DADWAGON

Parenting has a story out about whether kiddie sports have become too competitive:

Not only are players joining competitive leagues at ever younger ages, more and more of them are choosing to specialize, focus, and train intensively in only one sport. In 2009, for instance, the U.S. Kids Golf World Championship featured a category for boys under 6, the Amateur Athletic Union sponsored a national basketball championship for boys and girls under 8, the NCAA lowered the year at which a player could be considered a basketball “prospect” to seventh grade, and a 4-year-old tennis “prodigy” – Mia Lines – moved from Australia to south Florida to work with a professional coach.

The article then goes on to state that there is a “myth” out there that “Getting better means training younger, training harder, training more.” This, apparently, isn’t true. Starting older, training less intensely, and spending more time watching television is the way to Olympic glory, particularly if you are Bode Miller.

Don’t get me wrong, the “professionalization” of kids sports discussed in the article is a bad thing, but not for the reasons Parenting puts forth (it’s bad for the kid, it doesn’t work, etc.). The only way to get good at something is to work at it. What’s really at stake here is the loss of unstructured play time, right?

The problem with turning children into little Terrell Owenses (other than the Twitter dependency) is that they miss out on all that free time they could be using to smash their toys, bully other children, and generally be the little angels we all know them to be when they aren’t properly exercised.

Or maybe I’m biased. My Peewee League football coach was a Nutralife salesman. He wore very tight polyester pants. He wasn’t fond of black children (to put it mildly). He was kicked out of the league for attacking a ref, then asked the team to vote on whether or not we should boycott the next game to get him reinstated. I was the only one who voted against sticking with him. The coach was replaced…for one game.

Suffice it to say he wasn’t too pleased with me when he returned. He did get me in good shape though.

Before I start my diatribing, let me thank commenter Jeff, who over the weekend urged us to take up the question of babies in bars. We at DadWagon are always glad to get sharp suggestions from the outside, as they lessen our reliance on our own feeble minds and free up time to take our babies to more bars.

Of course, the only reason why we can really have this discussion at all is because of New York City’s “Ridiculous. Stalinesque. Brutal” (and completely welcome) 2003 ban on smoking in bars. In Germany, liberal politician Sabine Bätzing even took to defending Germany’s smoking ban by playing up the kids-in-bars benefits:

Pubs and restaurants are getting new customers: they’re being visited more by families with children other customers who have so far refrained from visiting because of the smoky air.

Same here. In New York’s thoroughly sanitized bar culture, the air isn’t going to hurt the babies. And they’re not going to drink any more or less than you let them drink at home.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a toddler drinking. Nico was recently making a grunt-fuss about wanting to taste mom’s wine, so he got some, on the gums, like a rock star tasting coke. His expression told me he, like our own cherubic Matt Gross, won’t be drinking until he’s 21.

That said, I am against babies in bars, for one reason: there’s a danger of cockblocking, something that no man or boy should be an accomplice to.

You see, it’s hard to meet and hook up these days. Bars are one of the few places where it can still work. Particularly in New York, which has so many well-defined microcultures–sorority girls about to do something they regret, sad drunks who smell like feces, sports addicts with empty lives, horny Connect-Four players–that you actually might meet someone with similar interests when you go out drinking.

A baby ruins all that. You may like your kid, but to everyone else, that child is a walking, whining PSA against having sex. Guys will freak out about whether that condom in their wallet might break later. Girls will look at the guys and ask themselves if they really want to run the risk–however small–of getting pregnant by him. On second thought, they’ll think, he looks like a douchebag. The opportunity for a hook-up will pass, and you, the self-congratulatory bar-parent, won’t even notice.

Meh, it’s probably for the best. You’re not having sex, so why should anyone else?

The Grey Lady tells us that more men are marrying wealthier women. Actually, the Census told us that; the Times just tried to make it seem surprising.

I know what the Times is talking about because I’ve rarely had any kind of relations with a girl who wasn’t already richer than me. Not by design. It just didn’t happen, not even when I lived in Latvia, which was full of women who were very nice and crazy-broke (although even that is changing).

I did eventually meet a lovely girl of modest means, but despite initial appearances, she had fierce ambitions. Seventeen or so years later, she’s a doctor. And I am hopelessly enmeshed in a profession that society doesn’t esteem, if by “esteem” you mean, “pay money for.”

The wonky Family Inequality blog, written by a UNC Chapel Hill Sociologist, has a good take on what the data does and doesn’t mean. Although maybe I just like the blog because its author seems to know my household so well. From the About page:

Families are one place where the powerful exploit and abuse the powerless, behind the veil of privacy that cloaks the family as an institution.

Actually, he makes a good point in his post today. It’s not that women are working more, it’s just that they’re working outside the house now, for money.

That raises the question: who has moved in to fill the void left by the liberated housewife? In some households, men have valiantly stepped into the breach, but not in mine. My wife and I exist in this weird space between the Old Ways and the New. She’s the main breadwinner, but I haven’t stopped working, nor do I plan to. So what happens? The dishes don’t get done. The closets are disorganized. In domestic matters big and small, we acutely feel the absence of a stay-at-home parent. But neither of us is able (in her case) or willing (in mine) to take on that role.

That’s why I’m gonna fill out and mail this Census 2010 form (although, seriously, it’s 2010, why can’t we just fill it out online?). I can only hope that in nine years, once they’ve crunched the numbers the right way, the New York Times will write a silly little trend piece about me.

So, I just got done reading the Findings column over at Harper’s Magazine, which is written by my good friend, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, who is perhaps the best dressed copy editor on the east coast. Most of Rafil’s musings in the column relate to the doings of highly trained kung fu monkeys, the handsome quotient of NFL quarterbacks, and other scientific findings of no use, factual basis, or relevance to anyone other than those who find these sorts of things amusing. He did have one line that I had to consider closely: “people with children are more prone than the childless to feeling angry.” Now, as an employee of Harper‘s, I am well aware of all the effort that goes into producing the Findings each month. It’s fact-checked, copy-edited, goes through several drafts, all of that fancy journalism stuff. But the only thing that finding left me with was this response: duh.

Below, lifted from the Harper‘s art archive, are some illustrated examples of how the glaringly obvious truth quoted above actually looks:

I write this column from the white hot fury of my father-dom.