DADWAGON

(Ed. note: This post inaugurates a new series, “The Tantrum,” in which each of our four regulars will address one subject over the course of a week.)

TV or not TV: In our house, that’s not the question. I consume too much of it, but my wife and I have decided that our little guy shouldn’t, at least while his developing brain is still getting itself sorted out. Her family also has a history of autism, and although the link is still hazy and preliminary, there is a certain amount of promising research that has persuaded us that the jittering of interlaced digital images may not be good for him. And anyway, reduced TV consumption will be a better habit later in life: good for attention span, even better for spending time on other things. I’m not anti-TV; I’m anti-mindlessly flicking it on whenever we’re home.

But this morning we made an exception for a few minutes. All three of us were home sick with a stomach bug (yes, this was the Weekend of Upchucking that everyone experiences at some point), and my wife’s boss was scheduled to do a segment on Good Morning America that she had arranged. So we thought a few minutes of TV wouldn’t kill him, and of course it was fine. But it was quite amazing to watch his reaction. He was rapt. The flickering screen of color and light worked its magic. It felt like the red apple in Disney’s Snow White: beautiful, shiny, toxic.

Yes, we’re going to hold out for as long as we can. But I have a feeling we’re bailing out the Titanic with a teaspoon on this one. He’s an American kid in the twenty-first century, and his father works in media. Is it even plausible to keep him away from (most) TV until he’s of school age? I’m going to try, and most likely, I’m going to fail.

(Up next: Confessions of a reformed anti-TV Nazi.)

Sunday afternoon Jean, Sasha and I hopped the G train over to Williamsburg for brunch at a friend’s house. On the surface, this was a normal Brooklyn-type event: a dozen or so creative types (photographers, writers, designers) eating croissants and spinach-mushroom frittatas and drinking mimosas; four young children were playing with expensive imported wooden toys; many of the attendees were Asian.

Normal, yes, but I felt like I’d stepped into Bizarro-World.

The hosts, whom I’d recently met, were in many ways our parallels. J. was a globe-trotting photographer with a focus on Asia; Z. was a Taiwanese-born fashion designer; their adorable son, D., was just over a year old.

In their apartment, the almost-parallels continued. They had a felt map of the world on one wall; we have world-map wallpaper in Sasha’s room. They had a textured, multipiece play mat on the floor; we have the same thing, only with a less-intricate pattern. I spotted one of those Ugly Dolls that parents seem to love but kids often ignore; it was larger and a different color than the one Sasha has.

There was plenty I could have gotten jealous about. Their apartment was bigger and airier, the furniture slicker (love those Quasar Khanh chairs!). D. had way more hair than Sasha, and was taller than she is (and she’s 93rd percentile already), and D.’s studded rubber toy ball was identical to Sasha’s, only silver instead of purple; it was, literally, shinier than what we have.

But please believe me when I say jealousy was not foremost in my mind. Instead, I was looking at all the things we truly had in common: the diapers, the kids’ sudden inexplicable tears, the proliferation of toys across the floor. They faced financial pressures, too, and in fact were about to move back to Taiwan to vastly lower their expenses and take advantage of proximity to in-laws. Taiwanese in-laws! Good luck, J.

All of which made me feel a hell of a lot happier about my own lot. Around 4 p.m., Sasha got crabby, so we bundled her up, loaded her into the Ergo carrier and jumped back on the G, where Sasha cutely and instantly fell asleep on my chest. An hour later, we were back in our by-comparison-cramped apartment and probably doing exactly what J. and Z. were doing at that moment—trying to get the kid to eat. No matter how bizarre Bizarro-World gets, it’s hard to escape normality.

Besides, so what if D. had more hair than Sasha? I’ve got way more hair than D.’s dad.

Thanks to the giant vanilla Slurpee that landed on New York this weekend, my flight out of St. Louis was canceled and I have another day in rural Missouri, on a hilltop above the Dickey Bub Farm and Home emporium.

I’d like to thank Continental Airlines, by the way, for being an industry leader in delaying dads who are trying to get home to their kids (and other types of travelers). Yes, worse things have happened on Continental Connection flights. But not answering the 800 number all morning and then informing me by email that you have rebooked me on a flight leaving two days later was a nice touch.

Of course, there are upsides to being stuck here. The Ozark foothills are lovely, with just the right amount of snow on them. And because I was here over the weekend, I read the Belleville News-Democrat, across the river in Illinois, and saw this cry for help from reporter Jennifer Bowen about her occasionally out-of-contol 8-year-old daughter:

I just don’t know what inspires her to be such a brat from time to time. I know her teacher finds herself at her wits end and running out of options with how to deal with her. I feel her pain. We work together to try to come up with solutions but sometimes, we both run out of ideas and we’re left wondering how the heck to get this kid to change her ways.

Usually, hearing about someone else’s bad kid cheers me up a little bit: a sort of Dadenfreude. But this post and the responses to it had the opposite effect, for a few reasons.

First, it’s clear that even in what some in my borough would call the Flyover States, parents are also anxious and disappointed and anxious about their disappointments. Too bad — there’s a part of me that would like to blame some of the complication of parenting on my Zip code. And what urban parent hasn’t had the fantasy of moving to the sticks with their kids and setting things right? Apparently, it’s not a cure-all.

The familiarity of the debate is a downer for another reason. In the reader responses to Bowen, there are some reasonable suggestions: she should take her kid to karate, or buy those special lights for wintertime if everyone’s feeling cooped up and sun-deprived. But most of the comments boil down to a fight between those who think Bowen is spoiling her kids and those who don’t.

That’s depressing because it’s the same argument we have in my extended family, and there are no winners. My almost-4-year-old daughter has her share of willfulness and poor manners, and there are those in the older generation of my family who think she’s spoiled. My perspective: I think they might not understand kids that well, and that the beatings we were all raised on weren’t what made us turn out alright.

But perhaps I’m just making excuses for my own fecklessness.

See? I can’t even decide how I feel about it. I agree with everyone else that kids need to have structure and consistent rules, but there’s more to figure out than that. Such as: If a child is misbehaving, do you just treat the symptoms (having a showdown with her on the spot to get her to stop)? Or do you treat the underlying cause (talk to her about why she is feeling frustrated/angry/stabby)? Both?

Before I had kids, I thought if you were strict enough, your kid would behave well. I tried that and it didn’t seem to work. I guess I’m looking still for Plan B.

That’s the real Missouri dilemma: Not only do I not have a plane ticket home, but I also still don’t have a firm idea of what kind of parent I should be when I get there.

Friday evening, after the nanny left, was a wonderful time for me and Sasha. For almost two hours we played together happily, dancing, babbling, rolling a ball around the apartment, and playing peekaboo. Whee!

And just that morning I’d written “What Do I Do Now?,” a post lamenting my inability to really get into it with Sasha, to bring myself to her level of entertainment. What had changed in those eight or nine hours?

Well, I was drunk.

Okay, not really drunk. But after a week of being sick, and a day spent visiting various banks to talk about refinancing, I desperately wanted a beer. And so, around 4:30, I had a perfect oatmeal stout, over at the Brazen Head, followed by a nice glass of 10-year-old Talisker, none of which helped me solve the Friday crossword puzzle in time to get home before the nanny departed.

But the two drinks absolutely helped me deal with Sasha, and without endangering her too much. It was an extremely pleasant evening, capped off by finding a single comment had come in to my post:

“You sir,” wrote Duder, “need a drinking habit.”

Truer words, Duder, truer words.