Category Archives: Edumucation

Crying Toddlers: Not Your Problem

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I’m a few days late to this, the latest controversy involving a toddler whose mother has a stripper-name (seriously, Google it: her name is Crystal Shores, which is also the name of some Marriott “club” on the west coast of Florida).

You’ve probably already heard the whole setup. If not, there’s a handy reference video below. At a Rangers game late last week, a foul ball was snagged on the field and then tossed into the expensive seats nearby (making this a one-percenter showdown). Either the ball was intentionally thrown in the direction of a tow-headed toddler, or the toddler—they are all such egotists!—imagined the ball being thrown to him. Either way, he didn’t get the ball—an older man with long arms and (presumably) full bladder control snared it, and didn’t notice his kid-competitor.

The kid, he cried. The man, there with his girlfriend/wife/secretary(?), exalted and cavorted. He and his girl took pictures with their phones, all while the kid was working up his best look of complete devastation and loss.

The television announcer, who should never ever be allowed to talk about anything besides the break on a curveball, immediately pronounced the couple The Worst People in the World for “taunting” this child that they clearly hadn’t even seen. Because I don’t get to use as many sports metaphors here as I would like, let’s just say that if this scenario was a 12 to 6 curveball, the announcer called it high heat. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

The toddler’s parents (Crystal and Kyle Shores!) and the offenders have both done their time in front of the jury of national media arguing that this was all just a misunderstanding.

That is, however, beside the point. Regardless of intention, of taunting or not, there are some good lessons to be learned here. Jotting a few of them now:

1) Baseball announcers should be more quiet. Except for the guys who call my Giants games. They’re great. Really.

2) Toddler bawling-face means nothing to me or any other parent worth their salt. This starts from the earliest days of infancy, when you realize that tiny babies cry because of disappointment, angst, cynicism, or gas. Or all of the above. And neither you, nor they, will ever know the difference. It is no different as they age. My children cry out in terror/anger at least 500 times a day. I am beyond caring, except if some sort of new frequency is reached, something that intimates real, different pain. This kid’s bawl? Pure theater.

3) Someone else’s crying child is should not be this couple’s problem. This is important, and hard to understand, as a parent. But the fact is that parents shouldn’t even feel responsible for their own child’s happiness. Why should strangers? To argue otherwise is to buy into the bizarre concierge-reaction to children that we see all around us: we value these little people, so our impulse is to serve them, to please them, to feed their whims, buff their egos, and shield them from disappointment. DO NOT DO THIS. I have tried. In the end I have only learned that for all the advantages my children have that I did not, for every time I tried to craft a special experience or protect them from a hurtful thought, my children are still just themselves, little bags of rage and love and greed and beauty that will do what they are wont to do, unswayed by outside stimuli. The only thing they really seem to respond to is the sensation of being doted on, and rather than relaxing or feeling enveloped by love when they see that they are being doted on, they turn selfish: little Lohans under the klieg lights of attention. They rant and spit on their stage, they slug photographers and expose their genitals. They wear big sunglasses and smoke cigarettes. You get what I mean: the attention warps them. They turn gnarled and spiteful.

I’m not saying you can’t offer some sympathy for the kid. But that he should get your baseball? Screw that. Leave him disappointed. He’ll be better off for it.

Ballet Dads: The Next Hot Political Bloc?

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Eager ballerina

One of the things I most looked forward to, after our family’s return to Brooklyn from Taipei, was taking Sasha to her Saturday-morning ballet class, held in a church in Cobble Hill. This is not because Sasha is a Natalie Portman-in-the-making. I mean, she’s a fine dancer for a 3-year-old, but she’s more into the idea of being a ballerina than actually learning her positions and pliés.

No, I like ballet class because for roughly 45 minutes, I get to hang out with the other dads who’ve brought their daughters. There’s the guy who lives across the street from me, the guy who works in a Chelsea art gallery, the graphic designer who once, long ago, came to check out my office. We talk about, well, whatever: travel, kids, art—I can’t even really remember much.

All of this is, for me, a novelty. There’s this image I’ve always had of unacquainted guys just hanging around, talking easily, and it’s an image in which I never pictured myself. I’m just not the type—too slight, too nerdy, and utterly unable to discuss that most guy-like of topics: sports. When I imagined such situations, I felt like a little kid myself.

But at ballet, it kind of works. There’s something nice about seeing everyone each week, drinking my takeout coffee and talking about iPhone apps or motorcycle trips or pre-K applications. There’s moms around, too, and we talk to them—this ain’t junior high—but there’s always some gender-based grouping off, as if the other guys, like me, relished this chance for some low-stakes, low-key male bonding. And it’s all over in 45 minutes.

In this election season, I like to imagine that we somehow form a real political bloc to which candidates should start pandering, for surely there are other ballet dads in other cities and towns and states. But then I realize: This is Cobble Hill, and we’re all just wussy liberals who are going to vote for Obama anyway.

The Myth of French Superiority

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These days in New York, parents have an inferiority complex: The French, we keep on thinking, are doing it better than us. Their kids grow up to be smarter, better behaved, more adventurous eaters, and why the hell can’t ours be more like theirs?

A couple of weeks ago, for example, Karen Le Billon wrote in the Times Magazine about her first encounter with these well-bred enfants at a dinner party:

Other children were already gathered at a respectful distance. Their eyes were on the crackers, but no one dared touch them. Later, a French friend hinted at how this self-control is achieved. Starting at age 3, all the children at her maternelle (preschool) had to sit still with their hands on their knees while the lunchtime dessert was served. Only when the maîtresse gave permission could they begin to eat; anyone who gave into temptation had her dessert promptly removed.

But my girls hadn’t had the benefit of maternelle training. Before we could stop her, my toddler, Claire, grabbed a cracker from the table, stuffing it into her mouth. I chided her: “That’s the adults’ table! Don’t be rude!” “Mais non!” replied our host, Virginie, smiling. “That’s the children’s table!” I looked more closely and saw that the wineglasses were miniature versions of adult ones, as was the cutlery. I couldn’t have imagined that such a beautiful table was intended for children.

Then, the other day, Jennifer Anne Conlin (whom I know a little bit) wrote in the Sunday Review about how her life had become increasingly child-focused since her family moved back to the States from Europe:

Before, they always enjoyed a healthy extracurricular life of sports and school clubs, but never one that overtly conflicted with my career or social life — on the contrary, in Brussels I did some of my best networking at the local playground cafe, which served chilled bottles of Pouilly-Fumé and Stella Artois to half-watching parents. (Why push a swing when you could sip a drink?). … I now look back appreciatively at my daughter’s early morning field-hockey schedule in London. The team practiced three mornings a week from 8 to 8:30 a.m., with the odd game taking place from 4 to 5 p.m. every other week, weather permitting (it usually rained).

Now our entire adult life revolves around the children’s activities. The last two weekends alone, my daughter was in three performances of the school musical, had softball practice, a state solo ensemble competition (that ended at 12:30 p.m., a 40-minute drive from the musical, which started at 2 p.m.) and a forensics tournament. My son had the musical (he manned the spotlight), a baseball practice and a Science Olympiad contest (with a 6:30 a.m. bus departure).

Now, the Motherlode blog tried to rescue American parenting approaches from the gutter by trying to say our child-obsession is a good thing, but I’d like to go a different way. No, I’m not going to launch into a discussion of the economics of European vs American parenting, and how having widely available, free (or simply cheap?) state preschools is a huge advantage in the uniform socialization of young children.

Actually, all I want to say is this: as great as their native cuisine is, the French are terrible eaters. Yes, they are enthusiastic aesthetes when it comes to three-course meals, and they cherish the wines of their native villages with great affection, and they certainly know their breads, cheeses, and cured meats. And oh, the table manners!

But put them outside a French context, and they’re often at a loss, especially if the cuisine involves any kind of spice. Have you ever been to an Asian restaurant in Paris? They’re pathetic in terms of flavor, and the chaotic fun of the “bring it out when it’s ready” approach is often sacrificed to a stately French procession of dishes. They suck, and that’s because French people can’t handle anything but French food. And don’t get me started on fusion food. Whenever a cuisine gets Frenchified, it loses the oomph that makes it special.

Okay, that’s maybe an overly broad generalization. There are certainly French people who don’t fear foreign flavors, who understand that the French style of dinner (actually imported from Russia, I believe) is not the ne plus ultra of dining, who joyously eat with chopsticks or their fingers, cramming fat-dripping burgers in their baguette-accustomed mouths. But they are the minority.

So, next time you hear someone crowing about how well-behaved little French diners are, tell them to go fuck themselves. (But be polite—use vous.) And next time your kid demands nothing but hot dogs or white rice, give it to them, guilt-free. Kids can be as dismally timid as grown-up French people, and anyway, they’re just kids. I didn’t eat live, squirming octopus tentacles till my mid-thirties, you know.

Today in the Annals of Incompetence

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Not Matt's work.

Most parents get very little proper training in the art of raising children. But you know what? We learn a lot of it along the way. Diapers are changed at first tentatively, then smoothly, so that eventually you can do it at 2 a.m., in the dark, naked, without your glasses—indeed, without remembering that you even got out of bed to do it.

Psychological techniques evolve, too: the bargaining, the manipulation, the sneaky tradeoffs. (“Okay, I’ll get you an ice cream cone, but you have to promise to be good for the rest of your life, okay?”) After a year or two of parenting, you even get to the point where you can visualize the other things you’re going to have to learn along the way. It all seems like it’s beginning to make sense.

Then comes something unexpected. In my case, it’s the ponytail. Now, for most of my life, I’ve had relatively little hair. I think in maybe 8th or 9th grade, I tried to grow my hair out long in hopes of replicating the Tony Hawk over-the-eye SoCal ‘do. It didn’t work, and so I’ve spent decades closely cropped, sometimes almost to the point of skinheadedness.

Which is to say: Until recently, I had never put a person’s hair in ponytails. My little sister never asked me to, nor did any of the cute girls in high school. And my wife, Jean, has always been able to take care of that task herself.

But now Sasha is into ponytails, and in a big way. She wears them almost every day, sometimes one in back, sometimes one on each side, and it’s a pretty smart idea—if not, her hair falls messily into her face. Yuck. Often, Jean is the one wrapping her hair up in colorful, fake-gem-accented bands. But almost as often, it’s me. And I invariably fuck it up.

I mean, I understand the basic principle: push through, twist, repeat. But somewhere along the way, it gets messed up, usually toward the end when the loops get tight and my fingers fat and clumsy. No, that’s not right: It gets messed up from the very beginning, because I don’t actually know how to arrange and separate and pull up the hair into a proper proto-ponytail shape before threading it through the elastic. And so, even if I do manage to produce some semblance of a ponytail, a closer look will usually reveal that it’s horrifically flawed, the work of a half-blind mental patient with hooks for hands.

Of course, I know that with practice I’ll improve. But what really gets me about this is how it took me by surprise—I never expected to have to do ponytails!—and has me worried about the future. What other skills will I suddenly be required to master?