DADWAGON

I came across this headline at the Times’s Ideas Blog: “British Teeth Among the Healthiest in Europe”, and assumed it had to be a joke.

As most of us know, poking fun at British dental hygiene is a comedic staple worthy of immortalization by the Simpson’s (see Big Book of British Smiles) and others.

Apparently it’s not true. The source here is an Economist article with a zippy little chart that shows how many nations other than Britain commit crimes against good teeth. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, apparently, are tops for the rate of “decayed, missing or filled” teeth among twelve-year-olds. The U.S. comes in ninth. England is eighteenth.

And they say socialized medicine was no good.

C’mon, Canada. I thought you were on the side of the angels, with your sensible health-care system, your clean and polite cities, your excellent comedy chops. (I’ll even forgive you poutine.) And then I see this in your National Post.

The writer, Diane Francis, begins by making the easy-to-swallow argument that all discussion of global warming comes down to population growth. She is basically correct about that: If we keep adding people to the globe, and if developing countries continue to industrialize and consume like their First World brethren, we’re all sunk. She goes on to suggest (as Bill McKibben does in his book Maybe One) that fewer children per family are a good idea. And then she makes the giant eugenicist leap from “this would save us” to “the world needs a one-child policy like China’s.”

What do we know about China’s one-child policy, enacted under Mao to fight starvation? It has slowed, but not stopped, population growth. (Some sources say the lion’s share of the slowdown happened before the rules took effect.) It has thrown the male-female ratio, especially in rural areas, wildly out of whack, because families seeking sons abort or abandon their girls. (Historically, societies with too few women are not just unhappy; they breed violence among their pissed-off  young men. And they potentially live with weak economies as those men age and each become the sole supporters to two parents and four grandparents. As of the year 2000, 117 Chinese boys were being born for every 100 girls.) Forced sterilization was not uncommon in China until a few years ago, and still happens; so were coerced abortions.

It is, like so many idealist societal manipulations, the kind of rule that only a dictator could love. And, apparently, one dopey Canadian.

The New York Times Magazine’s “Year in Ideas” issue is always a fascinating read, chock full of crowd-sourced mathematical theorems and hourglass surfboards. But this year’s edition left me feeling a bit depressed.

First, the news that “Infant Sleep Is Destiny.” Apparently, researchers have figured out that if your 12-to-18-month-old has “erratic sleep patterns,” then the kid will also have reduced “executive functioning” (impulse control, ability to focus), which in turn determines whether he or she winds up, I guess, a handsomely compensated executive or a gibbering, subliterate drone.

Next, we now have to worry about thirdhand smoke—the potentially carcinogenic particles left lingering in the air long after a cigarette’s been extinguished. “The more you smoke in these locations, the more microlayers of these toxins build up,” says the professor of pediatrics researching the phenomenon. Great. At least we’ve got a couple of months till he publishes and we can really start freaking out.

Actually, none of this should surprise any of us, since the Earth effectively has a death wish. According to “The Medea Hypothesis,” species are inherently selfish and self-destructive: plants suck up carbon and cause ice ages; bacteria spew methane and toxic oxygen; humans grow tobacco and leave carcinogenic particles lying around for their children to inhale. Message: Even if your kid sleeps all night and you don’t smoke, we’re all doomed anyway!

And it’s just another Sunday morning at the Gross household….

DadWagon got a strong shout-out from Greg Allen over at DaddyTypes, a blog with its own worthy mash of reflections on David Bowie, hexagonal cribs and dadslapping. I’ve been hanging on his site as it is; glad to see he’s over here from time to time.

All this bonhomie reminds me of a big dad-to-dad question that came up this week: What kind of advice do we as fathers owe dads-to-be?

This came up because it’s nuptials-time in South Florida, and all the cousins and their babies have come down to play Rock Band and drink liquor and see my brother get married tomorrow.

It was the first time I’d seen my cousin after he had a baby eight months ago. The great times with the baby were great, he told me, and the bad times were exactly as bad as I had told him they would be.

What?

Had I really, when hearing that one of my favorite relatives was about to have a beautiful baby with his lovely girl, told him to gird for hell? Apparently I had.

Not that I was the only one, he said. Tell other men you’re going to become a dad and you invite, as my cousin put it, a “shitstorm” of warnings and dire predictions about the struggles of raising a baby.

Is this a bad thing? Not to generalize, but if a woman says she’s pregnant, she can mostly expect a chorus of cooing from her girlfriends. As she should. It’s a fricking miracle that anyone can get pregnant in this era of chemicals and careerism. Celebrate that shit.

Yet I’ve found that sometimes the most dire predictions have given me the most comfort. One particularly memorable warning from a friend of mine when he found out I was going to have a kid: ha, he said, you will never have sex again.

And while that hasn’t quite turned out to be true, it sure has felt like it at times. Knowing that I wasn’t the only one did me a lot more good than a thousand “oh you’re going to love being a dad” comments would have.

So I’ve gone around passing that warning forward. And others. Let none among my friends say they had no idea about the sleeplessness, the blown diapers, the irrational (and rational) rages, the altered marriages.

Some people really shouldn’t have kids. For the rest of us, myself included, the pros heavily outweigh the cons. Having a kid means ranging into high categories of love I didn’t even know existed. But you don’t need succor or advice to get through the good times. You need it during the many times when you fail your wife or your kid or when they fail you.

So fuck it. I’m happy to keep seeding the shitstorm.