DADWAGON

I am an occasional contributor to the Harper’s Weekly Review, Harper’s Magazine’s online newsletter. The idea for the Weekly is that by aping the language of conventional reporting, in the hope of calling some attention to the hypocrisy of how reporting gets done (distorted third-hand news), the linguistic obfuscations involved (was Obama really “considering his options” in Afghanistan? I think not.), the silly redundancies of weird science (macaque study, anyone?), and if there’s any time left over, to report on the week’s events.

Here’s an example from this week’s installment, which was written by my brilliant colleague, Paul Ford, who should be famous (and kinda is):

Utah state senator and gay marriage opponent Chris Buttars said he would support some housing rights for gays but that he did not approve of gay and lesbian activism. “I don’t want them stuffing it down my throat all the time,” he said. “Certainly not in my kid’s face.” Martin Amis promised that his new novel would anger feminists, and the English town of Cockermouth was recovering from huge floods. A study found that 13 million American women go online each month to watch porn. A Nigerian man killed his two-year-old son for being an evil wizard, and was caught carrying the child’s corpse in a woven plastic “Ghana must go” bag; a wallaby brutalized a two-year-old girl in Australia.

Not exactly the news, right? But it’s all real, all reported, just distorted for humor, and to mess with the reader’s mind. I love the form and have been writing it since 2005.

One of the key ideas of the Weekly is to be as offensive as possible to as many people as possible, using the language of journalism as cover. There are no standards. We want the reader to be angry (at least I do).

And yet, once I had a baby, I did identify my personal red line: bad things happening to children. Prior to becoming a father, I had no trouble making this juxtaposition: “A sixty-year-old man was accused of biting a six-year-old boy’s genitals after the child refused to stop touching himself and an English woman capable of climaxing forty times per day was convicted of benefit fraud.”

Haha!

Once I had a kid, though, I found my capacity to even remotely picture in my mind a bad thing happening to any child anywhere was gone. Sad child on television? Change the channel. Starving kid in the paper? Read the sports section.

I make no pretense that is a good thing to do. It’s clearly sticking your head in the sand. Bad things happen to children, and the world should know about it. But making light of it to comment on reporting jargon didn’t work for me any more. At the same time, it always bothered me that I had become so unforgivably soft.

Not that I hold others to this high standard, mind you. Thus, hats off to Paul for penning what may be the most offensive and disturbing line in Weekly Review history:

A Detroit-area man, on learning that his 15-year-old son molested his three-year-old daughter, stripped the boy naked and took him outside; there, the boy fell to his knees, yelling “No, Daddy! No!” before his father shot him in the head.

Congratulations, Mr. Ford. You made me cry.

The subhed of this story tells you all you need to know: Father Calls Police When He Forgets Where He Parked His Son. That he left his 5-year-old kid in the cab of his 18-wheeler to go visit a strip club just makes the story sweeter.

Me, I prefer this version of trucker dads:

Giving Nico his flu shots was easy. It was like Basketball Diaries. Dude practically chased the needle.

Dalia was not so easy. She’s almost four. She knows to anticipate pain. So her good mood yesterday afternoon, which came in part because she was excited to take a trip with her dad (taxicab!), ended with an agonizing shriekfest and forcible restraint while she got her shot. Not sure which of us was more traumatized, but it wasn’t fun.

It did get me thinking about whether plunging a needle into your kid is the only way to do this. So here’s a few pediatricians talking about how to give kids pain-free immunizations. The average child, they say, will have 28 immunizations before the age of 6. Why not make them pain-free?

Besides the nasal spray option, there’s a prescription drug called Emla that numbs the skin about an hour before any shot. Or an over-the-counter numbing cream called LMX-4.

But I’m not so sure it’s a good idea. The woman who bore me these children is a gas monkey/tube jockey in her day job. As such, she loves all sorts of anesthetics. But she also says that Emla, like any drug, could be toxic if given the wrong way–there’s a risk, even if it’s pretty small, that the drugs could be misapplied and poison the blood. Check this death in North Carolina: the girl was going for laser hair removal and died from lidocaine poisoning. If you think that’s a ridiculous reason to die, try explaining that you wanted your kid not to cry at the doctor’s office.

OK, so the death talk is overblown. But something about trying to numb your kid for an injection reeks of overparenting. Yes, the shot sucked while it was happening. She felt bad, I felt bad. But it was temporary. We got over it. We had ice cream. We were survivors. It was a good day.

Seattle has given the world so much, from orca sex to Rainier Beer: the beer from here. But did you know there are a lot of doctors out there? And that one of them studies daycare?

Here’s Dr. Dimitri A. Christakis at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, commenting on his dismal finding, in December’s issue of Pediatrics, that kids in home-based daycare watch 2.4 hours of television at their daycare, 2 hours a day more than kids in center-based daycare:

Research continues to link excessive preschool screen time with language delay, obesity, attentional problems and even aggression depending upon content. At the same time, studies show that high quality preschool can be beneficial to children’s development.

Of course, you don’t have to have an MD to know that center-based care is almost totally unaffordable in this county. According to the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies, the average cost for an infant in a daycare center in 2008 was as high as $15,895. For home-based daycare, it was $10,720. So in America, I hope you can pony up that extra $5000 a year. Otherwise, your first teacher will be Mr. Squarepants. Good luck competing in the global economy, little fry.