Since all parents are busy giving their children a variant on the same generic style of upbringing it is a truism that every family at some point has to consider when to bite the bullet, take the plunge, climb the mountain. I am talking, of course, about when to embark upon the dreaded and mystical Orlando vacation. Obviously this is mostly for Disneyworld, but I’m advised that now there’s apparently all kinds of other shit there as well.
The topic of the Orlando vacation is not something a good father ever raises himself. The discussion is nearly always thrust upon him by his oldest child, but sometimes you can get surprised while offguard by a meddlesome grandparent, so be cautious.
You may or may not be a Disney fan. I haven’t been as an adult, so I’m not really sure if I am a fan, but regardless of whether you like it or not, the key goal of any father when it comes to Orlando is simple: go to Orlando as many times as you want, but make sure that you only pay for it once. If you personally purchase plane tickets to Orlando three or more times, you’re a horrible failure and, frankly, you’re raising the bar for the rest of us, and the organized dad community is going to have to blacklist you. No more letting you admire our grills and stereo systems and shit like that. You’re getting the Miller Lite in a can at the cookout while we enjoy a Red Hook or Great Lakes brew. Consider yourself warned.
So how to scheme so you only have to pay for it once? You have to try to go at a time when your youngest child is at least 5 or 6 so that they’ll remember it when they are older and don’t try to claim that you photoshopped them into Disney vacation pictures to trick them. So the main key is delaying that first visit.
After that, a few years will go by and the youngest will whine about going again, but by then your oldest will be in high school and will think Disney is uncool. So they will do your dirty work for you and put the kibosh on any Orlando vacation for you (this is one of those situations where the oldest mocking out the youngest at the dinner table for wanting to go see Mickey Mouse “like a baby” needs to be deftly ignored by you).
So how to delay the first visit? I could only come up with one solution: Socially retard your oldest child. You need to make your oldest child a giant pussy. When they’re seven years old, tell them how the rollercoasters normally “kill probably three or four people a day” due to “flying offtrack on the hills.” So when they’re eight and Disneyworld comes up you can say “Sure, but are you ready to go on the rollercoaster, yet? We don’t want to go now when you aren’t ready for the rollercoaster, yet!” Normally this will shut them up for at least six months.
This is a strategy you can use in any number of scenarios; not just Disneyworld. A problem a lot of families have is, when going to the movies, the 12-year old wants to go see the PG-13 superhero movie that would completely freak out the 6-year old, whereas the 6-year old is still up for the G rated fare. How to get around this problem? You need to introduce nothing to your 12 year old until absolutely necessary. Stretch Teletubbies out until age 3 (it will be very painful, but worth it in the long run). Sesame Street stays on until age 9. Resist your impulses to share Star Wars and other cool movies with your oldest. That way your oldest will have no problem when you make him go see the latest Winnie-the-Pooh movie at age 9 along with his 3 year old little sister.
A handy guide I use is to THINK MORMON. When it comes to my oldest child, I ask myself “Would Tagg Romney let his son or daughter do this?” If no, I don’t let my oldest do it either.
Of course, the flip side for those of us with 3 children is to make sure that the youngest is raised a little bit ahead of her time. She needs to figure out Spiderman and Batman movies and be ready for the PG-13 slashers by age 8 or 9 at the latest. I’m pretty sure this is why although she’s only 18 months old, my wife is making sure that she has a good handle on most of the swear words out there.
June 27, 2008
June 20, 2008
Roofing It
(Settle down; no, this isn’t a blogpost about a date rape drug. jeez … this is a parenting website for chrissake)
Most of the things that I do with my children tends to fall into two categories. Category One is in the “pure fun” category. Sometimes I’ll just go for a ride on the public transit trains (in Cleveland, we call it The Rapid) with my son just because he loves it. Or we’ll go to the drug store and buy a bunch of licorice or play music and dance or play video games. Category Two is the “crap that has to get done” category: taking them to school, getting clothes on or off; brushing teeth, picking up the playroom, etc.
But like most parents, I try to do things aren’t just fun and aren’t just crap that has to get done (although it doesn’t happen as much as it should). Like most parents, however, one of the things that we do that is fun AND good for them is reading. Early after the birth of our daughter, my wife informed me that, if we were an English class, she was “literature” and I was “grammar.” Translated, this meant that my wife would read to the kids all the time (which she does), but she was looking to me to do the heavy lifting when it came to actually teaching them how to read.
I had some educational training (of dyslexic kids) right after I got out of college, so I just happened to have a professional set of phonics flash cards in my old teaching box. And so when my oldest daughter was three and showed an interest in reading, I started showing her the sounds the cards made and taught her a dozen cards or so and started going over them with her, without thinking about it very much. And then, all of a sudden, I realized that I was using flash cards with my three year old child.
Certainly this crossed the line. Doing this seemed like what we call a “strict liability” offense in the legal profession: if you are using flash cards with your children, it doesn’t matter what your excuse is: the judge doesn’t want to hear it, you’re guilty of overparenting and that’s that. Commercials make fun of behavior like this.
And so I put the flash cards away, intending not to use them, but my daughter requesting the “sound cards” and so I ended up using them 50 or 100 times with her as she was learning to read. Yet another principle of mine out the window.
After 6 or 9 months of enjoying this, she eventually plateau-ed and stopped getting better at reading. It got a tad frustrating for her, so she stopped wanting to try to read, and so it got frustrating for me as well and I’d sometimes nudge her (“come over here and lets finish the cards”). And I think she sensed my frustration and that led her to establish some unfortunate negative associations with reading. What kind of father makes their child dislike reading? The kind that uses flashcards, I guess. I felt awful.
After letting things go for a while, I eventually wanted to start reading in the home again. Thus, I resorted to a parent’s last resort: bribery. Simple candy or toys seemed just too cheap. I wanted to offer something better, and so I said “if you will read to me, I’ll let you read to me on the roof.” This got her attention.
In our old house, we had a screened in side porch that probably ran 10 feet by 18 feet, but there was no house over the porch, so you could climb out of our second story bedroom window onto the lightly pitched porch roof. The trees hid the street. It was actually really really nice. And I could take my 5-year old outside with a book and a bag full of grapes and she’d read for 30 minutes or more. The roof was magic. Her little brother would complain about us getting to go out on the roof, and I explained to him “when you are ready to read, we’ll go out on the roof too.” This was going to be my magic bullet.
But there was a downside (there’s always a downside).
My wife is one of those people that loves a good breeze, the windows always have to be open in the summer unless the air conditioning is on. Unfortunately, some of the screens in our old house were tough to put down. So one day, walking through my bedroom, I heard someone say “Boo.” I whirled around and say no one in the room. I heard laughing and looked out and saw my three year old son, hanging out on the roof by himself. He hadn’t even taken a book out with him. With that incident, my wife brought a swift conclusion to roof reading.
Of course, in our new house, the accessible part of the roof is flat and bigger and really safe. And my four and a half year old son has stalled out on his reading …
Most of the things that I do with my children tends to fall into two categories. Category One is in the “pure fun” category. Sometimes I’ll just go for a ride on the public transit trains (in Cleveland, we call it The Rapid) with my son just because he loves it. Or we’ll go to the drug store and buy a bunch of licorice or play music and dance or play video games. Category Two is the “crap that has to get done” category: taking them to school, getting clothes on or off; brushing teeth, picking up the playroom, etc.
But like most parents, I try to do things aren’t just fun and aren’t just crap that has to get done (although it doesn’t happen as much as it should). Like most parents, however, one of the things that we do that is fun AND good for them is reading. Early after the birth of our daughter, my wife informed me that, if we were an English class, she was “literature” and I was “grammar.” Translated, this meant that my wife would read to the kids all the time (which she does), but she was looking to me to do the heavy lifting when it came to actually teaching them how to read.
I had some educational training (of dyslexic kids) right after I got out of college, so I just happened to have a professional set of phonics flash cards in my old teaching box. And so when my oldest daughter was three and showed an interest in reading, I started showing her the sounds the cards made and taught her a dozen cards or so and started going over them with her, without thinking about it very much. And then, all of a sudden, I realized that I was using flash cards with my three year old child.
Certainly this crossed the line. Doing this seemed like what we call a “strict liability” offense in the legal profession: if you are using flash cards with your children, it doesn’t matter what your excuse is: the judge doesn’t want to hear it, you’re guilty of overparenting and that’s that. Commercials make fun of behavior like this.
And so I put the flash cards away, intending not to use them, but my daughter requesting the “sound cards” and so I ended up using them 50 or 100 times with her as she was learning to read. Yet another principle of mine out the window.
After 6 or 9 months of enjoying this, she eventually plateau-ed and stopped getting better at reading. It got a tad frustrating for her, so she stopped wanting to try to read, and so it got frustrating for me as well and I’d sometimes nudge her (“come over here and lets finish the cards”). And I think she sensed my frustration and that led her to establish some unfortunate negative associations with reading. What kind of father makes their child dislike reading? The kind that uses flashcards, I guess. I felt awful.
After letting things go for a while, I eventually wanted to start reading in the home again. Thus, I resorted to a parent’s last resort: bribery. Simple candy or toys seemed just too cheap. I wanted to offer something better, and so I said “if you will read to me, I’ll let you read to me on the roof.” This got her attention.
In our old house, we had a screened in side porch that probably ran 10 feet by 18 feet, but there was no house over the porch, so you could climb out of our second story bedroom window onto the lightly pitched porch roof. The trees hid the street. It was actually really really nice. And I could take my 5-year old outside with a book and a bag full of grapes and she’d read for 30 minutes or more. The roof was magic. Her little brother would complain about us getting to go out on the roof, and I explained to him “when you are ready to read, we’ll go out on the roof too.” This was going to be my magic bullet.
But there was a downside (there’s always a downside).
My wife is one of those people that loves a good breeze, the windows always have to be open in the summer unless the air conditioning is on. Unfortunately, some of the screens in our old house were tough to put down. So one day, walking through my bedroom, I heard someone say “Boo.” I whirled around and say no one in the room. I heard laughing and looked out and saw my three year old son, hanging out on the roof by himself. He hadn’t even taken a book out with him. With that incident, my wife brought a swift conclusion to roof reading.
Of course, in our new house, the accessible part of the roof is flat and bigger and really safe. And my four and a half year old son has stalled out on his reading …
June 16, 2008
Father's Day
As I hope most of you remembered, it was yesterday. I had a good one this year. After my first few Father’s Days, I began to think that passing down crappy Father’s Day traditions was something that women are really good at. What I’ve now realized, and what new fathers need to know, is that Father’s Day is one of those days that just takes your family a while to get right.
The thing about Father’s Day that still seems just wrong to me is almost too embarrassing to mention because it feels so selfish. What seems wrong is that your wife will do stuff for her dad and you have to do stuff for your dad. It’s like sharing a birthday with a disabled uncle or something and having to go to Chuck E. Cheese for your party at an inappropriate age because that’s what they want to do. You don’t begrudge them: they deserve their happiness. But you kind of feel ripped off. And, I mean, c’mon, it’s not like your dad or you father are still doing any day-to-day parenting, dammit. (Even typing this just seems like inappropriate whining, but at least I was able to get it off my chest somewhere, and my dad and father-in-law are very good about this).
One reason that Father’s Day can be a flop for new dads is that I suspect what happens is that most wives remember doing things for their fathers – picking them flowers; making them pancakes; or buying them ties – and, if their dad was a good actor, they remember that their fathers seemed to like it. So the first few Father’s Days, they just go on autopilot and have the kids do the same stuff that they did, without stepping back to think that maybe their own dad was faking his enjoyment of nasty M&M pancakes they used to make. Another potential pitfall is the actual real budget-busting gift that costs twice as much as you would’ve spent on something (and you’re just paying for it anyway).
But this year, everything was golden. I got to sleep in past 10 a.m.! The kids got me a big jar full of Bottle Caps, my favorite old school candy, and a nice video thank you. And we went to see the Indians and C.C. Sabathia beat the Padres and Greg Maddux. And then I went and bought myself a new grill (the old one was 9 years old and on its last legs, so we were going to get one anyway). That’s quite a day.
The thing about Father’s Day that still seems just wrong to me is almost too embarrassing to mention because it feels so selfish. What seems wrong is that your wife will do stuff for her dad and you have to do stuff for your dad. It’s like sharing a birthday with a disabled uncle or something and having to go to Chuck E. Cheese for your party at an inappropriate age because that’s what they want to do. You don’t begrudge them: they deserve their happiness. But you kind of feel ripped off. And, I mean, c’mon, it’s not like your dad or you father are still doing any day-to-day parenting, dammit. (Even typing this just seems like inappropriate whining, but at least I was able to get it off my chest somewhere, and my dad and father-in-law are very good about this).
One reason that Father’s Day can be a flop for new dads is that I suspect what happens is that most wives remember doing things for their fathers – picking them flowers; making them pancakes; or buying them ties – and, if their dad was a good actor, they remember that their fathers seemed to like it. So the first few Father’s Days, they just go on autopilot and have the kids do the same stuff that they did, without stepping back to think that maybe their own dad was faking his enjoyment of nasty M&M pancakes they used to make. Another potential pitfall is the actual real budget-busting gift that costs twice as much as you would’ve spent on something (and you’re just paying for it anyway).
But this year, everything was golden. I got to sleep in past 10 a.m.! The kids got me a big jar full of Bottle Caps, my favorite old school candy, and a nice video thank you. And we went to see the Indians and C.C. Sabathia beat the Padres and Greg Maddux. And then I went and bought myself a new grill (the old one was 9 years old and on its last legs, so we were going to get one anyway). That’s quite a day.
June 11, 2008
The Last Day of School
Last Thursday was the kids’ last day of school, as I’d imagine is the case for most of you with school aged kids. The approach of the last day is always a tad bittersweet for me. I think most working adults think, even if just for a second “damn those kids are lucky,” and I’m no exception (and I was a teacher for two years, so I also think “damn those teachers are lucky; why the hell did I stop doing that?”). But at least I get a reprieve from my normal help-get-the-kids-ready-and-drive-them-to-school duties, so summer break does normally mean 30 extra minutes of sleep for me, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. And to the extent that I sometimes feel that my stay-at-home wife has it easy with two kids in school these days, now with all three kids home all day well … lets just say she’s working harder than me these days.
We don’t need no education; we don’t need no thought control
That was all they sang, just the one line, over and over. It was simple enough that many of us younger kids picked it up and started singing it, over and over (and dumb kids in my class simplified it further to “we don’t need no education; we don’t need no education”: repeat). That phrase must’ve been uttered 10,000 times at St. Mary’s elementary school in June of 1980.
We don’t need no education; we don’t need no thought control
That was all they sang, just the one line, over and over. It was simple enough that many of us younger kids picked it up and started singing it, over and over (and dumb kids in my class simplified it further to “we don’t need no education; we don’t need no education”: repeat). That phrase must’ve been uttered 10,000 times at St. Mary’s elementary school in June of 1980.
I was thinking of this last week, driving the kids into their second to last day of school. They were chatting to each other in the back seat and I just started singing along. I began to get into it and, before long, I was belting out “Hey, teacher, LEAVE US KIDS ALONE!” I looked in the rear-view mirror to see four eyes staring at me, wondering who the hell their father was talking to.
June 7, 2008
The Kindergarchy and Laissez-Faire Aren't the Only Options
There seems to be a backlash recently (or maybe I’m just paying more attention) to the phenomenon of overparenting and overscheduling kids: people are just saying no to too many activities. An article that came out last week written by Joseph Epstein about how the United States has turned into a Kindergarchy (a term I really like) where Epstein rails against our overly child-centered lives here in the 21st Century. Add this to the “Free-Range Kids” champion, Lenore Skenazy, the mom who let her nine-year old ride the New York City subway unaccompanied (something I support, by the way) and got all kinds of guff for it (luckily the article includes a handy picture for all the pedophiles out there that are looking to nab an unaccompanied minor on the subway … I keed!). And a few years ago, Caitlin Flanagan emphasized in some of her articles in the Atlantic that her mom tended to not pay too much attention to her. There are other examples…
A few things about this. Of course kids should play outside and shouldn’t have scheduled activities taking over all of their after-school time and weekends all of the time. The fact that you shouldn’t overschedule your kids and let their schedule dominate your life is so incredibly basic and such a cliché that it’s hard to work up the energy to even build up this paper tiger enough to knock it down. You shouldn’t be dropping your kid off at the airport at age 9 to spend a month at Bela Karoli’s gymnastics camp. You shouldn’t taking your 9 year old to 5-day a week soccer camp, even if you think he’s the next Landon Donovan. If you don’t get that, you probably aren’t reading this anyway. So on some level Epstein and Skenazy are of course correct in their basic assertions: don’t schedule the hell out of your kids. But 97% of people don’t actually do this (at least for more than one season).
But there are really two over-scheduling issues here, based upon the age of the kids. At ages 5 through 11 or so, the parents are generally in control with respect to the activities their kids participate in. They can pretend that the kids want to swim an extra hour but, at this age, kids will express their preferences. And most kids at this age are hedonists at heart. They make a quick and simple decision when choosing between an second hour of violin lessons each week or using that hour to go outside and play freeze tag with the neighbors. But, at the end of the day, you’re in charge.
But older kids, 12 and up, tend to, well, do what they want. And kids these days, for a variety of reasons, tend to schedule themselves into all kinds of activities. Part of the problem here is cultural. If a kid wants to be a swimmer, the high school invariably instills in him or her the idea that they have to try to be state champs and devote themselves to the sport and come in for 60 minutes before school in addition to the 2 hour practices after school, not to mention the offseason programs and weight training. Many high schools athletic programs resemble the programs that Olympic athletes went through less than 100 years ago.
But if your 15 year old wants to go out for the team, and wants to be good, are Skenazy and Epstein saying that the parent is supposed to forbid it?
I get the sense that the demographic that Epstein and Skenazy really are focusing on is the younger 5-11 bracket; and the younger children of rich people. So really how many kids are they actually worried about?
And they do what everyone tends to do: lionize the past. I grew up in a nice middle-class town of 15,000 people where lots of people had kids and the kids roamed the neighborhood. As the oldest of four kids, my mom often had her hands full and the only enrichment activity I was given was to “go outside and play.”
I vividly remember those days. Kicking around in the driveway for 15 minutes. Deciding to actually try to find a friend. Getting 3 guys together and then finding another … we’ve got 5! … neighborhood kids together and spending another hour trying to get one more so we had 6 guys so we could get a real backyard football game going (anything less than 3-on-3 kind of sucked). And then, when the last guy finally finished his chores, and the game was ready to go … we’d get one series in, and one of the guys invariably would get called in for lunch. And the game would be off, or we’d end up with a less-than ideal lineup.
So there’s 4 hours outside and the end result is a game that lasted all of twenty minutes. Great.
And that was if we were able to avoid the older kids who would steal our ball and teach us the meaning of all kinds of new vocabulary words with never an adult in sight. I guess if this was a good thing, a good educational tool, then I think we should suggest that all adults be mugged, just to know what it feels like, right?
Back then, I just thought getting the ball stolen by Randall just sucked. All it did for me was imprint the notion that life wasn’t fair and treating someone like crap actually had no real consequences most of the time. Isn’t that the opposite of what we try to teach kids?
I don’t doubt that all this no-rules-laissez-faire kicking around the neighborhood kept me busy, and kept a lot of kids busy (and I’m sure that if you are only given 10 books to read in your childhood, you’ll get to know those books very well, and might even appreciate books in general more than someone who has had anything they ever wanted to read). But wishing this mundane existence on the youth of America; nay, demanding that it be imposed upon the youth of America; I’m not sure why anyone would want that.
If such a thing could even be imposed today. I was born after the baby boom ended, but even then, the world of the 1970’s is different demographically from today (and I don’t mean that today there is more crime and some huge wave of sex predators out there; I don’t buy most of that, since while crime rates did spike for a while, they are generally back down these days). Overall, there were a whole lot more kids running around back then, for a lot of reasons. People were having kids earlier, so there were less DINKs out there. People were living shorter lives, so there were less old people with no kids filling out the neighborhood. Families were larger back then; now a family has 2 kids instead of 4. Back then people had less money to spend on outside activities, so they couldn’t afford to be out of the house paying to do things: they were hanging out near the house.
All of these factors combined mean that there were generally more kids running around back then than you see today. If Epstein’s boyhood self hopped into a time machine, I doubt he would be able to scare up much of a stickball game here in 2008.
And so I don’t see a lot of value in giving your child a completely unscheduled childhood these days. It looks particularly valueless when compared to kids’ activities. Indeed, young kids actually really like to have a couple of things to do a week. My daughter has a weekly 30 minute lesson from a piano teacher and, while she’s really just getting started, so far she absolutely loves it. My kids play baseball or softball in the spring, have swimming lessons in the summer and soccer in the fall. They go to art classes and nature camps from time to time. They like this stuff a heck of a lot more than I ever thought they would.
But there’s an entirely different area that Epstein and Flanagan delve into that Skenazy doesn’t seem to touch, and that is the idea that it is somehow debasing for parents to involve themselves in matters that are thought to be childish. Epstein and Flanagan seem to want us to feel shame if we play Go Fish with our kids.
I’m sorry guys, but life isn’t neatly divided into adult activities that exist over here and kid activities that exist over there. I personally have tastes that run the gamut from highbrow to lowbrow to everything in-between. Many of those tastes – complicated literature; European porn (again, I keed) – can’t be properly enjoyed by a child. But other things I enjoy – watching baseball, eating at a greasy diner, hiking, playing chess – are completely accessible to my kids. If I like these things, why shouldn’t I enjoy these things with my family, the people that I love? Why is that debasing?
Writers in many ways devote their lives to the pursuit of influencing people’s opinions on things: Leaving aside the obvious examples of editorial pages and opinion columns, journalism is often the pursuit of giving people more facts so they are more informed. Biography and memoir are often dependent upon the empathy of the read. And I would hope that most people would admit that there is literature out there that changed their outlook on the world.
Yet Flanagan and Epstein, who have devoted their own lives as writers to influencing people’s thinking, seem to be saying that parents should actively try to avoid influencing the thinking of the people that they care about the most: their kids. They want to convince everyone else of the way to live their lives, but they don't want to influence their kids. Does this make any sense at all?
In fact, the unbalanced nature of the parent-child relationship opens all kinds of great areas of conversation. I enjoy baseball games with my friends, but my friends don’t want to hear me talk about the way 2nd baseman is positioned for half an inning. My daughter, however, hearing for the first time how the middle infielders often position themselves based upon the batter, or lean one way or another based upon the pitch that’s called … when I explain that to my daughter, and then she SEES IT …
… she gets a smile of recognition on her face that is beauty and magic and just every wonderful that exists in this world. Watching the light bulb of a great idea go off in your kid’s head: I’m not sure there’s anything better.
I realize that, at the end of the day, it’s a balancing act. There’s no reason why kids can’t sometime be kicked outside, away from the supervision of their parents, and sometimes have a friend over and pretend they’re animals. But there’s no reason that the next day they shouldn’t be sat down and be taught how to play that marvelous game called Euchre, and why they can’t be taken to a Little Gym karate class every now and again.
I don’t want to live in the Kindergarchy. I also don’t want to live in a wholly parent-centered society.
But at the end of the day, no one is asking you to make that choice, and there’s plenty of room in between: and there is the space where most of us raise our kids.
So I hope Epstein and others have a good time beating down that paper tiger. Because now that I've spent 2 hours writing this, I'm going to go play with water balloons with my kids.
A few things about this. Of course kids should play outside and shouldn’t have scheduled activities taking over all of their after-school time and weekends all of the time. The fact that you shouldn’t overschedule your kids and let their schedule dominate your life is so incredibly basic and such a cliché that it’s hard to work up the energy to even build up this paper tiger enough to knock it down. You shouldn’t be dropping your kid off at the airport at age 9 to spend a month at Bela Karoli’s gymnastics camp. You shouldn’t taking your 9 year old to 5-day a week soccer camp, even if you think he’s the next Landon Donovan. If you don’t get that, you probably aren’t reading this anyway. So on some level Epstein and Skenazy are of course correct in their basic assertions: don’t schedule the hell out of your kids. But 97% of people don’t actually do this (at least for more than one season).
But there are really two over-scheduling issues here, based upon the age of the kids. At ages 5 through 11 or so, the parents are generally in control with respect to the activities their kids participate in. They can pretend that the kids want to swim an extra hour but, at this age, kids will express their preferences. And most kids at this age are hedonists at heart. They make a quick and simple decision when choosing between an second hour of violin lessons each week or using that hour to go outside and play freeze tag with the neighbors. But, at the end of the day, you’re in charge.
But older kids, 12 and up, tend to, well, do what they want. And kids these days, for a variety of reasons, tend to schedule themselves into all kinds of activities. Part of the problem here is cultural. If a kid wants to be a swimmer, the high school invariably instills in him or her the idea that they have to try to be state champs and devote themselves to the sport and come in for 60 minutes before school in addition to the 2 hour practices after school, not to mention the offseason programs and weight training. Many high schools athletic programs resemble the programs that Olympic athletes went through less than 100 years ago.
But if your 15 year old wants to go out for the team, and wants to be good, are Skenazy and Epstein saying that the parent is supposed to forbid it?
I get the sense that the demographic that Epstein and Skenazy really are focusing on is the younger 5-11 bracket; and the younger children of rich people. So really how many kids are they actually worried about?
And they do what everyone tends to do: lionize the past. I grew up in a nice middle-class town of 15,000 people where lots of people had kids and the kids roamed the neighborhood. As the oldest of four kids, my mom often had her hands full and the only enrichment activity I was given was to “go outside and play.”
I vividly remember those days. Kicking around in the driveway for 15 minutes. Deciding to actually try to find a friend. Getting 3 guys together and then finding another … we’ve got 5! … neighborhood kids together and spending another hour trying to get one more so we had 6 guys so we could get a real backyard football game going (anything less than 3-on-3 kind of sucked). And then, when the last guy finally finished his chores, and the game was ready to go … we’d get one series in, and one of the guys invariably would get called in for lunch. And the game would be off, or we’d end up with a less-than ideal lineup.
So there’s 4 hours outside and the end result is a game that lasted all of twenty minutes. Great.
And that was if we were able to avoid the older kids who would steal our ball and teach us the meaning of all kinds of new vocabulary words with never an adult in sight. I guess if this was a good thing, a good educational tool, then I think we should suggest that all adults be mugged, just to know what it feels like, right?
Back then, I just thought getting the ball stolen by Randall just sucked. All it did for me was imprint the notion that life wasn’t fair and treating someone like crap actually had no real consequences most of the time. Isn’t that the opposite of what we try to teach kids?
I don’t doubt that all this no-rules-laissez-faire kicking around the neighborhood kept me busy, and kept a lot of kids busy (and I’m sure that if you are only given 10 books to read in your childhood, you’ll get to know those books very well, and might even appreciate books in general more than someone who has had anything they ever wanted to read). But wishing this mundane existence on the youth of America; nay, demanding that it be imposed upon the youth of America; I’m not sure why anyone would want that.
If such a thing could even be imposed today. I was born after the baby boom ended, but even then, the world of the 1970’s is different demographically from today (and I don’t mean that today there is more crime and some huge wave of sex predators out there; I don’t buy most of that, since while crime rates did spike for a while, they are generally back down these days). Overall, there were a whole lot more kids running around back then, for a lot of reasons. People were having kids earlier, so there were less DINKs out there. People were living shorter lives, so there were less old people with no kids filling out the neighborhood. Families were larger back then; now a family has 2 kids instead of 4. Back then people had less money to spend on outside activities, so they couldn’t afford to be out of the house paying to do things: they were hanging out near the house.
All of these factors combined mean that there were generally more kids running around back then than you see today. If Epstein’s boyhood self hopped into a time machine, I doubt he would be able to scare up much of a stickball game here in 2008.
And so I don’t see a lot of value in giving your child a completely unscheduled childhood these days. It looks particularly valueless when compared to kids’ activities. Indeed, young kids actually really like to have a couple of things to do a week. My daughter has a weekly 30 minute lesson from a piano teacher and, while she’s really just getting started, so far she absolutely loves it. My kids play baseball or softball in the spring, have swimming lessons in the summer and soccer in the fall. They go to art classes and nature camps from time to time. They like this stuff a heck of a lot more than I ever thought they would.
But there’s an entirely different area that Epstein and Flanagan delve into that Skenazy doesn’t seem to touch, and that is the idea that it is somehow debasing for parents to involve themselves in matters that are thought to be childish. Epstein and Flanagan seem to want us to feel shame if we play Go Fish with our kids.
I’m sorry guys, but life isn’t neatly divided into adult activities that exist over here and kid activities that exist over there. I personally have tastes that run the gamut from highbrow to lowbrow to everything in-between. Many of those tastes – complicated literature; European porn (again, I keed) – can’t be properly enjoyed by a child. But other things I enjoy – watching baseball, eating at a greasy diner, hiking, playing chess – are completely accessible to my kids. If I like these things, why shouldn’t I enjoy these things with my family, the people that I love? Why is that debasing?
Writers in many ways devote their lives to the pursuit of influencing people’s opinions on things: Leaving aside the obvious examples of editorial pages and opinion columns, journalism is often the pursuit of giving people more facts so they are more informed. Biography and memoir are often dependent upon the empathy of the read. And I would hope that most people would admit that there is literature out there that changed their outlook on the world.
Yet Flanagan and Epstein, who have devoted their own lives as writers to influencing people’s thinking, seem to be saying that parents should actively try to avoid influencing the thinking of the people that they care about the most: their kids. They want to convince everyone else of the way to live their lives, but they don't want to influence their kids. Does this make any sense at all?
In fact, the unbalanced nature of the parent-child relationship opens all kinds of great areas of conversation. I enjoy baseball games with my friends, but my friends don’t want to hear me talk about the way 2nd baseman is positioned for half an inning. My daughter, however, hearing for the first time how the middle infielders often position themselves based upon the batter, or lean one way or another based upon the pitch that’s called … when I explain that to my daughter, and then she SEES IT …
… she gets a smile of recognition on her face that is beauty and magic and just every wonderful that exists in this world. Watching the light bulb of a great idea go off in your kid’s head: I’m not sure there’s anything better.
I realize that, at the end of the day, it’s a balancing act. There’s no reason why kids can’t sometime be kicked outside, away from the supervision of their parents, and sometimes have a friend over and pretend they’re animals. But there’s no reason that the next day they shouldn’t be sat down and be taught how to play that marvelous game called Euchre, and why they can’t be taken to a Little Gym karate class every now and again.
I don’t want to live in the Kindergarchy. I also don’t want to live in a wholly parent-centered society.
But at the end of the day, no one is asking you to make that choice, and there’s plenty of room in between: and there is the space where most of us raise our kids.
So I hope Epstein and others have a good time beating down that paper tiger. Because now that I've spent 2 hours writing this, I'm going to go play with water balloons with my kids.
June 3, 2008
Parenting Terminology
There is a whole set of terminology that you’re going to have to learn if you’re gonna be a parent.
Here are just a few of the words and phrases you should learn:
Babisinki Syndrome: Helsinki syndrome is when a hostage begins to develop positive associations with the hostage-taker. Babisinki Syndrome is a similar phenomena that occurs with children that is best illustrated by example:
You’re home alone with your 22-month old. She wants ice cream. You say no. She shrieks “EYE-ZZZZZ KEEEEEEM!!!! EYE-ZZZZZ KEEEEEEM!!!!!” You say “no.” Repeat exchange four times. Your 22 month old then whips herself onto the floor crying and screaming. You walk away. 60 seconds pass. Seeking comfort from her crying, your 22 month old runs to you – the tormentor - seeking to be picked up and cuddled: Babisinki syndrome.
Daylight Savings Time. Multiple definitions. 1. (fall) A time change system designed to ensure that children wake their parents up at 6 a.m. on the weekends instead of 7 a.m. 2. (spring). A time change system designed to ensure that children do not go to bed at a reasonable hour.
Helium Balloon Storage Unit: The part of your house with a vaulted ceiling.
Kid Latin. When your children start using rhyming words because they are banned from using a naughty word. For example, after banning the word “poop” from our dinner table, our children began calling each other “soop.”
Do you have any idea if you’re supposed to punish your son for telling his sister that “she likes to eat soup?” Me neither. Which means he ended up in the corner.
Kiddisonification: When your toddler enters the phrase where they name all inanimate objects. For example, in early 2003, our daughter nicknamed two of the washcloths in the bathtub "Sadaam" and "Starburst.”
Primogeniseat: The seat in your car in the backseat behind the passenger seat. If you want to know which kid is a mother’s favorite, check who is sitting in this seat. From the driver’s seat, you can see the kid in this seat and chat with them while driving. You can hand them snacks. If they drop something you can reach the floor beneath that seat whereas you can’t reach the floor in the seat behind you very easily without being double jointed.
The seat behind you? If you put your favorite kid in the seat behind their kicking of the seat will quickly make them your not-favorite kid.
In child abuse cultures, this seat is known as the Slap Seat.
Pump and Dump: When a mother who is breastfeeding goes out for a night on the town and consumes some adult beverages and then, in order to not poison her child, pumps out the breastmilk and dumps it out on the street for the hoodlums to get at it.
Soft Serve: A description for what young kids’ poop looks like in potty-training books. In real life, it will actually look like this twice annually. You may be tempted to take a picture, but you should not.
Here are just a few of the words and phrases you should learn:
Babisinki Syndrome: Helsinki syndrome is when a hostage begins to develop positive associations with the hostage-taker. Babisinki Syndrome is a similar phenomena that occurs with children that is best illustrated by example:
You’re home alone with your 22-month old. She wants ice cream. You say no. She shrieks “EYE-ZZZZZ KEEEEEEM!!!! EYE-ZZZZZ KEEEEEEM!!!!!” You say “no.” Repeat exchange four times. Your 22 month old then whips herself onto the floor crying and screaming. You walk away. 60 seconds pass. Seeking comfort from her crying, your 22 month old runs to you – the tormentor - seeking to be picked up and cuddled: Babisinki syndrome.
Daylight Savings Time. Multiple definitions. 1. (fall) A time change system designed to ensure that children wake their parents up at 6 a.m. on the weekends instead of 7 a.m. 2. (spring). A time change system designed to ensure that children do not go to bed at a reasonable hour.
Helium Balloon Storage Unit: The part of your house with a vaulted ceiling.
Kid Latin. When your children start using rhyming words because they are banned from using a naughty word. For example, after banning the word “poop” from our dinner table, our children began calling each other “soop.”
Do you have any idea if you’re supposed to punish your son for telling his sister that “she likes to eat soup?” Me neither. Which means he ended up in the corner.
Kiddisonification: When your toddler enters the phrase where they name all inanimate objects. For example, in early 2003, our daughter nicknamed two of the washcloths in the bathtub "Sadaam" and "Starburst.”
Primogeniseat: The seat in your car in the backseat behind the passenger seat. If you want to know which kid is a mother’s favorite, check who is sitting in this seat. From the driver’s seat, you can see the kid in this seat and chat with them while driving. You can hand them snacks. If they drop something you can reach the floor beneath that seat whereas you can’t reach the floor in the seat behind you very easily without being double jointed.
The seat behind you? If you put your favorite kid in the seat behind their kicking of the seat will quickly make them your not-favorite kid.
In child abuse cultures, this seat is known as the Slap Seat.
Pump and Dump: When a mother who is breastfeeding goes out for a night on the town and consumes some adult beverages and then, in order to not poison her child, pumps out the breastmilk and dumps it out on the street for the hoodlums to get at it.
Soft Serve: A description for what young kids’ poop looks like in potty-training books. In real life, it will actually look like this twice annually. You may be tempted to take a picture, but you should not.
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