No Stopping Sam: or, why very few babies are Hollywood scriptwriters

As baby Sam closes in on four months, I’ve given up on movies. Evening chores mean less time for entertainment. It used to be a question of just rocking, but now there’s bathing, massaging, feeding and burping, and that’s just my wife. By the time Sam’s sleeping, Fitzsimmons and I are too tired to commit to a 90-minute movie. Romances are out, obviously, and comedy disappeared some time ago. Which leaves domestic drama as our preferred genre.

So now instead of watching films, I invent my own. There’s some borrowing from Hollywood, because after all, making up stuff for a living is hard work. Last Thursday, as I walked with Sam on Van Ness Avenue at six in the morning, I thought up a twist on Speed, the 1994 thriller in which a bomb on a bus is primed to blow if the vehicle drops below 50mph. After fifteen blocks of steady metronomic footfalls, Sam had finally fallen asleep in his sling. Then I realised that not only was I a mile from home, but if I stopped moving, he’d wake up.

‘Halt and the baby explodes’ ran through my head as I jiggled uncomfortably while waiting for the Jackson Street traffic lights. I wondered whether a better tagline would include bombs, given the ticking detonator strapped to my chest, but I wasn’t sure I could sneak it past the censors. Americans are notoriously po-faced about combining nitroglycerine with babies. Plus it’d be tough to keep everything PG.

At Vallejo Street, Sam started to wake up and I had to get a move on before he began yelling. Unlike most British cities, San Francisco seems to have no highway regulations for the use of horn or police sirens before 7am, but given Sam’s Richter-like capabilities I’m pretty sure they’d say something. Walking downhill was handy for picking up speed – we were up to about 4mph. It doesn’t sound much compared to Sandra Bullock’s breakneck bus-driving, until you remember the extra fifteen pounds bouncing on my ribcage. For those of you who don’t have children, try to imagine all-you-can-eat pizza followed by a steeplechase.

We caught green lights at both Union and Greenwich, but I knew the real danger lay ahead. Lombard Street. Six lanes of commuter traffic sweeping in from Highway 101. The odds were against us. Even if we were lucky enough to catch the lights and Sam didn’t wake up, the exhaust fumes would probably kill us. It would be like snipping the blue wire only to find out that instead of defusing the bomb, you’ve started the countdown.

The lights were red. I cursed American streets, their rigid blocks and ridiculous jaywalking laws. Sam snuffled. We’d been walking now for nearly forty minutes. My shoulders throbbed. If he woke up, I might have to do the whole thing again. I looked west, towards the green treeline of the Presidio; there were no cars or cops on Lombard Street for three hundred yards. We could still make it. I leapt off the foot-high curb…

Later, after I’d defused the baby and put him to sleep, I wondered whether waking Sam was really what I feared. Crossing Lombard was like parenting, a little leap of faith. Stopping represented doubt, that anxiousness innate in every parent. Are we doing this the right way? Will he ever be this cute again? What comes next? In the tiny thrillers of our own lives, dread drives our blind pursuit of infant development: the first tooth, the first step, the first word. And out beyond our fear of stopping, lies our need for speed.

Simon Hodgson

Four Observations About the Bad Parent "Movement"

I got a call this morning from a journalist asking about the "bad parent" trend, wherein folks like Bad Mother author Ayelet Waldman are proudly revealing their most secret parental failures. That got me to thinking about this topic, and I thought I'd share some random observations:

1) Fathers are pretty much defined as "bad parents," as the term is being popularly used. When we talk about proud "bad parents," most of the time we're really talking about "bad mothers" who are rebelling against the idea that they must be perfect to be good. Ayelet isn't actually a "bad mother," at least as revealed by her book and in her husband's new book, Manhood for Amateurs; Bad Mother is a reaction against the unrealistic, cognitively dissonant standards to which mothers are held. Meanwhile, fathers are not held, and do not hold themselves, to the same standards. When fathers reveal their foibles and failures as parents, they do it, by and large, with a laugh. They are allowed to be human, which, I think, adds more to the pile of evidence that guys remain a privileged class in America and the world.

2) That said, I think the "bad mother" thing is also evidence of the degree to which the genders are measurably converging in attitudes and behaviors. Wide disparities remain; it's just that differences are smaller than they were ten, twenty, fifty years ago. More women expect to have careers, and many do have them; more men expect to do more housework and childcare, and they are doing more at home. Fathers and mothers are both expected to play breadwinning and caregiving roles. That's a big change. When moms like Ayelet shake their fist at "good mother" standards, in many respects they're asking to be judged by a standard that's closer to the twenty-first-century "good father"--someone who is perhaps a slob and is perhaps not always the most empathic person in the world, who perhaps carves out space for a life apart from his family, but who is still a day-to-day presence in the lives of his children and fulfilling whatever role falls to him as parent.

3) That flexibility is key; in a time of profound gender role fragmentation, that's what both mothers and fathers have asked for--the ability to be themselves and to be judged by the circumstances of their lives--as opposed by the standards of fifty years ago or by the standards of people who imagine that their own private circumstances are universal. In a dense, connected, diverse world, tolerance and openness are necessities as well as virtues. And as I think Ayelet's work reveals, acceptance of one's own failures is a pathway to accepting other people's "failures," as we perceive them. Self-compassion leads to compassion for the people in our lives as well as a more generalized social compassion.

4) I won't personally be jumping on the "bad parent" bandwagon. I've rarely felt oppressed by the judgements of others about my fatherhood--but I have been confused about what, exactly, I'm supposed to be doing as a father. For that reason, my book The Daddy Shift is not a bad parent book--it's about good fathers, and what ideals help them to be good. There are individually bad fathers, of course, just as there really are genuinely bad mothers, but fathers as a group are often judged as "bad parents" for not behaving like mothers. That's why we need a good father movement. Moms might indeed need a bad parent movement. But fathers need positive, aspirational images, and tools for negotiating roles that their fathers were never expected to adopt. And I think we need other people, particularly the women in our lives, to understand the kind of fathers we are trying to be.

Your thoughts?

My Baby Rides the Short Bus -- a review

I enjoy learning things from a book, those moments when you are stunned at what you just read, or shocked at some statistic, some point, some example. Those are the books I cherish. My Baby Rides the Short Bus was just such an experience.

From reading the introduction and on through the essays, I learned that some parents of special needs kids are radical prior to becoming parents and some become radicalized through parenting. I learned that they struggle, make mistakes, come to realizations about things they did, realizations that cause them pain, that inform choices they will make in the future, that serve as a catalyst for standing up and fighting for change.

I learned that, like parents everywhere, "they learn how their kids function and they make it happen as well as they can." Just like me; just like you.

But I also learned about the complexity of parenting, how it is something we learn to do, how we discover the depth of our militancy, awareness and patience, strengths sometimes we didn’t know we even had. Until we needed them.

I learned that the medical profession and schools and court systems, which can be difficult to navigate in general, can be downright ruthless when dealing with a special needs child and family.

I learned how encounters with these institutions can belittle, can terrify, can cut deeply.

I also learned that encounters with other parents sometimes hurt the most.

I learned a little humility.

I learned new words: neurotypical, authentic activism, and scores of acronyms I never knew existed.

I was reminded how sometimes the simplest things are the most effective, like playing with your child. Down on the ground rolling around.

I was reminded of the intensity of love. How sometimes the best thing to do is pick up your child off the floor and walk away, leave the office, ignore the advice. And yet, sometimes the most difficult act of love is to let go, to trust.

Reading My Baby Rides the Short Bus, I was reminded of the ferocity with which we love, the depths of our feelings, the need for community.

I was reminded of the power of sharing stories.

These are the stories I want to hear. The stories of pain and fear, stories of surprising strength, of learning, and then of doing. As Sharis Ingram writes, “at some point you will give up trying so hard, and come to trust yourself, trust your child, trust what *is.*”

Trust me, and go get the book yourself.

Startled Reflections

In the dark days of Sam’s first month, back when I wondered whether the diaper existed that could contain him, his principal redeeming feature was his infant semaphore. Startle Reflex occurs when babies instinctively raise their hands. Because they don’t yet recognize their own limbs, they’re frightened. I was tickled by his ‘what the...?’ expression as well as the idea of infants scaring themselves with their own arms.

Babies’ startle reflexes are totally natural; just as when the doctor boings your knee with a rubber hammer. For some reason, I always giggle at that too. Maybe I’m the immature one here, not my boy. Back then I used to watch Sam sleeping, occasionally freaking himself out like a stoner watching a looped horror movie. Only later did I recognize that it was me who was crazy, the lunatic adult who sat rapt on the edge of the bed, chuckling quietly as his tiny son raised his arms aloft like a footballer encouraging fans.

In his fourth month, I marvelled at his developing dexterity, his growing strength. Though he quickly became accustomed to his arms and no longer scared himself, the sudden two-handed salutes continued. I wondered what he was thinking, my tiny son venturing into his embryonic imagination – I imagined an event, an arena, and Sam rising intermittently to join a Mexican Wave amid a roaring crowd that only he could hear.

At five months old, he still naps occasionally with both arms raised over his head, as if surrendering to sleep. But he’s graduated from the startle reflex, in which his empty hands appear unexpectedly. Now the problem is what’s in his hands. Although Sam can pick up objects with the grip of a Burmese python, he has yet to master releasing anything. I watched him today, impassively gnawing Zoe the plastic giraffe. He drooled on her little nubbly antlers, wrapped a slimy paw around her nose and bit her foot. Giraffe feet are probably a delicacy somewhere in the world. Pig’s trotters are big in the Deep South, I’m told, so imagine what kind of cachet a giraffe offers for bigger game eaters.

Sam eventually tired of the chewtoy snack and tossed it aside with the casual profligacy of a drunken Mississippi gambler. Only he didn’t. Because his release isn’t perfected, a tightly-gripped giraffe appeared immediately in front of him. He stuck his lower lip out and looked at me desperately. I picked him up and nuzzled him and told him he was a good fellow and that a giraffe in the hand was worth two in the bush. It was the least I could do. After all, where else am I going to find a home entertainment system like this. I can’t wait till he discovers his feet.

Simon Hodgson

Write for rad dad zine's next issue: December 1st

Winter fast approaches. For my family it’s a time of contradictions. The time of holidays and visiting family. A time to question traditions, yet a time my kids begin compiling lengthy lists of things they want, they must have. Socially, it’s a time of rampant consumerism, of the spectacle of this capitalist culture at its most perverse.

What are we to do as parents, as individuals? What do you do?

For the next issue of rad dad tell us; consider winter in all its glory, in all its potential, the beauty of quietness, of hibernation, in the profound way it sets the stage for the coming rebirth.

Send in stories, polemics, celebrations, recipes, songs sung with you and your people to keep at bay the monsters, lurking, lurking...

With much love and respect,

tomas
tomas.moniz@gmail.com

Election Night Shrinkage

In my book The Daddy Shift, I reported research that shows men’s testosterone levels rise and fall in response to what's happening in their lives and environment. Having a child lowers testosterone; so does losing a tennis match.

Now comes a new study providing more evidence of a link between testosterone and social cues. The night to the 2008 presidential election, it seems there was a a dramatic drop in testosterone for men who voted for McCain or the Libertarian candidate, whoever that was.

"In contrast, men who voted for the winner, Democrat Barack Obama, had stable testosterone levels immediately after the outcome," says the press release for the study. "Female study participants showed no significant change in their testosterone levels before and after the returns came in."

"This is a pretty powerful result," said Duke neuroscientist Kevin LaBar. "Voters are physiologically affected by having their candidate win or lose an election."

In a post-election questionnaire, the McCain and Barr backers were feeling significantly more unhappy, submissive, unpleasant and controlled than the Obama voters.

The Economics of Potty Training

Stickers as the Basic Unit of Exchange Value

Introduction

Potty training, when you really think about it, is applied economics. Sure, I could make jokes about toxic assets and deposit banking, or diapers as a form of moral hazard, but what I'm talking about here is the creation of value, the function of currencies, and rational calculations of profit and loss. If the field of economics is to survive the ongoing market debacle, it will behoove the profession to get back to brass tacks, as it were, and ground such basic concepts of these in the behavior of real people, not computer models based on the herd behavior of androids and coded by physics PhD's.

This is why my son Spot and I offer you an empirical case study on the economics of potty training, based on data collected in my bathroom.


The Case: Potty Training and Sticker Inflation

We did not invent the use of stickers as a type of currency. Stickers have been used to incent toddler behavior as long as we can remember, probably since the dawn of adhesives. Like gold or precious stones, stickers have an intrinsic value to the toddler's eye. So the first step in potty training is to establish a standard of value between a certain amount of potty production, and a certain number of stickers. In our study, this standard was 1 : 1, or, 1 sticker to 1 poop or 1 pee-pee.

Prior to this step, poop has no value. Suddenly, it is worth one sticker, and if he pees, maybe two. The basis for exchange has been created, and through the miracle of economics, poop has become a commodity.

Problems only arise when Spot exits this closed system and spends the morning with Grandpa. Grandpa, despite our best efforts to persuade him otherwise, does not adhere to our standard of value. Instead of maintaining a 1:1 ratio of labor to remuneration, he demonstrates an utter lack of discipline and rewards Spot four, five, or six stickers for every session on the potty. The inexorable result is sticker inflation.

Grandpa displays all the characteristics of an inflationary central banker. Stickers flow like water. Instead of issuing them himself, Grandpa lets Spot take as many stickers as he wants. He keeps the sticker sheets on the coffee table where Spot can get at them, in effect letting the fox into the hen house. On any given morning, Spot would return with what looked like permanent tattoos on both arms. What we observe in Grandpa's case is clearly a case of hyperinflation, and as a result, the rate of exchange for poop fluctuates wildly between households.

We determined that Grandpa's hyperinflationary sticker regime, therefore, was undermining our own domestic potty training economy. A standard of value of 1 sticker to 1 poop or 1 pee-pee was no longer generating an incentive for Spot at home. He was listless and irritable. Grandpa's inflation was "bleeding over" into our system, poop was now worth far more at Grandpa's house than in ours, and Spot was not happy with the imbalance.

At first, though Grandpa recognized the problem, he failed to perceive the correct solution, and proposed that we abandon stickers as currency and replace them with something else, such as crayons. We argued in response that this would only result in the same inflationary spiral. The only solution, as he came to appreciate, was to resume control of sticker issuance, and to clamp down hard on the money supply. Ultimately this is what happened, and stability returned to the inter-household sticker-poop exchange rate.


Conclusion

Spot is now almost fully potty trained. The sticker regime, over a period of six to eight months -- despite the episode of Grandpa's hyperinflation -- helped to construct a successful regime of incentives for sitting on the potty.

The sticker economy has served its purpose, and has now been largely surpassed. Because he has advanced from potty training, the most basic stage of economic rationality, Spot now covers his entire body with stickers in no relation to his pooping labors, while having absorbed the following important economic lessons: that the origin of economic value is in poop, that poop can function like money, and that the value of poop must be closely managed so as to avoid destabilizing and demoralizing inflationary episodes.

The Onion: How To Find A Masculine Halloween Costume For Your Effeminate Son

How To Find A Masculine Halloween Costume For Your Effeminate Son

Urban Butterflies

Here's a little video my friend Axel put together about our "Bees and Butterflies" group, which involved a group of almost 20 San Francisco families to explore the life-cycles of bees and butterflies, and to introduce basic ecological concepts to our kids. That's me in the goofy brown and green sweater, reading a customized version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar; that's my wife talking about the puppet show we did at our local farmers' market. Want to start your own neighborhood group? My pal Olivia Boler describes how we did it over at Shareable.net.

Obsessive. Compulsive. Dad.

My wife Fitzsimmons has decided that at four months, Sam needs a routine. “All the books recommend it,” she says airily. I’m worried. Routines for babies seem so… fixed. According to our pediatrician, four months is when babies start to understand cause and effect. But what if Sam learns something and can’t unlearn it? What if he never eats again unless he’s being carried? What if he can’t get to sleep ever again without listening to The Beatles’ Yesterday? What if, and this is the big one, my son turns out like me?

It’s not that I’m a bad person, though I occasionally re-use bus tickets. It’s just that I’m resistant to change. I’ve been eating muesli, for example, for nearly three decades. I like to listen to the same song over and over – this week it’s Somebody’s Crying by Chris Isaak. I have a system for washing up that Fitzsimmons refuses to adopt.

At four months, Sam has a chance to escape this fate. At thirty-four years, I’m toast. Since he was born in March, I have become OC Dad. And with all these new routines for the baby, I’m only getting worse. “You need to read to him every day,” Fitzsimmons will say as she leaves us for work. “And when he shows sleep cues, make sure you play the Rockabye Baby music.” “Sleep cues,” I say, “Rockabye baby.” As if I need reminding about repetition.

I blame my parents. My mom said that when I was a baby, they made a rod for their own backs by creeping out of the bedroom backwards when I fell asleep. Three decades later, I can’t remember any of this routine, but I quite like the sound of it. The image of a snoozing baby on his crib seems faintly monarchic, as the courtier-parents retreat backwards, curtseying as they go. From where I stand as OC Dad, looking backwards and forwards, I’m conscious of a crossroads in the history of Hodgson routines. I feel like the Hamlet of novice dads: to repeat or not to repeat? Do I deny our son these simple behavioural guidelines because I fear his future? Or do I agree to Routines, knowing what might befall him?

My problem is that my own amateur autism is selective. I never seem to repeat sensible practices: do 100 sit-ups daily; drink four liters of water; be nice to my wife. Instead, it’s always random, daft stuff: eating crystallized ginger after every meal; cooking the same meals compulsively (linguine with garlic and pancetta); watching Spies Like Us on YouTube.

Sam’s needs have prompted freaky new OC Dad iterations. My latest idiocy is to help him burp. He has reflux, baby heartburn, so I’ve evolved a method of winding him, by stalking around the apartment with a herky-jerky motion to release those tricky gastric bubbles. Yesterday, while carrying him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and I was ashamed. I looked like a rooster with too-tight underwear. Or Richard Pryor ‘gettin’ bad’ as he prances into prison in Stir Crazy. Still, every time I do it, Sam eventually burps, so I think the herky-jerky jive turkey is here to stay. When Fitzsimmons left for work this morning, she handed me a stack of parenting books with yellow tags on the Routine pages. I’ve yet to find my new technique in any of them. I’m not sure why.

Simon Hodgson

Justin Roberts "Stay-at-Home Dad"

My family loves Justin Roberts...maybe yours will, too?

Clive Owen says Yes to Fatherhood

Despite his tough guy reputation, British film star Clive Owen is no stranger to cleaning up after kids. In real life, he’s dad to two young girls. On screen, he’s done diaper duty in both Children Of Men (protecting the last baby on earth) and Shoot ’Em Up (delivering a newborn amid a gun battle). His latest picture however, The Boys Are Back (released in cinemas October 8th), offers the brooding actor a new challenge: performing opposite children.

Owen plays Joe Warr, a sportswriter in South Australia shattered by the death of his wife, then confronted with the responsibility of taking care of six-year-old Artie (Nicholas McAnulty). Although the RADA-trained actor prepares for every role meticulously, playing off Nicholas wasn’t exactly something Owen could plan, says director Scott Hicks. The film-maker had his own problems: how to light a scene featuring a spontaneous and unschooled performer. Hicks chose to film using handheld cameras “to capture something that might be unrepeatable.” Owen meanwhile responded by delivering one of his most complex performances to date.

This is a Clive Owen that film audiences haven’t seen before. Unguarded, angry, and bruised, Joe Warr doesn’t have all the answers. He makes mistakes, leaving Artie and fourteen-year-old Harry (his son from his first marriage) alone for a weekend at their farmhouse. When he returns, the house has been trashed by beach revellers. Actually, it’s hard to tell whether it has been trashed, given Joe’s laidback housekeeping. When Harry arrives from England, he’s shocked at the stack of washing-up in the sink, then thrown straight into a pillow fight riotous enough to put the bed into bedlam. “I run a pretty loose ship,” says Joe, explaining his no-rules approach to Harry. “The more rules there are, the more crimes are committed.”

So evolves Joe’s credo: Just Say Yes. What father wants to tell his boy ‘no’ after what they’ve both been through? Want to skip the washing-up? Cycle through the kitchen? Drive the Land Rover through a river? Yes, yes, and yes again. So what if Joe’s mother-in-law thinks he’s drinking too much, so what if the house looks like a bombsite, so what if the moms by the school gate frown? Through giving Artie the freedom to grow, Joe too finds the space to move on.

Not just a rewarding family drama, The Boys Are Back also offers an original parenting model. Behind the Hollywoody catchphrase of Just Say Yes lies a real idea. Joe Warr doesn’t want to deny his boy, he doesn’t want to say ‘no.’ He fears, like so many single dads, that Artie will miss his mom. He fears that he alone is not enough. Simon Carr, the British political writer whose memoir inspired the story, remembers wondering what would happen to his own boy after his wife’s death. “Frankly, I didn’t know whether I’d be allowed to keep him. The idea of a man bringing up a young child was alien to the spirit of the age.”

As the plate tectonics of 21st Century parenting shift toward fatherhood, here is a big screen dad who’s not afraid to fail. Just Say Yes is neither an epiphany, nor the promise of a happy ending. It’s a compromise, a deal Joe strikes with his boys as he struggles to find his feet amid mistakes and missteps. This quirky little family remains a work in progress, albeit one whose success is simply in surviving to write its own warming story.

Simon Hodgson

Sleepless In San Francisco

What’s the worst bit, friends ask, about being a new dad? I smile and give them my Enron answer: It’s great. This week, I’m changing my tune. I’ve been struggling to get Sam to sleep. Babies don’t always know how to sleep, they have to learn. Which means I have to learn how to teach him.

“He’s virtually asleep,” says my wife Fitzsimmons, handing me our bundled baby.

“Virtually?”

“Uh-huh. See you in twenty minutes.”

By the time I figure out that ‘virtually asleep’ means wide awake, she’s slipped out of the bedroom, leaving me bouncing mutinously on the exercise ball, while Sam gazes at me wide-eyed. This is Fitzsimmons’ latest tactic in our unspoken competition. We spoke last week about trying to be better parents. I now see that what she meant was to be the better parent. So when she hands over Sam saying blithely, ‘virtually asleep’, it’s a win-win. Either he nods off and she takes the credit for preparing him, or he stays psychotically awake and I’m Rubbish Dad.

What really stinks, I think as I bounce our child listlessly, is that she is the better parent. Her instincts are more developed, her rocking techniques are first-rate and she has breasts. I, meanwhile, have a saggy exercise ball and a handful of secondhand lullabies. I rock dangerously close to the sharp corner of the bed, voice cracking from a cold as I repeat another tuneless dirge.

“Hang on, Sam. I have to get a cough drop.”

As we leave the bedroom to retrieve a Halls throat-soother, Sam perks up. He doesn’t usually escape from the bedroom until the morning, so this must be like the Nazis escorting Steve McQueen to a motorbike race. I settle back down on the ball, bouncing more jauntily. On my tongue, the cherry-flavoured tablet seems the size of a horsepill, easily large enough to last until he falls asleep. My throat feels as soothing as the lullaby. “Beo, beo, be my bonny baby,” I sing, then swallow the lozenge whole.

As a YouTube devotee, I’m accustomed to pythons gulping foreign objects. But the sensation of a cherry-flavoured pebble sliding down my gullet is new to me. Imagine Frankenstein ingesting the bolt in his neck. Despite my discomfort, there’s no way I’m calling for Fitzsimmons. Although maybe I should be dialling 911. Sam’s eyelids are drooping, or perhaps it’s just my asphyxiation. I wonder how the San Francisco press will swallow this one. ‘Mystery of dad found dead Tuesday 7pm beside yoga ball. No murder weapon found. Infant asleep, virtually.’

Simon Hodgson

In The Company of Moms - Part 2 of 2

[Transcript -- Session #4: Stay-at-Home Dad A]

Q: So then what happened?

A: So I'm sitting with Spot back in the corner at parent-tot, and he wants to read, so we pull out a Barney book, Barney's on the farm, lots of pull-up flaps, he loves it, we read it like four or five times whenever we go there. So I'm getting into the pig, the cow, the ducks, all that, and one by one a few other toddlers make there way over to where we're sitting, like the way the ducks on a pond figure out who is tossing out the breadcrumbs and assemble until they're in a naval formation coming your way.

So then I'm reading Barney to two, then three little kids plus Spot, all girls, and we're hanging out. It suddenly strikes me that Hey, this is what the teacher usually does, but the teacher is over on the other side of the room, standing next to the empty easels, the vacant sandbox, talking to 3 or 4 moms.

Q: What are they talking about?

A: I don't know, I can't hear. I'd guess it's the stuff they usually talk about. I call it "boob talk". I can't really participate, although I know what they're talking about. I mean, I was with my wife the whole time that stuff was going on, I understand what boobs are for and how sometimes they work and sometimes they don't work. I like boobs as much as the next guy. But I can't talk about boobs. Certainly not the way they talk about them, and not with Spot hanging around.

Or they might be talking about their husbands. Joking about how their husbands spend all Sunday watching the game, or maybe complaining a little bit about how they are always the ones who are doing all the laundry. I'm like, then why did you marry such losers? This is the 21st century, people. But you know, that's not polite, so I sit in the corner and read books to their kids while they kvetch.

Q: How does that make you feel?

A: I kind of like it. I like kids. I'm a teacher, always have been. It keeps you young. It's a beautiful thing, really, to read to kids. But it weirds out some of the moms, clearly, when I do it.

Q: How so?

A: Well, I have this image in my head, or it's more like say there's this screen behind me, and on it is projected my real life, my secret life. And what you see is the parking lot behind the school, where my white, 1989 Ford Econoline van is parked with the engine running, because that way it will be easier for me to abduct all these little girls and drive off onto the set of America's Most Wanted.

That's what the other moms see when they look over at our little reading group.

Q: How do you know that's what they see?

A: Well, not all of them, but I'm pretty sure that's what a lot of them instinctively feel. But I mean, it's [deleted] 9AM in the [deleted] morning, I haven't shaved, I'm strung out just like everyone else, and I'm there with my 2.5 year old son, the last [deleted] thing I'm thinking about is sex with anyone, OK? And I don't drive a Ford Econoline van with plywood bolted over the windows, in case anyone is wondering.

Q: This really strikes a nerve with you.

A: Of course. Jesus. So we'll be reading for about 2 or 3 minutes, then a mom will notice her little girl is over with Spot -- now we've moved on to a counting book from the Natural History Museum, How many mummies are on this page? How many dinosaurs are on that page? that sort of thing -- and Mom Q notices her kid is not at the easel or at the sandbox, and so calls to her: "Sally, do you want to come over and paint at the easel?" which really means, "Can you please leave that pervert and come over to where I can see you?" And Sally is like, "Forget that, mom, cause this is where the action is," and so Mom Q kind of sashays over to about 6 feet away and pulls out a firetruck to tempt Sally away from the danger.

Q: Do you do anything to reassure these mothers that you are not the kind of person they may be worried about? Think about it from their perspective: the media is bombarding them with stories of abducted children, child abuse, horrible stories on TV every night.

A: Yeah, sure. I need to reach out. I try. But then I run into the other problem. The "pack problem". I've thought about this a lot. As soon as they have kids, most moms want to form a tribe with other moms. It's a way to get some sense of orientation when you're going through all this stuff you've never gone through before. I understand that. The thing is, when you form tribes, there's a danger of being tribal. So you have more and more dads, who don't form tribes, and they're trying to engage with all these moms, who do form tribes, and it's like a big culture clash.

Q: Can you give me an example of how this tribalism affects you?

A: Well, it doesn't just affect me, it can affect other moms, too. I've seen that. In fact, if you're a man, you're kind of spared, because you have this other universe you live in, where you really don't give a flying [deleted] what the local mom-pack might think about this or that, who packs the best lunches and all that [deleted]. But the other moms, especially the young ones, they don't have that luxury. If they're not "in" the pack, then they're on an ice floe with a starving polar bear drifting out to sea, and it's mighty tough place to be.

But say you get a brave mom, a real Independent, and she's like, Oh, that dad in the corner, he must feel left out. She then faces the following dilemma. She thinks:

I'd like to be nice to him, because he's being nice to my daughter, thereby freeing me up for boob talk with the other moms over by the sandbox, and of course I am motivated by real and genuine and profound feminine sympathy for another human being ...

... but then a sudden tribal signal scrambles these intentions and she makes the following social calculus:

But if I go over there, he may take it the wrong way and think I'm flirting with him, that I'm being a coquette, yes a coquette, over animal crackers and grape juice and the amorous fragrance of Purell hand sanitizer. Because that's how men are, they see everything that way, but also because I'd kind of like that, actually, because it would be nice for an impartial outsider to make me feel attractive at this stage of my life, plus all this constant baby care is a drag and I need an escape. But in reality the problem is not what HE will think, it's what the TRIBE will think if I do go over there, because if the tribe thinks I'm being a coquette, even if I haven't the least flirtatious intention, then I might be branded with the Scarlet Letter, led out to the town square and shamed on the scaffold, kicked off the island as it were, which means of course that this poor mom -- me -- will then have no one to sit next to at the playground except the nannies, and I don't speak Polish.

And that would be hell, pure hell. And so I'm not going to go talk to him, she thinks.

Q: Do you feel sympathy for her?

A: In a way, yes. These moms, they're nice people. I meet them one-on-one on the outside and it's like we're best friends. Hey, how's Baby Julius doing? Great, how's little Esmerelda? But on the inside, it's like a street gang or something. Even if they like you, they have to focus their energy on maintaining their rank in the gang. Chatting-up stay-at-home dads at parent tot class gets them zero cred with the tribe. Zilch.

It's like I'm a Pacific island and they are Britain and France fighting over who gets Samoa and who gets Fiji. I just smile and keep planting my yams while they work it out.

Q: We're out of time.

[End of session]

In The Company of Moms - Part 1 of 2

There are a lot of ways for a man to be in a group of women. A man could, for example, be taking a class. It doesn't matter what. Any extracurricular interest aside from black powder riflery, auto repair, or stock picking, will attract more women than men. Especially past a certain age.

I'm not making this up. As with all my opinions, I got this one from the New York Times. Men tend not to take classes. Women tend to be oversubscribed. In the journalistic explanation, the old stereotypes come into play: men, at least Manhattanite men, don't want to publicly learn something new. They prefer to achieve private mastery which is later revealed to the world in all it's perfection.

This is not an issue for me. So I've spent a fair amount of time with groups of women in dance classes, in tennis classes, in alpine skiing classes, and evening adult-education classes, pushing my glasses up the damp ridge of my nose every five minutes or so. And of all of these classes, the only one that came close to achieving gender parity were the pre-natal and birthing classes.

There are still other ways. A man could be working as an office temp who, because of relatively good typing skills (learned in a class, also full of women) and a degree that connotes a tolerance for spending hours in a chair, looking at computer screens, and not talking much, one could for these reasons get placed in the secretarial pool of a large corporation full of, generally speaking, women.

A man could also have an office job downtown, working for the County Clerk, the Recorder of Deeds, or the Public Library. Although the last occupational subset does not overlay the first two in the sense of yielding exposure to the white-sneaker-over-nylons-for-the-commute-to-work class, it does reliably guarantee a man at least 2 or 3 luncheon sojourns to Wendy's every week in the exclusive, or almost exclusive, company of women.

And of course, there are ways for a man to be in the company of women that I have not yet experienced, such as being 60 or 70 years old in a time of war when the vast majority of able-bodied men are either dead, damaged, or in enemy POW camps.

All this being said, however, once a man hits a certain age, gets married and has a kid or two, the already rare occasions for being in groups of women become vanishingly less frequent. When, through some freak aberration of personal life history and global economic mutation, you find yourself like me the one dad in the parent-tot class, you realize that the situation is of a different kind, with new rules, its own vibe, and that everything you thought you had figured out about how to be the one guy in a group of women gets tossed out the window.

Because you're not really with a group of women anymore. You're with a group of moms, and that changes everything.

To be continued:
Tuesday Moms and Thursday Moms, or,
Angels and Mean Girls

Announcing Dads Change the World, a Parents' Salon, and Shareable.net

Three announcements:

1) I've started a new series over at my Mothering magazine blog: "Twenty-Five Ways for Dads to Change the World." Here's the introduction and here's the first entry, "Attend every prenatal class and doctor's appointment."

2) I'll be reading with Daddy Dialectic contributor Tomas Moniz at Book Zoo in Oakland, California, to celebrate the release of the fifteenth issue of the Independent Press Award-winning 'zine Rad Dad: November 6 at 7 pm.

3) My new employer, Shareable.net, launched (softly) last week. The basic argument of Shareable is that there is a generation coming up whose sensibilities have been shaped by peer-to-peer file swapping, social media, and open source programming, and that sharing is actually becoming necessary (and even profitable) in offline areas of life due to a combination of technological innovation and ecological crisis.

So at Shareable.net we'll be pulling together stuff like Zipcar, equally shared parenting, Kiva, Facebook, cohousing, Burning Man, etc. all under the same umbrella, in order to explore how a specific worldview (that we can generate value by sharing what we have) is being implemented by different people working in different areas of life and the economy. We're just playing with that idea, holding these things up together so that we can see what they have in common and how they can be replicated. For a better sense of Shareable's philosophy, see Janelle Orsi's essay, "Four Degrees of Sharing."

Also of possible interest to Daddy Dialectic readers: "What's your carbon Footprint?" in which I ask: Can the California Academy of Sciences help families see themselves as part of the solution? I talk with tourists about the impact of the museum's climate change exhibit.

Lactation Tips With Christopher Walken

Last week, my wife Fitzsimmons found a moms’ website with a tip to help me break through the bottlefeeding barrier with our son Sam. He feeds well when she’s nursing, but so far he’s refused to take a bottle from me. What she told me was – feed Sam while walking. What I heard was ‘Feed Sam while Walken.’

“Hello, little man,” I say, sweeping up our three-month-old son and striding round the apartment wearing a Baby Bjorn kid-carrier and a deranged expression. “Boy, I sure heard a bunch about you.”

Sam doesn’t look too convinced about this Tarantino-lite and looks in vain for his mom, who’s disappearing into the kitchen lest she distract from Daily Bottlefeeding. No, today is the day that bottle trumps breast. Today he drinks, whether out of hunger or because he’s so freaked out by my Christopher Walken impersonation. I’ve got him whichever way he chooses, I figure cockily, either the carrot or the schtick.

“Your daddy carried this bottle with him for five long years,” I tell Sam, manically brandishing an ounce of fresh milk. In reality, I’ve tried to bottlefeed him for six weeks, but it feels longer. Today, as ever, he’s not biting.

“He hid it in the one place he knew.” Old Sam gets the anatomically edited version of Pulp Fiction, even if my fruitless feeding of my son is indeed a pain in the ass.

“If any other baby saw this bottle, it’d be confiscated. But the way I see it, this bottle is your birthright.”

Sam looks at the bottle warily, then up at me. He hasn’t heard this before, this level of entreaty. Or maybe it’s my accent, am I stressing the wrong words sufficiently? My Walken’s starting to sound Welsh. No wonder the poor kid looks terrified. Still, I’m in too deep now to stop. I need a dramatic finish, I need to give it more cowbell.

“And I’ll be damned if any kids are gonna put their drooly hands on my boy’s birthright.”

Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. So this is where it’s led, emotional blackmail with an infant using Pump Fiction. It’s no consolation that all the traditional methods have failed, from milk-warming to music-playing, lap-rocking to lip-tickling. After a month of feeding fiascos amid rubber seals and silicone nipples, I feel less like a parent than Inflatable Dad. One day he’ll drink, I think, one day he’ll crack. Or I will.

“It’s not working,” I say to Fitzsimmons, as I hand over the hungry boy. Sam looks across at me implacably, a tiny hunger striker eating away at my parenting reserves. My wife arranges him expertly across her lap and pulls down a shoulder strap. Within four seconds, Sam is attached and feeding. The injustice. The ingratitude. The swine.

“Either it’s the bottle,” I say, “or it’s me.” I am careful not to mention Walken, or my Fatboy Slim shimmy in front of the hallway mirror.

“No, you’re doing well,” she says loyally. “We still have time to experiment.”

Her maternity leave ends in six weeks and I’m getting desperate. When she goes back to work part-time, it’s up to me to bottlefeed Sam in the mornings. Today was my last hope, my last inspired shortcut to father-son bonding. Play-acting Walken has been fun, despite the failure, but this is serious. What now? Either I learn fast or it’s Honey, I Shrunk The Kid. Fitzsimmons sees my hopeless expression and tries to reassure me.

“Maybe it’s the bottle,” she says. “Maybe you should try a different brand?”

But I’m not listening, I’m daydreaming. Now there’s an idea. Brando.

Simon Hodgson

Fatherhood and the Anxiety of Freeway Interchanges

Certain places in the city disorient me. They are passages where multiple layers of traffic converge in space, passing over trestles, across bridges, up and down ramps, at grade and at elevation, in different directions and at different velocities.

I experience a moment of anxiety at the wheel of my car, focus on the lane lines on the road, and in a few seconds I am through the vortex and in the clear. No particular bravery is required to do this; hundreds of thousands of people do every day. It's the system that does most of the work, I just hold the wheel. The elements hold together, and its contents circulate safely through their channels.

My son's pre-school is nothing like the web of ramps and tunnels that I navigate every few weeks. It's a quiet, calm place, where everyone comes together in one harmonious room and stays there. We arrive at the same time and depart together. But on the first fall day, sitting around the snack table with its bowl of animal crackers and all the toddlers silently chewing their over-full mouths, I feel the same flash of anxiety, as if I were entering the expressway chute, merging into freight traffic with locomotives rolling above me.

What could possibly connect the two situations? None of the kids that Spot played with last spring are here. Older than him, they've gone on to the half-day program. The new set of kids is younger. But this is only temporary. In three months Spot will join the older kids for the half-day program. It will be familiar to him but new to me, because for the first time in three years, I'll be taking him somewhere each morning and leaving him there. These are small, gradual changes, like the turning of the seasons.

But they remind me of bigger changes, the ones my wife and I talk about after Spot is asleep, chronicled across time zones in phone conversations that go later than we'd like. Grandma is in a state of lingering emergency. Mother-in-law is struggling against a terminal condition. The prospect of one day fathering my son without a father of my own rouses me from whatever sleep I managed to win earlier in the evening. And when not observing our son, who is channeling the cosmos as it gathers inward for a burst of youthful transcendence, I study my own face, an ancient piece of furniture, tracing the spread of cracks in the varnish that seals the wood.

A family is a group of people traveling at different velocities, some of them accelerating and some of them slowing down, some departing for a while to other time zones, but all of them usually circling back. For stretches of time, our family has been a uniform frame of reference, something against which I gauged the movement of other things. Yet lately is feels more like the expressway chute, a frame of reference that appears to be decomposing, pulled in the directions of all the different people passing away from and beyond it.

Spot is often in the backseat when I go through the chute, strapped in and protected by a steel cage as the trains go over and the barges float under us. With Spot in the backseat it's the rest of the world that is moving, not my own. It's a favor he grants me, letting me share the optimism that a small force of attraction can counter life's scattering impulsions. Thanks to our smallest and most needy family member, no one of us can go very far. I don't care where the semis and boxcars and minivans wind up. For now, even in the chute, I have my privileged and uniform place of rest.

In the outer lanes, it's true, I see the pieces breaking off, veering down ramps and disappearing through tunnels that may not circle back. I can only keep my hands on the wheel, focus on the lane lines ahead of me, and get into the clear. No bravery is required to do this; it just means picking up my son in a few moments, rolling his soccer ball out the door, and stepping into the September sunshine.

Does parenthood make men more conservative and women more liberal?

A new study says that parenthood pushes men and women in opposite political directions:

"Parenthood seems to heighten the political 'gender gap,' with women becoming more liberal and men more conservative when it comes to government spending on social welfare issues," says Dr. Steven Greene, an associate professor of political science at NC State and co-author of the study. Greene and Dr. Laurel Elder of Hartwick College used data on the 2008 presidential election from the American National Election Studies to evaluate the voting behavior of men and women who have children at home. Parents who have grown children were not part of the study.

"Basically, women with children in the home were more liberal on social welfare attitudes, and attitudes about the Iraq War, than women without children at home," Greene says, "which is a very different understanding of the politics of mothers than captured by the 'Security Mom' label popular in much media coverage. But men with kids are more conservative on social welfare issues than men without kids." Men with kids did not differ from men without kids in their attitudes towards Iraq.

You can read the press release here and the whole thing here.

This is a strong study; they have a good data set, and like all good social scientists they control for variables like age and education. The results are consistent with other studies, and also easy to understand.

Response scales varied, but all ranged from a number indicating very liberal to one indicating very conservative. So, the "social welfare index" (which measured support for issues like government-sponsored, universal health care), the scale ranged from -1.37 (very liberal) to 2.07 (very conservative), based on responses to specific questions.

This is the area where the contrast between men and women was starkest. Women zoomed from -.01 childless to -.11 after having children in the social welfare index--which is statistically very significant. Meanwhile, men went from .04 childless to .14 after children. A ten point difference for both, but in opposite directions.

To which I say: Wow.

Why the difference? The researchers argue that it's women's experience with nurturing kids that pushes them a more liberal direction when it comes to weaving the social safety net. From the paper:

We argue that this long-standing liberal motherhood effect is grounded in the gendered experience of parenthood. The societal expectation as well as the reality that women play the primary role in nurturing their children and take primary responsibility for their health care, day care, and educational needs fosters an appreciation for well-funded, domestic government programs.

Moreover, with the vast majority of mothers working outside the home, mothers are required to rely on people or programs outside the nuclear family for at least part of their children’s care, which may also foster their appreciation for a supportive and generous social welfare state. The fact that the liberal effect of motherhood remains highly significant even in the regression model (Table 2) when potentially confounding variables are controlled, means that it is not simply Democratic or unmarried or poor mothers that are driving the liberal motherhood effect. Consistent with some feminist theories, there seems to be something about the experience of being a mother that leads to more liberal social welfare attitudes (Ruddick 1980, 1989; Sapiro 1983). It may be that the act of nurturing children fosters empathy and caring, thereby generating more liberal attitudes concerning the role of government in helping others.

Whereas fathers, they write, tend to "view an active social welfare state as an intrusion on their ability to provide for their families."

That sounds somewhat plausible to me--although it must be pointed out that throughout American history, many men have looked to government to support their roles as breadwinners, as with, for example, minimum wage laws. It might be more accurate to suggest that men's relatively privileged social position makes them more receptive to contemporary conservative messages, and more invested in the status quo.

Some folks, I think, will tend to see this as an essentialist argument: Women are more liberal and pacifistic because they're women, and men are just warlike jerks. But actually this research suggests politics are shaped more by social roles and day-to-day tasks than by biology. An obvious way to test this theory is to look at stay-at-home dads: Does taking care of kids push men in a more liberal direction?

I don't know of any peer-reviewed studies that have examined this question, but I explored it quite a bit in researching my book The Daddy Shift through interviews with families.

The result: It's certainly the case that many stay-at-home dads and breadwinning moms feel that taking care of kids does make dads more liberal--according to these couples, they're just more conscious of the importance of access to the commons, things like playgrounds and health care. "The world would be a better place if more fathers...took care of children," said one Kansas City mom. "I think a man becomes more aware of other social issues."

Many of these couples, it must be said, were at least somewhat liberal to begin with, which makes sense--liberal values allow for the possibility of a gender-role reversal. However, there are many conservative stay-at-home dads; do their attitudes evolve? To get a firm answer to this question, you'd need to track couples' political trajectory over many years, from pregnancy to the teenage years, and control for many variables.

If the answer turns out to be yes, this suggests that men as a group should become more liberal as they spend more time with kids. And if we want to push our society in a more liberal direction, policies that encourage male caregiving--starting with paid paternity leave--are a good place to begin. If the answer is no, we'll need to look elsewhere for an explanation about why men and fathers tend to be more conservative than women and mothers.

[Originally posted to my Mothering magazine blog.]

"Are you a writer?"

1. "Are you a writer?"

I'm at a reading by the novelist Nicholas Baker. The man who asks this question (apropos of nothing) is in his fifties, trim and gray, and he leans forward earnestly, as if he has seen in me the possibility of some revelation.

"Yes," I say. "Yes I am." I'm still surprised when I hear myself answer this question in the affirmative.

"Oh!" His eyebrows rise with admiration. "What do you write about?"

"Parenthood, mostly."

I can see the admiration drain out. "Oh," he says.

I hasten to add, "But I write about other things as well."

Too late. He turns away, hand going to his cheek, waiting for Nicholas Baker to appear.


2. "Are you a writer?"

The barista sweeping the floor isn't asking me. She's asking the long-haired bohemian with a serious mien who sits across from me.

He smiles. "No," he says. "I work in a record store."

"I thought you were a writer," she says, leaning on the broom. "You look like a writer!"

They both laugh.

"I'm a writer," I say.

They both look at me cautiously.

"Really?" I can see that the barista doesn't believe me, even though I'm sitting at the table with a pen in hand and a stack of manuscripts. "What do you write about?"

"Fatherhood, most of the time. Books. Science. Politics."

"Oh," she says, her interest visually waning. "Well, you don't look like a writer."

"What do I look like?"

She thinks for a moment, eyes skyward, and then goes back to sweeping the floor.

"You look like a schoolteacher," she says.


3. "Are you a writer?"

I'm on an airplane, and it's the steward who asks me, a clean-cut, blonde, middle-aged Midwesterner.

"Yes, I am."

"Ho boy!" he says. "I've got some great stories. You should write about one of them! This one time blah me and my father blah blah blah blah blah blah biggest fish I ever caught blah blah blah..."

I look past him, towards the emergency exit. Can I make it...?

[Originally posted to my Mothering magazine blog.]