Parenting While Male: 74 Fathers Talk about Playground Discrimination

You’ve probably heard the phrase “driving while black,” which refers to a perception that black drivers are more likely to be stopped by cops. This was whispered in the African-American community for years before it broke out into the wider cultural conversation and was gradually validated by empirical studies.

Similarly, stay-at-home dads have whispered for years about feeling unfairly targeted for "parenting while male," and recently their concerns have started to get mainstream attention. In last week's Wall Street Journal, Free-Range Kids author Lenore Skenazy explored what happens when “when almost any man who has anything to do with a child can find himself suspected of being a creep.”

I spotted the column in a tweet from the redoubtable DadLabs. I replied: “I was once asked to leave a playground by a grandmother. I wonder how many guys have had that experience?” DadLabs tweeted back: “Most? Or faced playdate discrimination of one kind or another? #dadsnotpervs.”

This little twitter exchange echoes less-public discussion I’ve heard many times at gatherings of fathers: that they are often made to feel like outsiders at parks, playgrounds, and situations where most of the other parents are moms or grandmoms—and that their participation in playgroups or classes is sometimes rejected.

Atrocity stories circulate, but how widespread are actual "parenting while male" experiences, really? To start to get the answer, on Monday I created this survey, which as of this morning had been taken by 74 guys—60 percent of whom spend 31 or more hours a week taking care of a child. Here are the results so far:

• Three men—4.5% of the participants who answered this question—said that they had been asked to leave a playground by a caregiver.

• Twenty-four percent said that they had been refused entry to a gathering of parents and children.

• Fifty-five percent said that their parenting skills had been criticized or corrected in a public setting.

• Fifty-eight percent of participants felt that this criticism or exclusion occurred on the grounds that they are male.

• Twenty-eight percent of participants reported that they had experienced these incidents on five or more occasions.

At the end of the survey, I asked how experiences of criticism or exclusion shaped their attitudes and behavior. Many reported feeling hurt or resentful, but then getting over it and moving forward with their lives:

"At first I was a little indignant. As someone who was forced into being the primary caregiver role, my confidence was already shot from losing my job, and so to have other mothers correcting me or looking at me crossways was an extra gut-punch. At some point, though, I realized being a full-time father was my role and that's what my wife and kids needed more so than a paycheck. Once I reached this mindset, what other mothers thought of me didn't matter any more. I just did the best I could, and tried to be as charming as possible. In a way, it turned the tables because most of these mothers had insecurities of their own in their role, and to come across a dad who seemed to be handling full-time parenting just fine, I think made them feel threatened.”

“In our neighborhood, people occasionally offering my wife and I unsequestered (and unwanted) advise [sic] pertaining to parenting. It generally annoys or perplexes me, but I don't believe that it has changed my behavior or attitudes, except to wonder about cultural differences to parenting and advise giving.”

However, a majority reported permanent changes in their day-to-day behavior and feelings as caregivers:

“I am very reluctant to put myself out there to groups of moms with their kids. I often let my sons go and play with kids at the park and I will stand on the periphery as the other moms talk. I often feel excluded and thus am more reserved.”

“It certainly made me feel excluded, possibly looked-down-upon. The strange thing was that each time such criticism or behavior was couched in such a way that it excused itself. 'Of course, it's better for the children for a mother to do these things' was one comment I remember, delivered with a short, self-conscious, judgmental laugh. As though it were self-evident that I wasn't the best choice to take care of my daughters.”

“I currently tend to be more on guard, and intervene between my child and another child in a public setting. This is due to twice where an unknown parent in a public playground setting has confronted me as a parent on my child's play being unsafe or rough.”

“I avoided events/organized activities that were dominated by stay at home moms.”

“Makes me instantly defensive, so after the first incident or two, even if the comments weren't made because I was male, I probably assumed the worst and reacted as if they were.”

Some participants did not did not hear outright comments, but modified their behavior based on ambient fears about men on playgrounds:

“I was playing t-ball with my son and a couple of other toddlers on the playground and my own wife (who arrived after I'd been there for an hour or so) pointed out that I should be careful about touching the other kids when helping them hit the ball. That surprised me, as it hadn't previously occurred to me that anybody would think it was an issue. Now I am much more self-conscious about it and try to remember to ask parents' permission in similar situations. Which is annoying.”

“I don't think I've ever been excluded from a play situation as a dad. I have had odd experiences - the mist [sic] salient here us that I've had young children who were strangers to me approach me at the playground and climb into my lab. That made me distinctly uncomfortable - I actually went and found the mom and told her about it, both to give her a heads up as to what her kid was doing with men she didn't know and also to protect myself.”

It’s important to emphasize that a minority of respondents did not report any kind of overt discriminatory behavior:

“After 14 years of being a father, 11 of them as primary caregiver, I have never been asked to leave a setting nor been criticized. While I may have been ignored by the moms a few times, that is not the norm.”

“I have never felt excluded from a playground or other public setting, nor a playgroup. All group activities related to my childrens [sic] school and peer group have been supportive of involved fathers. I have received a couple of comments about parenting choices - one was probably not without reason (I was distracting my toddler with a bottle of eyedrops and got ‘It's medicine, not a toy.’) but I found the delivery and attitude to be rude. I have never felt that the comments were made with an ‘incompetent dad’ attitude, but were specific to the action that was being criticized.”

A few respondents felt that the discrimination had a basis in reality:

“No change - I understand that women may not feel comfortable with a 'random guy' at the playgroup. It sucks, but I wasn't doing anything wrong so I didn't feel like changing. Plus, it's a little hard changing being a guy.”

“Nobody wants unattached, creepy dudes hanging around playgrounds.”

For others, discrimination provoked them to try to build a community of fathers:

“I've never been explicitly excluded because I was a male. Criticism based on my gender only prompted me to write about being a SAHD and to make connections and build community with other like-minded parents.”

“I am very confident in the way that I parent, so I was not affected by nannies questioning my skills. Men are specifically excluded from the local mothers' group, so it wasn't personal. I did work with a friend to start a dads' group in our city.”

There was another type of response: some dads used the experience as a way to understand the experiences of others. As one guy put it, “It made me sympathetic for the bias that others feel from white men.” Nearly all of the respondents identified themselves as “white” (obviously a limitation of this survey; I plan to do something later that casts a wider net) and so I think it’s fair to say that in many cases these men were experiencing social discrimination for the first time in their lives.

I have many thoughts about the context and how to interpret these results, but first I'd like to have a discussion. Please share your reactions, thoughts, and experiences in the comments, and invite others to join the conversation through your own blogs and social media.

Have You Ever Been Kicked Out of a Playground?

In this week's Wall Street Journal, Free-Range Kids author Lenore Skenazy explores what happens when all men are treated like predators.

This got me to thinking: Exactly how many guys have had the experience of being excluded from gatherings of children and parents? To get the answer, I created this survey, which I hope you will take and pass on to other male caregivers. I'll report the results here on Daddy Dialectic.

Failing to access my inner Tiger Mother

By the time you read this, the outrage caused by Amy Chua's Wall Street Journal essay, entitled "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior," will have mostly died down. A lot of people will read her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (#4 on Amazon's bestseller list at the time of this writing); but those who don't will remember her only as the crazy bitch who calls her straight-A, musically prodigious daughters "garbage," and violates a dozen articles of the Geneva Convention while overseeing their piano practice--all in the name of helping them achieve their potential.

And sadly, many who read the WSJ essay, or even just scan a few of the bazillion blog rants and Twitter freakouts it inspired, may have forever etched in their minds the stereotype of the hardcore Asian Mama who shuns affection always, and breathes the fire of shame when her kid gets an A-minus, despite Chua's subsequent backpedaling regarding her overstated claims and bombastic tone in the essay.

I'll probably never read the book (unless somebody wants me to review it, or gives me a copy when I'm caught up on all the other stuff I want to read or...who am I kidding?--I'll never read it), but I'll take her at her word that the voice of her essay represented her earlier, more confident attitude about her draconian parenting style, before her younger daughter's rebellion caused her to lighten up a bit. She also explains in the essay and elsewhere that she uses the phrase "Chinese Parent" as shorthand for the tough-as-nails mentality any number of immigrants adopt as they strive to prove their mettle in their new country.

By the time Chua has responded to her critics, it seems that her argument is less that oppressive, coercive, "Chinese"-style parenting produces exceptional adults, and more that high expectations and an unrelenting work ethic of the kind embraced by immigrant populations, when built on a foundation of love and understanding, may contribute to success for some children. But that kind of talk isn't going to sell many books, is it?

Even before hearing Chua qualify her claims and soften her tone, however, I wasn't outraged by her essay.

My wife, whose family immigrated from Vietnam when she was a toddler, grew up in a household that was in many ways similar to Chua's, the major exception being that my wife's family arrived empty-handed, with no idea of how to navigate the labyrinth that led to success in the U.S. Her father worked nonstop, and her mother didn't speak enough English or have enough education to help the kids with their schoolwork or music practice the way Chua's parents (and of course Chua herself) did. My wife went to kindergarten knowing only the English she had picked up from Sesame Street.

But her parents' demands were much the same as Chua's: excellence in school, success in every endeavor, and unquestioning obedience. And the prohibitions on sleepovers, playdates, inessential extracurricular activities, dating while in high school (and in my wife's case, in college* and med school as well) were in place too. The language of shame was also deployed with gusto whenever any minor transgressions occurred, and they peppered their admonitions with hyperbolic threats (e.g. "I'll beat you until you die") that, although my wife and her five younger siblings never really felt that they were in harm's way, certainly added emphasis.

While my wife wishes she had been allowed to do a lot of things her peers were when she was a kid (attend sex ed, for instance), she doesn't seem to resent her parents any more than the average person does. In fact, we often lament the abolition of shame as a guiding principle in our society as we gripe about my entitled students and her entitled teenage patients who snap their gum and shrug when she asks how they expect to support their babies.

Our kids, we say, will never be like that.

***

The three principle differences between "Chinese" and "Western" parenting, as laid out by Chua, seem as fair as such broad generalizations can be, despite some overstatement and anecdotes of borderline child abuse as illustrations. First, Chua claims, Western parents don't push their children hard enough because they worry about their self-esteem; whereas Chinese parents "assume strength rather than frailty," and parent accordingly. Second, Chinese parents operate from the assumption that "children owe the parents everything," while the opposite is the case for Western parents. Finally, according to Chua, whereas Western parents indulge their children and give them the freedom to make stupid decisions, Chinese parents "believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children's own desires and preferences."

My wife and I agree that Chua is largely correct in this assessment of cultural differences in a very general way, and that children and society in general may well benefit more from the "Chinese" way than the "Western" way. In theory.

But as tough as we talk about what's wrong with kids these days, and how most people could use a good dose of shame, I just can't see us as anything close to "Tiger Parents." It will take all the willpower we can muster, in fact, to be anything tougher than "Free To Be You And Me" parents. Like many Westerners, we're enchanted by our babies, and can't stomach the idea of withholding affection from them, even if it was in their best interest. Chua might say that this attitude is indulgent, not only of the children, but of the parents. That a parent who cares about the long-term happiness of their child would sacrifice the pleasure of a comfortable relationship during childhood in the interest of shaping a confident and productive adult. I hope we will be able to teach our kids responsibility, humility, and respect without having to resort to threats. But I think that empathy and compassion are equally important traits in successful adults, and I don't know of any other way to teach that except by example.



*Where we met and were Just Good Friends


Please come visit me at my personal blog, Beta Dad, where I post funnier stuff than this, as well as hella-cute pictures and videos, and sometimes epic DIY projects.

I also write for the group blogs DadCentric and Aiming Low.

Daughters and Sons; Sons and Daughters

Pip and Polly are the proud inheritors of Ava’s childhood collection of 1980s Cabbage Patch dolls, and last week they decided to take each doll in for a visit to the doctor. They do these visits periodically, designating one of the tables in our living room as an exam table and pulling out various utensils from the kitchen to serve as a stethoscope, an x-ray machine, etc. Pip usually takes the lead in this process, handing out roles to Polly and me and telling us what we should say at various points throughout the examination.

This time, Pip told me that I was to act as each doll’s parent and that I should bring them into the examination room and explain to them what will happen during their visit with the doctor. He then handed me the first doll – a girl with stringy blond hair who we’ve named Olivia – and led us into the living room. As I walked in and sat down on the couch with Olivia on my knee, I was thinking ahead to naptime and how I needed to get a lasagna made for dinner, put a load of laundry in the wash, clean up the dishes from breakfast and lunch, and do some writing for the week’s blog post during that time. After waiting in silence for a few seconds, Pip impatiently prompted me to start explaining to Olivia what he and Polly were going to do. Stuttering a bit to get my words out, I quickly said, “Um, Olivia, this is, um, Dr. Pip and Nurse Polly…”

Then I stopped, remembering as soon as the words had come out of my mouth that thirty-some years of enculturation create habits which are annoyingly hard to break.

Polly and Pip looked over at me in confusion. I took a breath, paused for a moment, and then made a correction: “I’m sorry Olivia, this is Dr. Pip and Dr. Polly.”

*****

Taking care of Polly has brought me into direct and immediate contact with the mysterious world of women. While I thought I was ready for this, it turns out that, much like in rock climbing, there is a distinct difference between visualizing a route and executing the climb. From the ground it can be relatively easy to pick out the series of points one wants to hit, but up on the cliff, getting through those points is never that simple. With each move upward, new details emerge and new options appear, creating questions that challenge and complicate the previously established choices.

With Polly many of the daily questions are sartorial in nature. Dressing Pip each morning is relatively simple: I pull out of his drawer some variation of the same button-up shirt and khakis that I wear most days, throw on some athletic socks and tennis shoes, and run a brush through his hair. Polly’s wardrobe choices require a whole other set of considerations: Is today a dress day or a pants day? Do I put bloomers on if she’s wearing tights? Which pair of shoes is supposed to go with this outfit? How do I get these hair clips and hair bands in without her screaming in pain?

The questions take a more serious turn as intimations of sexuality appear: How short a dress am I willing to put on her? How low a top? Do I really want decals or words on the seat of her pants? What if they’re just flowers? And why do some people insist on putting halter tops on two-year-olds? Do girls become sex objects the moment they can stand on their own two feet?

Even more seriously, Polly’s presence in my life has made me hyper-aware of how many historical inequalities of power between men and women are still present in our lives. For example,

- In 2007, women in the United States earned an income that was only 80% of that received by men.¹

- In 2008, only 35% of science and engineering positions in business or industry were held by women and only 15% of top-level managers were women.²

- Of the 535 seats in the 112th edition of the United States Congress, only 93 (17%) are held by women. ³

- 1 in 4 women will become a victim of intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. ⁴

Every day I think about these statistics and contemplate what they mean for Polly’s future. I wonder how I might prepare her to face these realities and what I might do to help her overcome some of the obstacles that create them.

My first instinct in this regard was to avoid making her excessively feminine. Driven by the idea that being “too girly” leads people to dismiss a woman or treat her as weak and incapable, I hypothesized that by keeping the pink to a minimum, avoiding the plague of Disney princesses and fairies, and cultivating interests in trucks, sports, construction equipment, LEGOs, electronics, and other ‘boy’ topics, I could somehow make Polly immune to all the statistics. I imagined that as she grew up people would recognize that she was different, that she was better than all the other girls, and consequently they would not subject her to the same indignities that all the rest wind up suffering.

This hypothesis, of course, is ridiculous. Trying to essentially raise Polly as a boy is not the answer. For one thing, intentionally creating significant discord between what Polly understands about herself and what things are socially and culturally expected of her as a woman is unfair to her. This discord would only make things more difficult for Polly as she navigates through the world outside our door. For another achieving equality among men and women cannot be accomplished through the creation of sameness. Such attempts only instigate further oppressions by limiting everyone’s life to the simplest and most linear of existences.

In the face of this false choice between Polly being too girly and not being girly enough, I have come to two conclusions. The first is that the best thing we can do right now for Polly is to create within our household small interventions in the dominant patterns of the world beyond. My hope is that through these interventions she will eventually become aware that the inequalities of power between women and men in our society are not natural and unalterable properties and that this awareness will allow her to negotiate the inequalities she encounters with some sense of ironic separation between herself and her cultural position as a woman. As such, I don’t want to, for example, regularize the doctor = male, nurse = female equation in Pip and Polly’s role playing. This equation reproduces a relationship in which the highly paid man holds final decision-making power and the lesser paid woman is responsible for following his directions. I’d rather have them enact the other possible combinations: Pip and Polly as doctors, Pip as nurse and Polly as doctor, Pip and Polly as nurses. She will see plenty of the first combination during her real visits to the doctor.

The other conclusion I have come to is that such interventions may not be as important for Polly as they are for Pip. As Ava has brought to my attention repeatedly, it’s easy to think that addressing the patterns of gender inequality means altering how women operate in the world. But the reality is that the practices and habits of men drive the reproduction of these patterns. As beneficiaries of these inequalities, men bear greater power and responsibility for acknowledging and changing these patterns than is often recognized. For me living up to this responsibility means creating our interventions with Pip in mind as much as Polly. If Pip grows up sensitive to the historical practices of exclusion and obstruction that determine the unequal nature of the opportunities with which he and Polly are respectively presented in life, then perhaps he can further contribute to the type of cumulative cultural adjustment necessary to eliminate from our world the specter of the false choice and all the associated injustices that still haunt women today.

*****

After my slip that morning, I spent the next hour or so making a point of talking to Dr. Pip and Dr. Polly as I brought each of the dolls out for their turn in the examining room. Much to my relief, Pip eventually began parroting this manner of address as well. In some respects it seems like such a little thing, but at the moment these little things are what we can do. One day Ava and I will be able to have those conversations with Polly and Pip where we will talk about history and statistics and the reproduction of inequalities. For now, though, we have to try and show them what could be possible and hope that through this showing they learn to imagine and work for what the world should be instead of accepting as good enough what the world has already been.

¹ See this report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
² See this report from the National Science Foundation.
³ For the current list of women in the US Congress, look here.
⁴ See the Department of Justice’s webpage for the National Institute of Justice

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Interested in stories about our family or just some thoughts about being a parent in this day and age?

Take a look at my blog at http://www.postindustrialparenthood.blogspot.com/

There's a new post every Thursday.

Adopting Mei Mei: or, Waiting for Junior's Little Sister

Our family is about to expand. We are expecting a daughter, sometime in the middle of 2011. We can't provide a due date, because she is already alive, and when she was born, we were unaware of the event. But already, multiple lines of fate are converging across continents and oceans, the result of decisions made by dozens of people, many of whom we don't know. As a result, our family of three, and one orphaned Chinese girl, are falling like small steel bearings through a vertical maze, channeled through the chutes and tunnels of international bureaucracies, until we will come to rest this summer, blinking in silence and side by side, in a single room somewhere in China.

Whether it speaks to the strength or poverty of my imagination that I can envision the event as if it has already happened, I can't say. A fictional version of the first encounter plays itself automatically, over and over, on some inner screen of my thoughts. There were no such trailers running before my wedding, or even Junior's first day in the world. But these coming events I see quite concretely: There is banter in Mandarin between my Chinese father in law and the orphanage attendant. Junior's aunt, who is a physician, holds the little girl's medical paperwork in her lap, and silently observes the conditions of the facility. Junior, who will by then be half-way between 4 and 5, is hiding behind mama's leg, because he is shy, because he is tired from trans-Pacific travel, and perhaps because he is overwhelmed to be surrounded by people who look more like mama than daddy, and who talk like Grandpa talks, but all the time.

A little girl is brought in, around two years old, abandoned somewhere in the province by parents we will never meet. Their lives are blank spaces that will be filled with every newspaper story we will ever read about the rural upheaval, economic struggle, and domestic drama of modern China. Junior will sense how quickly and completely the adults have turned their attention toward this little girl, and will emerge from behind mama's leg. After fifteen or twenty minutes, he will attempt to communicate, maybe tease or jest with a smile. He'll speak in English at first -- although he can speak Mandarin -- because he thinks of himself as "an English person." He will see that this very important person, his mei mei, makes no response. The curious second language that lies scattered inside his head as casually as the troupe of stuffed animals that live among his blankets, will suddenly become instrumental and self-conscious as the most important bridge to his sister. And he will display all the shades of generous openness and shy retreat that we have seen with his friends, the same demanding claims on mama's attention, and the same mimicry of daddy's own first gestures of welcome and care for this new family member.

This is the point at which the film begins to stutter, and I am momentarily blinded by the whiteness of a blank screen, as the movie reel flaps in a slowing tempo of completion in the projection room. Antique metaphors for an antique man, whose imagination is here outstripped, and left flapping on its own spool.

Who will this child be? With what disposition will she greet the world? What will be the genetic projection of all the untold accidents and couplings of her anonymous pedigree? What will develop between this child and her new mother, who longs for a daughter with an intensity that still partially bewilders me? And what is in store for this father, who has grown into fatherhood with the comfortable familiarity of a man who can find the time of his own lost boyhood by watching Junior discover his own? How will being the father of a girl change the way he thinks of himself as a dad, and as a man? The cast of characters is about to expand, the narrative is set to grow in dynamism and complexity, and my skills as the chronicler of it all will need to be significantly upgraded, from the level of a neighborhood gossip columnist, to that of a Jane Austen or a Russian novelist, or perhaps the two of them combined.

Homeschooling? For my kids?

Last month I concluded my post on why my kids don’t go to preschool by writing,

“I have five brief years to spend with Pip and Polly before I have to release them into the wilds of institutionalized education. That time is precious to me. I don’t want to waste it on preschool.”

Several of the commentators on this post subsequently pointed out that this idea of a fast approaching limit to my time with Pip and Polly overlooked an obvious possibility. By undertaking their formal education at home, i.e. homeschooling, I could push back that limit and gain more of the time with them that I consider so precious.

After reading these comments, I opened up the comment window to write a reply. “Yes, I know,” I started. Then as I further parsed my thoughts, I realized that I had more to say about this than was reasonable for a comment posting. I closed the comment window and started jotting down some notes instead. The process of articulating my reasons for assuming that I would send my kids off “into the wilds of institutionalized education” had created a cascade of thoughts that merited their own posting.

*****

There are at least three significant reasons why I have always assumed that my children will not be homeschooled. The first is that when Pip was born I viewed the moved to stay home with him as a hiatus. I was taking leave of my own individually defined life for a while in favor of a hybrid collectivity wherein the interests of my children would take full precedence over my own. This sublimation of myself had a definite endpoint: the entrance of out last child into kindergarten. Once all the kids were handed off to the formal education system, I figured I would get back to my life and reclaim something of an identity apart from my children.

The second reason I have always assumed my children would become denizens of institutionalized education is a financial one. When Pip was born, the decision for one of us to become a full-time parent had a financial component. The cost of quality childcare is very high. As neither Ava nor I were headed towards a huge salary in the near term, we concluded that any second line of income would, after taxes, essentially go directly from our pockets to the childcare provider. In our minds, this made the decision to stay home and avoid the cost of childcare a financially acceptable choice.

Once both kids reach kindergarten age, the financial logic changes. If the kids can go to school for free, then other long-term financial questions come to the fore. For example, how do we save enough money to send the kids to college and subsequently retire in the way that we want to? This seems almost impossible for us to do with only one income. Of equal concern is what happens if Ava loses her job or is no longer able to work for some reason? Accidents happen and we no longer live in an economic environment where one can take their job for granted. A second income stream gives us a buffer if some unexpected were ever to happen.

The third reason my kids’ going to school is seemingly a fait accompli is that this is the pattern of life that I know. I grew up in a small town in southern Virginia. My mother was a public school teacher and just about everyone I knew there went through elementary, middle, and high school together. Even the nearest private school was a half-hour drive away so I rarely had contact with anyone who did not attend public school, much less anyone who did not attend school at all. It is difficult for me to imagine that the upper middle class, white, Methodists and Presbyterians who constituted my family’s social community ever discussed or seriously considered homeschooling their children.

Plus, the school system, with its regular events, performances, and athletic competitions, was a central organizing force for much of the town. To homeschool one’s kids and essentially reject the school system was to reject the community itself. It didn’t matter how uneven the educational quality was, such radicalism was not a comfortable proposition.

*****

In many respects all three of these reasons are really symptoms of a general middle class ethos that continues to be a part of my cultural identity. I was not raised to become a full-time father. My role models, both male and female, were upwardly mobile people who went to work each day as businesspeople, teachers, lawyers, doctors, and engineers. They did much of their parenting outside of regular work hours and on the weekends. Even after the birth of Pip, I expected to eventually do the same.

I feel like this expectation was true for most of my peers as well. We came of age in an era where most kids from middle class families anticipated building their lives according to an established checklist: finish high school, finish college, get a job, start a family. The implications of this list, with ‘starting a career’ coming temporally before ‘starting a family,’ certainly were not clear to me when I started down that track, and I think – as evidenced by such things as the “opt out phenomenon” – many others have found it to be a less than perfect ideal as well. All the same, the dictates and assumptions embedded in this list about how one chooses to manage life and work and family are an engrained part of the default knowledge I hold about my world.

*****

In The Agony and The Ecstasy, his novelization of the life of the Renaissance master Michelangelo Buonarroti, Irving Stone describes the work of a sculptor in terms that for me captures something essential about how these questions fit into my ongoing experience as a full-time father. Picturing Michelangelo in his workshop, Stone imagines him approaching a rough hewn block of marble with an idea, an image in his head of what he wants the block to become. Stone then describes him picking up his tools and carefully chipping away at the rock, exploring what it can do and discovering what it is incapable of. With each bit of stone that falls away into dust, Michelangelo must subtly adjust the image in his head to fit what he has learned. In the process, his work becomes a conversation, a series of questions and answers in which the block of marble is an equal, and sometimes the dominant, contributor.

The moment I become a full-time father, I shaved off a piece of the marble that is my life in such a way that the sculpture I am carving no longer cohered with the image that exists in my head. With that chip, some of the fundamental assumptions I held about who I was and who I was going to be became suddenly not quite true. This has left me somewhat in limbo, scraping away at the block and trying to get a handle on what is there, what is possible, exactly where the image I carry of myself meets the evolving trend of choices I make, and how those two entities can become conversant again. It is a frightening and exhilarating position in which to be.

The question of homeschooling brings this sense of limbo between artist and art, identity and practice, right to the fore. Given the sensibility that I laid out in my November post, it seems like I should engage wholeheartedly with the idea of homeschooling. I should test it out and see what it would mean for me and my family. But I’m not there and I don’t know if I’ll ever get there. It’s a direction and course of life that leads me radically away from what I ever envisioned my final sculpture would be. Before I can even get around to the technical questions of how or why, I have to address this issue of identity. Am I a person who would homeschool his children? I don’t know. I guess I am just going to have to keep chipping to find out.

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Interested in stories about our family or just some thoughts about being a parent in this day and age?

Take a look at my blog at http://www.postindustrialparenthood.blogspot.com/

There's a new post every Thursday.

The Death of Naptime: Competing Models

A month or so ago, Junior's naptime died.

It has been replaced by daddy's naptime. I don't call it "daddy's naptime," and it only lasts thirty minutes on the outside, but it is still a nap, it is me who is taking it, so this represents a sort of revolution. For Junior, the new regime is called "quiet time." It may one day provide Junior with his first retrospective inkling of his father's gradual descent into dotage. What quiet time means, from Junior's point of view, is that there is a temporal zone in the early afternoon when, for the sake of daddy's nap, or for the sake of daddy's sanity, life deliberately slows down, and pandemonium is prohibited. Things that make noise are discouraged, excessive motion is frowned upon, and an atmosphere of meditative silence, if not overall sleepiness, is cultivated.

There are days when Junior, perhaps nostalgic for the fading Golden Age of his toddler-dom, does indeed crash as he used to, which is to say with bravado and wherever he happens to find himself. But more often, he complies with the new regime and its exhortations to quietness rather than somnolence. He draws in his coloring books, erects fantastic structures with blocks and train tracks, or arranges all the objects of his life into mysterious Joseph Cornell-type compartments. It is during quiet time that Junior assembles his collection of tiny plastic beads, which no one remembers acquiring and which have since been eaten by the dog, into the shovel of his plastic bulldozer, or the tilting container of his toy boxcar.

I will find that our horde of buckeyes, harvested last September and stored in a dedicated bowl of natural curiosities, has now been dispersed among the bookshelves of our home, positioned to the left in each case, perhaps a marker indicating how one should scan the titles on each shelf from left to right, or perhaps placed there according to some inscrutable principle of feng shui. Coming upon Junior during his quiet time activity is like stumbling upon a lone prairie dog, a sentinel: he pops up as from out of a hole, his long torso still and fully extended, sniffing the air for my intentions and scanning my body for the slightest movement. Is quiet time over? What is the afternoon fate of our domestic ecosystem? If I continue on my way with wooden face and no eye contact, he drops back into his burrow and returns to his Joseph Cornell projects. If I show the slightest sign of empathy or affection, then the spell of quiet time is irremediably broken, and our noisy, kinetic life resumes.

Modeling the Nap Function
x = time, y = need for nap
A = Daddy, B= Junior
q area = daddy's productivity
r area = daddy's dotage
s = nap equilibrium

What I haven't yet explained is why the death of Junior's naptime coincided so neatly with the birth of my own. Neutral observers might reasonably infer the presence of some kind of causal relationship, and indeed, they would probably be right. But a causal relationship of what kind? There are two competing models used to explain the data plotted on the graph above. Fortunately, I am confident in dismissing the most obvious explanation, that of the Dotage Theory. The Dotage Theory posits an inverse relationship between Junior's mounting stamina and my own declining energy level. It is a conceptually simple, intuitively appealing, and straightforward explanation for daddy and junior's changing nap needs.

Plotted on Cartesian coordinates we see -- in greatly simplified outline, of course -- how daddy's need for a nap presents the concave up-sweeping parabola A. Over time, daddy's nap need is increasing, though it is not clear how this curve may taper off or plateau. Conversely, Junior's decreasing nap need plots the concave down-sweeping parabola B. At t = 0 (the year 2007) the point in time when these curves were farthest apart, the area q (or daddy's productivity) was at its greatest extent; it has steadily decreased since then, passing through a point of nap parity s, and has now entered a stage described by area r, which may be understood as an overall daddy productivity deficit.

I contend that the Dotage Theory, though perhaps valid when extended into the later decades of adult life, does not adequately capture the complexity of the system in which I find myself. My new naptime habit, I argue, is a result of the displacement of a portion of my daily sleep requirement from evening to afternoon. According to this more sophisticated Sleep Displacement Theory, my total sleep need has remained constant; what has changed is the scheduling of that portion of the day during which I harvest a certain portion of sleep, together with undisturbed Me Time.

In this view, the reason daddy now needs these afternoon naps is that he is staying up later. Now that Junior no longer naps as long as he once did -- for one, two, or even three hours in the afternoon -- late evenings are the only time daddy can carve out some solitude, find a little peace of mind, or a moment in which to read a book. Glorious, egotistical, voluptuous satisfaction of daddy's greatest middle-aged desire: not to have sex, but to read a book. And so it is: next morn, like an adolescent lover, I am groggy and grumpy, punching in at my job and giving it my caffeine-fueled best for the next 8 hours, until I can return to whatever it was I had been reading before I fell asleep the previous night.

But, long before a verdict is returned from the tribunes of science, and usually at around 2PM, despite all self-stimulating efforts to the contrary, I am hit by a collapsing wall of fatigue. I can see it coming from far off, an oncoming wave moving in from the horizon. It is usually clear that there is no escape, that there is no safe or higher ground. I simply have to ride it out, which I do. On the couch.

Preschool: A Second Look

Back in September, I posted an entry wondering if the seeming ubiquity of preschool attendance for three-to-five year olds around our neighborhood made it an unavoidable necessity for my own children to go to preschool (The link is here). My biggest concern in that post was how my children would learn to interact socially with their peers if they were with me while everyone else was at preschool. In many respects I was not actually trying to answer this question in my post. My intent was more to highlight, and vent my frustration at, one of those moments in parenting when the choices others make significantly constrict or complicate my own range of options.

In the two months since publishing those thoughts, I have returned several times to the question of whether I will ultimately have to send Polly and Pip to preschool. In the process I realized that I wanted another crack at the topic. I wanted to write something that would clarify my thoughts from the first entry and bring them to a definite conclusion. I wanted to write something that would end with a period instead of a question mark. And so, here we go again:

There is something potent about the notion of going to ‘school’. I’ve never had anyone suggest that I should send Pip or Polly to daycare for a couple of mornings a week. In fact, it was not until Pip passed thirty months – the age at which many preschools start accepting children – that anyone brought up the idea of turning him over for a while to someone else, even under the logic of giving myself a break or creating some more one-on-one time with Polly. But once the idea was in the air, it was hard to get rid of. There was some kind of unarticulated power at work, a sense that having mastered walking, talking, and eating, Pip’s next natural milestone would be going to preschool. Being conscientious parents, Ava and I dutifully sought out and found a quality preschool that we could afford and enrolled Pip in the two-day program.

As I described in the first post, Pip’s year in preschool was okay but not great. It ultimately left us wondering what he really got out of it. Preschool was supposed to introduce Pip to a whole series of things that would over three years culminate in his being “ready for kindergarten.” But in looking at some of the kindergarten readiness check lists available on the web (like here and here), I found that Pip can already cross off just about every item listed. He recognizes almost all of the letters in the alphabet. He can count to twenty. He knows how to use scissors and glue safely. He can write his name with help. In the past two months he has also demonstrated a willingness and capacity to play with other kids. Two more years of preschool are not going to make him significantly more ready for kindergarten.

And Polly at eighteen months is not very far behind Pip. She follows him everywhere and mimics him relentlessly. In the process she has learned – and, I expect, will continue to learn - much of whatever he is into. For example, she is already grasping some of the things Pip and I are working on at home. She can count to four, recognize some letters, and identify a couple of shapes. She is also becoming more capable with writing instruments like crayons and markers. And she is quite skilled at managing interactions with people of all ages. Preschool can’t hold a candle to the education gained from having an older sibling.

The one item on the readiness lists that Polly and Pip will not be able to check off before they enter kindergarten is the possession of an intimate familiarity with the dynamics of a formal classroom setting. This is not a small thing. As a commentator on one of my later posts suggested (see here), ‘school’ is a completely different world from ‘home.’ The rules are different. The routines are different. The organization of space is different. The personal relationships are different. Managing this difference is not just a matter of learning how to deal with more people. It also means understanding how to function within an additional array of power and authority centered around the classroom teacher and, further along, the administration of the school writ large.

There is an intuitive logic to this question of familiarity which says the sooner a child gets familiar with this alien world and the sooner she can start functioning within it, the more opportunities she will have to gain whatever benefits are possible. The implication of this logic is that, on average, children who attend preschool should have some continuing developmental advances over those who do not. But does it really work this way? Are the cognitive and social development of children essentially a process of linear accumulation? Does it matter whether Pip and Polly get institutionalized as three-year-olds instead of five-year-olds?

I took a look at some of the scholarly research on preschool outcomes to see if I could find any solid answers to these questions. The results of this search were interesting though not particularly definitive.

First of all, most of the preschool research I found focuses on low income populations and whether preschool attendance by these populations can reduce a frequently observed “achievement gap” between children from lower and higher income families. While most find that preschool programs do create some positive impact in this regard, these findings are not that applicable to Polly or Pip as they are members of a hyper-educated, professional class family with an income that falls somewhere within the middle bracket.

Secondly, much of this research is conducted in the context of policy discussions regarding whether the public provision of preschool should be pursued through universal or targeted programs. For parents like Ava and I who are trying to determine how many thousands of dollars we should be willing to pay for our children to go to a good preschool, these discussions offer little guidance.

In the few papers I did find which held some relevance for our context, the results were circumspect about the overall value of preschool. On the positive side, there seems to be a consensus that middle class populations do derive some advances in cognitive development from preschool (see this report for more). However, these gains are small. One report estimated that the difference between children who attended preschool and those who did not amounted to the ability to answer one more question correctly on the test instrument. This same study also found that this effect fades over time. On the negative side, another paper concluded that any cognitive gains come paired with a negative trend in measures of social development, though exactly how social development was measured is not clear to me.

Given the ambivalence and the relative lack of evidence regarding what preschool does for kids like Pip and Polly, I feel justified in deciding that actually attending preschool is a largely neutral proposition. So, what benefits might be gained from keeping them at home with me? In my original post I tried to answer this question in a comparative way, claiming that my kids will do more and learn more with me than they would at preschool. While I still believe that to be true, it is a very subjective measure and one that obscures a simpler and more self-centered reason for my ambivalence about preschool: I don’t want to give up my kids yet.

Not only do I love Polly and Pip, but I really like them. They are smart, funny, and impossibly sweet. For example, Polly blows kisses to every animal she sees – in books, in stores, in people’s houses. She has also, in her imitations of Pip, taken to crawling around the house on all fours and pretending to be different animals, woofing when she is a dog and growling when she is a bear. For his part, Pip is currently in a stage where the sophistication of his thoughts and the language he uses to articulate them is rapidly increasing. Just yesterday he told me, while talking about our upcoming Thanksgiving trip to his grandparents, that “My heart hurts because we have to wait so long before going to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.”

As a full-time father, I have the rare opportunity to be immersed in all of this and to be on hand for almost everything that happens to them. While this positionality comes with its ups and downs, the cumulative effect of my experiences with them has been one of great joy. By sending Polly and Pip to preschool I would be giving up some of this, and that is not an idea I relish. More importantly, sending them to preschool effectively outsources all the fun stuff about being a parent while requiring me to spend much of my time playing the less enjoyable roles of nag and chaperone. If the roles were reversed and I got to play with my kids, read books to them, or do art projects with them while someone else cooked, cleaned, and made sure they got out of the door on time, then I would sign up for that immediately. But that’s not how preschool works and so for me, sending my kids to one doesn’t make sense.

I have five brief years to spend with Pip and Polly before I have to release them into the wilds of institutionalized education. That time is precious to me. I don’t want to waste it on preschool.

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Interested in stories about our family or just some thoughts about being a parent in this day and age? Take a look at my blog:

http://www.postindustrialparenthood.blogspot.com/

There's a new post every Thursday.

A PASSAGE ON EXIT GLACIER

The following essay is excerpted from the book, Truckin' with Sam: A Father and Son, The Mick and The Dyl, Rocking and Rolling, On the Road (SUNY Press, May 2010), by Lee Gutkind With Sam Gutkind. Lee Gutkind is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Arizona State University and founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction Magazine. Sam Gutkind is a student at Carnegie Mellon University.

The mosquitoes attacked the moment we started up the trail, an army lying in wait to ambush and destroy us. I was glad I had heeded Kathy’s warning to take plenty of bug dope, which I sprayed generously all over us. Sam, my 12-year-old son, made an “I’m being tortured, leave me alone face” and kept turning away as I sprayed his cheeks and forehead. “This smells terrible,” he complained.

“That’s what we hope the mosquitoes are saying to themselves,” Kathy said, punching the air like a shadow boxer. “‘I can’t stand the smell—I give up. I’ll leave these poor people alone and bother somebody else.’”

Of the three of us, the least prepared was Kathy, the Alaskan, who went on this hike with leaky boots. While Sam and I stomped through the snow in our waterproof, insulated Gore-Tex hikers, Kathy sloshed through puddles, swearing at her boots and vowing to destroy them the moment she returned home. Exit Glacier, in the Kenai Mountains, was named because it served as the “exit” for the first recorded crossing of the Harding Ice Fields, which was where we were headed, at the summit.

The terrain leveled off as we climbed, but the snow got deeper, burying our boots, At first, we were able to follow a trail of tiny orange flags marked by a Park Service ranger, but the flags soon disappeared, and we had to bushwhack our own way, our general direction guided by the far-off distant summit, a sparkling mass of glittering white, caked with ice blue. There were many trails—just lines of footprints, really—but none that seemed most suitable to follow. After slipping, sliding, and falling in and out of other hikers’ mistakes, we realized that braving our way through new snow would work best. But it was slow going. Three steps forward meant two steps sliding backward. The trick was to keep your legs moving, continue to scramble upward, often on all fours, in order to maintain a slow and steady forward progress.

Something happens to me when I get into situations like this, a combination of panic and sheer persistence, jelling, building, converging, and exploding. A time to be tested: against the elements, against other people, and against myself. My heart beats faster and I click into a special awareness and focus on the task ahead, an intense tunnel vision that allows me to block out any extraneous details and hone in on my overall objective, as in the case of the rising plain of snow confronting us.

“Fall down nine times and get up ten,” is the phrase I continue to press upon Sam.

“Never give up,” I say, pushing the concept further by paraphrasing Winston Churchill, “Never give in, never give up. Never. Never. Never. Ever.” This is something that I, an old-new dad, in my early sixties, read in elementary school and never forgot.

As I move forward in this manner, I become increasingly crazed. I am not self-destructive. I don’t jump out of airplanes or windsurf, but I hunger for situations offering an edge, and then I try to see what it takes—what inner resources I will have to muster forth—to meet the challenge and beat it. I knew that Kathy was minding Sam for the moment, so I could permit this explosion of expression.

Then I began running. In my hiking boots, my daypack bouncing on my back, it was like plunging through the obstacle course at U. S. Coast Guard boot camp all over again, forty years later.

Suddenly, I was young, strong, driven. The distance between Sam and Kathy and I began to lengthen. After a while, I lost sight of them. I knew that Kathy was slowing down and tiring and I realized that my responsibility, Sam, was behind me. But I couldn’t help myself. I felt jet-propelled.

Finally, I forced myself to slow down. I was feeling guilty for leaving behind my friend and host, not to mention my son, but I was also glowing inside with an aura of triumph. I could still beat most people, I thought. I could still marshal my amazing ability to concentrate with all of my physical resources and demonstrate my superiority and my grit over anybody, almost. But then came the sound and movement, which I first sensed and then heard: distinct footsteps behind me. I turned. Sam.

The realization that Sam had caught up with me—me at my strongest, my most powerful and supercharged best—was startling. For years I had been the person pushing Sam and setting the pace for him—but I could see now that he really didn’t need me as much anymore and would soon not need me at all. Like any son, he was catching up with his father. Bypassing me was inevitable.

This is what we work to achieve as fathers—and in certain ways dread, when we are so incredibly successful.

3.75

At 3.75, there is a certain way of running on the cratered surface of playground wood chips, with arms bent at the elbows like the upper limbs of a marsupial, tucked in and irrelevant. There is the forward motion -- toddling -- generated by legs swinging without hips to smooth them out, the torso upright and isolated from the movements of the lower half, so unlike the athletic movements of a 6 year old. At 3.75 persist the red apple spots on the cheeks of a boy that are the envy of passing women.

At 3.75, we are bent over, he more comfortably than I, examining what flora can survive the Park District's weekly motorized guillotine: thick blades of something resembling lawn grass, and the flowers of a common clover plant; bottle caps burrowing their way to archaeological posterity, and the locust seedpods that he collects into bundles because they rattle like plastic toys. At 3.75, I show him freshly shucked buckeyes, and he is not moved. Not much later I circle round a tree, harvesting cicada shells, which he drops from his hand as soon as I place them there.

When my son turns 3.75, as his father turns 41.5, our individual chronometers briefly stop, marking an absolute moment in time with two particular values. At that moment, in an empty playground between Lake Shore Drive on one side and a late-season pickup game on the other, we are visited by the daddy dialectic.

The dialectic is better known for its role in cosmic things, revealing its staging of history's greatest events in small and offhand ways, as when Alfred Hitchcock appears in a film of his own direction. For those who happen to be listening, perhaps writing a thesis in philosophy a few floors above, the morning echo of hooves through the streets of a German town, trailing behind the horse that carries Napoleon, announces that the world has changed forever.

The daddy dialectic produces revolutions of a smaller scale. When it visits us several weeks after the cicadas fall silent, it is not the insects but my son who has molted. I can see his transparent shell. It is in the baby swing, with the little rubber baskets for four-legged children. "Daddy, those swings are for babies," he tells me from the big-kids swing a few yards away. Then, realizing that he is now a creature with a past, no longer living in a uniform, timeless present: "I used to be a baby. Do you remember when I was a baby? Were you a baby, too, daddy?"

Yes, you used to be a baby, it was just yesterday and I remember it well. And of course, I used to be a baby too. But I don't remember that.

And so departed the daddy dialectic into the autumn afternoon. In my hands it deposited the worldly recollections of my son's first 3.75 years of life, like the molted cicada shells I had handed to him in August. I hold these moltings as if I had lived in them myself. But to him, they are the only signs of a first experience that will always be alien, reflected back to him by the others and objects he touched but does not remember: family albums, cell cam pics posted to Facebook, preschool artwork, stories we make a point to tell him or the ones we manage, haphazardly, to remember. What is clear and distinct to me in the run of those 3.75 years will be the hazy, enchanted, mythological prelude to his later life.

Of course I, who am interested enough in his childhood that for three years I have written about it on this blog, remember virtually none of my own. Sometimes, in the hallway at preschool, or on ever rarer occasions when I am alone in a cafe, I hear mothers trading stories about the wild animals trapped in their slings, the untrained or tranquilized primates that challenge and bewilder them, as if they had never been such very small children themselves. To hear and join in their chatter, the experience of an other's earliest youth unfolds as fresh and as rough as accounts of the first voyages of discovery, when continents and oceans were opened to Christopher Columbus and Vasco de Gama.

But the freshness of early childhood and voyages of discovery are only possible after a tremendous forgetting. What Columbus found had been there for some time, and others had come across it well before him. In laughing with and being charmed by small children, I am laughing with and being charmed by what I imagine I used to be, seizing on their image in order to resurrect vestiges of the toddler's neural architecture preserved within the later formations of my cerebrum. I hold in trust the memories of my son's first years, and he restores me to a semblance of my earliest self.

At 3.75, the days of October string out before us like a gallery of paper lanterns twirling slowly on a sagging rope. They filter dry light through draperies of cellulose, to enclose the world in glowing boxes or orange, red, and gold. At the end of this collapsing gallery that arches above our sidewalk waits November and, not far beyond, birthday number 4. For the first time, he knows his birthday is approaching. And he knows that it will be followed by another one with yet another number, the way he now knows that fall is a season that is followed by winter, the way he used to be a baby, and now is not.

Here's to Having Kids!

One of my guilty pleasures is taking about 15-20 minutes each Friday to read Bill Simmons’ column on ESPN.com. Written from the perspective of someone who is a passionate fan, a sports addict, and a recreational gambler, Simmons’ column jumbles together sports, cultural touchstones, mildly puerile comedy, and anecdotes from his personal life in a way that I generally find amusing.

This past summer, however, a couple of his comments rubbed me the wrong way.

Bill Simmons has two kids. While his editors want him to avoid talking about them, every once in a while he can’t help it. Over the summer, he wrote a couple of times about things his young son had gotten into – vomiting in the hallway, slinging dog poop around the house. He prefaced these stories with the line, “Here’s another reason not to have children.” Now I know he was trying to be funny, and in other columns he has talked about how much he likes his kids, but whenever I read that line I found myself getting annoyed.

By employing this kind of light-hearted complaining about kids in a column aimed at 15 to 40 year old men, Simmons is doing fathers a disservice. The line “here’s another reason not to have children” draws upon and perpetuates for his audience a larger discourse of fatherhood that positions ‘dear old dad’ as a largely disengaged parent for whom the kids are mostly a nuisance imposed upon him by his wife. This is the same ‘dad’ who in Hallmark’s humorous Father’s Day cards spends his non-work hours playing golf, mowing the yard, or taking a nap (sans kids). While this is certainly not the only discourse of fatherhood out there, the prevalence and widespread acceptance of this particular trope makes it more difficult for me to be taken seriously when I speak in genuine and caring ways about my children.

Since this summer, I’ve been trying to imagine a counterpoint to Simmons’ “reasons not to have kids.” The statement I had in mind is not about why my kids are great per se, but more about why I like having kids in general. Articulating this general thought has been trickier than I first expected.

The reasons not to have/like kids are pretty easy to capture. They boil down to two logical categories:

1) Kids require you to do things you don’t want to do (e.g. clean up excrement, negotiate over petty things like how many spoonfuls of vegetables to eat, forego sleep)

2) Having kids requires you to give up things you want to do (e.g. lazily reading the newspaper on Sunday morning, taking a spur of the moment trip, sleep again)

The likes are much harder to parse into simple groups. I find the times when I am most aware of how much I love my children come in unpredictable and irrational bursts. Sometimes it’s when they are wandering around drowsily after first waking up from a nap. Other times it’s when I watch them happily work on something together. I also really enjoy hearing them laugh uncontrollably and seeing the pride they feel when they are suddenly able to do something new.

In fashioning a reason to like having kids, it was tempting to group these moments under a label like ‘innocence’ or ‘purity’ or ‘simplicity’ and to pose them against the exhaustion, stress, cynicism, manipulation, and jealousy of adulthood. But this opposition is fanciful and unfair to both children and adults. My children are not naïve actors in the world. They have their demands. They have their desires. They have their strategies to pursue them. In this, they are not pure, innocent, or simple. Similarly, as an adult I don’t find my life to be defined in world-weary terms. Adulthood is so much more complicated and interesting than that.

I’ve found that a more honest assessment of what I really like about having kids has to do with the quality of newness with which their world is flooded. For my kids, so much of what they encounter in the world is new and unknown. This makes the smallest things become a cause for great excitement and investigation. For example, I gave Pip a pair of scissors yesterday, and he spent a solid two hours patiently cutting large pieces of scrap paper into tiny bits. Similarly, Polly spent much of this morning shining a flashlight into various rooms, against different walls, and inside a range of containers to see how the color of the reflected light changed from spot to spot. It’s fun to be taken in by this kind of fine-grained curiosity and experimentation. It reminds me of how intricately textured the world is and how satisfying such mundane things as the click of scissors in your hand can be.

This quality of newness also points towards what I think is the fundamental reason I enjoy having kids. A friend and I were talking recently about the current iteration of the do-it-yourself movement. He was describing to me how enjoyable he found it to create something from scratch that he could have just gone to a store and bought off the shelf. For him, this joy comes from a combination of two factors: 1) learning how something like butter or a radio actually comes to exist, and 2) feeling an inordinate pride at having made them with his tools. Somehow, the butter tastes sweeter and the radio sounds clearer when the labor of production comes directly from his own hands.

As my friend talked, I realized that the feelings he was describing were very close to how I feel about having children. First, I get to experience how a person is made. I have watched as my own children learned to crawl then stand then walk. I have listened as they moved from babbling to words to sentences. I have seen them develop particular interests and the infinite idiosyncrasies that sculpt a human into a person. I have even had the chance to tinker with these processes by introducing Pip and Polly to a whole variety of words, ideas, and activities.

And then, when things go well, I get that intense feeling of pride. Everything Pip and Polly accomplish was achieved better or quicker or smarter than anyone else’s child could have done. It’s a bit silly, but after investing such large amounts of time and energy in something or someone it’s hard not to become overly emotional about their successes (and failures). I understand now why professional athletes cry at the end of championship games.

And so, here is my counterpoint to Bill Simmons and his reasons not to have kids: Raising children is the most intense and personal DIY project you can ever imagine. Each child is different, and you have to figure out a tremendous amount of stuff to make your parenting work. But, in the process, you can develop a relationship with this person unlike any other. You can also come to understand much more clearly why people are who they are and how they come to do the things that they do.

And if all goes well, there is no feeling sweeter than parental pride (whether it’s deserved or not).



Interested in stories about our family or just some thoughts about being a parent in this day and age?

Take a look at my blog at http://www.postindustrialparenthood.blogspot.com/

There's a new post every Thursday.

Counting Dads at Preschool Potluck

Guess what happened at our fall preschool potluck? Lots of dads showed up. Hooray!

I don’t know what was going on. Had they all read that recent Newsweek cover story about how men need to step up to the parenting plate to survive the rigors of the 21st century? The one rehearsing those awful statistics about how even unemployed men do less housework than their wives, and including a choice and characteristically hopeful quip from the founder of this blog?

Or is it that Daddy Dialectic has succeeded in guilting all those late 20- and early 30-something dads into giving up whatever the hell it is they are so devoted to doing on Monday evenings, once every three months, at 7 o'clock in the evening? Reorganizing their tool box? Lowering a new racing engine into the chassis of their pro stock car? Founding a charter school? Or maybe flying back from Africa where they have performed free surgery on thousands of needy children? Perhaps these worthy projects were all put on hold for this one modest event in late September, because suddenly, strewn among the current generation of neighborhood toddlers, there were dads everywhere. And for the future of this generation of preschoolers, I don’t think that is a bad trade-off.

I should give some specifics as to the sample size and metric upon which I base these remarks: having attended a number of preschool potlucks, I now feel like I have a good sense of which dads can be expected to attend these events, which dads would probably rather not -- but can be prevailed upon approximately once every 9 months to do so -- and those who will just never show, because they need to … well, do whatever the hell it is they need to do.

A number of the latter have nonetheless found the time to encumber their wives with at least two children, a toddler in one arm and a suckling infant in the other, a situation that is usually best witnessed around 7:45PM in January, at the conclusion of the winter potluck, when it’s past the kids’ bedtime, frickin’ freezing outside, and mom has to belt the kids into the back seat. As far as I’m concerned, the Chicago Police should be stationed outside the building door, issuing violations for “Being Too Much of a Male Douchebag for the Conditions ,” or, “Failing to Yield Your Wage Slave Ubermensch Identity” in order to help out with a quarterly ritual of some significance. Fines would range between $100 to $150.

The question naturally arises, what exactly is it that prevents dad from going to the preschool potluck? That is indeed the mystery. Might it be answered by that classic alibi, work? The one reason rooted in real, inescapable, hard-core, survival-of-the-fittest economic imperatives (such a string of conventionally masculine adjectives!) The realities of a globalized, Great Recession world that make it virtually impossible to break out of the centuries-old division of gender labor that decrees: And man shall work, so that woman shall attend potluck dinners.

Pondering this, I envision the deals doubtlessly being struck around kitchen tables across the land: “Look, honey, I bust my ass at this job that I can’t stand (and at least I still have one) to make sure that you and the kids have a roof over your head. So in return, it’s your job to take the kids to the potluck, while I, well, while I whatever.” And the wife nodding her head in agreement, or just nodding her head, and thinking to herself, “So… (even though I have a law degree) we’ve decided that I’m going to stay home, so … and you really are doing important stuff and earn more money, so… OK, I’ll be the one who takes the kids to the potluck tonight, and then again … Every. Single. Time.”

Fair enough. Or is it? Obviously, it doesn’t apply to those unemployed men who aren’t helping around the house. But what of those who are working? I do in fact know some super-achieving males, those who make over the infamous $250,000 threshold doing such things as cutting-edge medical research, and therefore are usually in a clinic or somewhere in China or South Africa advancing the field in ways that will probably benefit all of humanity, or at least the minority with health insurance. You could argue that guys like this deserve a pass. Go, Great Men, go save the world. I’ll take the kids.

Yet aside from this conspicuous minority of Great Men who might – might -- deserve a pass, the interesting thing is that this alibi is not deployed by my wife, whose earning power stands to my own as does the Pentagon’s latest fighter jet to a paper kite. She can run with the best of them and does run, back and forth to the train station every morning and night. In fact, of the moms who never fail to attend these modest potlucks, I can think of a half dozen of them who work at least part time and a few that, like my wife, are full-timers. Somehow, they are always there. They would be ashamed not to be.

And here is where the double-standard comes in: working moms are more insistent about cutting out to be there for the events in their kids’ lives, but they get dinged for it, and make less than their male counterparts. Their employers mistakenly anticipate lower productivity from their female workers, let them cut out, and pay them less. Their husbands don’t get off so easily. They think – assuming they want to cut out from work, which is evidently still an open question – “I might be able to do this once or twice, but much more than that and it will hurt my career.”

The dad who checks out of the meeting for an early flight, so he can get back in time for his daughter’s softball game, might be fawned over by the women in the meeting room, but one too many such departures and his boss might pull him aside for some words about his future.

Which brings me back to the $250,000, heroic medical researcher. Maybe I shouldn’t give him a pass, even if in reality he happens to be a neighbor to whom I have entrusted the care of a very sensitive portion of my insides. Why not? Because until guys like him conspicuously demonstrate that they will not automatically trade family time for career advancement, until they insist that the well-being of their own children is just as important as the well-being of future generations to whom their scientific labors are dedicated, it will be harder for Joe Spreadsheet to make the case that he has to cut out in time to get to the softball game. And easier for Joe Douchebag to get out of a potluck just because he wants to.

In which case, I say, write that last guy a ticket.

A social dilemma: What if we’re the only ones who don’t send their kids to preschool?

On the Tuesday after Labor Day, we went to the playground. The sun was out. The air was warm. And the place was empty. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and Pip, Polly, and I were the only people there. This was a surprise to us. On the previous Tuesday there had been a number of kids running around, whipping down the slides, twisting on the swings, and creating the general commotion that is the specialty of children. Now, the playground was a ghost town. It was so quiet I could hear the swings creaking as they were pushed by the morning’s gentle breeze.

We stayed for about an hour. During that time, only one other kid appeared – a toddler who was probably 18 months old. At first my kids enjoyed having the place to themselves. They ran up the slides. They hopped from empty swing to empty swing. They scurried up the little climbing wall over and over. But soon the absence of other kids to watch and to play with left them bored and ready to leave.

Where was everyone? The answer came to me on the walk home: preschool. With the passing of Labor Day, all the area preschools are now in session. The kids we had seen the week before (and the week before that) are now scattered about the region’s various churches and private preschools. And they won’t return again until sometime in the month of May.

This phenomenon has raised an uncomfortable question for me: Am I going to have to send my kids to preschool to give them the chance to play with other kids? I hope not. We’ve done preschool. Ava and I sent Pip to one last year, and the experience was mediocre for us all. This was not the fault of the preschool. The program was well regarded, and the teachers did everything they said they would do. Pip made art projects. He went to Spanish class. He did music class. He learned some sign language. He got playtime everyday. We went with him on field trips to a local farm in the fall and to a exhibit of live butterflies in the spring. His experience was everything the ‘preschool industrial complex’ (Ava’s term) promises preschool can be.

But we never really were happy with it.

Our unhappiness stemmed largely from two areas. First, it felt like the activities were tailored heavily towards producing ‘things’ for parental consumption. On a daily basis, we were swamped by a deluge of paintings, drawings, collages, paper cutouts, etc. The importance given to all of this ‘stuff’ by the teachers did not align well with our own attempts at living a relatively simple life.

Second, Pip never really seemed comfortable. While he always said he liked preschool, whenever we did something with him there, he never appeared happy and relaxed. In fact, the indelible image for me from Pip’s year in preschool is of him standing on stage at the end of the year concert and nervously pulling the cuffs of his shorts up around his hips while he was supposed to be singing along with the music. His uncertainty in that moment was emblematic of what I saw from him throughout the year.

The main reason we sent Pip to preschool was for him to gain some “socialization.” As a two-year old, he was significantly more comfortable talking with adults than with kids. We hoped that by having the opportunity to independently interact on a regular basis with a group of kids his own age, he would at least get comfortable in a crowd and maybe even make some friends. In this respect, Pip’s preschool time was largely successful. He is much more outgoing now with other kids than he was a year ago. In particular, he is much more willing now to talk to new kids on the playground and engage in the kind of back and forth that is necessary for learning about new people.

That willingness made me hopeful that we could skip preschool this year. Over the summer our family moved to a new city and the potential for non-preschool socialization opportunities seemed high. We now have the great fortune of living in a neighborhood that is crawling with kids of all ages. There are strollers in abundance and tire swings hanging from multiple trees. During our first couple of weeks, Pip had begun to make a couple of friends at the playground nearby. He was talkative and playful and seemed to be figuring out how one goes about making friends.

Then Labor Day arrived, and now I’m facing a dilemma. In a new place where we don’t go to church or have an established network of family and friends with young children, if we want our kids to interact regularly with others their own age, do we have any choice but to send Pip (and eventually Polly) to preschool?

Obviously, I don’t really want to. In addition to my ambivalence about Pip’s earlier preschool experience, the following question comes to mind: what good comes from my being a full-time father if we are just going to send the kids to preschool every morning? I can do all the cognitive stuff better and more efficiently at home. The kids will get more direct attention, read more books, learn more letters and numbers, get exposed to more novel ideas, and have longer periods for playtime with me than at preschool. As a result of all of this, they’ll probably start reading and writing on their own sooner, too.

But what I can’t replicate at home is a social environment where Pip or Polly has to negotiate things with six other kids. How important is that in the long run? Will it put them at a significant disadvantage once they go to kindergarten or are these social development moments ones that they can catch up with pretty quickly? I don’t know. These are questions I’m still working out.

In the meantime, I’m trying a couple other avenues to get them playing with other kids. The most promising is an internet meet-up group for playdates that on the surface looks to be well-organized and highly active. Unfortunately, like the good preschools near us, there is a waiting list to get in. So, while I wait in line there and elsewhere, Pip, Polly and I’ll keep prowling the playground, hoping for that chance meeting with some other preschool holdouts.

What Kids Want from Technology

For my fellow geek dads (and moms): Check out this very original study of what children want from technology. At first glance, the questions and the answers they provoke seem, well, child-like: Of course, the kids want the world, they want the whole world, and they want today and tomorrow:

Love that song!

But the Latitude study reveals some deeper things going on, which are nicely summarized in this video:

There's a couple interesting things here. One is that children's science-fiction dreams are very much shaped by how they're experiencing technology right now, and the video does a nice job of connecting what they imagine to real technological trends like augmented reality and RFID tags. Innovation starts in imagination and children live in a world augmented by stories and images in their heads; it's a strange but true fact that a great deal of recent technological innovation has started in childhood science-fiction dreams.

On a much less idealistic level, it's also true that wants and needs drive innovation; children are imagining things that someone will try to manufacture and sell to them, as both fantasy and reality.

But consider, for a moment, how so many of these desires rely on being connected to other people. The kids want cool stuff, but they're also imagining opportunities for creativity and community. Veruca Salt and Charlie Bucket co-exist within all of us, a selfish devil and a community-minded angel, which is the root of the appeal of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory story. It's really up to us adults, parents and non-parents alike, to create a world in which kids are encouraged to find and amplify the non-materialistic, communitarian possibilities presented by a connected world like the one you're a part of on this blog. In other words, we should all strive to be Grandpa Joe, not Veruca Salt's bad egg of a dad! Honk honk!

I'm curious: Any stories to share about your kids and technology? Any thoughts inspired by this video? Leave them in a comment!

Revised from a post on Shareable.net.