DADWAGON – Page 378

Bye-bye, Baby! (Again.)

At 5:30 a.m. this morning, I dragged my suitcase down to the ground floor of my in-laws’ home in Taipei and hailed a taxi to the airport. Trailing me were my wife, Jean, and daughter, Sasha, and as the cab driver loaded my bags into the trunk, I kissed them good-bye in a ritual that is becoming so familiar that I worry it’s losing all power to unsettle me.

I travel. It’s my job. I go away for a week, two weeks, at a time, to random corners of the globe (today: Tokyo), on missions almost too ridiculous to describe (eat ramen till I burst).

Meanwhile, back in Brooklyn or Taipei or wherever home happens to be at the moment, Jean and Sasha carry on without me. The baby eats, sleeps, poops, plays, laughs at jokes only she understands, and cries at every minor head bonk or perceived abandonment. The nannies come in the morning and leave in the evening, and sometimes my mother comes down from Connecticut to help out.

Really, I don’t know what things are like there. I’m having picnics in Paris or sailing the Caribbean, and though I whip out the iPhone to show strangers photos of my darling daughter, to be honest I feel a bit of relief that I don’t have to get up at 6 to change her diaper and prepare her bottle. With that comes a bit of guilt, of course, that Jean is stuck with the chores, but such are the paths we’ve chosen. This is my job; what am I supposed to do?

At the end of it all, though, I get to come home, and there confront an infant who’s probably on the verge of forgetting my face. The first few times, it was as if nothing had happened at all. Daddy’s here—she grins! But the morning after the last trip, when we brought her into bed with us for that first bottle, she smiled and gave me… this look. “You again?” she seemed to say, a bit sarcastically. “So glad you could join us.”

Did she really know I’d been away? I mean, she knows if I put her in the playpen and walk into the other room. I can tell by the screams. But not to have seen me for 16 days—does that compute for a 10-month-old?

For now these reunions are easy. What more does a baby want than a bottle and a cuddle? But soon, I know, she’ll see the packed bags in the hallway, and though she’s recently learned how to wave and say “Bye-bye!” what I’m sure I’ll see is tears.

No, Seriously, Dirt Is Good

Just a quick follow-up on my previous post on the virtues of messiness: science agrees with me! Not that I had any doubt, but according to researchers at UC San Diego, letting children play with messy stuff is actually good for their skin.

Thank you, wise scientists, for confirming what I already knew: my ex-wife is a jackass.

Or are they on to something with this whole dirt-is-good jazz (clever nerds)?

I mean, the essence of these hygiene hypothesis arguments is really nothing more than the stark differences in mother/father concepts of clean, plus charts and statistics.

Seen from my perspective, then, one must ask: why are all mothers crazed germophobes? Have they all been brainwashed by Lysol advertising blitzes? Have they in fact been drinking Lysol?

Will this breakthrough in silly science be enough to finally set them straight?

It Takes a Village, Idiot

I know, I should be happy. There is, after all, a revolution under way — a movement to end the overhyped, overprotective phenomenon known as Overparenting. So sayeth Time magazine:

“The insurgency goes by many names — slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting — but the message is the same: Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they’ll fly higher.”

At the forefront of the struggle are people like Lenore Skenazy, whose “Free-Range Kids” aims to return us to a time when 9-year-olds could ride the subway alone. Elementary-school principals and college administrators are starting to resist the overparents who ghostwrite their kids’ times-tables homework or give their 19-year-olds wake-up calls every morning. Soon, perhaps, we’ll be raising our children to be tough, resilient, independent-minded—not the ninnies and ready-to-crack teacups of the past decade or so. Viva la revolución!

Me, I’m skeptical—and not just because the online version of the article is larded with links blurbing “the 25 best back-to-school gadgets” and “pictures of Barack Obama’s college years.” The insane protectiveness of today’s overparents was not bred by a logic that can be reversed with reason and statistics. So what if only 1 in 1.5 million kids is kidnapped and killed by a stranger? The fear that induces parents to buy three-foot animal leashes for their progeny will not be assuaged. “A kind of parenting fungus” is how Time’s Nancy Gibbs refers to the fear, and as anyone who’s had mold in their walls knows, it’s not so easily eradicated.

And I’m saying this as a free-ranger myself! I grew up walking to school and biking (without a helmet!) all over Amherst, Massachusetts, rarely giving my parents an idea of where I was going, or with whom. Somehow I survived. I’d love my Sasha to grow up the same way, and am as dedicated an underparent as you’ll find in my small corner of Brooklyn.

But there are obstacles, even at home. My wife, Jean, for one. While she’s not about to start helicopter parenting at Sasha’s preschool, the idea of letting Sasha ride the subway solo strikes her as crazy. Okay, Sasha’s only 1 year old, but still: Jean successfully grew to adulthood in Taipei, a very big city, so shouldn’t she be cool with this? And mightn’t Sasha be better off growing up in Taipei herself, away from American educational insanity? As a child in elementary school, Jean had to do things like clean the bathrooms, and the disciplinarian in me quivers with delight at the thought that Sasha would have to do the same.

And yet…

I’m actually in Taipei right now, staying with the in-laws, and things seem just as screwed up here. Sasha was crabby this morning, so we left her sitting slack-jawed in front of the in-laws’ copy of Baby Einstein while I started work on this story. (Actually, I wanted her to watch the rip-off Brainy Baby®, but the DVD wasn’t in the case.) She sneezed—once!—and my mother-in-law rushed in to make sure Sasha was okay. “Warm clothes,” she just now told me. I did nothing, so she put a bib on the baby. She hasn’t sneezed again.

Then we put Sasha down for a nap, and as soon as she started crying—which was about five minutes in—some in-law or other retrieved her from the crib, effectively ending any chance we’d get a break from her. In other words, I WANT to leave her alone, let her learn to deal with her world on her own (yes, she’s only 1, I know), but the rest of the world, it seems, has other plans. If I’m not overparenting, someone else will be: an in-law, a neighbor, a teacher, a parent whose love of lawsuits ensures that everyone else falls fearfully into line.

It takes a village, they say, but you know what? There’s a reason some of us move to the city.

Fighting your Kid’s Fights

In the crowded, colicky waiting room at Nico’s pediatrician’s office, I was mostly concerned about the syringe-ambush I was about to let happen to my baby’s upper thighs. That’s right, H1N1 vaccine finally reached Manhattan yesterday–an event that should be marked by some sort of commemoration, maybe like National Infant Immunization Week but with a beer and a bump.

But then, as often happens when I’m around lots of other families, my thoughts turned to the weirdness that is parenting. Particularly, the inability of parents to let kids solve their own conflicts. There were a lot of toddlers, and a lot of toys, and a hint of illness in the air, so yes, there was some tussle over who got to play with what. Some toy frogs were grabbed, some plastic Elmos were yanked. But the kids were all about the same size and just not that aggressive. It was no Dien Bien Phu.

But still the parents couldn’t help but micromanage the situation. Put that down, ask him nicely, please give him the toy back to my son. Not just correctives for their own kid, but also reffing the other kids as well to make sure that everybody played by the rules.

Holy Christ, people. Just let ’em play. And don’t get involved in your kid’s fights. Otherwise you’re gonna get this gem of a misdemeanor they’re talking about over at Strollerderby. Apparently some mom got some naked pictures that her daughter’s homecoming rival had taken of herself (you know, sexting; all the cool kids are doing it). The mom, though, took the pics to the police and then to the school in an attempt to get her daughter’s rival disqualified from homecoming. Full details here. Read them, they’re lovely.