DADWAGON

If you are the type to worry about how your child uses the Internet, then you must read this. It’s a draft of “Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review,” by two Harvard researchers, and it’s chock-full of reasons NOT to freak out over sexual predators on the Internet. A sampling of the results:

I could go on, but it’s worth reading the report on its own. It’s a reassuring reminder that kids aren’t as dumb as we think they are. Happy Friday!

(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one question over the course of a week. For previous Tantrums, click here.)

I guess I’m all on my own here. All three of my colleagues found Hannah Rosin’s Atlantic story overlong and under-persuasive. I powered through it the day it was posted on the Web, and gave it another once-over when the print magazine arrived in the mail a week or so later. Maybe I’m a sucker for a good anti-conventional-wisdom argument. Or maybe I am preternaturally inclined to Rosin-admiration, because we once shared billing on a big award. (Full disclosure: Those two stories were packaged together, but she and I have never met or spoken or even e-mailed.) But, for whatever reason, I bought her argument, even if the conclusions may have been too easy and broad.

I happen to think that the way girls are socialized does make them better suited to your average midlevel workplace job. The preferred female tendencies toward chat and conflict management are much more valuable than classically valued male attributes, like being able to lift heavy stuff and quote Caddyshack. Only in certain settings where the maleness of the culture is set very deep (as on Wall Street) or in places where the physical demands are still pretty stringent (say, the NFL) will a male bias persist for long. I see it in my own office, where nearly every young staff member is a woman: Below the age of 30, publishing has become a mostly female business. Same goes for jobs in the service economy—again, only if you’re talking in the broadest terms, but that’s what statistics-driven stories try to do. If the college-admissions stats are any guide (not to mention Judd Apatow movies), and if I could invest in such things, I’d be shorting my own gender.

If you need that fact slammed home, look around this site. Of the three married Dadwagon editors, Matt recently posted about his wife’s superior earning prowess, as has Nathan in the past. Well, time for a confession: My wife also brings in more than I do. That’s right, readers: It’s a clean sweep for the gals around here. (Ted works for a nonprofit-foundation-supported magazine, meaning that if he were to remarry anyone but a homeless person, we’d likely go four for four.) We’re not just irrelevant as a gender; we are also nearly useless as individual wage-earners.

I know I shouldn’t go looking for nuggets of wisdom in the (virtual) halls of our nation’s capital, but something about the URL compelled me to avoid my deadlines and browse. That URL? Fatherhood.gov, the website of the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse.

Honestly, I didn’t want to make fun of this site. Clearly it fulfills some policy initiative or other, and it certainly doesn’t look very expensively designed. I just can’t stand my tax dollars going to froofy Flash animation. But… But then I read things like this, from the “Child Development Info” page:

Each stage of your child’s life is special. Infants and toddlers all the way up to adolescence there are developmental and social steps and stages. Learning about these and keeping track with them can help you guide your kids and help keep you involved.

This may be true, but this is terrible, terrible writing—up with which I will not put! I love hate to be so pedantic, but I do appreciate having my government-sponsored Websites copy-edited. “Infants and toddlers all the way up to adolescence there are…”?!? I can’t go on.

But go on I must! Fatherhood.gov, do you have some parenting tips for me?

Take Time to Be a Dad Today Tips

Watch a game on television with your children. Cheer for your favorite team and chat about the plays. Mute the commercials and use those minutes to talk about what’s going on in your lives.

Green Dads Tips

Buy compact florescent light (CFL) bulbs, which last about 5 years and use less energy. Switching just one standard bulb to a CFL can help you reduce your electricity bill by as much as 75 cents per month.

Well, those were sure helpful! Thanks, government!