DADWAGON

I don’t pretend to understand what constitutes a discussion about social mores in England, but these days it apparently involves something called the Tatler, Martin Amis, and fairy godparents. That is, British godparents suck:

It’s what one might call the Godparent Trap: Like a horror B-movie, legions of zombie godparents are walking mindlessly among us. The parents who do the asking don’t know what they’re asking for. The friends who do the accepting don’t know what they’re accepting. And the children who do the receiving don’t know what they’re receiving.

I find this all kind of fascinating, partly because Jean and I put some real thought into who we chose as Sasha’s godparents. Or maybe that was just me—they don’t have such an institution in Taiwan. In any case, we/I picked two friends who both have very strong moral centers—who are definitely concerned with doing the right thing. One is religious (Catholic), the other is, as far as I know, not (Chinese). We don’t always agree with their points of view, but their points of view are instructive nonetheless.

Do I actually expect them to guide Sasha on a religious/moral level? Hardly. My own godparents didn’t do anything of the sort.

The way godparents affected my life was not morally but, perhaps, thematically. My godfather is my uncle—my dad’s brother—and my godmother was Marsha (Marcia?) Moss, a librarian in Concord, Massachusetts. It’s a hard thing to quantify, but simply knowing who these people were had something of an effect on my life. Okay, my thinking must have went as a child, my godmother is a librarian—what does that mean for me?

In other words, it probably doesn’t really matter what a godparent does. What matters is who the godparent is, and how a child sees their selection in light of his or her own development.

So, chill out, Brits, and go spend some time at your local library. I think you might even find Martin Amis there.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come yet again for that annual celebration of home-schooled religious wingnuts, first-generation-immigrant-over-parented-over-achievers, and all-purpose Asperger spectrum adolescents: the Scripps Spelling Bee.

An interesting–if borderline xenophobic/racist–article in Slate reminded me of this. “Why Are Indian Kids So Good at Spelling? Because they have their own minor-league spelling bee circuit” makes the case for, well, uh, why Indian kids are so good at the spelling bee. Apparently there is a network of pre-Scripps spelling tournaments funded by something called the North South Foundation:

The NSF circuit consists of 75 chapters run by close to 1,000 volunteers. The competitions, which began in 1993, function as a nerd Olympiad for Indian-Americans—there are separate divisions for math, science, vocab, geography, essay writing, and even public speaking—and a way to raise money for college scholarships for underprivileged students in India. There is little financial reward for winners (just a few thousand dollars in college scholarships) compared with the $40,000 winning purse handed out each year by Scripps. Still, more than 3,000 kids participated in NSF’s spelling events this year due in part to what NSF founder Ratnam Chitturi calls a sort of Kavya Effect. “Most American kids look up to sports figures,” he says. “Indian kids are more interested in education, and they finally have a role model.”

See? Cheating.

Over at Salon, John R. Barry has come clean: “My baby is too boring to blog about” is the self-explanatory title of his story, posted today.

Well. I’ve never met your baby, Mr. Barry, but don’t you think that this is more about you than about him? You’re a writer, man. Write something! And then whore yourself out shamelessly and indiscriminately to promote it! It’s the Internet way. Works great for us over here. Take your kid to a bar while you’re at it.

George W. S. Trow was not widely known as a father. Fancy essayist, editor of the twee, proto-media-critic (in the days when Media might include painting, television, and opera all at once), but Daddy? Not so much.

But his most famous work, Within the Context of No Context, which I highly recommend, does expend a lot of energy describing children. Granted, the children in this, uh, context, weren’t really children at all, but members of our culture, which Trow believed to be infantilized by television (and though he didn’t know it when the essay was first published in 1980, the Internet), confused by dissociative stimuli, and ruined by isolation.

That said, several passages in this fascinating, confusing, startling, beautifully written little book refer to the parenting of actual children, not “cultural” kids raised by folks who thinks “open and honest dialogue will keep Baby Judy from gulping Quaaludes and drinking Night Train Express and marking her arms with razor blades,” or who indoctrinates his little ones with such thoughts as “nobody does anything in America unless it is perceived as a step up.”

A couple of examples:

An important role of a father is to give a son a sense of permission—a sense of what might be done. This still works [in America], but since no adult is supported by the voice of the culture (which is now a childish voice), it does not work well.

And this:

In the absence of adults, people came to put their trust in experts.

And this:

“Adulthood” in the last generations has little to do with “adulthood” as that word would have been understood by adults in any previous generation. Rather, “adulthood” has been defined as “a position of control in the world of childhood.”

I started out thinking that this post would be about my efforts to parse these statements, but I’m going to let them stand. I think they are relevant to many of the situations I encounter as a parent, and I would wager many of this site’s readers would agree. I definitely think these lines above help explain much of what gets put up on this site, for better and for worse. Perhaps some of you will tell me what you think.