DADWAGON

On Monday night, I came home after another long, two-week trip abroad and, like the last time around, I was worried. A month ago, when I went away, Sasha pretty much forgot who I was. Or, well, she had some vague idea, but was overall miserable—and that wasn’t really a great feeling for me.

This time, things went a hell of a lot better. First, I came home to find I live in the 4th best neighborhood in NYC, and the trees on my block were in full pink, green, and white bloom.

Then I got Sasha up in the morning, and after she stared me in the face for a while, she seemed to make a decision: I was okay. And so was she—more than okay. In the two weeks I was gone, I’d missed an ear infection and other assorted miseries, but still, she’d grown. Her face was rounder, and she laughed easily. She played games: ironic peekaboo, let’s close the front gate on Dad, brush your teeth with yogurt.

And what’s more, she’d learned things. Before, she refused to hold hands when she walked, as if it showed she wasn’t capable of getting by solo. Now she’ll hold my hand no problem. She blows kisses good-bye. She has a self-possession that seems new.

Would I have noticed this if I’d been around all this time? Or would it have slowly crept up on me, unnoticed? I guess this is the advantage of going away. I get to skip some of the bad stuff, and take extra note of the good.

So: Dad + travel = awesome!

I came across this piece in the Star-Ledger that on a brighter day would’ve perhaps added some sunshine to my step. But on this particular day, it made me want to castrate wallabies.

It’s a guest column, I suppose, from a “career coach” (let’s just piss on the grave of journalism a bit more, thought the editors).  In it, the author thanks his father for his bounteous good advice.

Lovely.

Except that the advice starts with “disagree without being disagreeable” and continues with “give the gift of belief”. Actually, all the advice is like that: the kind of bland slogans you’d see on a corporate inspiration poster.

Now, I’m not saying that everyone has to be an asshole. I am a mixed-breed myself, part showman (on my father’s side) part theologian (on my mother’s side). And I dare say that the fuzzy, huggy ministers in my mother’s family have never been disagreeable while disagreeing.

But could we get advice with a little more pop from this dude’s dad? Something a little more… fierce?

Life is not a Hallmark card. Telling your child to Play Nice can’t be the only lesson, can it? I bet that if the author of this piece, if he would stop being so incredibly fucking warm and bubbly for a second, would find that his father taught him other lessons that were far more valuable. When to control your anger, when to give into it. How to hold a marriage together when even the thickest bonds have been busted by the arrival of a baby. How often it’s OK to go out smoking and drinking with your buddies while your family waits at home. How to respond to being laid off. These are the things our mentors should teach us.

But these (all-too-common) tropes about the bland encouragements of Everydad are not just unrealistic. They’re hurtful to the rest of us fathers who are actually raising kids in reality. Our cause won’t be served by those plastic platitudes. And any father who has struggled is diminished by this sort of soggy bread served by newspapers. Acknowledge the difficulties, find help for those who need it. But don’t smarm and tell me the most remarkable thing you father taught you was to be nice to people you meet.

I should start out by saying that there is no argument about the amount of childraising done by men and women. Even in this dual income world, where mothers bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, do the laundry, meet the sexual needs of their lazy-ass spouses, the expectations and the reality remain: mothers do more of everything.

Certainly this isn’t universally true. Rumor has it that Matt has changed a diaper or too in his time (frugally, of course–sometimes he uses them twice). And yes, Nathan did breastfeed his youngest (and looked mighty fine doing it from what I hear). But frankly, I think that most modern fathers can only really say that they do more than their fathers (who did more than theirs).

As a divorced father I have had to perform far more parenting tasks than I did while I was with JP’s mother. Not that I was ever unwilling (ah the joys of never having my facts challenged). My ex tended to dominate most of this work because she was convinced that I couldn’t do anything right, and that I was likely to harm JP as I was to get him fed. I dispute that characterization, but it existed (still exists) nonetheless.

I thought of all of this after reading this Q and A the Times posted yesterday with Erin Sheehan, the community editor of UrbanBaby (must resist urge to poke fun at their tagline–no! I can’t do it: “Parenting, Kids, Honesty, Style” but not necessarily in that order):

Question: Where are all the stay-at-home dads in this city? How come we don’t have a support group?

Answer: As a stay-at-home dad you are part of a growing breed. Fathers today are spending more time with their children whether they are working fathers or stay-at-home dads. There are even those men who work with their employers to create a flexible arrangement so that they can make up for some child care during the week while the mother works. I personally know of two fathers in my extended family who have chosen to be stay-at-home dads.

Thanks for the acknowledgment, Erin, but I really think it’s unnecessary, and perhaps undeserved. Yes, I do have a flexible work schedule that allows me spend more time wih JP, but really, I think the media and the market will begin to more fully recognize fathers as parents when more fathers begin acting like parents. Like or not, it isn’t universal. The two fathers mentioned in her response? Well, I know two fathers who refused to have a child with their wives unless they had an explicit agreement exempting them from any childcare until the kid becomes a “person” at five years old.

Happens all the time.

An article in Time magazine this week confirms what many parents already know: Spanking your kid is a good way to get him to stop being such a pussy. Even better, it will teach her not to be such a damn smart aleck. So writes Alice Park:

Of the nearly 2,500 youngsters in the [Tulane University] study, those who were spanked more frequently at age 3 were more likely to be aggressive by age 5. The research supports earlier work on the pitfalls of corporal punishment, including a study by Duke University researchers that revealed that infants who were spanked at 12 months scored lower on cognitive tests at age 3.

What’s great about this is that it really gets into specifics. Want to make your kid half as docile and wussy-ish? Just beat him every couple of weeks, says lead researcher Catherine Taylor: “The odds of a child being more aggressive at age 5 if he had been spanked more than twice in the month before the study began increased by 50%,” she says. Alas, she does not go on to say whether weekly beatings make the kid 75 percent more aggressive, or if daily spankings might bring the figure asymptotically close to 100 percent.

Nor does the article state whether further research is under way to see if whippings with a leather belt improve a child’s understanding of the “my house, my rules” principle, or if telling them they were “an accident, and that’s why Daddy drinks” will encourage them to cut their hair and get a goddamn job.