The Best Way to Yell at Your Kids

Would you yell at this cutie?

A couple of days ago, I picked Sasha up from her preschool in Chinatown. Lately, this has not been easy. Always always always, she won’t leave the school unless one of her friends is leaving at exactly the same time, which means we’ll often have to wait 10 or 15 minutes for the friend’s mom or dad to show up. This time, however, we were okay: twins Abby and Emma were going downstairs, too, so we descended in peace.

But outside, the nightmare began. Abby and Emma were standing with the school’s education director on the sidewalk, waiting for their mom to show up, and Sasha desperately wanted to go home and play with them. When told this was impossible, she—quite naturally—erupted in tears and screaming. I left in a hurry, dragging her down the hot street toward the subway. It sucked. She cried, she dawdled, I dragged, I tried to keep my cool in the 90-degree heat. By the time we’d reached Pike Street, she’d actually calmed down a little bit, and when I saw the walk signal begin flashing, I said to Sasha, “Let’s go! Hurry, hurry!” and started to jog. Sasha, however, was having none of this, and began wailing again, at which I finally lost it and yelled:

“Shut up!”

This was weird, and wrong, and I knew it instantly. Sasha’s crying suddenly changed. Where before it had been a frustrated bawl, now it was truly sadder, hurt. She stumbled across the street with me, quietly saying (to herself and to me), “Don’t say that! Don’t say shut up!”

She was right, and I should have known better. After all, when I was a kid, “shut up!” was the worst thing you could say in my family. Almost any other kind of outburst was okay, but to tell someone to stop talking was beyond the pale—a pure contravention of Gross family ideals. Needless to say, I told my little brother to shut up quite often, and always got in trouble for it. And I understood. If you can’t work out your differences by speaking to each other, even with anger in your voice and your vocabulary, then you’ve failed as a human being. “Shut up!” was a swear word with more force than any fuck or shit.

And Sasha knew that. Sasha herself has an angry word: stupid. She doesn’t know what it actually means, but when she’s pissed off at the world, she’ll mope about and just say “Stupid! Stupid!” simply because she knows it’s a word she’s never supposed to use. That, I guess, and “Shut up!”

What frustrated me most about my own “Shut up!” was that it worked against one of my larger goals: teaching Sasha that it’s okay to be angry. For me, this is important. As a kid, I often felt—from watching shows like “Sesame Street”—that anger itself was forbidden, and yet, for reasons I didn’t and still don’t understand, I was often angry, filled with rage and the need to break things. Mostly, I kept it in check, but when it erupted, it wasn’t pretty. Had I learned how to express anger, not in some hippy-dippy way but through other outlets (like skateboarding, which would later help quite a lot), I might have been a bit more settled. But now, with a single “Shut up!,” I was showing Sasha exactly the wrong thing to do.

When we’d made it across the street, I kneeled down, looked her in the face, and apologized. “I shouldn’t have said that, Sasha,” I said. “I’m sorry. Can we be friends again?” Then we had a nice hug and walked the rest of the block to the F-train station, tear-free.

Until, of course, we passed the bodega, where she screeched for a bottle of water, and then when we got onto the train and she demanded to sit down in a carful of people, and then when we emerged from the subway and she didn’t want to go home, and then and then and then. But did I yell at her again? Nope. This time the “Shut up!” stayed internal and silent, directed at the one who should know better: me.

Envy, Thy Name Is Baseball

Before I get into any of this, let me be clear: things aren’t so bad. I have a lovely and continually pregnant wife, two lovely and preternaturally intelligent kids, a lovely and relatively remunerative job in an only-perceived-as-dying-but-not-really-dying industry, most of my teeth, and whatever additional things one might think of to connote basic, boring, lame-ass middle class ambrosia.

Now onto the complaining.

So I took JP to a baseball game this past weekend, which is a fine thing to do. Good seats, better hot dogs, and a fireworks display at the end. The only problem was that it wasn’t to a game contested by my favorite team–the Mets (whatever)–or his favorite–the Yankees. No, we weren’t watching the Major Leagues at all, but the minors, the Met’s a-ball affiliate that plays its games on the boardwalk in Coney Island. This was a reasonably priced evening, as these things go: $16 a pop for the tickets, plus whatever I spent on two dogs and a two cups of ice cream (served in a tiny cup that resembles a Met batting helmet–souvenir!) Fun was had by all (although the woman sitting next to us that JP spent the night describing videogames to might disagree).

As a kid, my father, who, at the time at least, occupied a fairly similar place in the middle class as I do today, took me to a few ballgames per year–major, not minor–plus the Knicks, and don’t forget the U.S. Open, a couple of Broadway shows, the opera or ballet once or twice when he could sedate me into going, along with a few other pricey cultural activities that slip my mind. He also sent me, my brother, and my two stepbrothers to an uptown private school.

Again, Tomoko and I are doing all right. It’s just that times have changed in this brutal and vicious city we so love, that the middle class lifestyle is now only the prerogative of the super-wealthy. Or, a better way to put it–I went looking for the middle class (in my wallet) and discovered there was no there there.

Final complaint: brother, can you spare a dime (I’d like to retire some day).

Tribal and Viral In Anaheim

Yes, from the 'We're Going to VidCon' music video

When my fourteen-year-old son, Jack, ran ahead of me into the gleaming, Oz-like Anaheim Convention Center for the third annual VidCon, he left me with much to ponder. Sure, the revolutionary aspects of online video fascinate me (“YouTube isn’t something you look AT, it’s something you participate IN”) and after two days of attending panels, meet-ups, and performances, I’ve got a lot to mull over. But I’m thinking mostly about my son’s tribe.

It is a bittersweet thing, watching your kid find his crew. The YouTube kids, like pen pals connecting for the first time in real life (IRL), are charming, so that’s the sweet part. The bitter part reveals itself when I do something kind of dumb: My better self knows my son would really rather not have me groom him in front of his new friends, yet some pathology, some need, compels me to straighten the lapel of his natty blazer, to his great chagrin. He’s kind, and he appreciates his parent-funded attendance to VidCon, so he mutes his irritation, but he cannot wait to ditch me and bolt into the breach to further discover who he is, what he can do, without his Dorky Dad interfering.
When I spy him in the distance, in fact, he is as happy as I’ve ever seen him, fully engaged, singing, laughing, dancing. And it is time to go get my ass another cup of coffee, and mind my own business. Find some other business to mind. Luckily, I am not the only functioning adult here, and there is much to do and see.
My empty-nester friends, who long for the days when their kids were home to irritate, have no time for my sulking. Just as further-along parents used to be jealous when my son clung to me like a spider monkey, I’m doing the same at parents wrangling tots in the hotel lobby. This feels correct like lactic acid in stressed muscles feels correct; it’s not altogether unpleasant pain. It’s part of the deal, says my Jiminy Cricket, spare me the bitching.
I am glad my son is throwing his lot with this group, whose desire to communicate seems a shared cardinal trait. Of course VidCon also offers opportunities to witness aching hunger for attention, naked avarice, and various other dark strains of humanity, but all that is just predictable undertow. Most attendees—like Jack—aspire to use YouTube (and whatever comes after it) in the way my generation used/uses the printed page, recording gear, radio, et al, to get their work into the world.
And even though VidCon rides on technology, I recognize his tribe from my distant analog past; bookish, passionate about music, alternately thrilled and repulsed by their percolating bodies, occasionally hostile to/impatient with dimwits, and fiercely loyal to one another. Heartbreakers, all of them, whether they know it or not. And if anything is truly, uncontrollably viral, it’s that.

DadWagon Q&A: Jennifer Niesslein of the late, lamented Brain, Child

As editors of a dadblog that rarely produces anything particularly smart, we are keenly aware how little protein-rich writing there is about parenting. So at the end of May we were saddened, along with the rest of the Internet, to hear that the magazine Brain, Child would stop publishing. The magazine, run for 13 years by co-founders Stephanie Wilkinson and Jennifer Neisslein, had a unique style of parental inquiry, often expressed through searing personal essays, that seems quite irreplaceable. And yet, they are no more. Neisslein was good enough to chat with DadWagon about Brain, Child, its demise, and the future of writing about parenting.

DadWagon So let’s start at the beginning. Why did you start Brain, Child?

Niesslein The short answer: it’s something Stephanie and I wanted to read. The longer answer is that I didn’t feel as if I had a community (Steph was literally the only new mother I knew at that point), and I was irritated at the condescension directed at mothers.

DadWagon Let’s talk about that condescension. Where did you see it?

Niesslein Oh, holy hell–everywhere? From the ped office calling me “Mommy” to various dogma-based advice-givers warnings that if you don’t follow these parameters, you will almost certainly screw your kid up. We just really wanted something that was a peer-to-peer kind of vibe.

DadWagon The wonderful (!) thing is that those are completely different kinds of condescension, although they both would seem to add to a sort of forced identity change: you are a mother now, I’m going to call you Mommy and tell you how to raise your child

Niesslein Yep! The whole title is a play on, yes, I have a brain and a child, and it’s, as Steph says, not an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp.

DadWagon So that peer-to-peer conversation, did it tend to have its own tilt? That is, did it advocate for more of a free-range parenting approach, for example?

Niesslein Not really. We don’t have any particular parenting philosophy. Honestly, I couldn’t really live with myself if I thought I had all the answers for every family. Do what works for you. I think that’s one reason people liked the magazine. You get to step inside families like yours and families that aren’t like yours. For me, at least, it’s been a big empathy-strengthening experience.

DadWagon I guess that is a bit of a hallmark of the magazine, that open-mindedness. Do you think it’s still as rare now as it was in 1999 to find that kind of writing on parenting?

Niesslein No, not all. What I think is rare still are places to publish the length of work that we do. If you’re writing under 1000 words, there are some outlets, and if you’re writing a book, it’s possible to find a publisher, but if you’re writing long, meaty essays about parenthood, it’s a tough place to be.

DadWagon It does raise the question: your readers (including folks we’ve heard from) were passionate, you were doing something quite different then and now. Why did it fail?

Niesslein I don’t actually think of this as a failure. Maybe I’m being delusional, but we had a good long run, got to do things and meet people we wouldn’t have otherwise, and actually made a modest living for a number of years. The day we made our announcement, the message we got… that was probably the most gratifying day of my professional life.

I’m thinking of this as a transition to a different business model. Why are we having to transition? I wish I knew the answer. But I think it was a combination of rising postage costs, the simple cost of paper, and the internet. Or not really the internet but the perception that the written word should be free.

DadWagon The idea that something like Brain, Child should be free is amazing, because it was already quite a bargain to subscribe (I’m saying that, of course, as the kind of hypocrite who didn’t actually subscribe). But seriously, you were charging very little for some great content. If you had it to do over, would you raise rates, or is there something else you’d change?

Niesslein Hmm. I can’t think of what. All of publishing, from the big six to small independent magazines like Brain, Child, are in flux, it seems to me.

DadWagon You mentioned in your Transitions letter than e-subscriptions had been going well, but not enough to keep the presses running. Will you keep eBooks going? With your anthologies? What is the afterlife plan?

Niesslein It seems like you have to have an ereader version these days, doesn’t it? We still haven’t worked out all the nitty gritty of the anthologies yet. We’re uploading the Summer issue to the printer today, and then I think the plan is rest and vacation, then work on the new plan.

DadWagon Will you go back to journalism?

Niesslein I’m actually working on a novel now–I’m 25K words in. Who knows if I have any talent for fiction, but I’m having fun. It’s like the lamest mid-life crisis ever.

DadWagon Yes, from editing to writing isn’t exactly sailing around the world for a year, but I understand the vertigo.

Niesslein It’s about my speed.

DadWagon Final question: the world of (ick) “mommy blogging” and “dadblogging” has come into existence almost entirely since you started Brain, Child. What’s your view of the parenting blogosphere in general? What is it useful for, what doesn’t it do well?

Niesslein I’m not very well-versed in it. But I once interviewed Jenn Mattern (from the blog Breed ‘Em and Weep), and she made the point that writing is writing–parenthood is just one lens to look at the human experience. I think that’s true, whether you’re writing for a magazine or a blog. Like everything, the quality of blogs can vary and what people are looking to get out of them varies. Sorry to be so wishy-washy here.

DadWagon I can see the point. But to echo what you said before, longform is not a big strength in the blogosphere. I hope someone picks up where you left off, and pushes it forward. There. That’s my closing wish.

Niesslein I’m trying to think of something pithy to say here.

DadWagon Please let us know when the anthologies come out.

Niesslein Oh, definitely! Thanks for the chat.