A dad's take on the breastfeeding wars

As World Breastfeeding Week winds down and the streamers and buntings are removed from city streets, the breast-shaped floats are garaged until next year, fountains in plazas once again feature cascades of chlorinated water instead of spurting milk, and the piped-in mamo-centric music at the mall fades out, I find myself reflecting on how fundamentalists on both sides of the breastfeeding war have misdirected their ire and played into the respective hands of two powerful corporate cartels: Big Formula and Big Breast Pump.

Although not affiliated with any pro-breastfeeding organization, noted attractive person Gisele Bundchen perhaps best expressed the sentiment of the most radically mammalistic of activists when she recently called for legislation making breastfeeding mandatory for mothers of children under six months old. This was followed by feminist men quietly celebrating an excuse to google “Gisele Bundchen breasts” with impunity, a backlash against her overstatement, a retraction and apology by the model, and continued googling of her breasts.

On the other side of the issue, while you would be hard-pressed to find any spokesmodels denouncing breastfeeding outright, there are certainly those who think putting pressure on moms to breastfeed rolls back many hard-won advances of feminism, and that the mandatory household appliance for working breastfeeders—the breast-pump—is an instrument of oppression and even torture.

In the spring of 2009, Hanna Rosin’s controversial article in The Atlantic caused a massive kerfuffle in the interblogosphereweb. Her piece, The Case Against Breast-Feeding, questioned the consensus among the medical community and parenting punditry that the benefits of breastfeeding are so clear that to opt out of suckling one’s young is tantamount to child abuse. She claimed that in fact, the benefits are negligible, and, even though she was breastfeeding her third baby at the time (she planned to continue only for a few months), she was convinced that the hassle to the mom was not worth whatever minor advantages it conferred upon the baby: she encouraged moms not to feel obligated to breastfeed if they didn’t want to, and not to feel like failures if they wanted to but were unable.

Even worse than the inconvenience and career damage inherent in having babies attached to the breast like so much fleshy body-jewelry, according to Rosin and others, is the degradation and humiliation inflicted by the execrable breast-pump.

In describing one of her friends tethered to a breast-pump, Rosin wrote that the first-time mom was “hooked up to tubes and suctions and a giant deconstructed bra, looking like some fetish ad, or a footnote from the Josef Mengele years.” Judith Warner, in a post on her New York Times blog , agreed with Rosin about the de-humanizing elements of pumping, and yearned for a day that “books on women’s history [would] feature photos of breast pumps to illustrate what it was like back in the day when mothers were consistently given the shaft.” The language in these comments is incendiary, and suggests an insidious plot by The Man to keep a sister down by vilifying any alternative to breastfeeding. But the obvious power of Big Formula—the samples and coupons lurking in every free diaper bag thrown at parents on Labor and Delivery floors and pediatricians’ offices being its most obvious artifacts—render that theory as toothless as an Enfamil-guzzling newborn.

Clearly, the tactics of both Big Formula and Big Breast Pump are well beyond the bumbling oppression techniques of The Man. The Man wants only complacence and conformity. BF and BBP want to recruit zealous consumers who will march into righteous battle on behalf of their products.

Just a few weeks ago, my wife switched off the breast-pump for the last time after a year of feeding our twins primarily with the miraculous elixir that somehow her body knew how to produce only when needed and roughly in the correct quantities (yet another supremely bizarre aspect of human reproduction that convinces me that no space alien would ever believe humanity was possible if it were informed of our existence).

But my wife is no breastfeeding ideologue. It worked for her, the evidence of its benefits was compelling enough to make up for the time and discomfort, it gave her license to eat with abandon, and it was actually cheaper than formula. As a doctor, she strongly recommends breastfeeding to her patients, but she doesn’t try to shame them into embracing it.

To her, the pump was a necessary inconvenience, not an instrument of degradation. Even when I tried, just for the sake of conversation, to get her to talk about the indignity of being milked by a machine, she rolled her eyes and went back to reading Perez Hilton to the rhythmic lull of the Medela Symphony.

Although my wife was oblivious to the Symphony’s subtle overtones, every night as I went to sleep, every morning as I changed the babies’ diapers, and every day as I gave the lunchtime report to Dr. Mom over the phone, I heard the infectious subliminal message from the mechanical heart of the pump and realized the extent to which companies will go to win over their consumers.

“Good-girl, good-girl, good-girl,” the pump slurred rapidly in Phase One.

And as the pump slowed down to roughly the pace of the human heart for Phase Two, it would repeat, for the next twenty minutes or so, “Breast-milk, breast-milk, breast-milk.”


Please visit me at Beta Dad, where I write about twins, Asian mommy groups, daddy groups, weird flights of fancy, and post lots of cute pictures.

Why Working Parents Hate Life

Having read a lot of chatter on the blogosphere about Jennifer Senior's July 4th article, "All Joy and No Fun, Why parents hate parenting" in New York magazine, I finally had to break down and read the damn thing.  I realize I'm a day late and a dollar short with my contribution to this conversation, but I've been pretty busy with the allegedly heinous drudgery of child care.

In her article, Senior examines a number of studies concerning the effects of parenting on the happiness of adults.  As you might expect from the title of the piece, the implications are overwhelmingly negative (unless you happen to live in Denmark or other countries with progressive parental work-leave policies).  Despite the findings, which include lower reported rates of happiness in virtually every aspect of life among parents as compared to non-parents, and "child care" ranking near the bottom in a survey about the enjoyability of tasks and activities; and despite the provocative title of the piece and hazy photos of quietly desperate-looking parents on its pages, the article ends on a note that is, if not upbeat, at least hopeful.  Senior does not dispute the findings that suggest that parenting makes us unhappy, but she questions what we mean by "happiness," and invokes psychologist Tom Gilovich, who asks whether our "minute-to-minute happiness" is more important than our "retroactive evaluations" of our lives.

 Photo by Jessica Todd Harper for New York

Of course I can only speak from my own limited experience as a parent, but I have a few quibbles with the bleaker implications of this research and the way it is framed by articles like Senior's.

First of all, the subjects of the research and the characters in Senior's anecdotes are by and large harried parents who work full-time jobs and only deal with their kids when they are already exhausted.  I realize that I am in the minority insofar as I have the luxury of being able to stay home with my kids.  Yesterday on the NPR program Tell Me More,  where Senior was among the guests and the discussion revolved around dads' reactions to her article,  Rice Daddies and Daddy Dialectic contributor Jason Sperber (daddy in a strange land) explained in a concise and moving way why parenting makes him happy.  Like me, Jason is a stay-at-home dad with no regrets about having kids and no major resentment toward the day-to-day chores of child care.

I'm not aware of any studies about how having children affects the happiness of those of us who don't have the added stress of trying to bring home the bacon, but I suspect that we would be significantly less unhappy than working parents.  My argument, then, is that the existing research does not really measure frustration with parenting, but rather frustration with trying to fulfill the responsibilities and expectations of both work and family.  This is not a huge revelation, and in fact both Senior and the authors of the studies she cites acknowledge that this is the case.  However, by framing their work in terms of "grueling life with kids vs. freewheeling childless adulthood," they cast parents as victims of their own decision to have children rather than critique a socio-economic model that makes it almost impossible for most parents to both provide for their children and enjoy them.  Maybe the conversation shouldn't focus on parenting as problematic, but instead should be framed as "why working parents hate life." 

Of course, I could be way off base in suspecting that the work side of the equation is at least as soul-sucking as the parenting side, because I'm not a huge fan of being employed.  I have had jobs that I enjoyed, but I have never had one that I would trade for staying home with my kids, and I think that the majority of people I know would rather take care of their kids than go to the office.  I want to see the study that asks people if they would quit their jobs and be full-time parents if they could afford to do so.  Or at least reduce the hours they work by half and spend those hours with the family.   

Senior's article and her comments on NPR emphasize that much of this unhappiness epidemic is caused by a feeling of lost independence on the part of parents, especially those who (like my wife and me) started families later in life, after having lived unencumbered for so many years.  This made me wonder what these unhappy parents were doing that was so awesome before the kids came along and ruined everything.  My wife and I had been together for twenty years before our twin girls were born a year ago, and we had many adventures in the pre-kid era.  But it's not like as soon as the kids were born, everything got boring.  Quite the contrary.  Raising children has been exciting, scary, and hilarious so far.  Sometimes I miss traveling, but if my parents are a valid example, traveling with kids is neither impossible nor necessarily painful.  The other stuff--movies, parties, restaurants--bah!  Who needs it.

I'm not sure why I feel compelled to bicker about the implications of this research, which seem to be bolstered every time a new study comes out (except in Denmark).  Maybe I'm trying to convince myself that I will be able to avoid the crushing stress and disappointment that most parents apparently experience.  Or maybe I don't want people who read about sociological research to be discouraged from producing classmates for my kids.  But part of me feels like the people who report being unhappy as parents probably would have been equally unhappy had they decided not to have children.  And the happy, childless subjects had much more exciting and fulfilling lives than the rest of us schmucks could ever have hoped for with or without kids, and had the foresight to know that parenting was not for them.  The other study I want someone to conduct is a comparison between parents and these childless gadabouts of  their "retroactive evaluations" of their lives once the children have grown up.  I hope that it would show no significant difference.  


Please visit me at Beta Dad, where I post cute pictures of babies.

     

Random Memories of The Today Show

So, apparently, on Tuesday I was a guest on The Today Show:

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1. When I walked up to the studio, the guest entrance was besieged by awe-struck teenage girls. Were they waiting for me? Er, no, they were there for a supernaturally handsome dude I later learned was Peter Facinelli, one of the stars of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse:

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Peter and I were ushered into the studio together; he gave me the once-over to make sure I wasn't somebody famous, and then ignored me. That's OK, because I didn't recognize him either, and I would rather gouge out my own eyes than watch The Twilight Saga.

2. Did you know that The Today Show allows same-sex couples to compete in its "Modern Wedding Contest"? Thank you, Today Show.

3. I got my hair and makeup done -- and my blazer vacuumed (?!) -- then hung out in the guest lounge with the producer Josh and Stacy Kaiser, who seemed very smart and nice -- and who looks normal in real life and great on TV, which strikes me as unjust given that I look like a dork both in real life and on TV. I also chatted with the husband of the foot doctor who went on after me and Stacy. He was interested in the anthology I co-edited, Are We Born Racist?, which Beacon Press is publishing next month. He turned out to be a big, big fan of musical theater and suggested that "Carefully Taught" from South Pacific become the theme song of the book:

Why not? Henceforth, I declare "You've Got to be Carefully Taught" to be the theme song of Are We Born Racist?!

4. In the lounge, I watched coverage of the not-funny domestic abuse saga I shall call The Mel Gibson Saga: Idiot. Let it be noted that he disgusts me, and I would rather gouge out my own eyes than watch anything with him in it. Except for Mad Max and The Road Warrior, which are classics. Also, the first Lethal Weapon is kind of funny, if you happen to be as wasted as I was when I watched it in college. It was Gibson's mullet. The mullet made me lose it.

5. I liked the segment of Lance and his family that preceded my interview, which I watched in the lounge; he and his wife are really the stars of this show, and I'm not sure why Stacy and I were necessary, though I'm happy enough to chat about my book with any national TV audience. (Because I've become a media whore?) The night before, I'd had dinner with Lance and Matt and Patrick of NYC Dads. What a great bunch of guys and what great work they're doing.

6. I was dismayed that Willie Geist was filling in for Kathie Lee -- because, come on, it's Kathie Lee! -- but Willie seemed like an amiable fella. In person, Hoda came off as bigger than life.

7. I was quite sick that day, and the interview itself was a blur. I recall being disappointed by the questions; I remember Willie looking pretty uncomfortable when I rejected the idea that stigma defines stay-at-home dads and when I brought up paternity leave. (Thought-ballon I imagined over his head: "Crap, he's not going to get political, is he? I thought this was supposed to be about stay-at-home dads!")

8. I'm pasting in the code for the clip without having actually watched the clip--and I don't plan on ever watching it, truth be told. I can't stand to see myself on TV.

9. Apparently, Liko can't stand to see me on TV either. Since we don't have a TV at home, he and my wife and my mother went to a diner with a big flat screen on 24th St. to watch the show. About two minutes in, Liko finished his breakfast, sighed heavily, and said, "Can I go home now?"

That's exactly how I felt! That's my boy!

Keep it Low and Slow: from Rad Dad 18

A movie script about a father, three kids, the evil media, and the perils of sex education

Voice-over: I always thought this would be easy. I humored myself with assurances that I wouldn’t handle the subject like my parents did, that I would be a beacon, a guide, dare I say, a confidant for my children.

Ah, the bullshit we tell ourselves when we’re rocking babies about how we will parent in the future. Let me tell you right off what the moral of this story will be: humility.

Scene 1: I was driving in my car with my thirteen-year-old son; I discovered a few days earlier he’s acquired some pornographic material. I know what you’re thinking. What’s the big deal about some adult magazines tucked up under a mattress. Oh, how I long for those good ol’ days. You see, if only I discovered a dirty magazine. Nooooo. Thanks to the Internet, instead I discovered 45-second clips of hard-core group sex on my computer desktop.

It’s time for The Talk, which I’ve had many times before, so this should be easy.

Hey, I found some…stuff…on my computer I think we need to talk about.

Awkward silence.

Really? What? he asked.

More awkward silence.

He continued, do we have to talk about it?

Cue cheesy music.

As I pulled over, I mumbled something like, Well, if you’re gonna look at it, I guess we need to talk about it.

I‘ll spare you the gory discomfort (though if you are really interested, check out Rad Dad 3) but admit that: Joking about sex with him when he was ten, was nothing like having the first real conversation with him about the seriousness and the responsibilities of sexuality.

Flashback: I was standing with my father in the garage. It’s dusk. I was about fifteen. I rarely had time with him alone anymore because he’s a busy man, he’s a silent man, but I knew he loved me, I knew he tried the best he could. He didn’t look me in the eyes. He called me out here because he caught me the other night getting down like only teenagers can in the horrifically uncomfortable backseat of my ‘76 Toyota Corolla.

So now was my The Talk.

Listen, he told me, and waited, the pause pregnant with anticipation.

He said, Keep your willy in your pants. I’m serious. Then he walked away.

And I’m serious; that’s what he said, the extent of our birds and bees conversation.

Of course, soon his advice became my way of joking with my girlfriend about getting it on, it’s time to release the willy; it was funny until when, at the age of eighteen, she becomes pregnant.

Non-sequitor Flash Forward: The horror and accompanying popcorn gag as my son and I were getting ready to watch Aladdin (don’t ask why my son was invited to a three year old’s birthday party at a movie theater) when I witness for the first time the preview for the movie Free Willy.

Scene 2: After having a difficult discussion about drug use with my fourteen year old daughter, I jokingly asked her, Well anything else we should talk about, like are you having sex?

Now, of course, I joked with her too from around age four about sex, but once again not really prepared for her response.

No, dad, I mean I‘ve made out with a few hot boys that’s all.

I stared blankly at her.

And, once again, in a moment that highlights the generational differences between my teenage years when you had to have a girl/boyfriend to free willy, today’s young people are more empowered to be sexually active without having to have a significant other; the wisdom is shocking.

I stuttered something like, I didn’t even know you had a boyfriend…

I don’t.

Oh?

Picking up on my mental conundrum, she explained, There are boys you want to be your boyfriend and then there are hot boys you just wanna kiss.

Still stuck somewhere in the1950s, I asked, But don’t you want your boyfriend to be hot?

Yes, but sometimes you just want to kiss a hot boy. Can you leave my room now?

Voice-over: The third time really is the charm. I understand that now. From the sheer horror at the need to talk with my son about masturbation and pornography, to the disorientation of generational changes with my middle child, to finally the self-reflection, the epiphany of oh I’ve been here before with my youngest. Now some people may not need three children to see the light; unfortunately, I did. Of course, my cynicism almost makes me blow it again. And here’s where I blame the evil media. I hate all this faux female bisexuality (it’s almost never male) that has became a pop culture trend; it’s all over YouTube videos, hip-hop songs, and Facebook groups, but then again who am I to judge or question Lady Gaga’s sexual dalliances.

Scene 3: When my youngest daughter informed me that she’s joining the Gay Straight Alliance at her middle school, I almost missed it. When I was twelve, I was still playing with tractors and thought my willy was indeed a whale.

Uh huh, I mumbled while trying to decide what the hell to make for dinner for two daughters who never want the same thing.

But after a second, her words reached me. I remembered my father, the dark garage, the silences. I stopped what I was doing, and I looked at her. I told her how proud I am of her. I asked her questions, and I just listened.

And a few weeks later, I listened again as she shared with me her frustration that even people who are members of the alliance use the word gay derogatorily.

And later still, I apologized to her when she overheard me joking with a neighbor about a friend of ours who is a self-proclaimed fag hag. I saw her face; I knew immediately she only heard me saying the word fag.

Scene 4: We are watching the movie La Mission; it’s three teenage girls and me. At first they wanted to see Hot Tub Time Machine. To be honest, I did as well, but I knew that it’s not often we get to see movies that bring up issues critically. It’s true though that even bad movies are opportunities to discuss the way things are fucked up: sexual violence, gender rigidity, racism; but tonight I wanted to go the high road. We’re in the dark, and it’s the scene in which the father is refusing to listen, to know about, to acknowledge his gay son’s desires. It’s the familial version of don’t ask, don’t tell. We’re in the dark, and my daughter reached to grab my hand; she leaned into me and said, I can’t believe there are still people like him.

It’s then that I am thankful for the privilege of being a part of communities in which the homophobia I remember as a teenager seems surreal, seems like Hollywood exaggeration to my teenage daughters.

Voice-over: I rented The Life and Times of Harvey Milk and planned on watching it with my kids, but now they’re busy, now they have so many other things to do that they just wanted to watch the funny parts. Funny, you might ask. They simply loved the scenes of street life in the Castro. They commented on the clothes, the hair-dos, laughed at the Castro street parade footage, the dancing. But as the story shifted to the spontaneous memorial that moved down Market Street after Harvey Milk was killed, they watched silently; I saw their sadness, felt their disbelief. They soon left and returned to their rooms. I didn’t have to say anything. They knew.

And when I tell them about the event I’ll be reading at a few weeks later to celebrate the city’s first annual Harvey Milk Day, they smiled and one added, that’s cool, but just don’t embarrass me, ok.

So it’s come to this. Even though I don’t have to explain things anymore and even though I am so clearly the last person they want to confide in about anything sexual, I still ask questions. And they still hate it.

I still ask if they are having drugs and doing sex. They just roll their eyes and look utterly offended. My mantra now to them is low and slow; I’ve stolen the line from La Mission. I tell them in my best vato accent to have fun but keep it low and slow.

I think it’s better than telling them about willies and freedom.

Green Eggs And Sam

On Wednesday I sat on our bed, fully clothed, reading Green Eggs And Ham out loud to my one-year-old son, and wondered how it had come to this. That our bed was now for getting Sam to sleep, rather than for nookie.

“That Sam-I-am.

That Sam-I-am.

I do not like that Sam-I-am!”

He gets to choose two books, then I pick the third. The third book needs to end with sleep, so that he’ll get the message that it’s afternoon naptime. On Wednesday, he picked out Green Eggs And Ham, a classic, and not only because the main character is called Sam-I-am. The real Sam grunted and shifted positions, managing simultaneously to unbalance himself and put a heel into my groin.

“Careful, Sam.” There goes my shot at a second baby.

We even kissed the other day. Not me and Sam. My wife Fitzsimmons came back from work and looked cute in her new jeans and we had a little snog in the hall. And then she broke away, hair all muzzy, and checked her watch.

“How long has he been asleep?”

“An hour and forty minutes.”

“Ahh.” She smiled, forlornly (he never sleeps for two hours). I smiled too, though it was the smile of a trapped Chinese miner who wants a drink but gets a picture of the mine company president.

Sam reached forward and started to help me turn the page, then tried a swivel-flip to reverse off my lap.

“Hang on, Sam. Do you like green eggs and ham?”

Now that’s what I need. Sex served up on a platter. Instead, I’ve got seven hours of childcare after barely six hours sleep. By the time Fitzsimmons gets him to bed in the evening, she’s shattered and I’m already thinking what 5 a.m. is going to feel like.

“Would you like them here or there?”

Last week I read a chapter in one of these parenting books, all about two parents’ sizzling sex lives. Probably not with each other, the snakes. How they were constantly hopping on and off the washing machine, or the sink, or the dishwasher. A washing machine would really make my life better. I think I’d rather take that, on balance.

“We did not do it here or there.”

Who are these people, who have the energy and time to get their leg over, while the baby sleeps? Haven’t they learned the perils of procreation? Wasn’t once enough?

“We did not do it in the house.

We did not do it with a mouse.”

Sam flailed his arm and elbowed me in the stomach. He didn’t seem sleepy, and this was book two. Book one had been Frederick, about a poet mouse who told stories while the other mice humped corn and grain back to the burrow for winter. Sounded too close to my own situation for comfort.

“We did not do it in a box.

We did not do it with a fox.”

When does the sleep thing change? Fitzsimmons has been angling to get a sleep consultant for weeks now. Someone super at diagnosing infant sleep problems. I can see it now, the wise old lady coming in and doing psychological feng shui on our living situation.

“Ze baby must sleep facing east (all therapists must have German accents, even the feng shui ones). Turn ze crib that way. Ze muzzer must sleep in an adjoining room. You, you are ze fazha? You need more sex.”

“We did not do it in a car.

We did not do it in a bar.”

No, the word bar is not in this legendary American children’s story, but the old ham-and-eggser doesn’t always do nouns in couplets. And besides, not only do we not own a car, but we’ve only been out for one drink in nine months – one pint of Anchor and a small Hefeweizen, please. Total time away from baby? 42 minutes.

“We did not do it in the rain.

We did not do it on a train.”

Jesus. Stop with all the transportation, Seuss. Seven hours, childcare… you do the math. No cars, no trucks, no trains. I need energy, space, time to shave so I look almost presentable. And for my wife to stop worrying over our kid for long enough to put on her fancy underwear.

“We did not do it on a boat.

We did not do it with a goat.”

No boats either. Although, we did once take a Croatian overnight ferry from Dubrovnik to Rijeka. That was fun. No goats though. There’s always something missing.

What’s with the green ham and eggs, anyway? Green bacon is the closest I’ve come to this cartoon breakfast. Although nothing in America seems to age – endurance milk, long-suffering sour cream, astronaut cheese – I grew up in a British house where food had to be savagely rotten not to be eaten. My mother would scrape the mold off the marmalade and say, “Perfectly alright.” Which was how I came to eat bacon that had a silvery green sheen, like the wings of a pigeon which has seen better days.

Sam yawned and didn’t bother turning the last page. In five minutes, with some coaxing, he should be asleep. His namesake, Sam-I-am, was now in the ocean with the unnamed grinchy character with the stovepipe hat, surrounded by boat, goat, fox, box, mouse, bar, and washing machine. The green ham and eggs were dripping, but still intact on the platter.

“You do not like them, so you say.

Try them, try them, and you may.”

He’s so persistent, Sam-I-am. Maybe that’s the lesson for parents in Green Eggs And Ham – just keep showing up. I picked up Sam and put him in his crib, then buttoned him into a rather Seussy sleepsack with blue and green stripes. He grumbled a little, then slumped into a downward-facing pigeon pose. I stroked his back until he fell asleep. Behind me, our duvet was strewn with Sam’s colorful books and Fitzsimmons’s cotton pyjamas. I sat down on the bed and tucked the pjyamas under a pillow. Perfectly alright.

Simon Hodgson

Who changes the diapers in your house?

In The Daddy Shift, Jeremy Adam Smith explores the ways in which perceptions of parental roles and responsibilities are changing and argues that gender is becoming less of a factor in the fundamental decisions families make about raising children.  The broad scope of Smith's project is alluded to in the book's subtitle, How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family.

Many aspects of Smith's argument resonate with me as a novice stay-at-home dad, and one thread in particular corroborates a hunch I had based on the logistics of my own household.  Smith cites research that suggests an increasingly equitable division of "unpaid family work" within American families; however, he cautions that this doesn't signify an inexorable move toward an egalitarian utopia.

Although he characterizes the trend of men taking on more family work as "tenuous," Smith's profiles of non-traditional families serve as models for a much more balanced distribution of household labor than in the "traditional," male breadwinner/female caregiver home.  (Although the single-income household is a rarity these days, the legacy of the "traditional" family often manifests in women doing the bulk of the housework and caregiving even when they work outside the home.)  He suggests that in "reverse-traditional" (i.e., caregiver dad and breadwinner mom) and same-sex parent families, there tends to be less specialization, so that the breadwinner is likely to participate more in caregiving, and the caregiver may dabble in breadwinning--thus the workload is shared more equitably.  

This pattern became obvious to me when my wife returned to work after spending the first four months of our twin girls' lives at home with them.  At that point I became the primary caregiver (who occasionally gets paid to build something or teach a class); but contrary to what the term "reverse-traditional" may imply, my wife didn't suddenly transform into a disengaged patriarch.

I often receive more credit than I am due--and rarely try to deflect it--for the amount of work people assume is involved in taking care of two toddlers.  And it would be a lot of work for just one person.  But when my wife, a family practice doctor at a non-profit community clinic, comes home from work, she wants to spend every minute that she can with the babies.  There's no time for reclining with a pipe and the evening edition of the Mayfield Press for her--it's all about feeding, bathing, reading to, and playing with the kids.  But people tend to expect that from a mom, regardless of how much work she does or money she makes outside the home.

I know breadwinning fathers who likewise come home from work and immediately engage in as much caregiving as they can in the few hours before bedtime.  But I also know fathers who try to squeeze in as much time away from their families as possible.  This is unfathomable to me for a number of reasons (but who knows--maybe I'll develop an interest in golf and multi-day fishing trips in the next couple of years).

As much as I am philosophically down with the notion that work is work, and certain things need to be done to keep a family as healthy and happy as possible, and it's all equally important, I have to admit that there are times when I feel like the archetypal frustrated housewife.  When I'm just finishing cleaning up the mess from lunch in time to start making dinner, for instance, it's hard for me not to dwell on the Sisyphean nature of my labors.

But there are two things that assuage my frustration.  First, I have worked for decades outside of the home as a carpenter, contractor, and more recently as a teacher; and I know that any job can at times be tedious and seem endless and thankless.  When I grouse about rinsing out diapers (we use cloth as penance for the environmental havoc wreaked by raising kids) or washing bottles, I only have to remind myself that my wife could very well be gritting her teeth while doing her tenth pelvic exam before lunchtime instead of playing with her babies.  Would I rather be building a deck than scraping poop?  Probably.  But on the other hand, I would rather feed a baby than grade a stack of essays.   

Secondly, I receive plenty of recognition for my housework.  Not only from my wife, who notices my domestic achievements (and if she doesn't, I point them out), but also from acquaintances and strangers.  Unlike many of the caregiver fathers profiled in The Daddy Shift, I have not heard any withering comments or noticed any sideways glances about my domesticity (of course, this could be due to my self-preserving oblivion).  Instead, I am lauded almost universally for my willingness to face not only the supposedly daunting task of raising twins, but also the censure (yet to be felt) of our sexist culture.

The only sexism I have encountered in discussions about my stay-at-home status is of the condescending, mildly misandristic variety; e.g., "Oh my God--you watch them every day?  I can't even leave my kids home with their dad for the weekend!"  These comments usually make me seem heroic, and may reflect more on the speaker's perception of her schlub of a husband than on men in general, so I let them slide.

Although I'm usually perfectly happy to be compared favorably to other men, a couple things irk me about the attention I get for being a competent (as far as they know) parent.  The first troubling aspect is that it's still sometimes considered noteworthy that a man can take care of children and "keep house."  The other side of that coin is that women don't get enough credit when they do the same, since to do so is considered a function of their chromosomes.  The bar is set much lower for fathers, which is unfair to all parents.

My wife is reading this over my shoulder and thinks that the fact that men are perfectly capable of, and responsible for, doing every bit as much "unpaid family work" as women is a no-brainer, hardly worth discussing.  It's true that among the progressive types we usually hang around with, it goes without saying.  But in my conversations with moms at the dog park, members of my Asian mommies group (yeah--I'm the white guy with the double stroller), and even my stay-at-home dads group (members of whom often encounter incredulity at the idea that they can be trusted with kids), the assumption that men can't or won't contribute as much as women to the glamorless aspects of family life is a common theme.  Also, on the mommyblogs I lurk around on, casual kvetching about shiftless husbands surfaces regularly, especially in reader comments.

In The Daddy Shift, in other print and electronic media, and in his appearances on TV and radio, Jeremy Adam Smith has been an advocate and spokesperson for stay-at-home dads.  But he also stresses that gender equity in the home is not a done deal, exhorting us--especially caregiving fathers--to share our stories so that we can contribute to the evolution of the American Family toward this end.

What do you think?  Is the idea and/or practice of gender equity within the family so mainstream that we don't even need to talk about it anymore?  Or is someone doing more than their fair share of dishes? 

Please visit me at Beta Dad, where I'm much less serious and tell stories about my mommy group, daddygroup, and post adorable pictures of my kids

We Remember! On the Eve of The Oscar Grant Verdict

It was an accident that I hopped on the wrong train heading back to the East Bay lost as I was in the gallery of Sunday characters riding BART: tourists, hipsters, workers, and young teens. I smiled at them especially, the teenagers, excused their loudness, their energy. I imagined my teenaged daughters and son acting a little crazy just like them on the BART.

As we slipped past West Oakland station, I began to close my book, gather my belongings, but when we pulled into the Lake Merritt station and not 12th street I was confused. I realized I had boarded the wrong train. On or off? I couldn’t decide in time, and the doors closed.

No biggie; I’d just get off at the next stop. Which was Fruitvale.

I froze right there.

The skyline swept into view as we emerged from the tunnel, late afternoon sun spilling over the port of Oakland, serene and blinding.

It hit me then: Fruitvale BART station, the place where Oscar Grant was murdered.

His murder has stuck with me since it happened on New Year’s Eve 2009. I have been to vigils. I have facilitated discussions in classrooms and at Rad Dad readings. I have refused to forget for the last year and a half now the violence that is consistently perpetrated on the youth in our society. Especially youth of color. Especially young men.

But I have not come to where it happened.

The train hummed to a stop and I stepped off. The platform was empty, barren, almost peaceful. The geography was familiar. The cement walls. The red tile flooring.

Immediately, those bumpy, pixilated cell phone images come to mind, and then the noise, the chaos.

It was nighttime.

There were kids along those walls.

There were cops strong-arming and stomping back and forth.

There was Oscar Grant pushed face down on to the ground.

Then, there was the shot.

Standing in the Fruitvale BART station, I couldn’t help but feel my chest well up with such emotions, such sadness, such anger.

I searched for the spot thinking there must be a memorial: candles, pictures, flowers, something.

But there was nothing.

No sign to mark the spot, no image to bear witness. Everything wiped clean. I wonder what is left behind?

I walked the platform.

Soon, the first train heading my direction arrived. Two young men stepped off, laughing, holding cell phones to their ears. They nodded at me and walked to the stairs.

I was alone again and felt that I should do something.

But then I saw it; someone had written something in black sharpie, on the railing.

“We remember.”

I remember this as I, like so many in the Bay Area, await the verdict that will most-likely come out in the next few days. Initially, I was nervous, but still sure that justice would be served. Nothing could bring back Oscar Grant, nothing could give his daughter her father back, but at least a message would be sent to other officers of the law.

Now, I am not so sure this will happen.

I don’t know how I will respond to the verdicts. I fear the police are all too ready to subdue, to quell, to brutalize.

But they will not scare me away.

One thing I do know is that my daughters and I will be there with other people in downtown Oakland the evening the verdict is released.

I know we will not forget.

Join us.

Bay Area Event with Don Unger, author of "Men Can"

Hello. Today at 3 pm at Modern Times bookstore in San Francisco, Donald Unger will talk about his terrific new book Men Can: The Changing Image and Reality of Fatherhood in America. I'll be joining him, and I hope you'll consider joining us.

Men CAN tells the stories of a half dozen families—of varied ethnicities, geographical locations, and philosophical orientations—in which fathers are either primary caregivers or equally sharing parents, personalizing how Americans are now caring for their children and illuminating the ways that popular culture both reflects and influences these changes in family roles.

Contact, Time, Patience, Reflection

Last month my son and I were playing with his friend Oliver (not his real name) when Oliver had a seizure.

It came at me sideways; his scream possessed a rattling amplified quality, as though it were coming through an old speaker, and I saw his little body flex and seize out of the corner of my eye. I knew Oliver had epilepsy (as well as other difficulties) but I confess I needed an agonizingly eternal five seconds to understand what was happening. I was knocked out of my momentary paralysis by Oliver’s mom, who leapt over to him and shouted at me to call 911. Even in the moment, some part of my mind murmured to me a reminder that I had been spared watching my child go through what Oliver was going through.

My son Liko was not able to interpret these events; they were simply outside of his five years of experience. It wasn’t until the paramedics and firemen arrived that I think Liko realized that something serious had happened to his friend. From the stillness on his face, I imagined my son experiencing something that I believe was new for him: that sickening, cold, tingling feeling that starts in your stomach and spreads through every nerve.

In the weeks that followed, my wife and I both observed Liko shut down when the subject of Oliver came up; he expressed no enthusiasm for seeing his friend again. This didn’t, in my estimation, have anything to do with Oliver. Instead, I believe it emerged because Liko was afraid of the scary situation that had involved Oliver. Liko instinctively sought to avoid the situation, not the person.

Because I’m a writer—and because my work editing the forthcoming Beacon anthology Are We Born Ractist? taught me that the solution to kneejerk bias is mindfulness—I monitored myself for similar feelings. I found them. Don’t be surprised; is it a cliché to remind us that we all have a scared child inside of us, just inside the shell of adulthood?

I won’t go into the details, but the seizure ended up being part of a significant medical event for Oliver. While he was in the hospital, I talked to his mom Lynn. She anticipated Liko’s reaction, and perhaps mine. I don’t remember what tactful way she phrased it, but she talked with me about how afraid she was of being isolated because of Oliver’s disabilities. People avoid kids and adults with visible troubles. It took a lot of guts for her to bring this up to me, however indirectly; in fact, I saw Lynn show a lot of guts that day, though I doubt she saw it that way.

There was never any question that Liko would see Oliver again. In the weeks that followed, we read a few books about epilepsy but otherwise I did not tackle the topic head-on; I thought it best to emphasize the many good times we’d had with Oliver instead of the one scary time. Last week we returned to his house and played with rockets and watched a movie. Liko looked forward to it and enjoyed himself, and asked to return afterward. I’d like to think that his world has grown just a little bit larger.

As a result of this incident—plus a series of readings I did with the editors of My Baby Rides the Short Bus: The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Disabilities—I’ve been thinking about disability and social isolation. It’s struck me that the idea that people with disabilities should be fully included in social life is a truly radical one, whose implications range from the ways we think and comport ourselves to the ways we design our institutions and buildings. Radical in the sense of really getting to the root of human society, which starts with the question of who belongs in the group and who does not.

There’s an idea called “universal design” that invites us to think about how to open up the world—from streets to buildings to products—for everyone, including people with disabilities. Here are the principles of universal design:

• Equitable use


• Flexibility in use


• Simple and intuitive


• Perceptible information


• Tolerance for error


• Low physical effort


• Size and space for approach and use

It’s strange to think that this is a very new idea; before this new idea, people with disabilities were asked to accept their isolation, to stay out of sight and out of public life. In other words, the society around them succumbed to the same fears that I detected in myself. This isn’t just about installing curb cuts or publishing large-print books; it’s about how who we are willing to accept in our lives. Curb cuts are just an outer reflection of an inner adjustment.

In his contribution to Are We Born Ractist?, my co-editor and UC Berkeley psychologist Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton suggests that overcoming interpersonal racism takes "contact, time, and patience" — and to that, I'd add opportunities for reflection. Rodolfo is talking about race, but he could just as well be talking about disability — indeed, any fear of that which is different.

Jennifer Silverman, one of the editors of My Baby Rides the Short Bus, told me that the anthology was rejected by at least one publisher as being “too niche,” and not interesting to people who weren’t raising kids with disabilities. That may be true, but I wish it weren’t. My experience with Lynn and Oliver taught me something about myself and parenting, but it also asked me to lift my eyes and look at the way our entire society is organized. It can’t think of anything more fundamental than changing the world so that everyone can live in it.

This was revised from an entry in my Mothering magazine blog.

Boomerang Book-Throwing Action!!!!

Via Utne Reader.

On Trash and the Urban Outdoors

Spot is asleep in the car now. It's a cool day, he's in the shade, so we're letting him go instead of trying to displace him to his bedroom. In his hands is a one liter plastic bottle of RC Cola that he picked up after school this morning. His stated intention, before losing consciousness on the ride home, was to bring it home and put it in the recycling bin.

It's not unusual these days to find Spot with one of two things in his hands: a twig or enormous leaf from some low-hanging branch, or some unidentifiable but fascinating plastic widget retrieved from the grass in the park. Spot has become a great collector, amasser, and connoisseur of the world's small wonders, about half of which consist of trash.

There are no arbitrary divisions in Spot's world between "natural" and "artificial" wonders. He brings them all to us without prejudice, and it is we who sort them into arrangements suitable for a 17th century Dutch still life, on the one hand, and the recycling bins in the garage, on the other. Spot is a Renaissance natural philosopher, a Midwestern Erasmus with his growing cabinet of curiosities, encompassing acorns, glass beads, a dessicated monarch butterfly, plastic bottles, pine cones, and foil chip bags of all colors and sizes. The one thing they all have in common, besides each being a small part of the cosmos, is that Spot brings them all in from "outside."

So, when in need of a late afternoon rallying cry, "Let's go pick up trash!" is now one of the most effective. We get the tricycle with it's yellow plastic basket, and sometimes a trash bag, and we make our way down the block, picking up odd bits of paper, wrappers, pop cans and coffee cups as we go. Despite all our efforts, by the same time tomorrow, all of these things will have magically reappeared. No matter, for we will be off again, Don Quixote (Spot) leading Sancho Panza (me) on their fool's errand to clean up the neighborhood while sampling the plenitude of the universe.

Well, not quite; cleaning up the neighborhood is just one by-product of Spot's natural curiosity about the world, which ignores the fine distinctions of philosophers between "nature" and "culture", or between "society" and "the environment." Where does one stop, and the other begin? These are the questions that my three-and-a-half year old radical philosopher poses, in the language of objects, as we pass the neighborhood hipsters on the sidewalk and the shiny, spinning hub caps in the street.

Nature, of course, is everywhere. It doesn't begin at one edge of the park and stop at the curb on the other side, taking a detour to get around the basketball court along the way. It is inside my iPhone and in the revetment holding back the winter waves of Lake Michigan. It is in the nest of peregrine falcons on the twentieth floor of the high-rise down the street, and the coyote that runs up and down the train tracks behind our building. It's in the restored patch of prairie in the park, and the small stream of migratory waterfowl that makes use of it as they navigate across the metropolis.


And where you find nature, you find the great outdoors along with it. There are buildings that create their own weather, accelerating the wind on the streets below and crowning themselves with clouds in otherwise cloudless skies. There are spectacular sunsets beyond the viaducts and rail yards, there are days when the optics of the air bring the steel mills in Gary into focus as if they were battleships a few hundred yards away. There are days when the snow absorbs the city's surplus of decibels, turning the urban universe into a white and silent movie. There are man-made mountains, there is silence, and there is even, here and there, wide open space.

I fully support Spot's clean-up activity, and his precocious impulse to recycle, however much it may baffle the local teenagers who diligently undue all our work. It gets him outside, where the world is changing by the minute, the wind is blowing in his face, and the sun casts a thousand different shadows. A piece of trash removed clears the way for better view of the beetle on a leaf; our pursuit of the blowing bag lands us at the foot of a spectacular cottonwood tree.

I look forward to the day when Spot will be old enough to strike out with me into America's great wild places. I know them and miss them myself. But it is a fantasy to think that there is a place where nature exists apart from society and the impact of the age we live in -- the Great Anthropocene -- or a place where the artificiality of society has drowned out the authenticity of the natural world. If you just look closely, they are always both there. Like the pop can next to the mushrooms in the grass, sprung up overnight.

News, Daddy Shift event in San Francisco

Ah, Daddy Dialectic. I've been neglecting you lately. Sorry; I've had a lot going on. The biggest news is that I was awarded a Knight fellowship at Stanford University for 2010-11--and so my family will be moving to Palo Alto in about five weeks.

But in the meantime, my book The Daddy Shift (which evolved out of this very blog) is out in paperback this month, for the very reasonable price of $16. In many ways, The Daddy Shift succeeded beyond my expectations--if not necessarily in sales (sigh), then in the conversations it has triggered in forums from the New York Times and NPR to Parenting and Working Mother to many local TV and radio programs:

I hope you'll join me on Saturday, June 19, at 5 pm, at Green Arcade Books in San Francisco to celebrate the softcover release of The Daddy Shift. This is not going to be another reading; instead, I'm shooting for a fun, intimate gathering of friends (and friends of friends).

I've invited two daddy friends and one mommy friend to join me and share their work: Jeff Gillenkirk, author of the new novel Home, Away; Mike Adamick, a fantastic blogger and essayist; and Frances England, an extraordinary children's musician whose stuff also appeals to parents. That's not just my opinion--her CD "Family Tree" was named no. 1 children's album of the year About.com and took the Gold in the 2008 Parent's Choice Awards, among other honors. I'm happy to support their work and I hope you'll check out their books and CDs while you're there.

For my part, I'll be talking with you a bit about what I've learned about gender and twenty-first-century family life in the two years since The Daddy Shift was finished and the one year since it was published. Then we shall sip wine! If you're a Daddy Dialectic reader, please do come up to me and introduce yourself.

If you'd like to bring your kids, that's fine with me. We're bringing Liko! I'm imagining the first part of the evening as more kid-oriented, with Frances performing some of her songs. Then as Mike reads, perhaps kids will drift away with one parent for dinner and bedtime and the other parent can get a grown-up night out, or something like that. Hope to see you there.

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!