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?)

There were many revelations to come from the curious case of the Underwear Bomber. Yemen is a headache. London makes people want to kill Westerners. The TSA is a mess. Sen. Jim DeMint is more worried about unions than he is about al-Qaeda. The author of Dad’s Exploding Underpants and Other Potty Poems may have been trying to warn the world.

For us at DadWagon, though, we were most interested in the fact that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was ratted out by his dad. And it’s not like the father, one of Africa’s richest bankers, was trying to turn him in to the Sisters of Mercy. He went to the U.S. Government, the people who brought the world orange jumpsuits, force feedings, and infinite extrajudicial imprisonment.

The question for us is, when should you turn your kid in? Where is the line between protecting your child and protecting everyone else?

Okay, so the math changes when your child’s transgression is trying to blow himself (and other people) up. You might actually be saving him by turning him in. And like so much with young Umar’s hamhanded plot, he was incredibly, foolishly transparent with his father:

ABC News’ sources said that during Abdulmutallab’s final call [to his dad], he told his father the call would be his last contact with the family. He said that the people he was with in Yemen were about to destroy his SIM card, rendering his phone unusable.

He robbed his father of the things that usually keeps people from turning their kids in: denial, and any hope that things will just work themselves out. When your radicalized son says he’s in Yemen and won’t be speaking to you anymore, there aren’t many remedies left to you.

Unless part-Jewish part-Asian babies start growing up to be a major militant threat, we at DadWagon will not likely have to face the should-I-turn-in-my-young-suicide-bomber question. But for many of the more mundane instances of law and order, I am going to start the Tantrum off by saying that there are very few situations in which you should rat your kid out. Because once the police get hold of any complaint, you can’t control the consequences.

We’ve had some personal experience with this in the extended family, unfortunately. To protect the guilty, I won’t get into specifics. Let’s just say that someone was a little strung out (I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t me) and was a little menacing to his elders (also not me). The cops were called. The intention might have been to get this hophead to sit in jail for a night, but once the police got involved that was no longer an option. All attempts to drop more serious charges were rebuffed. The end result was a multi-year stay at the lovely race-riot capital of the Central Valley, Corcoran State Prison.

It works the other way, too. One of the best pieces I’ve ever read from Dan Savage, my old boss at the Stranger, was this dissection of a son who turned in his father for growing weed. Bottom line: don’t get the cops involved. It’s not their fault, but they’ve got their own agenda, which rarely matches a parent’s agenda.

Gotta love the Daily News. They have a little tidbit out yesterday on the positive aspects of smacking young children:

“A study…found that young children whose parents spank them perform better at school later on…The research, by Calvin College psychology professor Marjorie Gunnoe, found that kids smacked before age 6 grew up to be more successful.”

Duh! I don’t have a doctorate and I know that already.

I jest. I have yet to lay a finger on my son (not that I haven’t considered it–eat your damn veggies!), but there is a part of me that thinks that spanking isn’t such a great sin.

At JP’s age (three), my father used to smack me on the wrist as a punishment. This was a structured penalty, not an angry one. If I repeatedly ignored warnings to stop a certain behavior (spitting, fighting, Satan worship), then I had to stand up straight, put my hand out, and get a sharp wallop on the back of the hand. It stung, and I certainly didn’t like it, but it got the point across.

Later on, I received the occasional, not-very-hard spanking for major offenses. I also went to school in the south, which meant that my teachers were permitted to paddle me. And they did, with justification and great gusto. None of this seems to have had any major impact on me, except if you count my S&M predilection, serial killing rampages, and chronic bed-wetting.

End of the day, I haven’t made up my mind on spanking. Highly likely I won’t do it, but I’m not sure it’s such a bad thing, really, and it may be more effective than yelling, which according to a daffy little piece in the Times a couple months back, is the “new spanking,” whatever that means.

Any thoughts out there in parent-blogging land? Where do we come down on the issue of whacking?

It was a good thought. Caught up in the season (Thomas the Tank Engine was the major stocking stuffer this Christmas), we decided to escape the city by train on New Year’s weekend. The task: find a small town in the Northeast with an Amtrak stop close to a small downtown area with a hotel. Brattleboro, VT, fit the bill, particularly with the rather funky and unique old Latchis Hotel just a block from the Amtrak station.

We imagined clacking peacefully through the snowy north, drinking hot chocolate while our kids ogled birch forests through the window. Leave I-95 for the road ragers and long-haul truckers.

Of course, it was much more complicated than that.

Train travel with kids remains a mixed bag. On the plus side: There is no removing of the shoes, security scans or other inanities of the security age (like the recent emptying of Newark’s Terminal C). Once on the train, there are no seat belts of any kind (train travel may be three times deadlier here than in the UK, but it’s still safer than flying or driving, according to this Dartmouth study). Nor are there any dictums about when to sit or stand. You can get up for as long as you like, whenever you like, to buy a Sam Adams in the bar car, or just to rock the baby to sleep.

But it’s Amtrak, which means it’s also Slow and Expensive. The trip from New York to Brattleboro would have taken three hours in the car; it took five and a half hours on the train. The train cost $330 roundtrip for the four of us, instead of $70 of gas.

There were other annoyances: we were hoping to get the boy some milk on the way back, but the barman said that for six hundred passengers, they had stocked just 6 pints of milk. The seats were barely roomier than on an airplane, and the train was full and pretty dirty when we go on at Penn Station (much cleaner on the return).

But you know what? I’m glad we did it. Our nearly-4-year-old got bored at times, but there were stretches of fascination. It seemed to her like we had found some magical subway line that broke free of New York and made it into the woods. The train whistle enchanted her, as did the idea of a restaurant car, and she loved seeing the train stretch out behind us on a bend.

There are two reasons why that matters to me. First, there’s a constant fight as a father–against inertia and routine–to provide your kids with at least some diversity of experience. Before this weekend, she didn’t even know there was such a thing as a long-distance train. Now she does. So it isn’t quite a catalog of the entire human experience, but it’s a start.

Which leads to the second reason I’m glad we did it: Amtrak only sucks because certain powerful politicians want it that way. Amtrak will continue to need defenders: people who care about it, who have strong memories of it. After all, they say that John McCain started trying to kill Amtrak mainly after his wife Cindy was on a train that derailed in Texas in 1999. Hopefully when Dalia gets older, she’ll remember having been on some trains that didn’t derail, that cut finely through a snowstorm, that brought city people out to the Great North without cars.

It was a good weekend. We had Thai food for white people and stomped in the snowdrifts along Main Street. We went cross-country skiing and sledding just outside of town and hitched a ride with some locals back into Brattleboro. It wouldn’t have been the same with a car. Hopefully some part of her will remember that and other excursions to come and remember that train travel, even in the U.S., is worth fighting for.

I am not going to get into the tear-jerker element of this very fine “Modern Love” piece by Victoria Rosner in this Sunday’s Times, which describes the death of her ex-husband and the impact it had one her toddler (One example: “Now 3, Judah still doesn’t believe in forever and keeps trying to find a work-around for death. “Maybe Daddy is at that hotel where I saw him once? Maybe he’s in California?” He’s frustrated that he can’t see his father, though one night when he was lying in bed I told him he could talk to him whenever he likes. He was quiet for a moment and then called upward, “Daddy, how are you? Is it dark where you are?”).

It was well done, smart without being maudlin, and hit on a topic that most parents, myself included, try to avoid–how do you explain pain and human suffering to your child? The short answer is you can’t, but somehow, they learn it on their own, for better or for worse (story’s end: “Another child approached Judah and asked in a worried voice, “Your daddy died?” Judah nodded.“Does that mean he’s not coming back?”Judah put his hand on the other child’s shoulder. “Yes, but it’s O.K.,” he said. “I’m alive. You’re alive. Want to play?”).

I will, however, get into one minor facet of the article. The father in this case didn’t live with Judah’s mother, and more important, had until he learned he was going to die of cancer, largely abandoned his infant son. When he got sick he asked for permission to travel to New York City to spend time with the boy, and because of the high price of New York hotels, he also asked to stay in the apartment of his ex-wife’s mother.

There’s a little overlap here with my own wondrous divorce. At present, my ex and I are still wending our way through the legal process of severing our blessed union, which means the issue of the marital estate has yet to be resolved. My wife left me, so I have remained in the apartment, for now, at least until she can figure some way to force me out. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, my ex hasn’t come to grips with the idea that she no longer lives in the apartment we bought together. She still has a key, and she uses it liberally. I was out of town on vacation last week, and when I returned, she had cleaned and caulked my tub, replaced JP’s toothbrush, cleaned his sheets, thrown out a six-hundred dollar area rug, and left me a note complaining about my girlfriend’s cat, which she thought was giving him allergies.

This was all done, she said (in an email), for “JP and his well-being…specifically…in areas [of the apartment] that primarily pertains to him. I am trying to set set aside and separate our issues with each other and focus on what’s relevant to JP and his needs. Hence I am  bringing these issues to your attention because I hope you share my  interest in making sure that jerod lives in a clean, safe, and comfortable environment.”

I want my carpet back!