Liko blows out a candle

"Daddy, where does the fire go after you blow it out?"

"Where do you think it goes?"

"I think it goes to where they keep the fire. It's flying through the air right now into these pipes that go to a factory where they use the fire to make things like...[looks around the room]...furniture."

What? No Porn?

The Daddy Shift

My new (first!) book, The Daddy Shift, is now available for order everywhere books are sold, and its very first review appears in this month's issue of Mothering magazine:

In The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the American Family, Jeremy Adam Smith leaves no stone unturned in his adroit navigation of the slippery terrain of the changing role of "dad." Part lucidly written historical, social, and economic analyses of moneymaking and caregiving roles, and part eloquent portraits of stay-at-home dads of various cultural backgrounds (including gay couples), the book covers a lot of ground. But it never feels as if Smith is stretching to make his points. His investigations are very well researched, and he's pursued them with a rigorous intellectual integrity that makes his arguments engagingly persuasive. The result is an impressive book that even the childless should read, for at essence, The Daddy Shift is not just about stay-at-home dads, but about the changing roles of men and women in society.

Not a bad start. And my publisher, Beacon Press, even made this nice little promotional video. Embed it on your blog, forward it to friends! Here are some upcoming Bay Area events:

On May 30th at 2 pm, I will conduct a workshop for new and expectant parents on father involvement at Natural Resources in San Francisco. Come explore how new fathers and mothers can equally share in the joys and burdens of parenthood. Emphasis will be placed on successful co-parenting relationships and in understanding and overcoming obstacles to father involvement. To sign up, call 415 550-2611 or email info@naturalresources-sf.com. Co-sponsored by the Bay Area Homebirth Collective.

On Saturday, June 6, at 7 pm, Cover to Cover will host a release party for The Daddy Shift. Cover to Cover is located in San Francisco, 1307 Castro St (between 24th St & Jersey St). Come one, come all.

On Sunday, June 14 at 5 pm, Jeremy will read at an event for Rad Dad, which won the 2009 Independent Press Award for best  'zine. The reading will be held at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley, CA.

I want to thank all of Daddy Dialectic's readers and contributors, whose stories and comments through the years have helped shape my ideas about parenthood in America. I'm grateful. And I hope you'll consider purchasing a copy of The Daddy Shift--especially for friends and relatives (or even spouses...) who may be questioning why parents would want to share in caring for their children.

because you never know -- the intro to rad dad 13

Just a note to say that a bunch of local radical parents (including your very own Jeremy Adam Smith) will have a reading at Pegasus Bookstore in downtown Berkeley on June 14th at 5 pm -- spread the word and come out and say hi -- it should be a lot of fun! Here's my introduction to the newest issue of Rad Dad, nominated this year for an Independent Press Award for best 'zine:

Trust me. I was planning on writing this kick ass introduction for the fourth year anniversary issue of Rad Dad. The debut issue premiered at the 2005 SF Anarchist Bookfair (I make it sound all glamorous but really, I didn’t even have a table then, but occupied the free space outside the building). A lot of stuff has happened since then. I have met some amazingly inspiring and radical parents; the bookfair itself had evolved to include a kids’ space; last year we even had an anarchist parents panel! And, yes, now I have a table in the building. So I was all ready to write this articulate, perceptive, engaging manifesto on anarchism and parenting called A Primer on Potties, Procreation, and Politics. Or something clever like that. Trust me, I was.

But instead I find myself focusing on the little things. The small moments of fathering that bring my head and heart back to what is right in front of me. And upon reflection, I realize that it is in fact those very moments that all the theory and planning is put in to practice. It is in those moments we learn and test and reevaluate our values and morals; we discover our politics; we reveal on our honesty, our vulnerability, our humanity. What can be more radical than that? There is nothing wrong with theory and philosophy; in fact, I still want to write that manifesto, (someone out there wanna collaborate with me???) but for this introduction to Rad Dad 13, drummmrolll please, the anti-authoritarian anarchist zine on parenting, I simply want to share with you a few stories that for me get to the heart of this amazing, challenging, never static position we parents find ourselves in:

That coulda been…

Just two days before my daughters and I are leaving on a 5 week trip to southeast Asia, I hear a call come into my home phone. It’s a collect call. My heart freezes; it’s from my son, who is being held in county jail, no longer a juvenile but now an eighteen year old “adult.” I’m frustrated and confused. I can barely find out what happened because the cops are arrogant and condescending in my attempt to check on his situation and well-being. No help, no sympathy. I am told that after he tried to evade police, they “subdued” him. Subdued?! What the fuck does that mean? I ask if he is hurt in any way. The officer says, ‘I looked at his mug shot and his face seems fine. Just a bloody nose.’ I can’t even talk to my son about what happened because the phones are monitored.

Then there are the other questions: should we still go? should we change our plans? After much discussion, we depart leaving his mother and the rest of our community to handle the situation, which doesn’t appear to be over any time soon.

We had been in Thailand for just a week. It was a few days after New Years. We were at the point of feeling a bit homesick, missing our home in Berkeley and Oakland, when a person whom we met on the road says, damn you folks in Oakland are crazy.

Oscar Grant had been murdered, and in the aftermath, the people in Oakland took to the streets. Not knowing anything abut the situation, we make our way to an internet café and watch the video of his murder and of the protests on the streets of our home. My kids and I are stunned. We look at each other; we are all angry and horrified. There is nothing to say really. Until Ella, my youngest asks, how old was he?

Twenty two, I say.

Why’d they shoot him?

I shake my head.

Why does this happen? she asks.

At this point in her life, she knows me and knows my by now predictable stance on police brutality, on the need to rethink our criminal justice system and its affects on young people and people of color.

But what can I say now?

I don’t know why this happens, I respond.

She says that coulda been Dylan, that coulda been our brother.

I know, I say.

I know.

Kow Jai

After a few weeks of traveling, my daughters and I had the chance to meet up with Julia, a woman we meet earlier in our trip through a friend and who helped us out while we were in Bangkok. When we first met, I had been feeling a bit overwhelmed, and she was a blessing, showing us around the city for a couple days, making us feel at home. Her generosity really helped calm and relax me, something I needed after dealing with the stress of my son in jail and the reality of jet lag and the 15 hour time difference that hit me like a punch in the face (though my kids seemed amazingly unaffected!)

So we’re all there joking and feeling good; but it’s her laugh that is so amazing. It’s the best laugh: loud, guff, like a punchline. When she laughs, all three of us look at each and laugh even harder. To make matters worse, she speaks exactly like Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin; I can’t listen to her without smiling. The shitty thing I realize is that she’s the exact kinda person -- white, from the Midwest, dreads, yes dreads, hippie girl -- I would probably roll my eyes at, make some hasty generalization about with in earshot of my kids.

And my kids would hear and listen.

Yet when I, a complete stranger, needed some help, she was there, genuinely, asking no favor, nor thanks.

We we’re sitting around, telling stories over iced coffee - yes my daughters convinced me that they should be able to drink iced coffee while in Thailand -- don’t ask me how – discussing the differences we noticed between Thais and people in California. It just so happens, she’s is also tutoring this 13 yr old Thai girl who had asked the same exact question that morning. Julia says she’s not sure what the difference is and perhaps there really is no difference between us all. (I said she’s a hippy right)...

And then Ella shares with us all the Thai phrases she’s taught herself from her little Thai phrase book. After a few, she shares this one: ‘I don’t understand’ in Thai is ‘mai kow jai.’

Julia asks, so you wanna know what that literally means. It means ‘it has not entered my heart.’ Jai means heart and Kow means to enter or come into.

She smiles and I turn to her and ask, so when you wanna say ‘I understand’ you are saying: ‘it has entered my heart’?

That’s so amazing.

Oh yeaaah, she says, Thaïs always talk about their heart.

I say, that’s so opposite of us; we always talk about the mind. When do we ever talk about heart?

We both smile and she takes out her journal and writes a note about this to share with her student.

I look at my kids sipping their coffee and say: Ella and Zora kow jai. Kow jai.

Jai. Heart.

Why we do what we do

Here’s my favorite story from our travels. We were on a boat traveling between islands in the southwest of Thailand. The night before we had been struggling over the reality that my children were assigned homework to do while they were traveling. And not just some – shit loads. The school district doesn’t seem to think that they will learn anything outside of a classroom, regardless of the fact that the kids learned more about life in those five weeks than what could possibly be covered by the California state grade standards.

For example: the exchange rate for the Cambodian Riel is 4,226.87 for 1 dollar. Try figuring out how much a meal is when the bill’s 47,500 Riels? They learned phrases of Thai and Cambodian. They witnessed the social realties of global poverty. And talk about gender. Try explaining why we kept seeing signs about the dangers of “sex tourism” as well as the preponderance of so many older white men with super young Thai women.

Kids see a lot.

So as we were on the boat, we saw these fish jumping out of the water and flapping their little fishy wings like they were flying. We were amazed at them, whole schools jumping out and flying. I asked my youngest daughter why she thought that they evolved that way? What makes them do it? She shook her head and guessed that maybe they were escaping predators. I said, or perhaps it’s to see other fishies they wanna eat. Or maybe to breathe, she guessed.

Feeling like a good teacher helping my children rationally examine the world through the good ol’ scientific method, I turned to my middle child happily sitting there, head in a book, and I asked her why she thought they did that.

She looked at me and then looked out over the water and then without the slightest bit of hesitation said simply: because it’s fun. She returned to her reading.

I smiled. Yes. Because it’s fun.

It’s true: sometimes we do things because it’s fun.

Because it feels right.

Sometimes, there is no better reason.

So one of these next issues, I will address the historical implications of anarchist tendencies in regards to the notion of discipline. Or, How to Say ‘No’ the Anarchist Way. But for now, I am doing this because it feels right.

Because it’s fun.

Because it has entered my heart.

Practical Feminism, Part 1: A Belated Mother's Day Tribute

I fell out of love with my mother at the age of 26.

Of course, what I fell out of love with wasn’t really my mother; it was a certain relationship with my mother, which was the model until then for how I attempted to love all women. It didn’t work. It couldn’t, for me or for the women I attempted to love.

Within 6 years of that momentous event, and after a good number of romantic misfires, I married a woman who happened to share many of my mother’s best characteristics, both physical and spiritual: her rich black hair, her modesty, her elegant, practical intelligence, and her drive for personal independence won through a professional career.

My wife’s ambitions are self-conscious and grounded in an engagement with feminism. There is a tall bookshelf in our living room devoted exclusively to women’s studies, to the history, sociology, psychology, and economics of women, gender, sexuality and feminism. When I first met her, her two degrees were hung prominently on the wall, and she had developed elaborate strategies for deflecting her parent’s nagging: When was she going to get married? Did she want to have children? Why was she still single?

My mother’s feminism, on the other hand, was entirely untheoretical. She was part of no movement. She did not steep herself in (then non-existent) undergraduate women’s studies, nor in 60’s campus counterculture, nor in women’s issues generally. She didn’t come from a family with pronounced ideological commitments to social causes. Her father was an Ivy-educated, domineering, and quick-witted accountant from Philadelphia whose wife, my grandmother, dropped out of college after only one year to marry him.

After my mother was born, and my grandfather returned from the war in Europe, my grandmother became his secretary, working in an office on the ground floor directly across the hall from his. They were clearly -- even to me as a little boy -- a couple in love. They gardened together behind the grand old house they had acquired from one of Cincinnati’s minor industrial barons; they both loved the drawings of M.C. Escher and the humor of James Thurber, they both enjoyed bird watching, the Muppet Show, the same sweet dessert liquors, and the music of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

But it was always clear that a Patriarch towered at the apex of my mother’s family. And I am convinced that my grandmother’s lifelong subscription to National Geographic and her devotion to PBS programming were attempts to make up for, through self-directed enrichment, the college degree she gave up in order to be the Patriarch’s wife.

Social change often works in microscopic, capillary ways. From this decidedly conventional family background, my mother went to college and graduated, all with the support of grandfather the Patriarch. She then continued on to law school, among the first generation of women to do so in any significant numbers, and earned a Juris Doctorate. My grandfather didn’t understand why she wanted this, but again he supported her. Along the way, my mother met a man who later became a college professor -- my father -- who would never make as much money as she did.

Within one generation, my mother had outstripped my grandmother’s educational achievements, and by the beginning of her professional career, she had completely overturned the household role models she had grown up with, effectuating a family revolution of practical feminism. My father followed my mother in the early years, and tailored his career moves to suit hers. For a few years in my toddlerhood, he was a stay-at-home-dad. Yet no one complained, and my mother now sees herself as just another working professional. Maybe if my grandmother had finished college, she might have found a job and a route to independence back in the 1940’s. But it’s not clear that she really wanted to; and even if she had, it’s not clear how far she could have gone. My mother did want to, and it just so happened that circumstances had evolved in her favor. Now she has helped to change those same circumstances even further.

My mother saw her chance, and she took it. As a consequence, perhaps in unconscious imitation, I am now following in my father’s footsteps, raising a child with a woman who will probably always make more money than I ever could, and doing my stint at an at-home-dad. It feels very familiar, very matter-of-fact, and although I know in my head that there are more and more families in which the woman makes as much as, if not more than, the man, I am always privately surprised that it is not still more common.

Small actions can have large ramifications over the course of a few generations. En masse, they can amount to broad social changes in attitudes, opportunities, and behaviors. My grandfather saw no need to encourage the education of his wife and embodied many of the prejudices of his generation, but he provided his daughter with all possible resources to fuel her ambitions. He was in many ways a difficult man, but his loving open-mindedness allowed my mother to flourish. That, in turn, made for a loving mother who allowed her son to flourish, and left the son, now an adult, to wonder “Where will I be able to find anything comparable to this?”

Fortunately, after many years of looking, I have.

[This post also appears on Dad's Book of Days]

What happens when compassion hurts?

This is the edited transcript of a May 7 talk I gave to the nurses of UC Berkeley Health Services on surviving compassion fatigue. It occurs to me that it applies just as much to parents. Originally posted to the Greater Good blog.

I’m going to warn you: This is a somewhat difficult talk, full of paradoxes. I’m going to talk about the best in human nature and behavior, and also the worst. I’m going to talk about how human beings seem designed to care for each other, but also how the grind of daily care can be soul-destroying. And in the end, I hope to share my thoughts on how we can work with other people to bring out the good in each of us.

I’m an early riser, and I do most of my writing in the early morning. A month ago, I was walking to a coffee shop at 6:30 am, and I was doing what I often do during my early morning walks, which is to look around at the Victorians and hills and mist of the place where I live and think about how beautiful all of it is.

Without warning, I felt a blow on the back of my head, and someone ran past me holding a tire iron.

It's Funny! Because it's TRUE! Argh!

Autoworkers Compete to Keep Jobs, Livelihoods on New Reality Show

Are Men in Crisis?

I just returned from the annual Chicago conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, which consisted of a series of briefings and discussions about cutting-edge research into the family. Highlights:

• Clinical psychologist Diane Ehrensaft started off talking about her work with “gender variant children”—boys and girls who, from a very early age, decide to embrace identities as the opposite gender—and their families. Many parents, Ehrensaft said, struggle to get their boys to be boys and girls to be girls, with especially intense pressure on boys. The problem, she argued, is that there is a clear link between the mental health of the child and support of parents for the identity the child embraces. Ehrensaft tries to help parents form what she calls a "transcendent" family, which doesn't attempt to impose rigid gender roles.

• Sociologist Barbara Risman and colleagues spent a year studying gender identity in a racially diverse Chicago middle school. Findings: Girls felt really free to play sports and didn't feel they had to play dumb to get a boyfriend. This is a big change from the past. However, they focused obsessively on the body—painting nails, dieting, etc.—and were often hyper-sexualized.

• Risman's findings about boys: Boys police each other's masculinity and sexuality ferociously. Part of this involved objectifying girls' bodies, even though they were not interested in actual sex (i.e., these boys were still very much children)—this is a form of play, albeit of a negative kind. So girls could do boy things, but boys couldn't do girl things, according to Risman's study. She used the example of a boy in the school named Marcus, who was not gender variant but was good at gymnastics and decided to be a cheerleader. As a result, he was teased, bullied, and so forth. The middle schoolers, both girls and boys, generally sanctioned the bullying. (Note that Risman’s conclusions echo those of another study run by University of Puget Sound sociologist C.J. Pascoe, reported in her 2007 book, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School.)

• On the other hand, psychologist Braden Berkey reported that he's seeing vastly more confident and mentally healthy lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered youth. So what, the audience asked, is going on with middle school boys? Ehrensaft proposed a partial answer: Middle school is a very particular developmental stage characterized by extreme rigidity. Gender nonconformity in girls has accrued a fair amount of cultural support, she suggested, thanks in large part to the feminist movement; boys, it seems, are still on their own and are reacting to ambiguity with inflexibility. Of course, the boys (and girls) are not reacting this way on their own; they reflect the responses of parents, teachers, and the culture at large.

• According to a new study by economist Bob Drago, coupled mothers still do twice as much childcare and are half as likely to work; at the same time, coupled mothers make almost three times more money than single moms. White women are twice as likely to have access to paid maternity leave than black and Latina women; meanwhile, only one in ten American fathers has access to any paternity leave, paid or unpaid. Drago tried to figure out what would happen if paid paternity leave were offered to men in traditional families, based on survey responses and analysis. Answer: It would make a dramatic difference for moms in terms of work and care balance.

• Black marriages, reported University of Kansas sociologist Shirley Hill, tend to be more stressful and more likely to result in divorce; black couples are also least likely to embrace traditional gender roles. At the same time, however, African Americans are more likely than other groups to say they favor marriage and traditional gender roles. The answer to this paradox, according to Hill, is that black women have had more economic resources than black men (which is not the case in other American families) and are picky and hardheaded about whom they marry—often looking for men who can be providers, when only a minority have historically been able to perform that role. Thus the black historical experience is at odds with black-community ideology, according to Hill; this can contribute to stress, which in turns hurts marriages.

• I ran a panel on “gender convergence”—that is, the phenomenon of men and women growing increasingly similar in terms of how they behave and what they want out of life. The discussion turned controversial when the first panelist, sociologist Reeve Vanneman, suggested that the forty-year trend of gender convergence is now over. He noted a substantial decline in media coverage of feminist activism; a spike in men’s earnings relative to women; a slight decline in mothers’ labor-force participation; and increasingly conservative cultural shifts, as documented by surveys. Most of the other panelists, and many audience members, disputed Vanneman’s interpretation of the numbers: For decades, the pace of change was staggeringly fast, with more and more women going to work; while it has leveled off during the past ten to fifteen years, the evidence shows that the behavior of men and women continues to converge. Vanneman saw the leveling off as a cessation; most researchers at the conference saw it as a slowing down, and in some areas of male behavior, the pace has actually picked up. University of Oxford researcher Oriel Sullivan, for example, noted increasingly high levels of male caregiving and housecleaning in the U.K. and the U.S.

After the gender convergence panel, University of California, Berkeley psychologist Philip Cowan told me that “everything everybody on the panel said was true.” It seems we live in a time when many things are happening simultaneously and many of the trends seem to contradict each other.

Later, psychologist Joshua Coleman suggested that the baton of the gender revolution, carried by women for so many decades, is now passing to men—in other words, men will be changing more rapidly than women. (This is actually one of the arguments of my book The Daddy Shift, though I don’t put it in those terms.)

That change is complicated. At the close of the conference, I chatted with Chicago Pop (who blogs here at Daddy Dialectic), Marc Vachon of Equally Shared Parenting, and a former stay-at-home dad turned grad student. Our talk gradually turned toward our children, how much happiness they gave us, and what challenges we faced as fathers.

Sounds dull and perhaps a bit trite, doesn’t it? But the conversation gave me pleasure, and I still recall it with a small warm feeling. I don’t believe we are unusual; I think plenty of other guys quietly prize time with children and see their wives as true partners, even if they are not the types to make pretty speeches about it all.

The next morning I was in a café at the Chicago airport. A group of homeland security officers sat at the table next to me, and I was struck by the homophobic, misogynist tenor of their conversation--disliked male co-workers were “fags”; females were “bitches.” These are the men who are supposed to be keeping us safe, but their emotional maturity matched the level of the middle-school boys Barbara Risman interviewed. Most of them, I’m sure, were fathers, but there was no place at that table for a language of care. Of course, each of those men has a life away from that table. There is more to each of these individuals than what I saw.

And indeed, my contrast might strike you as smug—a more educated guy looking down on a group of working-class guys—but that gulf is precisely what I want to highlight: To an unprecedented degree, today the ice sheet of “masculinity” is breaking up and the pieces are drifting further and further apart. While I present those two conversations in Chicago as binary poles, most men live somewhere along the spectrum. Most men, I believe, would not want to join either conversation: They would simultaneously sneer at the one group of “sensitive” dads and at the other group of homophobic misogynists. And, interestingly, today those men don’t have to join one or the other: They can sit down at their own table and they will find companions.

I reckon that will be the condition of men for quite a long time--that is, a state of fragmentation, contradiction, alienation, and confusion. The apparent consensus by the end of the CCF conference was that masculinity is in what one speaker called an “invisible crisis,” in which men are confused about where to draw the lines of intimacy and respect, as well as of violence. This invisible crisis will likely be the topic of next year’s Council on Contemporary Families conference.

For a summary of new and surprising findings that came out of this year's conference, see CCF’s new report, "Unconventional Wisdom."

Moon Up There

One January morning, in temperatures that now seem as unbelievable, ridiculous, and as distant in time as the reign of the dinosaurs or the divine right of kings, I took the dogs for their first walk of the day. Wearing gear designed for polar exploration, I was comfortable enough to enjoy the modest consolations of winter mornings: the peculiar sound of very cold snow compacting under my feet, like the crushing of Styrofoam; steam rising from the storm drains; the silence of cities at dawn.

But these are all adult flavors of experience, and I wouldn't rush home to tell my son about them. When I saw the moon on the western horizon, however, this had to be communicated. In fact, if I managed to get the sled team inside before the earth advanced a few more degrees in its rotation, I might even be able to show him. Right at the breakfast table, out the kitchen window, like an extra page that had been magically inserted at very end of Goodnight Moon.

While we were faster than the earth's rotation, we weren't as fast as the clouds that quickly descended from the north. By the time Spot and I were seated and looking out the window, the western horizon and the morning moon above it were gone.

"Spot, the moon is out there. Right now it's just hiding behind the clouds." We ate. "Moon up there," Spot said, turning he head and looking out the window, at the fog.

"Not yet; it's behind the clouds, but it's coming. It's there." And sure enough, within moments the clouds had passed, and like a vindicated Galileo before his telescope I pointed out the window at the frosty white globe in the growing light.

"Moon up there!"

In the weeks that passed, we rarely saw the morning moon again. It was either absent on the clear mornings or, for all we knew, hiding behind the clouds on overcast ones. But the moon had obviously not disappeared from the universe, it had not exploded or for some other reason been deleted from his private planetarium. Spot seemed to know this with certainty, and almost every morning would sit with his yogurt or oatmeal in front of him and gesture out the window.

"Moon hiding cloud," even on the clear days.

Now he was telling me what was what, sharing with me what I had taught him. But what had I taught him? The mystery of his assertion sunk in as it was repeated virtually every morning.

Moon hiding cloud. Up there somewhere.

There was room enough in his boxy toddler thought, it occurred to me, for the wildest prophetic vision, and the most sober scientific observation, for the flaming poetry of Elijah as well as the reasoning of Galileo.

Elijah: what Spot is really expressing is not certainty, but expectation; not knowledge, but hope. The Messiah will return someday, and when obscurity is removed we will see the heavens as they really are. Indeed, he will return together with Elijah in a flaming chariot, to "turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and the hearts of children to their fathers."

Or, Galileo: working the problem through between gulps of porridge, Spot has observed a certain regularity in the phenomena of the celestial spheres, and it is therefore a matter of the highest probability that, based on earlier and repeated direct observation, the appearance of the moon is likely -- though not certain -- to be reoccur most often at night, but occasionally in the morning, just in time for breakfast and shortly before Curious George.

So, still uncertain whether my son was a budding Prophet or a junior Galileo, I leashed up the dogs for the evening walk sometime in late February. As on other frigid nights, we see the steam from the manholes, hear the sharp crunch of cold snow, and now we see the doormen dozing in the doorways. Turning the last corner on the way home, back to my sleeping household, we see -- the dogs and I -- a full moon high in the winter sky.

Whatever Spot may think about the harmony of the celestial spheres, of Galileo, Aristotle, Copernicus, or Elijah, a sublunary truth became clear to me on the moonlit stretch of sidewalk: that now, when I saw the moon, I shared his excitement. I saw the moon through his eyes. Had he not been asleep, I would have told him, taken him to the window, and together looked up. After 40 years of imperfect existence on an irregular globe, this, it seems to me, is what I have been shooting for all along.

Yes, how about that. Moon up there.

Random News, Mostly about Me

1. Greater Good (the magazine where I work as senior editor) has been nominated for another Independent Press Award in the category of "Best Social/Cultural Coverage." The new issue of Greater Good tackles the question, Why do we make art? You can read most of the essays online.

2. There is now a Wikipedia page about me. The book release party for my book The Daddy Shift will happen on Saturday, June 6, 7 pm, at Cover to Cover books on Castro St. in San Francisco. On Sunday, June 14 at 5 pm, I'll read at an event for the 'zine Rad Dad. The reading will be held at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley, CA.

3. In January 2010, WW Norton will be publishing The Compassionate Instinct, co-edited by me, Dacher Keltner, and Jason Marsh. In Spring 2010, Beacon Press will publish Are We Born Racist?, which I also co-edited.

4. Andrea Doucet, a Canadian sociologist who wrote an important academic book about stay-at-home dads, is now turning her attention to breadwinning moms. She's set up a new discussion forum for the moms, and I hope you (or your wife/partner) will join her.

5. I got mugged on April 4--my birthday!--and now I'm recovering from a concussion. Hence, the relatively long silence. Some thoughts on that later. And on that note, watch this video, "Warriors Against War":

Decency in Iowa

Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal refuses support Senate Minority Leader Paul McKinley's effort to amend the state constitution to ban gay and lesbian marriage on April 6, 2009, the first day the Senate met after the unanimous decision by the Iowa Supreme Court to allow same sex couples to marry:



Transcript
One of my daughters was in the workplace one day, and her particular workplace at that moment in time, there were a whole bunch of conservative, older men. And those guys were talking about gay marriage. They were talking about discussions going on across the country.

Any my daughter Kate, after listening for about 20 minutes, said to them: You guys don't understand. You've already lost. My generation doesn't care.

I think I learned something from my daughter that day, when she said that. And I've talked with other people about it and that's what I see, Senator McKinley. I see a bunch of people that merely want to profess their love for each other, and want state law to recognize that.

Is that so wrong? I don't think thats so wrong. As a matter of fact, last Friday night, I hugged my wife. You know I've been married for 37 years. I hugged my wife. I felt like our love was just a little more meaningful last Friday night because thousands of other Iowa citizens could hug each other and have the state recognize their love for each other.

No, Senator McKinley, I will not co-sponsor a leadership bill with you.

Paternity Leave: The Ultimate Family Vacation

And here's the result of my second collaboration with DadLabs:



I like the way this one turned out. It makes a strong 5-minute case for paternity leave, and the DadLab guys' descriptions of bonding with their kids during leave are really moving. If you think more guys should take leave when it's available and if you think more paternity leave should be available, then spread this segment around. We might change some minds.

Why Not Dad?

Why Not Dad?, says the film's website, "is the result of 9 months of ethnographic collaboration between the filmmakers and a group of stay-at-home fathers in San Francisco. Weekly contact with the men and their children gave rise to an unprecedented filmmaking collaboration in which the fathers were able to help shape the direction and development of the film." Which sounds a trifle dry; the film is actually warmer than one would expect an "ethnographic collaboration" to be. You can can watch it here:

Why Not Dad? @ Yahoo! Video

Notes on children and violence

I am guilty guilty GUILTY of neglecting my blogs, especially Daddy Dialectic. I've had a lot going on with my so-called career. But mainly, I blame Facebook, which has started to suck up a startling amount of online energy.

For years, I've been writing articles and blog entries on the science behind kids and violence, and recently I've felt like all those bits and pieces have started to come together into a coherent narrative. Last week I posted some notes on children and violence to my Facebook page, which drew some interesting comments from friends, including Dawn Friedman, who writes the blog This Woman's Work, and Gerard Jones, author of Killing Monsters and Men of Tomorrow. I am sharing my notes below along with reader comments--since I haven't asked anyone's permission, including Gerard's, the reader comments are anonymous. I invite your thoughts as well.

Evolutionary and psychological roots of violence:

1. Violent feelings are natural, and have an evolutionary basis

2. Measured in terms of the number of acts, childhood is the most violent period of human life; as they grow humans learn to avoid violence

3. It’s an empirical fact that the vast majority of mature humans avoid real-world violence at all costs

4. A minority of humans do act violently; thus sooner or later, we are all confronted with violence

5. Imaginary violence is not the same thing as real-world violence, but it is a form of preparation for the real thing

Violence in children:

6. All children, boys and girls alike, need physical play

7. For young children, violent play is a form of physical play

8. Violent play exists because it is a way of dramatizing conflict and learning to control violent feelings; this is how we prepare to confront real-world violence

9. Teaching children to repress violent feelings (and violent play) is not the same thing as teaching them to control those feelings

10. Violent and scary play is a way of confronting scary things and learning about conflict in a controlled, fantasy way

11. Adults often seek to repress violent childplay because they cannot control real-life violence; thus, adults teaching children to conceal violent feelings or play is itself a kind of escapist fantasy: If we don't see the expression of violence, we imagine that it does not exist. This is a comfort; it's also delusional.

Ways for adults to foster peacefulness in children:

12. If we behave violently, so will our children; thus we adults should never, ever be violent, except in the most extreme circumstances

13. Imposing rules and limitations on violent play without repressing it helps children learn to control the expression of real-world violence; it also helps demarcate imaginary and real-world violence

14. But the real key to reducing real-world, one-on-one violence is to foster empathy and self-control

15. The best way to foster empathy and self-control is to foster the imagination (i.e., conscience)

16. Fostering imagination allows children and young adults to conceptualize and pursue pathways away from violence

17. This is something they must learn to do on their own; it’s a long-term process accomplished over many years

18. The process consists of questions, conversations, modeling, and also stories…

19. Telling developmentally appropriate stories with violence in them is one way to help this process along. For example, The Iliad is mind numbingly violent and Achilles is the most violent character in The Iliad; and yet when Achilles and Priam weep together, the consequences of violence are revealed to Achilles as well as the reader; Achilles regains his humanity and his sense of restraint. This is what matters in a story with violence in it: it must show the consequences of violence and the humanity of victims.

20. Violent stories without consequences are amoral and help foster real-world violence; this is something we should explicitly explain to children when they are old enough.

21. People need heroism; there are more ways to be heroic than to fight; children, especially boys, also need stories in which heroism is expressed in caring, nonviolent ways

22. Participating in political action (e.g., taking children to anti-war demonstrations) is also a good way to foster nonviolent ethics, by making it public and heroic

Selected, edited reader comments to the original note:

1. Am particularly taken with #19 (hadn't thought of Achilles's "redemption" quite like that), #20 (YESYESYES. If only Hollywood could hear you!) and #21 Can't just say no to a naturally occurring, evolutionarily-based inclination, must alchemize/channel it toward positive release.)

2. This makes me think of Rudolph Steiner's ideas about how imagination is crucial to the development of empathy and how fairytales and myths play into that.

3. I was very influenced by reading Who's Calling the Shots when we were grappling with our then-4-year old's interest in having a toy gun. It allowed me to ease up on trying to control N---'s play while still keeping a discussion open about our values. (As an aside, it's influenced how I'm handling Barbie with my daughter, too.)

4. I'm conflicted on this. I don't really think violence is "natural" for little kids. I think some kids are more physical than others, that there's a range, but violence as we understand it includes the intention to do harm, knowing the consequences of our physical acts, and i'm not sure little kids have that. That said, i totally agree with your point about empathy, not necessarily because of violence but because empathy is the foundation for social justice.

5. Part of the problem here is that we all use "violence" freely but rarely talk about what we mean by it. By this definition, no, violence isn't natural. But it's become common to refer to kids' make-believe shoot 'em ups and swordfighting as "violent play" and superhero cartoons as "violent entertainment." The "V word" has become a common way to politicize and dominate discussions.

6. Funny you should bring this up; just today I was watching a group of four-year-old boys engage in a series of imaginary superhero playfights that three times out of five turned into real fights, in the sense that excitement escalated and one of them ended up really hitting and one of them got really upset about it. Was it violence? I say yes, definitely, and I know that most researchers who study violence in children would consider it to be violence as well, albeit of the impulsive childlike variety. Context is everything: I don't think these little kids were being violent in the same sense that, say, a drug dealer is violent, or, for that matter, a policeman making an arrest or a soldier on a battlefield--in fact, each of those contexts--the motivation, the intention, the situation--are different, and produce different types of violence with different levels of potential for harm.

7. This is one reason some over-controlling (frightened) adults want to eliminate kids' rough play. Pretty common for some kid to go too far and some other kid to get hurt or mad. But that's one of the ways we learn boundaries and self-control. You hit your friend for real and the play date ends. It's a great way to learn where fantasy stops and reality starts. Too bad adults sometimes have such a hard time distinguishing between their own fear-based fantasies and their kids' realities...

President's Obama's family policy agenda

It's ambitious. Highlights:

* Strengthen Fatherhood and Families: Barack Obama has re-introduced the Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act to remove some of the government penalties on married families, crack down on men avoiding child support payments, ensure that support payments go to families instead of state bureaucracies, fund support services for fathers and their families, and support domestic violence prevention efforts. President Obama will sign this bill into law and continue to implement innovative measures to strengthen families.

* Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit: In both the Illinois State Senate and the U.S. Senate, Obama championed efforts to expand the EITC, which is one of the most successful anti-poverty programs to date. President Obama will reward work by increasing the number of working parents eligible for EITC benefits, increasing the benefit available to parents who support their children through child support payments, and reducing the EITC marriage penalty which hurts low-income families. Under the Obama-Biden plan, full-time workers making minimum wage will get an EITC benefit up to $555, more than three times greater than the $175 benefit they get today. If the workers are responsibly supporting their children on child support, the Obama-Biden plan will give those workers a benefit of $1,110.

* Extend Paid Sick Days to All Workers: Half of all private sector workers have no paid sick days and the problem is worse for employees in low-paying jobs, where less than a quarter receive any paid sick days. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will require that employers provide seven paid sick days per year.

* Expand the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA): The FMLA covers only certain people who work for employers with 50 or more employees. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will expand the FMLA to cover businesses with 25 or more employees, and to cover more purposes including allowing: leave for workers who provide elder care; 24 hours of leave each year for parents to participate in their children's academic activities at school; leave for workers who care for individuals who reside in their home for 6 months or more; and leave for employees to address domestic violence and sexual assault.

* Encourage States to Adopt Paid Leave: President Barack Obama will initiate a 50 state strategy to encourage all of the states to adopt paid-leave systems. Obama and Biden will provide a $1.5 billion fund to assist states with start-up costs and to help states offset the costs for employees and employers.

* Expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit: The Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit provides too little relief to families that struggle to afford child care expenses. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will reform the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit by making it refundable and allowing low-income families to receive up to a 50 percent credit for their child care expenses.

* Protect Against Caregiver Discrimination: Workers with family obligations often are discriminated against in the workplace. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will commit the government to enforcing recently-enacted Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines on caregiver discrimination.

* Expand Flexible Work Arrangements: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will address this concern by creating a program to inform businesses about the benefits of flexible work schedules for productivity and establishing positive workplaces; helping businesses create flexible work opportunities; and increasing federal incentives for telecommuting. Obama and Biden will also make the federal government a model employer in terms of adopting flexible work schedules and permitting employees to petition to request flexible arrangements.

* Support Parents with Young Children: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will expand programs like the successful Nurse-Family Partnership to all low-income, first-time mothers. The Nurse-Family Partnership provides home visits by trained registered nurses to low-income expectant mothers and their families. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis concluded that these programs produced an average of five dollars in savings for every dollar invested and produced more than $28,000 in net savings for every high-risk family enrolled in the program. The Obama-Biden plan will assist approximately 570,000 first-time mothers each year.

The sad inevitability of Kelsey Grammer

Get ready, here it comes:

Will Americans be able to laugh about the scariest recession in recent memory? Will brands be willing to take part in such potentially perilous merriment?

ABC hopes the answer to both is yes, as the Walt Disney TV network readies two comedy pilots about the recent Wall Street carnage and the sad toll it's taken on that once-mighty warrior, the investment banker.

One is an untitled project starring Kelsey Grammer, who plays a Wall Street millionaire unhorsed by the collapsing economy and forced into a "Mr. Mom"-like role at home with the family he hardly ever saw. The other is "Canned," a pilot about several younger Gen X friends fired from their lofty perch at an investment bank.

"This is America"

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Nothing to do with parenthood...not directly. But still, every American should see this segment.

Prolegomena to a Theory of Mom Behavior

Half the time I don’t feel too weird about being the only dad in my son’s parent-tot nursery school class. The other half of the time I freak out.

The half of the time I’m not freaking out, I’m thinking Hey, you’re a person with a kid, I’m a person with a kid, you’ve got a back story, I’ve got a back story, we’re here for an hour-and-a-half and we’re both human beings so let’s share some tips and then get down on the floor and insert ourselves into the storyline playing out on the plastic Fisher Price parking garage.

The half of the time I’m freaking out, on the other hand, I’m feeling like I’ve accepted the invitation to someone’s church or temple or otherwise non-specific place of worship, which is fine, but when people start standing and sitting and shouting and chanting when you’re not expecting it then it starts to make you nervous because you don’t know what the hell’s going on and you wind up leaving with a headache and perhaps even cursing whatever the religion was that you were aping unsuccessfully.

Shortly after Spot was born I bought a t-shirt that read I Love Hot Moms, construing it primarily as a statement of affection for my post-partum wife, but also in some subconscious way as an assertion of my mojo and its continued existence: that things were still cooking under the lid, that even as an at home dad in a sea of moms, utterly subordinated to the starving animal that I had sired, even far beneath the weighty surface layers of parental rationality and obligations, the fires of Eros still crackled.

I’ve never worn that t-shirt. The t-shirt I should have bought, which I now know would have much greater social utility, is one that would read I Have a Penis: Will You Be My Friend? At the playground and at parent-tot class, this t-shirt would just put it out there, the existential structure of the I-Thou interface would be delineated in almost contractural fashion, and then people/moms, and maybe even people/dads too, could make up their minds to sign-on or not, and then we could all get on with our vicarious toddling without having to worry about all the implications that go along with one adult in the room having a penis when the others don’t.

Because there are implications, aren’t there? My wife thinks I’m making this all too complicated, and perhaps she’s right. Having gone to an all girl’s high-school, and been active in a sorority in college, she’s certain she has it figured out: women socialize in packs. The group is instrumental, and being left out of it is like being cast away on an iceberg when the tribe paddles to a new fishing ground. When the stakes are this high, once they’ve made it in then the next batch of newcomers is mercilessly policed. This is why the moms tend to supervise their toddlers, rather than play with them, standing back (rather than down on the floor) to deliberately empathize and sympathize among themselves about all the life-issues that I generally also empathize and sympathize about, without necessarily being inclined to schmoose about them.

A vignette from my field notes illustrates the point: Mom X is part of a couple that we socialize with, who had her boy about 6 months after we did. Mom X is very laid back, supportive, and warm, and we all get along. In the months before Mom X was due she began to strategize about socially surviving motherhood and with steely-eyed deliberation declared that she Needed to Get a Group of Mom-Friends, she Wanted to Make Sure They Weren’t Weirdos, and that she has Figured Out Where to Get Them.

By and large she has succeeded. And by and large this is the polar opposite of how I operate. I don’t have a strong desire to seek out other dads who are also primary care givers, the same way my gay friends don’t necessarily want to date or even hang out with everyone they know who is gay. If I manage to extract one true friend a year out of the voluminous slurry and dross of social life, I’m happy. If they happen to know what it’s like to be the point-man for potty training, well, that’s a plus, but not a prerequisite. But I find that most of the time what I want to talk about is the stuff I don’t get to talk about with Spot, like collateralized debt obligations, James Bond, the paleontological significance of Tiktaalik roseae, or Gertrude Stein. And when that isn’t working, I change into my fantasy partner costume and start naming all the stuffed animals.

[This post also appears on Dad's Book of Days]