DADWAGON

(This is our second run of “The Tantrum,” in which each of our four regulars will address one subject over the course of a week. Previous Tantrum: TV or not TV?)

Well, my opinion on this is pretty straightforward. My wife and I are devout believers in the concept of Ought—that is, you do many things not because they’re required but because you Ought to. And if your kid gets into something that genuinely risks injuring other people, there have two things you Ought to do: Get him to stop, and if you try absolutely everything and can’t, then call in the Feds. (As for relatively victimless crimes, I’m electing to punt till he’s a teenager.) I am confident enough in our parenting abilities that it won’t come to that, barring something entirely beyond parental control. And call me an egotist if you wish, but I do believe that my wife and I are able to make good enough choices to keep my kid from being the top-ranked Al Qaeda recruit of 2027. (I’d say he should try for Princeton first.)

The best viewpoint I’ve ever read on this subject is that of Lionel Dahmer, father of Jeffrey Dahmer, the guy who (you may remember) was that nice fellow in Wisconsin, that one who always kept his lawn neat, and turned out to have an apartment full of decomposing corpses and a closet full of skulls. “A Father’s Story,” published a few years after the son’s arrest, imprisonment, and violent death at the hands of another inmate, is a memoir less of mea culpa than of bafflement. The elder Dahmer admits to being an imperfect parent, sometimes a distant one, sometimes an ineffective one. But clearly he did not do anything that actively produced a monster. This father’s autobiography is simply mournful, and conveys that he’d probably have turned his boy in himself–but that his own human frailty stopped him from seeing what he didn’t want to see. That, to me, is the saddest thought of all: Knowing deep down that your troubled kid is washing out to sea, and being emotionally unable, or unavailable, to help.

So we here in the Valley of Flowers are looking to break in a new babysitter. Don’t know why it reminds me of mutton-bustin’, except that the bustin’ of muttons remains one of my favorite sports, and you’ll miss this year’s Tobacco Valley Rodeo only if you’re a fool.

But while babysitters may not be as treacherous as a terrified sheep with a child on top, we still have little idea even what to look for. We have a few criteria: must speak Spanish and have papers. Preferably not too young? I like the idea of a babysitter who won’t throw her back out separating my two warring children. But as we’ve seen before, emotional intelligence is a big part of the job.

G-d love the interwebs, they’ve got resources:

About.com pitches in with a eminently clickable interview checklist. Babble hits the streets and asks a few parents, who have nothing helpful to say. Those morbid bastards at the Houston Fire Department have a list that focuses mostly on avoiding drownings and electrocution.

For the other side of the ledger, Sittercity.com, whom we’ve been using on occasion with some success, offers a how-to and how-not-to for babysitters making their own video ads. Too bad the video itself looks a bit like a snuff film.

In the end, I think it may be less about the interview and more about the extended tryout. There are some things you can only learn about a babysitter just from having used them for a while.

It’s a pain in the ass, I guess, but at least we’re not on the Au Pair circuit. I don’t think any Au Pair would want to live in the electrical closet in the basement, which is about the only excess living space we have. And I’ve always been wary of any year-long cohabitation arrangement that is preceded by nothing more than a few pages of application and a couple of phone calls.

From the New York Times comes word of Our Little Genius, an awesome new Fox prime-time game show, in which “gifted and talented” kids answer trivia questions for cash:

The game show’s questions, on topics that the child chooses, like astronomy, the Civil War or Greek mythology, increase in difficulty over 10 levels, with each level worth an amount ranging from $1,000 to $500,000. At each level, it is the parents of the contestant who decide whether to advance to the next question or to stick with the money they have already won. Once they get above $10,000, they are guaranteed at least that much. But any additional winnings will disappear if their child attempts a new question and fails.

Now, according to the article, “The issue of whether preteen prodigies might be under an unhealthy amount of pressure… has bothered some clinical psychologists and behavioral experts.” Bothered? Really?

Me, I don’t see a problem, and that’s because all smart kids, whether prodigies or merely gifted and/or talented, are under a ton of pressure, much of it from their parents, much of it from themselves, a bit of it from psychologists who worry about how much pressure they’re under, and surely a fair amount from the prepubescent norms they’re surrounded by in the school hallways. Given the threats to one’s psyche from Dr. Bob the school shrink, Dad the chess-playing almost-was, and Paulie who’s hoping to go to juvie next semester, what’s one little potential loss of a half-mil on national TV?

The thing is, kids cry. No matter how brilliant they seem to be, they fuck up, occasionally in front of other people. The show’s producers seem to want to hide this simple, if traumatic, fact from viewers. To that end, they’re taping “fake endings to be inserted into the broadcast if the child subsequently answered a question wrong,” says the Times.

Meanwhile, despite these fraudulent countermeasures designed to conceal the horrors of life from Fox viewers, the concerned parents and concerned psychologists are, well, concerned. They’d rather treat their little geniuses (genii?) as delicate flowers, and protect them not just from harm, but from the possibility of harm—which makes the absolute inevitability of pain that much worse when it hits.

Point being: If everyone knew how awful and miserable childhood is, and could see that misery enacted regularly on TV, maybe it wouldn’t seem so awful and miserable in the first place. Or at least maybe it would be more bearable.

What I really mean is: Why’d they have to cancel Freaks & Geeks?

(Incidentally, before I started at Dadwagon, I was foreman at a Victorian-era coal-processing plant staffed entirely by minors. Fun fact!)

I have only one suggestion to make: With every level up these kids make, they earn not just cash but punishment. At $1,000, you get your books knocked out of your hands. At $10,000, a purple nurple. And when you hit that half-million dollars, there’s an atomic wedgie in store for your Einstein ass. Don’t worry—we’ll wince, too.

(This is our second run of “The Tantrum,” in which each of our four regulars will address one subject over the course of a week. Previous Tantrum: TV or not TV?)

When I was a kid, I did some bad things. I mean, not very bad, but not great. Once in a while, I shoplifted porn mags and lighters from the Dairy Mart around the corner. I skipped the last day of ninth grade. The cops once came thisclose to arresting me and some friends for skateboarding in an abandoned school. And I regularly drove our family’s Toyota Tercel 150 miles to Washington, D.C., without letting my parents know.

I did not, as far as I can remember, fill my underwear with plastic explosives and attempt to blow up a jetliner. But then again, there were a few months where I was smoking pot quite frequently, so you never know.

The thing is, I never got punished for any of these infractions. Because despite the stupidity of my actions, I was smart about one thing—I never told my parents about any of it until years later. (Some of it will still surprise them.) If they had known about the shoplifting, for instance, they would certainly have turned me in. My father loves to tell about the time when he was a boy and got caught stealing chocolate-covered ants, which I think were highly rationed even after World War II or something. Given his own history, he’d have had no choice but to rat me out.

Which is how I think about my daughter, Sasha. She’s just 1 now, and incapable of doing evil (at least intentionally). But one day she will, and I want her to know that if I discover her misdeeds, she will be brought to justice, either at my hands or those of the authorities (whom I actually deeply mistrust but somehow assume will help me out). I have no other choice.

But I also want her to know that it’s her duty as a child, or teenager, or young adult, to keep things from me, whether they’re trivial breaches (a skipped class) or more serious (stolen porn, Al Qaeda membership). This is, as far as I’m concerned, part of the process of growing up—one has to separate oneself, step by step, from one’s parents, financially, emotionally and every other -ly way. If that means keeping secrets about bad shit, so be it. I understand.

But it will also be important for her to realize that honesty matters, too. And I don’t mean honesty in the sense that she should tell me everything, get punished, get forgiven, blah blah blah. I mean that it’s surprisingly easy to keep secrets and tell lies, and a more serious challenge to live a life that doesn’t require fibs and treachery at all. I hope Sasha will be up for that kind of test.

Because if she isn’t, it’s extrajudicial rendition for her. And no cookies.