was at the center of a legal battle closely watched by national conservative and gay-rights groups. (Associated Press)

I can't post this without noting that this family is obviously in a terrible situation. As Mothertalkers notes, "Few things annoy me more than a lesbian mom who splits from her partner and then sues for custody on the basis that the ex's sexual orientation makes her unfit to parent"--which is, in fact, what happened. But this is still a victory for the rights of lesbian moms.

"Thank you for clarifying this very sensitive issue"

'Gays Too Precious To Risk In Combat,' Says General

Transracial adoption

Via my pal Howie, here's an imperfect but interesting essay in the Seattle Stranger about transracial adoption:

It would be easier for white people if race did not exist. Or if everyone could agree that race did not matter, that is. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "transracial" first appeared publicly in a 1971 Time magazine article. The article introduced transracial adoption, or adoption across racial boundaries—most often white parents adopting children of color—and reported a strange phenomenon. According to a study in Britain, some white parents "tended to 'deny their child's color, or to say he was growing lighter, or that other people thought he was suntanned and did not recognize him as colored. Sometimes the reality was fully accepted [by the parents] only after the very light child had grown noticeably darker after being exposed to bright sunlight on holiday.'"

It's such an outrageous finding that it sounds like a joke. Stephen Colbert's dimwitted white-guy alter ego has a joke like this, when he says on The Colbert Report, always in the most ridiculous of situations: "As you know, I don't see color." The joke is funny because in so many ways it's true. Plenty of white people don't see color. We refuse to look at it, prefer not to see too much difference, because difference almost always makes us feel bad by comparison.

Transracial adoption is awkward to discuss at first, because although it is designed to chart a radically integrated future, on the surface its structure repeats the segregated past. Just look at the basic structure of a family and apply race to the equation. The most crude way to put it: Whites are in charge, children of color are subordinate, and adults of color are out of the picture. And that's not even talking about class.

And yet there are more of these families now than ever. The exact number of transracial adoptees in this country is unknown, but the practice, which began in earnest in the 1970s, has been on the rise for at least 10 years. Twenty-six percent of black children adopted from foster care in 2004—about 4,200 kids—were adopted transracially, almost all by white parents, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect at Cornell University and the Department of Health and Human Services. That figure is up from 14 percent in 1998 and, according to adoption experts, it has continued to climb. The 2000 census, the first to collect information on adoptions, counted just over 16,000 white households with adopted black children. In the last 15 years, Americans have adopted more than 200,000 children from overseas, but that trend is cooling off, partly because international adoptions are so expensive.

Kids vs. Religion, continued

Two years ago (!) we at Daddy Dialectic had a very good, substantial discussion about whether kids need religion. (The original post was written by contributor Chip, who is now "retired" from blogging.)

The discussion continues. A fellow named Wes stopped by and posed some interesting questions: How do agnostics best approach the Christmas season and traditions with their children? At what age would you begin cultivating that appreciation of the differences between the faiths? At Jewish Community Center preschool (which my gentile son attends), if asked by another child if he is Jewish, what would your child say? And so on.

I confess that I've only given Wes some half-baked responses; I'm too distracted by holiday activities to come up with something coherent. But perhaps you, dear reader, have intelligent things to say? You can leave them here or revisit that discussion thread.