DADWAGON

In honor of this unfortunate child who speaks Klingon, here is some totally useless super-important stuff I will make certain J.P. knows by the time he is 50:

1. The ewoks were speaking Tibetan.
2. The term “peckerwood” has nothing to do with a pecker, an erection, or wood. It is still okay to laugh at it.
3 Champagne comes from Champagne. Only there. Anyone who cares about this should be avoided — unless they’re buying.
4. Don’t use the word “literally” in a sentence if you don’t mean it. Example: “I literally lost my mind.” No, you didn’t. Note: I do this all the time. It makes me sound like an idiot.

Thus endeth the lesson for today, young man. Back to tormenting the nice children in your preschool.

A scribe in Dinkytown unearthed this unearthly parenting technique: speaking to your child only in Klingon. For the first three years of life.

Some might see this as some kind of child abuse. At best, it’s sucking up valuable brain space for a language that you can only actually use to communicate during ComiCon. But as someone trying to raise my kid bilingual too (with the rather more commonplace Spanish), let me offer a few points of defense.

1. It’s only fair. The little ones are constantly bombarding us with gibberish. Why can’t adults serve up some of their own? Nico spent all week demanding “gooskh” from me, getting angrier each time I offered him something that clearly wasn’t whatever he thinks “gooskh” is. A synthetic, guttural nerd-tongue may actually be the only appropriate response.
2. You don’t need lots of words. According to the  interwebs, there are only 2,000 words in the Klingon language. A pittance by natural language standards, but way more than you need to communicate with a small child. I don’t know if diaper is among the 2,000 words, but “be’joy'” is, and it means “ritualized torture by women.” So succinct!
3. You don’t need many speakers. I once spent a summer in a tiny land far away where people said things like “sveiki” and “paldies” as if those words actually meant something. Yes, it was Latvia, and even though Latvian is an obscure language with few linguistic relatives and not that many speakers, it never occurred to anyone (besides me) that it might be a bad idea to teach it to children.
4. Raising bilingual kids doesn’t work anyway. Unless, that is, both parents are totally fluent. That’s my opinion, anyhow, after having quizzed Dalia gently on her spoken Spanish last weekend. We are both non-native speakers (hell, I’m a non-ethnic speaker), but we’ve been somewhat diligent, just like this Dinkytown dad, in trying to teach her Spanish over the last 3.5 years. She is part-Mexican, after all. But what did we get for our trouble? Over the course of five minutes, she answered every question in Spanish by repeating “boca! boca!” as if deranged. Or — as may very well be the case — as if she actually doesn’t speak Spanish.

Last night my old college friend Matt and I went out for a drink at a dim cocktail bar in our Brooklyn neighborhood. We hadn’t seen each other in a month, and so had some catching up to do: How was his trip to Hawaii with his wife? What random projects was I working on?

We’d only just gotten started on our second round of drinks when a blond girl interrupted to ask what I was drinking. I didn’t actually know—I told her I’d asked the bartender for something “rough” with rye.

“I like it rough too!” she said.

Apparently—and I don’t want to overthink this—she was flirting with me. Soon she was joined by her friends (two sisters) and Matt and I had to, out of sheer politeness, keep up the game. Which was difficult! Partly because we really wanted to talk to each other, but also because these were not our type of women. Attractive, sure, but so what? We had no interest in pursuing this.

Then they saw our wedding rings. And things changed.

One was visibly disappointed. Another seemed glad for a reason to edge away. But the third—she was divorced, the mother of two girls, 3 and 7, and once we started comparing parenting stories, sharing Facebook videos and commiserating, well, we got along great.

Except that as I walked home—at the late, late hour of 11 p.m.—I wondered: Have I become one of Those People, the ones who can only connect with strangers by the sad fact of parenthood? I mean, it’s not like there’s any dearth of parents out there. Does having successfully procreated make us so special that we have to band together in groups and share “insider” knowledge of dangerous toys, caring pediatricians, and feeding tricks?

But damn, those Facebook videos are cute.

So this is a picture of my kid getting into the back of a cab, with no carseat, on Avenue B on Saturday.

Am I a bad father? Oh yeah.

Okay, so usually he’s in someone’s arms when we ride in a cab.  And we don’t do this often, maybe a couple times a month. But still: It would only take one not-so-major accident to make it all seem like a very bad idea.

But I can’t be the first NYC parent to do this. This study of an anonymous U.S. urban area found that only 22% of kids under 1 used car seats in taxis. It makes sense: I mean, you are daytripping for pork and it starts to rain. Or the C, New York’s worst subway line, breaks down. You cannot carry a car seat around everywhere you go just in case.  The Graco Nautilus weighs 25.6 pounds. Ours weighs almost that much. It just couldn’t be done.

After getting home (unscathed) I tracked down the official New York Taxi and Limousine Commission stance:

Drivers of yellow medallion taxicabs and for-hire vehicles and their passengers, are exempt from laws regarding car seats and seatbelts. Keep in mind, the TLC encourages everyone in the vehicle to buckle their seatbelts while riding in a cab. There are no Taxi and Limousine Commission rules regarding this, as it is a State exemption. Passengers with children are encouraged to bring their own car seats, which the drivers must allow passengers to install.
*NOTE – Children under the age of seven are permitted to sit on an adult’s lap.

So my wife, who only half-jokingly said that they’d come and take our kids away if I went public with our hooligan cab riding, was wrong. Turns out that it’s completely legal.

The bureaucrats may exempt cabs from child safety laws, but they can’t exempt us from the laws of physics. I couldn’t find stats on how many kids are injured in cab accidents (I tried Googling it, but the results were almost all personal injury lawyer websites–did you know that taxi liability is only $100,000 per passenger?). But common sense says it just ain’t that safe.

Of course, I tell myself that our kids crawling around the back of a cab stuck in traffic are still safer than kids in most parts of the world. But then I remember Germany — who will stand for rules and accountability if not the Germans? — where Viviane, with her bum knee and all, tried to order a cab 30 minutes ahead of time in Lübeck and found that there was no cab in town that would accept her and her child for the five-minute ride unless she had her own car seat.

Later in Berlin, a sweet-smelling Anatolian cabbie explained that German law puts a tremendous amount of responsibility on the shoulders of the taxidrivers. “If that baby dies in an accident,” he said, “the cab driver goes to jail.”

There’s a lot of pressure on New York cabbies (paying off those crazy-expensive hack licenses, getting caught up in the war on cab gab, surviving Yonkers), and I don’t think they are thinking much about child safety. Nor does the city require them to.

Do I prefer that approach or the German nanny-state tactics? I’m a libertarian on the issue, I guess: it should be left to the parents, even selfish ones like me, to make the call. Finding that balance between convenience and safety, after all, is a big part of what raising a small child is all about.