DADWAGON

Okay, so the crush isn’t on me. It’s on my 18-month-old boy, Nico. I can see what a woman would see in him: he’s thoughtful, sweet, gives great kisses, and needs lots of help. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to start coming home and seeing little works of art like the one pictured here lying around the house. She uses paint time as an opportunity to express her love for the little dude. If I’m not mistaken, there was one that said NICO ROX!

There’s only one problem: Nico is not my only child.

As readers of DadWagon know, I’ve got a 3-year-old girl who is looked after by the same part-time babysitter. But I’ve not once seen the sitter writing Dalia’s name, much less with a heart on it (even though Dalia is the one starting to learn how to read and write). It’s not just the love-note differential; the babysitter simply doesn’t like Dalia nearly as much as she likes Nico. We’ve had conversations about it. I told her it wasn’t really appropriate to favor one kid over the other. She told me she can’t help it. It’s a problem.

The favoritism started, of course, with the difference in the kids themselves. If Nico is all sweet cinnamon, then Dalia might be something like cardamom: complex, cool, slightly astringent. If she doesn’t want you around, she’ll tell you. She has not mastered “please” and “thank you” yet (Nico can’t really talk at all, so he’s got it easier there). This has caused my babysitter to, as I see it, write the girl off as a problem child.

My babysitter is probably not unique. She’s in her early 20s, and while she’s a fine caregiver, one does get the feeling that she started looking after kids because she likes being around cuddly babies. Who doesn’t? But there’s more to looking after kids than that. Not all kids like to hug. Not all of them are well-mannered. They should be pushed in the right direction, but not judged, I don’t think, with such finality at a young age.

So is babysitter favoritism common? I could see how caregivers, with no prior emotional attachments to the kids, would gravitate toward the most immediately rewarding kid.

If it is common, it is really that harmful? The oddly named Family Business School has a little study of parental favoritism, and finds that kids who report having had parents who picked sides become more estranged from their siblings as adults. Since we basically had two kids so that they could be friends and collaborators as adults, it would suck if that doesn’t work out. (Side note: for a completely odd Internet experience, go to the Family Business School homepage and watch a video of the school’s director, a Brit with picket fence teeth and all, down an Efes tallboy beer on a Turkish hillside and ramble on about the school and the history of Asia Minor.)

If anyone has had experience with this, let me know. Who knows, we may set up a poll to see if this particular babysitter should be fired. Crowdsource it, as my grandpaw always said, and ask the cloud.

Last night, my daughter, Sasha, spoke to me. In a dream. It was lunchtime, we were hungry, other nameless, faceless friends were around, discussing where to eat. From her spot on the ground, Sasha spoke one word: “Burrito.”

Stunned, we stared at her. Had she ever even eaten a burrito? And where would we find a decent one in New York? Then she said it again. We asked her if she had, in fact, said, “Burrito.”

“Yeah,” she said.

So we went for burritos, and though I don’t remember either she or I eating them, I do know that I left her diaper bag at the restaurant, and then I was riding my bicycle back into Manhattan (which is odd because I don’t have one and don’t live in Manhattan), following Theodore on his bike along a strange elevated trail that eventually landed us just offshore of the island—and chest-deep in water.

Thinking of all the now-ruined electronics in my pockets, I said, “Thanks, Ted.”

Sasha, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen.

(For what it’s worth, last night I ate Momofuku’s fried-chicken dinner. I think that explains everything.)

(This is the third post in our new series, “The Tantrum,” in which each of our four regulars will address one subject over the course of a week. Read the previous ones here and here.)

I suppose I should start by saying that I’m lucky in this regard. JP doesn’t really care much about television. He’ll ask for a cartoon once in a while, and he’s not much into my football, and he won’t sneeze at a bit of Curious George, but at this stage he’s much more into playing with his toys and drawing. So TV’s not on my mind much.

When he was a baby, I guess the idea was that his watching should be limited. We were gonna raise him on classical music, NPR and raw-milk cheese from the jump. That lasted until he was a year old and I needed a minute or two of sanity in the morning. A conscious decision was made: we would hook him on Sesame Street. And it worked, too. We would plug him into the tube for half an hour while we ate breakfast (and argued; we split up not long after this period), and all seemed right with the world. Then he got bored of it.

As a general rule, I imagine having a rule on something like this is counterproductive. Each kid is different, all things in moderation, etc. Plus I feel weird about getting biblical about television when my flat-screened friend is exactly the one I’m turning to after JP goes to sleep.

I know this is all kind of boring, but parenthood is filled with false controversies designed to make us feel bad about ourselves. It’s why alcohol was created.

So long as the kid hands over the remote when I’m watching, and he sees sunlight once a day, I’m neutral on the topic.

(Next up: A couch-potato confesses.)

Over in Boston recently, a mom couldn’t get her 14-year-old son to stop playing “Grand Theft Auto,” so, being a concerned parent, Angela Mejia did what comes naturally: She called 911.

According to the Boston Herald:

An argument ensued as Mejia unplugged her son’s PlayStation. Then, this mad-as-hell mother dialed 911. Police responded and managed to talk the boy into shutting off the game and going to sleep.

“They (police) were just like, ‘Chill out. Go to bed,’ ” the boy told the Herald.

Now, I don’t want to get into an argument about whether it’s right or not to call emergency services for this sort of thing—maybe 311 instead?—but what’s surprising to me is that this kind of thing still happens. Aren’t we deep into second- and third-generation videogamers? Shouldn’t a modern-day mom or dad be able to challenge their spawn to a round or two of Halo, with the loser shuffling off to bed?

I mean, back in the day I was pretty good at videogames: Metroid, Super Mario Bros., Tetris—I rocked them all. If sleepless Sasha wanted to go toe-to-toe at Super Punch-Out, well, I’m afraid she’d have an early bedtime.

Of course, this will only work until Sasha develops some real skills—like, around age 4, right?