DADWAGON

We here at DadWagon are all for better, more thoughtful parenting (except when we’re sorta not), but let me just say that there seems to be a lot of private Parent Coaching out there, and some of it sure looks like bullshit to me.

Let’s see what one prominent parent-coach factory, the Seattle-based Parent Coaching Institute, has to say for itself:

“We view Parenting as a Living System™ and families as containers for dynamic growth, aliveness, creativity, and endless possibilities.”

Yeesh.

PCI was founded in 2000 and is part of the distance education lineup at Seattle Pacific University, a wholesome Methodist school that I lived near for five years when the girlfriend and I were living in the best, cheapest apartment we’ll ever know. I like Seattle Pacific. Their students were polite. They let me run on their outdoor track.

You don’t need a fancy degree to get into the parent coaching biz, though. Sandy McDaniel, a very tan and very Orange County grandmother who dabbles in motivational speaking, has started offering parenting tips online for $6.95 a month:

Less anger in our homes, less anger in our children, less anger in our world… For the sake of your heart, for the sake of our world, make raising your children your number one priority. You are the architect of a human being’s life! There are no re-runs in this vital game of nurturing and teaching our children.

Seriously: What is this? The algal bloom of parent coaches, at least judging from this list of Washington State PCI graduates, seems to mostly consist of moms whose children have grown up. I sympathize: They’ve gained all this knowledge about raising kids and then suddenly their kids don’t need any more raising. We at DadWagon will have to deal with that some day as well. But I don’t believe I will be tempted to throw down $5,800 to get a pseudo-degree as a “heart-centered” parent coach (the bulk of the PCI instruction, by the way, takes place in 36 “phone classes”).

But this is how the wedding-planner industry gets its workers, right? Women have a wedding themselves, or plan one for their children, and get so involved in the details that they start thinking they could do this for a living.

And can this really be a good business in these times? Parent coaching has to be at the very top of the list of things to cut out of the budget once Dad or Mom has to take fewer shifts at the factory.

I like New Delhi entrepreneur Puneet Rathi, a mechanical engineer turned HR manager who a few years ago decided to start selling his version of Positive Parenting, which he calls Atma Chetna. Not sure how that’s working out for him, though he did get a writeup in the Times of India.

It does strike me that his approach, which he teaches throughout the Middle East and South Asia, is essentially a progressive one: Respect the child’s beliefs and feelings, and decrease the pressure on students. Stateside, many of the parent coaches seem to be coming from a Family Values perspective: a conservative call for stronger parenting to ward off the moral decay of today’s America.

Good luck with that.

Am I wrong on this? Are the people at PCI doing Wonderful Work™ and I’m just too sarcastic to realize it? If you’ve got a good case to make in favor of Parent Coaching, make it.

The results of Lord Mayor Bloomberg’s grand experiment in forced mathematical learning have arrived, and the results are shocking:

Apparently if you require public school teachers to use testing as the one and only metric for learning in New York City, if you stake your political credibility on getting those scores up, if you even try to break the teacher’s union over their acceptance of scores as a metric on their efficacy as teachers…NOTHING HAPPENS!

See this article in New York Times today:

“New York City’s fourth and eighth graders showed no notable improvement on federal math exams this year compared with 2007, the last time the tests were given, according to scores released on Tuesday.

Worse yet, this is an improvement in city scores only. Look what the Times had to say about federal and state scores:

On the state exams, 71 percent of the city’s eighth graders met state standards this year, but just 26 percent were considered proficient or better on the federal exams. In 2007, 22 percent of eighth-grade students in the city were proficient.

For this we elected Michael Bloomberg God?

Holy shit! I mean: Ho-lee shee-it! According to some doctors, it turns out that possibly 4 percent of new dads suffer from “clinically significant depressive symptoms within eight weeks of the birth of their children.” Just like their wives! (Only less so.)

Apparently, some combination of starry-eyed enthusiasm, lack of sleep, and financial burdens is pushing literally dozens of new dads to the point of maybe possibly considering suicide. Because, like, who hasn’t just wanted to off himself when faced with another blown-out diaper at 3 a.m.?

I’m being sarcastic because this all just seems obvious, especially given the rosy fantasy of parenthood perpetrated by our culture. We have this growing sense that parenthood should be something wonderful, filled with bonding and warm moments and hilarious accidents—something that, despite the hiccups and tears, is, on the whole, good.

When actually it’s just something normal. I mean, it can be great, but it can also suck. (That’s what we at Dadwagon call: Insight!) But that’s no reason to surround ourselves with images both heavenly (Brad Pitt and his hip brood) and devilish (the innumerable failings of Jon Gosselin) and imagine that we have to be one or the other. Just kind of muddling through, with no expectations of how well it should all go, is the best kind of thing to aim for. Because if you think you’re supposed to be super-dad and then you drop the baby on her head—again—because you were distracted by the TV or the credit-card bills or the chapters of “What to Expect” that you should’ve read two months ago, well, then, yeah, you’re going to be depressed.

Which is exactly what you should expect. And that’s when you should realize it’s normal, and that even if you fuck it all up, it’s okay—there’s always someone out there doing it worse than you.

So, last night I’m at a friend’s book party in one of those unbelievable Chelsea lofts—the kind that seem to employ some Tardis-like technology for allowing small-seeming buildings to encompass infinite space—when I am approached by a towheaded 5-year-old. He’s raging on sugar or adrenaline, scampering around the room in full knowledge that he’s fucking adorable, but he stops at me and grins, his mouth crammed with little-kid teeth.

He puts out his hand. He wants me to give him five. I do. Then he crawls under my legs, turns around, and… spanks me. Weird. Then off he darts through the crowd, returning minutes later to smack my butt again. Weird.

Weird but normal. This is a game, and I’m a willing participant. The thing is, how did he find me? How did he single me out of all the other guys there and know that, yes, I’m a dad who knows how to play silly games like this? Is this similar to Chris’s “I, Hot Chick” phenomenon, where I now have some fatherly aura visible only to children?

Anyway, what makes this extra-weird is that I used to be kind of, well, scared of kids. I always imagined they were looking at me and trying to figure out what to make of me. Well, he looks like a grown-up, sure, but he really gives off this immature, little-kid affect. What’s his deal?

Later at the party, I met the kid’s parents, who ordered him to stop racing around and spanking me. Which was a disappointment: I wanted to corner him and dare him to spank every single person at the party—a dare I know I would’ve enjoyed at his age.

And so, well, maybe it wasn’t the daddy he saw in me. Maybe he recognized a fellow ass-whacker?