Once upon a time, I was an optimist. Things could be tough, I knew, but I always had a sense that they’d get better, eventually—that the world was, on some level, a good place.

According to science, however, I was wrong. Over the past few days, a number of stories have destroyed my faith in the future. Where do I begin? How about with this: 1,540 hours of footage of normal, middle-class California families, shot by UCLA researchers, prove that family life is “a fire shower of stress, multitasking and mutual nitpicking”:

Mothers still do most of the housework, spending 27 percent of their time on it, on average, compared with 18 percent for fathers and 3 percent for children (giving an allowance made no difference).

Husbands and wives were together alone in the house only about 10 percent of their waking time, on average, and the entire family was gathered in one room about 14 percent of the time. Stress levels soared — yet families spent very little time in the most soothing, uncluttered area of the home, the yard.

Mothers still do most of the housework, spending 27 percent of their time on it, on average, compared with 18 percent for fathers and 3 percent for children (giving an allowance made no difference).

Husbands and wives were together alone in the house only about 10 percent of their waking time, on average, and the entire family was gathered in one room about 14 percent of the time. Stress levels soared — yet families spent very little time in the most soothing, uncluttered area of the home, the yard.

Then there was the news that bullies—those miserable brats who made my childhood hellish—just want to be loved:

Bullies tended to divide their classmates into potential sources of affection and targets for domination. The latter were children who had already been rejected by kids the bullies cared about: They didn’t count. Interestingly, bullies cared only about the approval of classmates of the same sex. Boys pick on kids whom their male peers disdain, but couldn’t care less what the girls think. Similarly, mean girls disregard their male classmates’ opinions.

So, I see: That motherfucker Paul Bucksala used to slap me in the head in the hallways just because he wanted approval from some other fuckwit. I guess that makes it okay.

No, actually, it doesn’t. In fact, it’s enough to depress a preschooler—which brings me to my next study, “Preschool Depression: The Importance of Early Detection of Depression in Young Children”:

Research suggests that preschool depression is not just a temporary occurrence but may instead be an early manifestation of the same chronic disorder occurring later on — studies have demonstrated that depressed preschoolers are more likely to have depression in later childhood and adolescence than are healthy preschoolers. Due to the potentially long-lasting effect of preschool depression, early identification and intervention become very important. Young children’s brains are very “plastic” — that is, their brains easily adapt and change to new experiences and events. This plasticity may explain why developmental interventions are more effective if started early on and this may also prove true for psychotherapy.

Why are preschoolers depressed? Maybe because they face death with every bite of food, no matter how seemingly innocuous. We’ve covered hot dogs here before, but now pediatricians are calling for mandatory food labeling to protect kids from popcorn, carrots, and peanuts:

The pediatricians’ group began studying the issue nine years ago, when 17 children around the world, including several in the United States, choked to death on a gelatinous candy that had to be sucked out of a plastic cup the size of a coffee creamer. The F.D.A. eventually banned its sale….

There are no recent nationwide figures on food choking. In 2001, about 17,500 children 14 and younger were treated in emergency departments for choking, and 60 percent of the episodes were caused by food. In 2000, 160 children died from an obstruction of the respiratory tract.

Children under 4 are at the highest risk, not only because their airways are small (the back of a toddler’s throat narrows to the diameter of a straw) but also because of the way their eating abilities develop. Front teeth usually come in at 6 or 7 months — so babies can bite off a piece of food — but the first molars, which grind food down, do not arrive until about 15 months, and second molars around 26 months.

Luckily, there is a little bit of good news—and it’s not just that my Sasha is finally getting her first molars, and thereby staving off an early choking death. Actually, apparently, kids worldwide are not dying in numbers quite so high as they used to:

[Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation] and colleagues assessed information from 187 countries from 1970 to 2009. They found child deaths dropped by about 2 percent every year, lower than the 4.4 percent needed to reach the U.N.’s target of reducing child deaths by two-thirds by 2015.

Murray said death rates were falling surprisingly fast in countries including Liberia and Niger, but that progress had stalled in rich countries like Britain and the United States….

He was particularly impressed with progress in countries like Niger and Malawi, where there hasn’t been much economic growth.

So, good for you, Malawi, Niger and Liberia! While your children are growing up big, strong, and poor, ours are choking to death on nitrate-rich processed “meat” sticks. One day, however, you’ll be rich enough for us to start shipping our death tubes your way—and you know what that means.

I just finished reading John Seabrook’s article in the New Yorker, “The Last Babylift,” which recounted his experiences adopting a child from Haiti. Seabrook, who is married, in his fifties, and already has a biological (I think) child, is set after much bureaucratic difficulty to bring home a child from Haiti. When the earthquake hits, however, his domestic plans are immediately derailed, both by the chaos left by the quake (the offices where most adoption approvals were kept by the government was destroyed), but also by the unwanted zeal of Americans desirous to help save Haiti’s little ones:

In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti on January 12th, many Americans inquired about adopting Haitian orphans….International adoption agencies, adoption advocacy groups, and government Web sites were overwhelmed by calls and e-mails. “I would love to take about twenty or more kids in my home,” someone wrote on the U.S. State Department Web site. “I have plenty of room.” Queen Latifah, appearing on the “Today” show, said, “I want to just go and get some of them babies. If you got the hookup, please get me a couple of Haitian kids.”

Seabrook uses these callow examples to animate the ways in which his personal story fit into the larger–and morally ambiguous–world of international adoptions:

The desire to adopt needy children from other parts of the world, especially during times of crisis, is not an exclusively American impulse, but it draws together several threads in our national character. It combines an evangelical zeal to save the lost, a humanitarian spirit, and the love of a sensible idea: by bringing childless families together with orphans, international adoption solves two problems with a single stroke.

Those “American impulses” that Seabrook describes are what provide the inner conflict in this story. International adoptions from impoverished nations into wealthy ones represent a complex ethical and moral picture. Does the broader transactional nature of the adoptions–rich white folk in country A buying the offspring of poor dark-skinned folk from country B–outweigh the impact of the smaller-scale emotional and human good that comes from the adoption? What I mean is, in most cases, these adoptions are a positive outcome for the child, the adoptive parents, and perhaps even for the biological parents, but does this good outweigh the bad? Racism, paternalism, colonialism, all these things play into adoptions–and yet, ultimately, and in most cases (not all), needy child ends up with loving family.

Seabrook doesn’t state most of these things explicitly. But they are covered in the article. It is a fine read and thought-provoking to boot. Go read it and tell me what you think.

The girl is not that happy in her ballet classes. They are cheap, which makes me happy, but poorly structured–she, a 4-year-old, is lumped in with mostly 3-year-olds, and that means she has a hard time making friends in the class. No friends = little motivation to go.

I’m not normally a fan of taking her feelings in too much account, but I have my own reservations about ballet. I’ve just come back from staying with a friend in Berlin who is a dancer and just had, as seemingly everyone in her dance company has had at some point, a crushing knee injury that required surgery and will keep her unemployed for months. And those with the crutches are the lucky ones–the real victims of ballet are the bulimics and anorexics who warp under the surreal body-image pressures.

OK, that’s a little heavy to put on a pre-k dance class. But still, I won’t miss her time in le monde de danse.

My wife’s suggestion? Tae kwon do.

Here, I have much more personal reasons for being wary. I did a lot of tae kwon do as a kid, an amount unique perhaps to wound-up children stuck on small islands. I once was flown to Little Rock, of all places, for a tournament and kicked a kid in the gut so hard his cup fell out of his pantleg. For this (or perhaps something else I did there) I got a trophy that was as big as I was (I was 11 at the time).

And although I don’t remember the specifics, for all the good my national award did me in real fighting, the untrained brawlers of Key West might as well have stolen the trophy from me upon my return and repeatedly clubbed me with it. That is, being good at youth tae kwon do made me horrible at schoolyard squabbling. It gave me too much confidence, so I ran my mouth, but with its fluttery kicks and emphasis on form and decorum (as opposed to, say, biting or pre-MMA chokeholds), it could do nothing to protect me. It was more dance than fight, a lesson that I learned the hard way. Repeatedly.

And then, there was the structure. Lord knows that was probably a good thing for me as I got older, but I hate to think of the rigidity of the form systems, the bowing and the dojo-this-sensei-that, on a 4-year-old. I think my girl is happier in freer environments (even though I run dinner and bedtime with a fascist efficiency).

But, as I don’t remember what it was like to be four and to dress up in pajamas and fake kick, I will open the question to you dear readers. Is tae kwon do good for 4-year-olds?

Here on DadWagon, we tend to think the worst of our children. From mean girls to pathological liars, we look upon our crotchfruit with not entirely equal parts fatherly affection and mounting horror.

So I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that my daughter, Sasha, is a budding racist. Let me elaborate: She’s not prejudiced in the way that leads some children, say, to condemn all people of a certain race. But she certainly exhibits a strong strain of unconscious affective prejudice.

Example A: Yesterday, we had a cookout at my place. Weenies on the grill, loads of kids hacking through the garden, grown women drunkenly mistaking other people’s husbands for their own. You know, the usual.

At one point, my wife, Jean, had to go upstairs (because she’d made one too many such mistakes already, and I gave her a timeout), leaving me alone with Sasha—who instantly burst into tears. She was inconsolable, rejecting my embrace entirely, until… she spotted one of our guests, Beverly, and ran toward her, arms outstretched, and sat quietly on her lap until Jean returned.

Why such spontaneous affection toward someone she’d never met before? Because (and okay, this is only a theory) Beverly is, like Jean, Asian. Taiwanese, to be specific, but I doubt Sasha can tell. Or can she? What is going through her little mind when she glances around a yard full of adults, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mommy, who might very well have vanished for all time? Maybe this is just a natural and logical response, and not racist at all: If in the absence of one thing, pick what it most closely, outwardly resembles.

And you know what? I kinda get her. I mean, in Jean’s absence I myself have been known to spend time around other Asian women*. So maybe it’s genetic?

*Though of course, none of them can possibly substitute for my wife. Duh!