Book Salon: Red Families v. Blue Families

This coming Sunday the 18th, starting at 2 pm PST / 5 pm EST, I'll be hosting a Firedoglake Book Salon for Naomi Cahn and June Carbone and their new book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture:

Red Families v. Blue Families identifies a new family model geared for the post-industrial economy. Rooted in the urban middle class, the coasts and the "blue states" in the last three presidential elections, the Blue Family Paradigm emphasizes the importance of women's as well as men's workforce participation, egalitarian gender roles, and the delay of family formation until both parents are emotionally and financially ready. By contrast, the Red Family Paradigm--associated with the Bible Belt, the mountain west, and rural America--rejects these new family norms, viewing the change in moral and sexual values as a crisis.

This political perspective on the family is a big part of my book, The Daddy Shift--a fact that puzzled, and perhaps alienated, some of my readers. Everything in the book points to the last chapter, which argues that the "daddy shift"--the expansion of good fathering from pure breadwinning to include caregiving as well--necessitates a shift in law and public policy. I end the book by asking dads who have made the private shift to help make that public shift happen, to allow their caregiving experience to drive their political participation and inform their votes.

Of course, some folks would have preferred that I stopped with the (genuinely moving and complex) stories about stay-at-home dads and breadwinning moms. But since finishing The Daddy Shift, I've come to feel even more strongly that a specific political agenda flows from the emergence of what Cahn and Carbone call "the Blue Family Paradigm." We need policies, such as paternity leave and flextime, that will help us to be the fathers that we want to be.

Indeed, Red Families v. Blue Families makes a very compelling, research-tested case for the idea that the kind of family you're in is tightly linked to where you live, how much education you have, what you do for work, how much money you make--and how you vote come election time.

Does that sound unlikely to you? Well, I hope you'll join us this Sunday the 18th--you'll be able to put your toughest questions directly to the authors of Red Families v. Blue Families, who will be on hand to answer. The book salon will be the top blog entry at Firedoglake from 2-3 pm PST / 5-7 pm EST, and you'll be able to participate by posting comments.

Have Families Become More Resilient?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published today on Shareable.net.

Megan Fox: "There's no more room in here!"

Hot for Teachers w/ Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green from Megan Fox

My Brief Wondrous Career as a Soccer Dad

Spot clearly didn't want to be in soccer class. How could I tell? There he was, in the middle of the basketball court, crouched in turtle position with his face pressed against the floorboards as the phalanx of toddlers drove their soccer balls from one end of the gym to the other. This was a stunning, daring act of civil disobedience against the unwanted enforcement of our weekly athletics programming.

Yet it was hardly the first time Spot had protested in soccer class. It was only the most spectacular such collapse. I was confident that, as in previous crises, with a little cajoling he'd be back on his feet and off among the cones and floppy orange discs littering the floor. But this time Spot was raising the stakes. Coach Jaime swung in from the sidelines and stood protectively over my turtle boy as soccer balls careened around him. It was time for dad to intervene.

I approached Spot's successful participation in soccer class as a natural scientist might approach the outcome of a laboratory experiment. If I could control key variables in advance, I could guarantee the desired result in such a way that it could be replicated every Saturday morning at 10:30AM. It was simply a matter of setting the proper controls before plugging in the box. Did I administer the mid-morning fuel booster? Check. Had I drained the bladder? Check. Did I deliver an adequate pre-class pep talk? Check. Were the sneakers on both feet with shoelaces not too tight? Check.

So, if all went well, I would soon be jumping up and down on the sidelines as Spot managed to keep his focus and dribble the ball across the court and into the goal, much as I might were I warming up the giant magnets of an underground particle accelerator and high-fiving my lab assistants as we successfully smashed tiny bits of matter into their component quarks, bosons, and perhaps even a hadron or two.

But that wasn't happening, and Spot was deploying every possible subterfuge to sabotage the enterprise. Collapse #1 was a bogus potty alarm. Back from our unproductive run to the washroom and on the sidelines again, Collapse #2 followed with a demand for "banana." Banana peeled and in hand, Spot wandered back onto the court kicking randomly with one leg at balls that may or may not have been there, turning in ever larger, ever more meaningless circles.

Despite following every protocol and controlling for every variable, despite jerry-rigging the apparatus with a banana, this experiment was a failure. There were no quarks or Higgs bosons at the end of this accelerator. I failed to see the hand of God in the soapy tracks of my bubble chamber. No quarks or bosons, just randomly colliding soccer balls, just noise and a single rogue toddler with his banana gyrating through statistically improbable cycles of leg twitching glory.

It was at this moment that my Inner Hockey Dad awoke from its evolutionary slumber deep in the most primitive parts of my brain. This cold-blooded amphibian, this vestigial holdover from an earlier stage of male evolutionary development, lifted itself onto all four legs, swung its armor-plated tail against the more evolved portions of my consciousness, and bellowed:

"Kick the FUCKING BALL you fucking LOSER! Fucking A! Get your ASS off the FLOOR and K.I.C.K. the B.A.L.L!"

Now, although this crude commentary never made it out of my mouth, it nonetheless highlighted how invested I had become in Spot's performance. This was a surprise. It all began so simply: I saw a sign at the neighborhood club last spring, I signed him up, and all seemed to go well. He loved being surrounded by balls, endless piles of balls rolling everywhere, and running back and forth from one net to the other with other yelping toddlers. What joy!

Caught up in the enthusiasm, I joined an adult pick-up league, playing real soccer with real rules for the first time in my life, and loving it as much as my son. I endured one crippling injury after another, as well as the frustration -- as raw for a 40 year old man as for a teenager -- of not getting enough ball time. I took the ball to the park in the twilight of September evenings and dribbled endless figure eight's while Spot picked berries from nearby bushes and my dog panted blankly.

And why? How had my own expectations advanced so far ahead of my son's desires? Because, in the back of my head, I wanted to be ready to do all this with my son. I wanted to be ready to coach him when the time came. I wanted to jump into a sport that I always wished I had been able to play when I was a boy. And, more than all of that, I wanted to be able to kick the ball around with Spot.

But what if he didn't want to kick the ball, and in fact was now much more interested in picking the red berries from that bush and the black berries from this bush? So be it. He has tasted soccer, he has devoted roughly one-fifth of his brief life-span to it, perhaps it is time to sample other things. He can always come back to it, being the nimble, flexible creature that he is. It's his father, accustomed as he has become to projects requiring years of labor, who is not quite so nimble anymore.

Still feeling the effects of my Inner Hockey Dad's amphibian intrusion, I brusquely picked Spot up off the floor and carried him football-style out of the gymnasium and down the window-lined corridor. Away from the sound of bouncing balls and toddler voices, I set him down on his feet and let him run a few steps ahead. His protest was concluded. He had won. A smile returned to his overheated face. It was a sunny day and the rest of the afternoon lay before us.

He looked back at me and motioned me forward. "Not that way, this way," he said, coming back to get me. "I'll hold your hand."

Three years ago, there had been nothing in the space above that empty stretch of linoleum but swirls of dust floating in a ray of sunshine. Now a person stood there, and his small voice ahead of me called me forward. Only a fool would fail to listen.

a kid friendly wild rumpus!

I was twenty and about to be a father. He had just turned twenty-one and was on his way to Redwood Summer, a call for people to come participate in direct action to save the redwoods and old growth forests of Northern California. We ran into each other at the local hardware store. It was May 1990. We had been friends during the school year at UCSB, studying together, attending environmental meetings on campus, talking politics, becoming more radical like many college students. We had fantasized in hushed tones during class breaks what it would be like to join hundreds of others attempting to make a change. But as the spring quarter came to a close, we saw less of each other; he, in fact, was actually planning on participating; I, however, was planning on preparing the small home I shared with my girlfriend for our first child.

So there we were standing in some aisle; it had been a couple weeks since we last talked. He was holding a back-pack full of stuff for a road trip. I was holding a bag of supplies to baby proof the electrical sockets in my house. He was picking things in preparation to camp out for weeks. I was going to pick up a few more shifts at the used bookstore that I worked for to help with the bills over the summer.

I remember the look on his face when he asked for the last time, ‘can’t you just leave the baby with your lady for awhile; they’ll both be here when you get back, but, right now, the earth needs you; right now, not when your child’s eighteen or nineteen.’

Now despite all the ways that this statement is fucked up, it’s painful for me to admit that it almost worked. I saw Rainbow Summer as my big chance, my opportunity to do something more. I feared that the pending birth of my son would be an impediment to my abilities to participate in creating social change. Up north in the trees: that’s where the action was, not singing lullabies and changing diapers.

And so I squirmed and gave some lame excuse about how I would love to go but that my lady won’t let me. Pathetic to blame family, to see it as a burden. But I did.

Now as much as I hold myself responsible for those former attitudes, and I do, I believe there is a larger issue also at fault. As a burgeoning radical, I was surrounded by a mythology of revolution that celebrated only one way to be a revolutionary; and, believe me, there were no newborn infants involved.

So at the time, I felt cheated at having to miss this event because of my other responsibilities; I mean all my radical role models seemed to have chosen otherwise. Che (and who didn’t love Che at twenty) left his kids behind and wrote oft-quoted, eloquent letters home; Ulrike Meinhoff, who haunted my dreams as one of the few revolutionaries who had kids and chose to commit herself anyways, had to send her children into hiding and then sever connections with them entirely; my chicano icons Joaquin Murrieta or Gregorio Cortez, didn’t saddle up with their two year old. In the corridos about them, there were only guns, whiskey, and getaways.

None of the stories my friend and I shared about radical politics included parents or children or grandparents or safe spaces.

So he left, and I remained.

I went on to evolve into a radical parent through reading and studying and working to create a small community of like-minded parents. But during those first few years, I secretly dreamed of the chance to once again be “able” to participate like a “true” revolutionary. The mythology of the revolutionary created a chasm between what I was “doing” and what was “important;” someday, I consoled myself, I could return to the fray, just as soon as I got the kids to bed.

So I longed for the road to the next demonstration even as I sat worked to create a childcare cooperative in my neighborhood. I imagined campfires in the forests of Northern California while I changed diapers on my feminist studies teacher’s desk. I dreamed of delivering fiery orations as I read Where The Wild Things Are over and over to my son, both of us yelling, ‘let the wild rumpus begin.’ However, it finally dawned on me: why the hell couldn’t there be a kid friendly wild rumpus?

And, yes, I know there were parents who have been able to participate in various forms of resistance throughout history (a testament, I’d bet, to the people who surrounded them). I have even had powerful support from my family to dedicate time, energy, and finances to various projects. So it can be done. But it shouldn’t be so daunting, so isolating. I am calling for an end to the dangerously powerful myth that revolutionaries leave their families behind. We shouldn’t have to choose? That’s a false dilemma. I sometimes dream about what might have happened had my friend encouraged me to come with my lady and my baby. Perhaps I still would not have gone. Or perhaps I would have. Perhaps some else like me would have. Perhaps a bunch of us would have. If the entire event was kid friendly, family friendly, with various actions and spaces, some of which, of course, could be more “direct” than others. But the possibilities, the potential, seem unlimited.

How about a new mythology, celebrating revolutionaries who refuse to leave anyone behind and refuse to remain silent? If I have learned anything, I have learned this: whatever we are involved in, it should take into account the ability for multigenerational participation. That’s sustainability, that’s revolutionary, that’s the pre-figurative politics I want to commit myself to.

My son is now nineteen; I am at peace and, in fact, grateful for the choices I have made. Looking back over the time that has elapsed, I have no regrets. I often wonder what my friend is doing. I want to ask him how that summer turned out. What was climbing those tall trees like? What craziness happened around the campfires? Did he fall in love with a little earth mama like we joked about? I’d also like to thank him. He was one of many people I have met in the radical community who have inspired and revolutionized me.

In fact, when I think about being a radical parent and an anarchist, I remember fondly all the strange, amazing people that I‘ve met in this loose-knit diverse thing we call a radical community who continue to challenge my thinking and expectations: the ones who organize anarchist conferences with childcare and parenting panels, the mamas and papas writing zines and the allies who buy them, the infoshop volunteers who do it year after year, the anarchist parenting listservs with their thoughtful reflections on how to parent in radical ways, the wandering crusties I encounter as I travel, sometimes alone, sometimes with my children, the artists who plan midnight mystery murder bike rides, and the strangers in distant cities who welcome me into their homes.

Because whether I’m home or on the road, whether I’m with my children or not, I am always a parent as well as a radical, and I will not be silent about demanding we consider ways to include everyone. And when I’m old, I want to embellish stories of my swarthy figure, similar to the Chicano banditos of old, only instead of the reigns of a horse, I am cupping the palm of my child.

Welcome to rad dad 17!

Raise My Taxes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published on Shareable.net.

Seven Cool Kid Vids about Space Travel

Simon's post on fathering in the age of YouTube hit close to home.

Liko and I spend a lot of time researching space and spaceships on YouTube. Unlike Simon, I don't feel much guilt about this--I really do think our YouTube watching is educational. But like all the best education, it's also fun. Take this video:



Stirring, isn't it? For Hunakkah this year, we got Liko a scale model of the Saturn V. The cool thing about the model is that it breaks into all the stages, until only the command module remains for splash-down on our rug. So on lazy Sunday mornings, as we watch this video we'll act out every stage of the Saturn V's journey to the moon, and back.



I'll use each part of the journey to explore some different scientific fact or idea: orbits, gravity, rocketry, planetary formation, water on the moon, and so on. I'm no expert on this stuff, and so we'll often take side-trips on YouTube or Wikipedia to learn more. However, in the course of our quest for knowledge, we have taken some wrong turns:



"Daddy, what's a condom?"

Anyway, here are six more great YouTube videos about space exploration:


1. Best overall video about the Space Shuttle:




2. The International Space Station as seen from the outside:

'


3. And the ISS from the inside:



Liko actually gets bored with this after the first five minutes, but he does find those first five minutes fascinating.

The Space Voyagers Adventure Fleet also offers an International Space Station kit, which enables you and your kid to closely follow the tour and explore the solar panels and the functions of the different modules. Bonus: the kit includes a small Soyuz for docking!


4. Best video about Mars exploration:



Fun activity: use boxes and paper and kitchen appliances to build your own Mars rover. (Interested in Mars? This vid about Mars colonization is cyptofascist fun.)


5. Spookiest space video:



For an explanation of what it is you're hearing, see this NASA page. When Liko heard this, he said, "It sounds like music. Daddy, is there an orchestra inside of Jupiter?"


6. Best Soyuz video (so far)

Recently, we've been learning about the Russian space program. I haven't yet found a definitive Soyuz video, but it's always entertaining to watch these cannonballs crash into the earth:



Those cosmonauts are brave as hell.

YouTube Time

One of the potential problems with parenting – according to Nurtureshock, the excellent book I’m currently reading – is too many rules. Have a few rules with kids and stick to them, the authors advise. My problem’s not the rules imposed on my kid. It’s the rules imposed on me.

“No YouTube today,” says my wife Fitzsimmons as she leaves for work.

She’s right. I have to get a job, so that I can commit fully to the breadwinning section of Equally Shared Parenting. No more YouTube. No more showing ten-month-old Sam clips from Chariots Of Fire (the 400 meter final, with Ian Charleston throwing his head back – just writing it makes me want to watch it now), or the diplomatic immunity bit out of Lethal Weapon 2, or Eddie Izzard’s routine about Pavlov’s Cat.

That’s the problem with YouTube. I'm on the Jobs section of Craigslist and a great scene pops into my head (Romeo + Juliet, gas station) and I know I can find it within seconds. It’s a sickness, an addiction. Sure, there are some movies I can’t find (all the best Die Hard clips have been ring-fenced), but for every one placed off-limits by the scaredy-cat studios, there are ten classic scenes (take your pick between Jack Nicholson as Colonel Nathan R Jessep or Gene Hackman drinking a beer with the boys in Mississippi Burning).

The problem with YouTube, as I see it, is that Fitzsimmons has no imagination for wasting time. Having worked six years for a cable company with a TV on my desk, I have a sixth sense for a good scene. I can speak on the telephone, answer emails, cross-reference two online databases, and drop everything when I see an alpaca-clad Chevy Chase surrender in Spies Like Us.

But no, I will not YouTube. I will not even use the word, as verb or noun or elegiac regret. Sam will have to wait to hear the angelic voice of Edda Dell’Orso in Ennio Morricone’s score for Duck, You Sucker. He will have to search out antique Blu-Ray disks to appreciate bug-eyed Christopher Macdonald as Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmore. He will have to glimpse fleeting scenes from The Natural as his own wife flicks channels, and wonder why the soundtrack seems strangely familiar.

Instead, I spend my morning with Sam playing with his basketball game, and looking out our back window at the rooks playing helter-skelter on the fire escape opposite our building. In the distance, a helicopter whocks towards us, coming from the Golden Gate Bridge. Sam looks up at it. “Helicopter, Sam. Helicopter.” His eyes are big and blue, his mouth open. The chopper zips past, oblivious to our rear window lesson in aviation identification. I wonder if he got a decent look. Helicopters are cool. Wouldn’t it be great if that was his first word. Hang on, I’ve got an idea.

I boot up YouTube. It’s okay, this is educational. Type in ‘helicopter.’ Various clips from airshows, then other sites from Huey obsessives. Find a two-minute clip of one taking off. Perfect. “Come and see this, Sam.” He’s not sold, comes over slowly. Wonders why we aren’t looking for birds, wonders when the whocka-machine’s coming back.

The clip is slow. The engine starts, the rotors begin to turn. Sam’s mouth opens. The blades whirl round, the sound not yet recognizable from the helicopter we saw outside. The engine pitch rises, blends with the beat of the blades. Ninety seconds. “Watch, Sam. Look at the tail.” The rotor at the tail is buzzing, the aircraft starting to judder on the H-marked landing pad. A hundred seconds, no movement. Sam looks across at me, as if to say, “What’s this clip supposed to be? Can’t we go back to The Matrix and Agent Smith interrogating Neo?”

Then it rises. Awkwardly, as if on strings. First tail, then nose. The helicopter levitates and Sam is rapt. It’s like mechanical sleight of hand. He is ten months old, has no knowledge of physics, gravity, or aerodynamics. But he’s spellbound as the craft rises into the air and swivels, dips its nose then flies away. “Not bad, huh?” Sam waits, as if this helicopter might come back. The birds are forgotten, he lives only for this new whirlygig. It’s not yet twelve, not yet lunchtime, while Fitzsimmons isn’t due back for at least an hour. Easily enough time for an Apocalypse Now clip.

Simon Hodgson

Ten reasons why I both love and hate cell phones

Or, yes dad I know, no sexting!

If you saw me now with my iphone, warm against my left butt cheek like a lover’s palm, the last thing I see before bed, the first thing I stroke in the morning, you wouldn’t believe that less than two years ago, I had never even owned a cell phone. I was (and to be honest still am) a Luddite in theory though in practice I struggle. It’s become even more of a struggle now as each one of my three kids has a cell phone. Sometimes I wonder what the hell happened to me. But in an effort to understand more critically my love/hate relationship with the cell phone, I explored these ten scenarios.

Reason 1:

SUANT p: \sue –ant\: Lying on the couch, my daughter and I were watching a movie and every couple minutes I observed the dexterity with which she would do her nifty wonder-woman like phone flip, nimble fingers texting faster than I could LOL and then slip the phone back in to her lap.
What the hell’s going on? I barked, that’s so irritating.
Dad, it’s a SUANT night.
What?
SUANT, she declared as if I should know exactly what the hell she was talking about, Stay Up All Night Texting. Me and my friends are doing it.
Are you serious? I asked.
My daughter’s response: the perfect eye roll, and then, as if to accentuate the point, her phone buzzed.
Flip.
Text.
Flip.
Yes, dad, I am.
Now recently, my kids have been very interested in reading everything I write for rad dad for “clarity and honesty” they intone, like editors from hell. So after this exchange I told My Youngest that I was working on an essay about cell phones and said, you know this has gotta go in that essay.
Whatever.
And, I added, I gotta text your mom about this, grabbing my own phone which conveniently is always within arm’s reach.
You text? My Youngest declared horrified as if she’d just seen me naked.
Ah, yeah.
Stop acting twenty, Dad. You’re forty.
Somehow every conversation ends with this statement
Addendum: a few weeks later when I read what I wrote to her, she laughed and smiled but confessed, well, we really only ever stay up to twelve texting.

Reason 2:

Random text messages that continue conversations or more particularly arguments from days earlier. I’m in my office one morning. And in comes a text from My Youngest; she’s had the phone for only a month, so each text is the cutest thing in the world: an ‘I love you, dad’ here, an ‘I miss u’ there, perhaps even a random ‘hey dad, whats happenin.’ So I open the text and discover nothing of the sort, but instead find a final point in a week long discussion we’ve had about shaving her legs since she’s eleven. ‘what about that smooth away stuff - it’s not a razor and it’s not a chemical!!!’ We initially agreed that we’d consider it after the holidays. This, of course, was unacceptable to her. So her strategy: intimidating and/or pleading texts sent sporadically at various times of the day and night to pressure me in to caving. She’s trying to wear me down, I know. I text back, ‘how ‘bout we just wait until your legs are as hairy as mine and then you can decide if you want to.’
Ah, the textual silence that follows.

Reason 3:

I love photos. I own two manual cameras, a Polaroid and a stash of Polaroid film. However, there is something cheesy and immediate about cell phone images, the pixilated quality, the surreal feel captured. Like these scattered throughout the essay.

Reason 4:

Lately my son and I have been a bit short with each other, and what I mean by short is that within thirty seconds of him entering a room, we both end up screaming at each other. So ironically the cell phone gives us the distance and space we need to be able to talk about things in a normal tone of voice. Of course, I have to get over the momentary panic coursing through my body when I initially see the call is from him fearing it is going to be about being arrested: but every now and then:
Ohmygod Dad, guess what.
What?
Guess who’s walking in front of me.
Who?
The Raiders’ head coach.
Raaaaaaideeeerrrss, I yell.
Raaaaaaideeeerrrss, he responds like some strange bonding ritual in which all acrimony is immediately forgiven and forgotten.
Ask him what the fuck, I excitedly implore.
What the fuck!, I hear him yell.
Then, realizing my son might actually accost the head coach of a National Football Team, I quickly decide to redirect with a more positive approach. Ah, the art of redirection; some toddler parenting skills you never forget, especially when they seem to also work so well with young adults.
Hey, wait; tell him, tell him that you still got faith.
Yeah, that’s a good one. Ok I’m gonna do it. Thanks, Dad.
Click and he hangs up before I have a chance to say, you’re welcome son, you’re welcome.

Reason 5:

When I call my Middle Daughter she often asks why I sound so grumpy. And I am. It’s horrible but the explanation is simple. I blame the 45 second delay in each and every phone call as we try to establish who is speaking. It goes something like this, I call her and she answers:
Hello.
Zor-
What? Hello.
Zor-
Um, hello, hello!?
Zora list-
Uh, yeah well um hello?!
Repeat for at least 20 more seconds and by the time it actually all clears up I feel like grounding her. Instead, I take a deep breath in and, of course, as if the universe is testing to see if I am really breathing deeply enough, I usually hear one final: um, hello.

Reason 6:

The realization that my children’s friends no longer have to interact with me as a parent. I think this make kids kinda creepy. Especially teenage boys. Both my daughters’ boy friends (note from The Kid Editor friends that are boys, not boyfriends) stand a house away when they “come over” and text that they’re here. So instead of having to knock on the door and be greeted by me, they sulk forty feet away and wait for them to come out.
What happened to showing a little courtesy, what happened to navigating the small talk, what happened to my chance to be the scary father interrogating hapless thirteen year olds? I want that chance.
Solution: Dad, my friend’s outside. Can I go play? My Middle Daughter shouts down from her lair upstairs.
I rush to look out the living room window, and sure enough at the corner of the house just out of sight stands a group of kids.
Ok, I yell, but let me walk you out.
Now my Middle Daughter is quick, but the speed with which she bounds down the stairs three at a time is impressive. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a child move faster, bolting out the door ahead of me, an audible trail of, it’s fine, Dad. I’ll be back in a few. Stay inside and relax.
Needless to say, I don’t.

Reason 7:

I know it sounds horrible and manipulative, but in a fit of fear and distrust, I somehow informed my kids that when the bill comes I am able to read every text message they send and receive.
My Middle Daughter nods her head, her face full of trust and says, wow, really. Every one. That’s gotta be one hecka long bill. And simply goes back to whatever she is doing.
However, I begin to feel a burning sensation on the side of my head; it’s My Youngest staring at me. Finally she asks, Dad, can you see them if I delete them?
Immediately, I suspect something devious. I know I better be careful.
Why do you want to know?
No reason, and then as if on cue.
Buzz. Smile. Flip. Text. Flip. She looks back at me.
I’m just curious.
Somehow I feel outwitted.

Reason 8:

My Middle Daughter pleaded to be allowed to go to her first high school party. Of course there were random text messages in the days leading up to the party. ‘You’re the best, dad.’ Two hours later. ‘So can I go?’ I’m such a sucker.
As she leaves for the party with a friend’s parent, I calmly state:
Now when I come to pick you up, I’ll call when I’m outside.
Ok, Dad, she utters pushing me away from the car window.
I decide to add, you know if you don’t answer the phone when I pull up though, I’m coming in to the house to find you.
Both her and her friend stop everything they are doing and stare at me horrified for what feels like 30 seconds. And then my Middle Daughter calmly states: don’t worry, Dad. Believe me, that’s one call I’m not gonna miss.

Reason 9:

Driving my nineteen year old son, who is moving to NYC, to the airport, I joke with him about the things I’ll miss: yelling at him to turn down the music or picking up his soiled underwear off the bathroom floor.
We laugh and then he yells, shit!
What?
I forgot my cell phone charger at the house.
This was after we had to turn around twice already for things he forgot: his 600 hundred dollars he had stashed in a sock that he put into a bag of clothes to give to Goodwill as well as a third baseball hat he just had to have.
I, of course, want to say something about irresponsibility and how that’ll have to change as he’s on his own now, but instead I smile and say, well I guess you’ll have to just write me a letter then.
I will dad, I will. Or maybe I can get grandma to just buy me a charger.
And off he goes.
Good luck!
Addendum: it’s seems distance and cell phones do make the heart grow fonder; we’ve talked every other day.

Reason 10:

As I hand My Youngest Daughter, my sweet, innocent eleven year old, her first cell phone, I am about to give her a little word to the wise.
Now remember, baby-
I know, Dad, I know, she interrupts.
What? I ask wondering what cute little thing she knows about owning a cell phone.
She looks me in the eye and says, no sexting. I’m only eleven, Dad, I don’t even have a boyfriend.
I almost drop the phone out of my hand, but manage to say, well, I was gonna say something abut not leaving your phone anywhere. But how do you know about sexting? I ask.
How do you, Dad?! Remember you’re forty, not twenty, gosh.

Unhappy Hipster Children

Friends (and by that, I'm referring to my Facebook friends) know that I've recently become highly amused by the blog Unhappy Hipster, which joins dream home photos from Dwell magazine with new captions that highlight their loneliness and narcissism. I thought I'd share the photos and captions depicting the psychological and spiritual harm these homes do to innocent children :


You can come out when you can properly explain the differences between Modernist architecture and postmodern ornamentation.



Maybe naming him Rimbaud wasn’t such a good idea.



And one day, a ladder appeared. Julien climbed with guarded optimism; could this be the way out for which he’d been searching all these weeks?



In search of a less bleak playground, the toddler pedaled faster.

Holy Equal Pay, Batgirl!

Thanks, Alex!

Oedipus Chex

I remember well the day my father said, as he shed the sports section of the paper from his lap and checked the day's barometric pressure on his GPS-wristwatch device, "You want to castrate me."

I don't remember exactly how I replied to this. It's not the kind of question that comes up often enough to have a practiced and ready response. One tactic that occurred to me would be to respond as my now 3-year old son does when his soccer coach asks "Are you a purple dinosaur?" Spot smiles knowingly and in a falling tone says "Nnnnnnnoo ...", meaning Of course I'm not a purple dinosaur, or in my case, Of course I don't want to castrate you.

But I think he meant it. Which made me wonder if I did mean it. So I remember thinking, there in the living room, as the Chicago Bears wasted yet another hour of my father's sports-viewing life, would it really be better if my father were castrated? If he were a docile eunuch who did not interrupt the flow of my existence with his bad jokes repeated as if the reason we didn't laugh was because we didn't hear him the first time? If he didn't disrupt my psychic equilibrium with his Russian peasant house manners, or his tendency to lose important documents and to rely on other people's cell phones for vital communications? And would I really want my mother all to myself?

In spite of all their potency, these questions quickly sank into my deep subconscious, an already crowded place, where they were duly labeled and set aside for consideration by some future psychotherapist.

Until, that is, the day the tables were turned. I descended the staircase one morning to be met by the same Oedipal glare that my father must have known well. In a bath of soft light before me I saw the heartwarming scene of a mother, dressed for work and feeding breakfast to her son, holding a boy in a puppy-covered sleeper with puppy ears flopping off the side of each foot. Yet this boy, shattering the Norman Rockwell charm of the scene, frowns when he sees me, and raises an accusatory, pointed finger into the air.

"Daddy, you go back upstairs!"

I grab a glass of orange juice, and sit down across the room. My son repeats his demand. I sense my inner Walter Sobchack dislodging and rising to the surface, the same irritable reflex I often saw in my father long before Walter Sobchak was invented. "Hell no," this Walter Sobchak/father composite might have said, this father who in those moments of lost self control reminded me of -- and may in fact have been distantly related to -- the fabled Jewish gangsters of Odessa.

"No," I say, with a small portion of offense and a larger portion of incredulity. Mom gets up and goes upstairs to get something. Exuding crisis and near hysteria, determined not to share the same breakfast space with Daddy, Spot bounds off of the sofa --"I better go see Mama!" -- and runs upstairs.

For the next several weeks, if I trespassed on the morning feeding -- which was Mama's job according to our division of labor -- I was told to go back upstairs. That never worked, of course, and so being the clever boy he is, Spot began asking that I relocate to the kitchen. Spot's Oedipal instincts didn't stop there, however. It wasn't long before Spot claimed exclusive possession of my in-laws, and not just sovereignty over breakfast, but lunch, too: "Daddy, you go away!"

It was sometime in my 30's when my father shared his Oedipal concern with me; Spot isn't even three yet and he's already working to banish me from breakfast with Mama, and then lunch with Mama's parents. I've always suspected there was a nugget of truth to Freud -- just a nugget -- but now I'm going to hide the cutlery.

How Do You Know What a Fork is For?

I thought I'd highlight some wholesome family content just published on Shareable.net, which I edit:

How Kids Learn to Share Tools: How do you know what a fork is for? Objects carry meanings and tell stories, says developmental psychologist Debbie Siegel--shared stories about who we are as humans and communities. This is a really interesting essay, and I think parents will find it helpful.

How to Share a Nanny: Very practical nuts and bolts overview of how to share a nanny with another family.

How to Plant a Garden at the Neighborhood Playground: Our circle of families went to the city and asked if we could plant a community garden in a strip of dirt available on our neighborhood playground. To our surprise, the city said yes. Here's how we did it.

Can Sharing Survive Parenthood? You're young, in love, and more or less equal--but will it stay that way after the baby is born? Marc and Amy Vachon (whose book came out this month) say yes, if you ask the right questions before you become parents.

New Law Requires Women to Name Baby, Paint Nursery Before Getting Abortion

New Law Requires Women To Name Baby, Paint Nursery Before Getting Abortion

Giving Hockey a Try

“Keep yer stick on the ice!” yelled a dad, his voice filled with anger.

“Come on, number fifteen!” yelled another. “You skate like a girl!”

Liko and I were watching a youth hockey game at the Yerba Buena rink in San Francisco. We were surrounded by fathers watching their boys play hockey...and, man, was it ugly.

As the kids battled on the ice, you could feel the tension rising among the parents.

Then I heard a lone, small voice from the other side of the bleachers:

“Have fun!” it said.

I looked up, and so did the other parents.

There stood a fellow on the top bleacher, smiling down at us. The smile said, C’mon, guys, lighten up.

I chuckled, and a ripple of laughter spread through the stands. We did lighten up.

One of the (few) moms yelled, “Have fun keeping your sticks on the ice!”

“Have fun skating like a girl!” shouted a dad.

Dads are way more active in sports than moms; in many communities, it’s the main way that fathers play a role in the lives of their kids and other people’s kids. Indeed, sports are the primary path many boys take to manhood.

That's both a good thing and a problem. It's a good thing because kids get exercise and they learn about discipline, focus, teamwork, and cooperation. It's a bad thing because in today's sports culture, they also learn about misogyny, homophobia, belligerence, self-destructive levels of competition...and the neuroses of their fathers.

"I've seen a lot of hardcore, winning-obsessed, hyper-competitive moms," says Regan McMahon, author of Revolution in the Bleachers: How Parents Can Take Back Family Life in a World Gone Crazy Over Youth Sports. But fathers, says Regan, can be much worse. "It may be more common for men who have grown up playing sports to have certain opinions about how to be a star, or perhaps they want their child to have the success they had, or if they weren't a star, they want to experience vicariously the stardom they never achieved."

This leads to the kind of angry heckling I saw in the Yerba Buena bleachers; those guys are angry at their younger selves, first and foremost, and at the loss of their youth.

Inwardly, I was cringing: My son has been skating for two and a half years, and we were there so that he could participate in "Give-Hockey-a-Try Day" that afternoon. It's something he wanted, that I had resisted. The thought of my son entering this hockey culture, surrounded by these thuggish men, filled me with an old, sickening disquiet.

I'm not superior to these guys, and I know what Regan is talking about: I often find myself projecting my own athletic anxieties onto my son. I was a decent runner, but in team sports I was mediocre (soccer) to lousy (baseball). I very well remember the shit I got from both teammates and coaches, and I came to dread practices and games. By high school, I had stopped participating, and like millions of other freaks and geeks, I grew to hate sports and jocks. Today, when I see my son trying a sport, my stomach clenches as I watch for signs for failure and weakness.

That's not so different from the dads who stayed with sports, but never achieved as much as they hoped. While individual ability and commitment vary, the ultimate truth about sports is that, by definition, 99 percent of us won't become stars. The best we can hope for is fitness and fun, but too often our sports culture ruins our bodies through overtraining or ruins our self-esteem through bullying and hyper-competitiveness. That culture has shaped me as well as other fathers.

That afternoon, Liko suited up and skated out onto the ice, stick in hand. All the pictures that accompany this blog entry are from that afternoon.

He was the smallest one on the ice, but I watched in awe, truly in awe, as he held his own. I watched him do his best, overcome obstacles, negotiate problems, recover from mistakes, take coaching, handle aggression from other kids, manage his own aggression, and gain new skills. All on his own.

Did this brave, strong boy really grow from the premature newborn who could fit in the palm of my hand? What a miracle. What a gift. I admit it: I was proud.

Again, that's a good thing and a bad thing, that pride.

"The father-son relationship is a delicate one, and boys really don't want to disappoint their dads," says Regan. "And I've seen many boys who seemed to care more about what their dad thought of their performance than their coach. One basketball star I knew would look up in the stands at his dad after every shot, not at his coach. I have heard, anecdotally, about a lot of kids -- boys and girls-- who want to quit a sport or a team but feel they can't because their dad doesn't want them too. That can strain marriages, too, when the dad is gung-ho and the mom isn't."

This might be the arena where dads can have the biggest impact in improving and repairing the world. I think about that dad who spoke up in the bleachers: "Have fun!"

It really made a difference, that small action; it took the emotion down a notch. Regan tells me that it's critical for dads to try to "be a voice of sanity in team meetings"--to emphasize the fun, to vote against yet another tournament or extra day of practice.

"Support your child's love of sports, but don't push them," advises Regan. "Keep your ego out of the equation. Keep in mind that your child is playing sports for his or her pleasure, not yours."

That's good advice for individual dads. But the issues go beyond behavior; there's also a policy dimension to the struggle to make youth sports fun again. I'm no expert in this stuff, but Regan is, and so I'll quote her at length:

Putting policies in place to prevent overuse injuries is an important step. One of the best thing to happen in recent years was Little League finally adopting pitch counts to save young pitchers' arms. Dr. James Andrews, the orthopedic surgeon who pioneered the so-called Tommy John surgery for baseball pitchers' elbows, lobbied the national Little League organization for five years before they finally agreed to limit how many balls a kid could throw in a week. Dr. Andrews got tired of seeing injuries in 9-year-olds that he used to see primarily in professional athletes.

I'm an advocate of keeping P.E. a priority in schools, re-establishing intramural sports and encouraging kids to be multi-sport athletes in high school. One of the big changes in youth sports over the past 15 years is that it's gone from being about fun and participation to a star system that weeds out the weaker players and promotes the stronger ones. So recreational leagues are looked down upon and elite travel teams are seen as desirable. Consequently, kids are specalizing early and playing one sport year round, which can cause overuse injuries.

Some states, like Utah, have mandated downtime for interscholastic athletics, so there can be no training or competition for 12 weeks in a given sport. That guarantees that athletes and coaches get a break, and their competition will not gain an edge because they're required to take a break, too. And hey, the kid might get to go on a family vacation or attend a cousin's wedding for a change!

The elite travel teams have gutted high school sports programs to a large extent. So the highly competitive players are missing out on the experience of playing for their schools, because many coaches and parents keep them off the school team because it won't improve their chances for a scholarship and their is a perceived inferiority of play. I think that's a shame.

Interscholatic leagues tend to set their schedules so kids can play multiple sports in a school year, but elite club coaches and parents sometimes discourage their athletes not to participate in school sports. One Bay Area high school I know of actually has a stated policy that kids can only go out for one sport, which I think is kind of shocking. Doing multiple sports is a good way to prevent overuse injuries. So I'd support policies that encourage participation in multiple sports.

In general, I think policy makers should recognize the need for balance in chilren's lives. So any policies that would improve the balance between hard work and free time, sports and and family, commitment to club team and participation in school life, would be beneficial.

This was originally posted to my series for Mothering magazine, "Twenty-Five Ways for Dads to Change the World."

A Note to the Judys of America

So I’m in Florida for my brother’s wedding. In the courtyard of my future sister-in-law’s apartment complex, I met a neighbor I’ll call Judy. She told me my brother is wonderful, my future sister-in-law is wonderful; she told me about her work buying and selling condos; I mentioned that I have a son.

Then she asked: “Where are you coming from?”

“San Francisco,” I said.

“You’re awfully brave to live there and raise a child,” Judy said.

“Why? Because it’s so expensive?”

“No,” said Judy. “Because of all the perverts! All I hear about on the news is gay marriage, gay marches, gay this, gay that. How can you stand all that perversion!”

This is not, in my experience, an isolated incident. Just about every time I go abroad to cities not named New York or Seattle, I find that perfect strangers—having ascertained that I am, in fact, a red-blooded, All-American male who has certified his heterosexuality by marrying a woman and fathering a child—feel free to say the worst, silliest shit you can imagine about San Francisco.

I was polite to Judy. I’m polite to all these ignorant wingnuts. I told her about our life on Castro St., about our gay and lesbian friends with children, how much we enjoy life and our neighborhood in San Francisco. I sketched the contours of my family’s life in the most upbeat, positive terms I could muster.

Later, I told a male relative I'll call Bob about my conversation with Judy.

“Well, you have to admit," said Bob. "It is unusual that you’re raising a child on Castro St.”

“No, it’s not unusual,” I said. “There are lots of families on Castro St. Lots of the parents are gay and lesbian.”

“How is that possible? Don’t you need a man and woman to have a child?”

“No, dude. People adopt, lesbians get sperm donors. You meet gay and lesbian parents on every playground, in every school. They’re a minority, sure, but they’re part of the world of families in the city.”

Bob just shook his head and walked away, as though he doubted what I had to say. He thought I was exaggerating, being politically correct, or something. He’s not a bigot, but my experience just didn't seem to compute for him. According to everything he knows, gay and lesbian people can’t be parents. They're too busy popping meth and engaging in unnatural (and thus curiously appealing?) sexual acts to raise families.

The main difference between Judy and Bob is that Bob thinks it's A-OK to engage in unnatural sexual acts. Their view of gay and lesbian life is identical, but Bob just doesn't have a problem with it. The problem with Bob is that his picture of gay and lesbian life is waaaay too narrow.

Why am I writing this? Realistically, I guess, to remind myself and Daddy Dialectic's tiny part of the world that bigotry and ignorance are alive and well. When you live in a bubble, you forget what it's like outside, or at least I do.

But I also want to (unrealistically?) say something to the Judys of America, on the off-chance that one of their representatives has stumbled here: It’s just not nice to tell a San Franciscan, after having exchanged a few sentences, that our city is full of “perverts.” For pete's sake, don't assume that because I'm straight, I'm on your side. San Francisco is full of families, and some of them are straight, and some of them are gay, and some of them are related by blood, and some of them are formed of friends and lovers. We don't live in separate spheres; we mingle and overlap, and the truth is that we've formed a great community in which to raise kids. And you know what? I'd rather raise my child in a city like San Francisco than among the Judys of America.

"I'm going to bag Scrooge!"

Hate the Holidays? Try Something Different

I thought I'd share some holiday-related stuff from the site I edit,Shareable.net:

"How to Teach Your Kids to Share": In which I yell with frustration and then ask myself, Why is sharing so hard?

"How I Rescued Myself from Holiday Shopping Through a Donation Exchange": In which my colleague Neal says, I hate the waste and materialism and frantic shopping of the season--how can I drop all that and still make the holiday meaningful?

"How to Make Your Holiday a Shared Affair": In which Danielle Davis asks how we can turn the focus of the holidays form me, me, me to we, we, we.

"How to Throw a Toy Exchange": In which Dawn Friedman discovers a solution to not having enough money for toys.

Also: The anthology I edited with Dacher Keltner and Jason Marsh, The Compassionate Instinct, is coming to a bookstore near you. I'll giving talking about it at 7:30 on January 25 at Booksmith on Haight in San Francisco. For more information, please do click here.

In Search Of Atticus Finch

The first time your baby crawls is one of fatherhood’s most cinematic images. Movements recorded in the memory to be replayed years later in slow-mo reminiscence. For a few weeks now I’ve been waiting for my son Sam to crawl. At first, he looked like he’d cracked it and I wondered idly when he’d start running and when applications closed for the 2012 Olympic track team. But my excitement, initially feverish, has faded as he pauses before the summit. I feel like Sherpa Tenzing waiting for Edmund Hillary to notice the view instead of rooting in his backpack for lozenges.

Yesterday, while watching Sam’s latest attempt to upgrade snake-belly-scooching to four wheel drive across the colored alphabet tiles in our living room, I reflected on my own memories of his first seven months. If this really was a movie, I mused while mopping up Sam’s vomit off the letter D, which dad would I be?

Ideally, one would borrow from the best, stealing Spencer Tracy’s wisdom, Gary Cooper’s sense of duty, and Jimmy Stewart’s Wonderful Life family devotion. Imagine if this was possible, fatherhood would be an absolute cinch. I’d just download the requisite qualities, then be instantly able to diagnose my son’s teething, or translate his gurgles, or be kinder to my wife.

Sam burped and reached for the pack of wipes by the sofa, reminding me of Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona, the desperate dad grabbing diapers as he robs a convenience store. Who was I kidding? This was hopeless, fatherhood was never a pick’n’mix deal. Besides, knowing my unerring eye for idiocy, I’d probably download qualities from all the wrong dads: Nic Cage’s rap sheet, Eugene Levy’s American Pie-style tact, Darth Vader’s bedtime stories.

Actually, there’s no doubt about who’d play me in the ideal movie of Sam’s life. Every father wants to be Atticus Finch. With his quintessential calm, Gregory Peck sets the celluloid standard. He is also the furthest thing from my own performance as a dad. Self-control and understanding are not exactly my watchwords when Sam craps biblically, or pukes so voluminously that I need to change not only his outfit, but mine too. On those endless nights when I stalk up and down a shadowy hallway to get him back to sleep – thinking darkly that if this is how it ends up, there’s no way I’m ever having sex again – I’m probably closer to Boo Radley.

In front of me, Sam lurched heavily from letter H to P, then slumped sideways. Arranged across the carpet, the alphabet tiles seemed a brightly-coloured roadmap of progress. Just as his scooching would become crawling, walking, and running, each letter represented something bigger, the building block of a word, a sentence, or a screenplay (though given that I’d only laid out 20 letters, it might not be much of a screenplay). Whether it was cinema dads or step-development, Sam and I each knew where we wanted to go, just not how to get there. He’d probably be okay – I know very few adults who are still crawling – it was me I was worried about. In these times of fractured families (my own father is 5000 miles away), who do today’s dads learn from? No wonder I’m making up my own rules.

Undaunted by my failure to identify my own cinematic inspiration, Sam scooched to the edge of the four-by-five rectangle with the crocodile-slither he mastered last week. Every day, it’s amazing to watch him. Even if he doesn’t crawl, each morning there’s another blink of consciousness in his eyes. He doesn’t recognize the boundaries of his two-dimensional tiled world, but reaches beyond it like a tiny Christopher Columbus. If he doesn’t need a roadmap, why should I? As he inched forward, there was something soaring about his effort, and for a moment I believed that Atticus Finch was attainable for us all. Then my boy collapsed facedown on the letter K and began to cry.

Neither his plastic giraffe nor the stripey rattle staunched the tears, so I flipped him over turn-turtle to bite his belly and he shrieked with laughter. I love hearing him laugh. After his grey months of heartburn, it’s like sunshine. Recently, he’s been teething, so I’ve taken to pouncing on him at unpredictable moments to distract him from the pain. Frequent mauling might be closer to assault than affection, but it’s the only act guaranteed to divert him. Forget justice or respect for your neighbor, eternal vigilance is our watchword.

When I rubbed my nose on his tummy, he yelled happily, then grabbed two handfuls of my hair. In that stabbing instant of pain I realized. Here am I biting him while he’s yanking my hair. This wasn’t To Kill A Mockingbird civics class and we weren’t Atticus and Scout. I was Clouseau and he was Cato. Sure, Peter Sellers and Burt Kwouk duelling obsessively in a Parisian apartment won’t make Good Parenting’s top father-son relationships, but it works for us.

Wisdom, restraint, and manners was what I shot for as Sam’s father. What he got was premeditated attacks inspired by an accident-prone Gallic detective and repeated every morning with autistic reliability. Still, what do you expect when you aim too high? You hope for Atticus Finch and you end up with Aspergers French.

Simon Hodgson