DADWAGON

Sasha is now just over 2 years old, and she’s talking—a lot. “Okay, let’s go outside!” she’ll say, and once we’re out on the disgusting streets of New York, she’ll point at patches of ice and say, “Slippery! Be careful.” She just goes and goes, and what she doesn’t know how to say in real words, she’ll fill in with babble. No idea what her point is, but it’s amazing to watch her talk on and on to me, to her friends in preschool, to her teachers, to her friends’ parents.

Jean recently told me that when she was dropping Sasha off at preschool, a couple of other parents were astounded at Sasha’s verbal ability, and asked us how we got her to talk so much, so easily.

Okay, yes, this is a blog post in which I talk about how brilliant my daughter is. Please forgive me; it’s inevitable on a parenting blog. But the dilemma is this: What’s the most humble way to respond? I see three basic options:

1. Take credit: We talk to her a lot, in English and Chinese, and surround her with words, so that’s why she talks so much. But, um, I’m not sure we did any such thing, and it sounds boastful. We’re not exceptional parents.

2. Take no credit: Sasha talks a lot because she wants to. Still, this seems like bragging: Oh, how special our daughter is! She’s just a unique genius!

3. Shrug, start mumbling, and pretty soon Sasha will start crying or drawing on something she shouldn’t be drawing on, or she’ll poop in her diaper, and I’ll be distracted and won’t have to answer at all.

Anyway, I asked Jean if there was another option, and she came up with the best one of all: “It’s her horoscope.”

Jesus, that’s why I married this woman! Now, Jean, what’s Sasha’s sign? I’m a man, so I don’t know these things.

Jean: “I don’t know what it’s called. That new one.”

Oh, right, the new one—the one they had to invent in the rejiggering of the zodiac that turned us all into people we didn’t know we were. (I, for instance, used to be a Leo—shy and proud all at once—but now I’m something else, so apparently no longer shy and proud.) Anyway, I don’t know what the new sign is called, and I’m not going to bother to look it up. All I know is that my daughter is so fucking special that the astrologers of the world had to invent a new horoscope sign to explain how awesome she is. Take that, fellow parents!

From our friend, the inimitable DaddyTypes, we learned about a new mom-op-ed in the WSJ–original home for the now fully meme-ified Tiger Mom excerpt. This new essay is from Lenore Skenazy, whom I look kindly on, despite her own adventures in book-opportunism and master self-branding. The topic this time?  Man-mania, HISteria, paraBOYa, or whatever else you want to call the irrational fear of men as predators around children.

Last week, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Timothy Murray, noticed smoke coming out of a minivan in his hometown of Worcester. He raced over and pulled out two small children, moments before the van’s tire exploded into flames. At which point, according to the AP account, the kids’ grandmother, who had been driving, nearly punched our hero in the face.

Why?

Mr. Murray said she told him she thought he might be a kidnapper.

And so it goes these days, when almost any man who has anything to do with a child can find himself suspected of being a creep. I call it “Worst-First” thinking: Gripped by pedophile panic, we jump to the very worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate ourselves for being so vigilant.

Consider the Iowa daycare center where Nichole Adkins works. The one male aide employed there, she told me in an interview, is not allowed to change diapers. “In fact,” Ms. Adkins said, “he has been asked to leave the classroom when diapering was happening.”

That is freaking insane, and if that kind of presumed guilt were levied against any other group, lawyers would be circling in the water.

But like any good trend-argument story, the examples here are curated from the raw fringe of male experiences. I’d wager that most encounters with the male species are handled with a lot more common sense. Still, we feel it. It’s at the playground, on playdates, in volunteering for school: that little touch of suspicion about what our motives are, who that kid is to us.

Something Skenazy didn’t quite hit on in her piece, though, was the extent to which men do this to each other. I don’t trust the other fathers any more than they trust me, I imagine. We’re all socialized. And it is, of course, a load of crap: just because most pedophiles are men doesn’t mean that other men should have to bear that shadow.  I have no idea what the hell a pedophile must be made of. That is one part of sexuality that doesn’t exist on a spectrum or a continuum. So I’m unimpressed by collective suspicion. Glad to see Skenazy is too.

First off, I’d like to lay claim to the title here at DadWagon of having put up The Nastiest Image of All Time. Charlie Brown, baby!

OK: mothers lie, and this, apparently, qualifies as news. Via the Times’s Motherlode blog:

In a survey of 5,000 British mothers by the Web site Netmums.com, a high percentage of moms admitted they have not been entirely honest when discussing parenting issues with their parents. They fudged about “coping in general” (69 percent) and “coping financially” (46 percent) and “time playing with children” (20.6 percent) and “time kids spend watching TV” (23 percent) and “food you feed your kids” (17 percent) and “your sex life” (13.6 percent.)

A longstanding trope at DadWagon addresses the ways in which mothers receive perhaps undue credit for their child-raising efforts, while fathers tend to be neglected, particularly within their homes. This, we all know, is largely a crock. Most women still do more with their children than men most of the time and in most circumstances (how do you like my qualifiers? Everyone feel covered?). We also know that men often enjoy voluble public approbation when paying even minimal attention to their kids. The ladies, meanwhile, are subjected to criticism for their efforts–and are further expected to accept that criticism with a smile.

But, still–THEY LIE!

Therefore, I hereby declare today Fake Moral Superiority Day on DadWagon. All male readers will be allowed to go out and get drunk tonight… and not even lie about it.