DADWAGON

From this week’s New Yorker, a funny one:

Congratulations! The application on behalf of your child for a place in the pre-kindergarten class for the 2012-13 academic year at The School has been rejected. This permits you to begin the Type-A Parent Appeal Process. We think of it as just the kind of challenge that makes the type-A parent’s life worth living.

Type-A Parent Appeal Process:

1. Threaten to introduce bedbugs to the pre-kindergarten blankie-storage cubbies if you are not granted an immediate personal interview with the full Board of Trustees.

2. Send money. The School cannot bow to parental pressure, of course, but it will accept cash in exchange for reconsideration of your child’s application.

3. Many type-A parents in your situation have found that blackmailing a School faculty member is a nonviolent attention-getter and has the additional benefit of saving you heavy legal-defense costs if your efforts to gain admission for your child have been accompanied by ethnic slurs, phony claims of physical handicaps, or the forging of the child’s date and country of birth.

File it under Seinfeld’s “it’s funny ’cause it true” rubric. This reminded me of a conversation I had with a neighbor I had the other day, about how to game the system to get JP into pre-kindergarten. Apparently, just filling out the forms and assuming that my child will be placed into the system of public education isn’t enough. Oh, no. I need to haunt the school administrators, demand a seat, cajole, lie, ply with bourbon and promises of heavenly retribution.

Now I’m not criticizing my neighbor. Her daughter got into our local pre-k, after being rejected twice (if you can make heads or tails of the Board of Education’s site on entering pre-k, and can come up with a better word than rejection, I’m all ears), after spending several hundred dollars to secure a spot in a local private school just in case, after waiting until the day before school began to actually get in….to pre-kindergarten.

Type-A is the way to go, right? For whatever reason, I’m not sure I have it in me. I want what’s best for JP, mind you, but the harassment, infighting, and general pushiness required to get things for him is sometimes beyond me.

One of the assumptions built into this New Yorker column is that fighting to put your kid forward in life is part and parcel of rich, entitled living, and maybe it is. But the world I live in, while comfortable compared to some, is hardly elite. And yet you still gotta push. What does that mean? Is middle-class the new privileged? Are the prerogatives of the upper crust open to all? I think not. It just means that parenting in this society has become, like so many things in our culture, a zero-sum game that you can’t really win. Not every child gets to go to Harvard (or in my case. P.S. 321).

I have no defined answers as to what to do about all this, other than screw up my nerve and start calling the principal every day until he lets JP in. If it doesn’t work, who knows what I’ll do. Certainly not what The New Yorker recommends:

If The School’s Final Verdict Is “No”

1. Check to insure that the applicant is in fact your natural child. Even wealthy parents have been surprised—and relieved—to discover that the babe sleeping peacefully in the nursery has been masquerading as legitimate kin when in medical fact he or she is an impostor.

2. Put your child up for adoption by a better family in order to improve his or her chances for acceptance.

3. Adopt a replacement child from a superior gene pool.

I always had the impression that British reality TV was ever so slightly less crummy than American reality TV. (This despite the fact that they gave a series to Jordan, London’s deadliest press-seeking missile. If you don’t know her, picture your typical Penthouse bimbo, and add an extra ten pounds of silicone, distributed in the customary way. Then make arrangements for her to step out of a limo sans underwear, into a scrum of paparazzi, every couple of weeks.)

Well, turns out that the Brits have, in fact, outpaced us on the race to the bottom. Courtesy of my pal Mary Elizabeth Williams, who writes for Salon, I present to you I’m Hotter Than My Daughter, the BBC’s latest show about moms who favor spandex, stilettos, and enough leopard print to upholster the entire savannah.

Marybeth’s column, linked above, analyzes this thing better than I could, and I’ll send you there for more. But, for what it’s worth, it does seem (from the shortish clips I’ve seen) that the daughters are more mortified than damaged by their moms’ ill-placed competitiveness, and I hope that carries them through into something approaching healthy adulthood. Or, if the show’s enough of a success, at least it’ll cover the therapy bills later on.

Disclaimer: I occasionally shout at my kids. Sometimes I make them skip breakfast. I wish my wife had been drunker while breastfeeding.

So maybe I’m simply the kind of parent who puts his own comfort over that of his kids.  But the end result is that I disagree with my totally esteemed colleague Christopher about sleep training. He argued yesterday that there was no benefit to the kid, only heartache and psychic trauma for all involved. Commenter Gregor had the same reaction as I did:

There’s a clear benefit to the kid when their parents are more alert during the day. Falling asleep at the keyboard? What about behind the wheel? And you certainly don’t feel as rested after non-consecutive sleep, what makes you think your son does?

At what point are you going to NOT do what the kid wants you to do when they cry? Next halloween when they start working through an entire bag of candy? When he’s a toddler at daycare and grabs toys from the other kids? When he’s 17 and wants the keys to your car and money for beer?

I think I had a harder time letting my kid cry it out before I realized the vast universe of things that make my kids wail. Can’t wear a specific pair of pajamas? They cry. Offered vegetables one too many times? They cry. It makes you realize that not every fit is a deep referendum on their parent’s love.

Just today, my 21-month-old son cried because I didn’t let him play with the dog’s water bowl at our friends’ house. Nobody would think I was being cruel or scarring my kid. There are some things that you just have to draw the line at, and let the kid cry if he wants about it. I think sleep is one of those things.

We guard our sleep as zealously as we take the knives away from the toddlers. So if, as I believe was true with both my kids, letting them cry it out is a quicker way to disabuse them of waking in the middle of the night, then it’s right for us.

That said, I don’t think that traditional Ferber worked all that well with our kids. The increasing intervals felt forced. And the idea of going into a room and not picking the kid up seems worse than just neglecting a crying baby: it seemed like being a total tease.

BabyWise, which another commenter mentioned, worked even less for us. I found its emphasis on bedtime routine laudable, but it’s a complete fantasy to say that a nice consistent schedule will make every child a great sleeper. I’m sure the method works for some, but for the rest it’s just snake oil.

In the end, a combination worked for us: steady and kid-friendly routine, but also clear schedules of sleep that were dictated by us, not by the children’s hysterics. It may be harsh, but there are clear expectations.

And about whether your kid will be scarred if you let them cry: to really damage a child and stunt their social growth, you need to be a Romanian orphanage that chains babies to beds. If you spend the day loving and nurturing your kid at all times except when they are pissed about going to bed, your child will be fine.

When I was 10 years old, I started taking karate classes, held in the evening at the local junior high. I loved it. I was young, flexible, and energetic, but more important, I loved my sensei, Grand Master Mumeet Shareef. A black Muslim in his mid-fifties, he could bench-press a couple of hundred pounds, treated us all with kind but strict discipline, and had his entire family around to help during class, from his sons in their 20s to his 13-year-old daughter—the very first girl I had a crush on. As I practiced dragon punches and held the horse stance till my thighs shook, I imagined what it would be like to be part of this well-oiled family system, to have the Grand Master as my master.

After a couple of six-week rounds of classes, however, by which time I’d attained a second-degree white belt, the Grand Master took a break from teaching. Word had it he was planning to open his own dojo in the next town over. But word soon faded, as did my enthusiasm for high kicks and katas, and my yen for karate (ha!) was soon overshadowed by a slightly shameful obsession with Dungeons & Dragons.

A couple of years later, I felt a pang of nostalgia and decided to put my gi back on. So I walked to the nearest karate studio to ask what had happened to Grand Master Mumeet Shareef. Oh, said the sensei, he had a breakdown a while back and had been committed to a mental institution. So, did I want to sign up here instead?

I left, shaken. What had happened to this man I had so admired? And why had I put so much faith in him to begin with? It’s not like my own father was a bad father figure. On the contrary, he was (and is) attentive, loving, a source of security, a role model.

But throughout my youth, I consistently sought out men as alternate father figures who then failed spectacularly. My first computer teacher was a man named David Sukal, a friendly and funny guy who showed me how to write programs in BASIC (10 PRINT “MATT IS COOL”; 20 GOTO 10) and who, more than anyone else, is responsible for my facility with keyboards and operating systems. (Ed. note: Writing a BASIC program that affirms your cool is, inherently, a paradox. Just saying.)

Less than ten years after I met him, however, David Sukal was shot to death by his grown son, a sometime friend of mine who, as a kid, used to hock loogies at the ceiling, then wait till they dripped back down and swallow them. It eventually emerged that he’d been beating his son and wife, and was a significant marijuana dealer on the side.

There were others, too, I’m sure—older men whose intelligence and charm masked their failings and fatal flaws. Thinking of them leaves me again wondering: Why? Why did I seek them out? And why did I have such unerringly poor judgment? Or was my judgment in fact excellent—in that I took from these troubled souls the best they had to offer, and then, when their true colors emerged, could see that, really, I had it pretty good at home with my real father?