Probably belatedly, the wife and I began giving our 8 and 4 year old kids' allowances this past Winter/Spring. After doling out the allowance for a good 6 months or so, I've realized several things that make me wonder why I didn't start handing out the dough several months' earlier.
First, holding the allowance over their heads is an excuse to make your kids do chores around the house, something my wife is semi-successfully using. My children are fighting back, of course, utilizing their world-class whining skills, largely bringing the standoff to a draw, but at least my wife is armed now in this battle to try to get them to do chores and clean their rooms.
Second, as part of my attempt to emulate life from 1950's TV shows, I have a change bowl near the back door of my house into which I deposit the contents of my pockets at the end of each day. The allowances are normally drawn, in part, from that change bowl. In the past, change sometimes mysteriously went missing. I don't know that the kids had any real intent to steal; it was just that the ownership of the change was never firmly established and it seemed like just another toy to them. Now that they know that they are getting paid from the bowl, if anyone touches the bowl they come running to me to tell. No one is cutting off their source of funds!
But really, the most important reason to give an allowance is that is serves as a magic cloak that you can wear when hanging out in the checkout aisle of a store with your kids. They want tic tacs, a crappy yo-yo, a cigarette lighter? There's no need for you to buy them anything. All you need to do is say "maybe you can spend your allowance on this." (note: when kids get older, you can change the response to the more brusque "what the hell do I give you an allowance for?"). Of course, they never have the money with them.
(note: don't fall prey to the "I'll pay you back" line. They are your kids. They owe you, if you think about it, tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in room and board, educational expenses, etc., none of which you're ever going to see. What makes you think they're going to pay you back for the $1.50 they just borrowed from you? Also, payday lending is getting outlawed in many states, so you can't charge them high interest rates anymore, so it's just not profitable).
With these benefits, there's no doubt in my mind that providing an allowance is a good idea. The problem I'm having now is determining the proper amount. One of the divorced kids from my kids' school is was alleged to be getting over $10 by the second grade by compensating parents. The children of the hippies at our kids' school are getting nothing still ("Teach kids about money! No way! Down with capitalism!"). Right now I'm giving my 3rd grade $3-4 a week and the kindergartener $1.50 a week, but I have no idea if that's the right amount or not. I didn't think I'd be able to get away with giving them different amounts, but the younger one hasn't thought to complain yet. Actually, since he normally leaves the money lying around the house on the floor anyway, if he complains I'll just up his allowance to $100 a week, since I'll be able to get it back at the end of the day anyway just by walking around and picking it up.
August 12, 2008
July 30, 2008
On Vacation With the Kids
Off to see the Atlantic Ocean and visit our nation's capital.
I'll be back August 9th or 10th.
I'll be back August 9th or 10th.
July 29, 2008
Why Three?: Parenting Marginal Cost / Economies of Scale
Some people have asked me why we had three children, so I figured I’d answer it in my next few posts (actually, these are the reasons that I claim now: the real reason is that my wife controls the birth control and she wanted three ... but anyway...)
People seem to understand why people with two kids of the same gender would try for another. But we “already have one of each” with a girl and a boy, and thus had no reason to have a third.
Th
July 27, 2008
Refreshment
Refreshed.
That’s what people say. They go on vacation from work, and they get back and you see them in the hall, or talk to them on the phone, and you say “how was the vacation” and they say “I’m refreshed. I’m ready to get back at it.” Or you read a study saying how vacation is important for the mental health of workers because it refreshes them.
At some point, it wears off and the feeling of refreshment ends on both sides.
July 19, 2008
The Only Rule of Coaching
This year, my 4-year old son is playing T-ball for the first time. My 8-year old daughter is in her 4th or 5th year of tee-ball and softball. As the years have gone by, I’ve become more and more involved in helping out at games and practices. In the 100+ hours I’ve spent on this stuff, however, I’ve only learned/noticed one non-obvious thing And that is this:
My daughter's coach is a woman we know pretty well. She’s a short-haired athletic woman of about 40-years who plays softball herself. She’s known for her somewhat boisterous personality and yells at the girls in a lovingly joking way. She’s a good coach. Another coach in the league is a very nice, super-positive guy; he wears baseball pants, so people are afraid of him and are skeptical at first, but he’s great once you get to know him. He’s a darn good coach.
July 13, 2008
How the 1970s Hold Up
I was a fan of Star Wars. I was about 5 years old when the first movie came out back in 1977 and I remember it as the first movie I ever saw in the theatre that wasn’t animated. I got the toys, did a Halloween at age 7 or 8 or so as Luke Skywalker (with my sister as Leia). I remember taping Star Wars on VHS off TV in the early 1980s and watching it 13 times, partially so I could brag to my friends that I watched Star Wars 13 times. I was a fan, but I never became one of those teenaged Star Wars geeks that just wouldn’t let it go (like these guys).
And so when I considered watching Star Wars with my daughter around the time that she turned five, I figured that it would be something that just she and I shared (and that the bigtime Star Wars geeks shared with their kids). It was, after all, a 25 year old movie. And the new series didn’t seem particularly popular. But soon after we watched the original Star Wars movie, my wife informed me that lots of kids were “into” Star Wars these days. A trip down the toy aisle at Target confirmed that kids these days were very much into Star Wars.
Certainly the new Star Wars movies had something to do with it, but it’s not like Spiderman had most of an aisle to himself, and he had popular new movies out too. So it was clear that Star Wars was something more. Kids were drawn to the whole universe like moths. This was something from the late 1970’s that kids took and claimed as their own. It had stood the test of time.
This led me to wonder exactly what else from the late 1970s (and in some cases the early 1980s) stands the test of time in the eyes of kids today. Here’s a short list of things I came up with and my thoughts regarding whether they hold up 30 years later or not:
Buck Rogers (1979-1981) Twiki-twiki-twiki. My wife rented this DVD the other day and tried to watch it with the kids. They were mildly interested for about 10 minutes. Also, my wife was right: Twiki’s head does look like male genitalia. Verdict: Doesn’t Hold Up.
(side note: Erin Grey, however, definitely holds up.)
Being Terrified of Teenagers. (Late 1970s/Early 1980s). Kids today don’t understand this, but in the 1970’s, us younger kids were absolutely terrified of teenagers. Teenagers were scary as hell. They were hairy. They had lots and lots of acne, since they had no Clearasil or Pro-activ to get rid of it. They were smoking and swearing all the time too. They would kick the crap out of you as soon as look at you.
These days, teenagers have clean faces and just sit there silently typing at their phones, well-dressed and not scary at all. Verdict: Doesn’t Hold Up.
Benji (1974) This is a close one. I watched this with the kids in the Spring. It has that 1970’s made-for-TV-movie touch with 3-minute songs accompanied by a montage of slo-mo shots of Benji running, as if he was Bo Derek coming out of the pool or something. It’s just weird. I blame the Graduate for stuff like that. But the dog-actor (who was apparently 14 at the time of the movie) was incredible. And animals doing their own stunts: that’s cool. And without all of the quick cutting, in your face, MTV-ish directorial style that movies have today, so the kids don’t feel overwhelmed (plus that makes the dog's acting all the more impressive). They can follow what’s going on (and they’ll be terrified by the scary teenage bad guys). Verdict: Holds Up.
Not Wearing Seatbelts. (1978) I was shorthanded on car seats the other day and had to hit the grocery store, which is about 2/3 of a mile from my house, so I told the kids, for the first time in their lives, to just hop into the back seat and they didn’t have to wear seat belts. You would’ve thought they were at a freakin’ amusement park they were so excited. The problem is that they were so used to their every movement being restrained, the younger two fell to the floor twice: once when I stopped; once when I went around a corner. Verdict: Mixed. Kids like it but don’t know how to do it anymore.
Cordouroys: (1976-1981) Still kicking around. I’ve noticed that the cords are tighter. Kids these days aren’t dealing with the quarter-inch sized cords that we had to deal with. But you still hear the familiar nostalgic zwhishing when a kid walks past you every now and again Verdict: Holds Up.
Adults Smoking. (1492-2004) Sadly, too many kids today have never actually seen an adult smoking in real life, so it is impossible to gauge how they would react. Verdict: Unknown.
Atari. (1977-1983) I got one of those fake Ataris – the Atari Flashback - a few years ago that comes with about 40 games built in and I play it with the kids now and again. Verdict: The games Pac-Man and Adventure hold up. Kids these days find it mind boggling (and thrilling) that in Adventure, “you are just a dot but you can still fight dragons.” Other games don’t hold up.
Shaggy Bowlcuts. (peaked with Adam from Eight is Enough in 1977). Hipster parent websites are trying to bring back plaid, but not even they dare to try to bring back bowlcuts. Verdict: Doesn’t hold up.
The All-Star Laff-A-Lympics. (1977-79). While it aired, this was perhaps the greatest television show on. It’s possibly the greatest show of all time (if you’re curious, the other competitors re It’s Your Move, Sledge Hammer, the Simpsons, Seinfeld, Homicide and the Sopranos; The Office is close). Only 24 episodes were made. After that, why mess with perfection?
Every kid in the universe has, at one time or another, sought to mix and match different fantasy character genres (i.e, who would win if Chewbacca fought Harry Potter?) Outside the world of comic books, rarely do the characters actually mix. Best I can figure, it’s happened 3 times. There’s Alien vs. Predator (twice). There’s Freddy vs. Jason. And then there’s the All-Star Laff-A-Lympics. And the All-Stars were doing it decades before the others.
You remember, don’t you? The three teams: the Yogi Yahooeys with Yogi, Huckleberry Hound and the whole A-team Yogi crew plus Grape Ape. These guys were so rich and famous already, they had nothing to prove, and competed accordingly. The Scooby Doobies (I can’t believe they got away with that name with Shaggy on the team) with Scooby and the gang, Dyno-Mutt and Captain Caveman, among others. And, finally, the Really Rottens, with all the bad guys, including Muttley, with his smoker’s laugh. The three teams would compete in simply bizarre events seemingly conjured up by a group of suspended-adolescent stoners.
It was the 1970s, where realism was king, so even in a cartoon show, the bad guys were allowed to win dozens of individual events and actually won 3 of the 24 episodes outright.
(side note: Why is “A-Lympics” spelled this way? It’s part of the beautiful mystery)
Of course, there is no DVD set and no plans for one. There is practically nothing on Youtube. There are apparently some 1996 VHS tapes of 8 of the 24 shows, but you can't even get those on ebay. And that’s it. So I couldn’t show it to my kids to gauge how it held up and had to simply explain the gist of what it was like.
I said it’s like Dora the Explorer, Diego, Franklin, Clifford and the Backyardigans against a team comprised of Pokemon, the Teletubbies, Boobah and the Wiggles against a team of Wall-E, Nemo, Ariel, Mowgli, Balloo, Tigger, Woody and Buzz Lightyear. This description certainly piqued their interest.
But they never saw the actual show, so it’s unclear what the verdict should be, so I have to guess at this one. On the one hand, this is the greatest concept of all time, so that’s a positive. But kids today have only a vague notion of who even Yogi and Scooby are, and the minor characters (Snagglepuss anyone?) are complete enigmas to them. Thus, sadly … Verdict: does not hold up. But only because the classics have been lost. If kids are prepped with 25 episodes of Scooby Doo and other 1978 Saturday morning cartoons prior to viewing, it would definitely hold up.July 10, 2008
Understanding Child Abuse a Bit Better
A major impact of having children is that it grants you special kinds of understanding. Having children makes you understand many many things with a fullness that you never appreciated. You understand exactly the havoc that pregnancy wreaks on a woman’s body. You understand how it is possible to sleep next to a woman for over a month and not have sex with her even once, something the 18-year old version of you simply could not have comprehended. You gain an understanding of why it was that your father cracked open a beer Sunday afternoons a little earlier than seemed necessary and why there was a small smile on his face Monday mornings when he left for work. And one thing that you unfortunately gain an understanding of is the genesis of child abuse.
If I had noticed this 7 years earlier, before I had children, I would’ve been aghast. Actually, I’m still a little bit aghast now, but in many ways, now I understand how people could get to the point where locking your kid in their own room seemed like a reasonable thing to do.
Actually, these days, I’m pretty much ready to give the parents there the benefit of the doubt on just about anything. Even when I see one of those leash kids, I figure the kid probably deserves it and that it just might be necessary (well … almost … the leash kids probably cross the line, but the fact I’m even thinking about it shows how much less judgmental I am about stuff like that than I once was). You start to realize that even some of the stuff that would make you aghast might be necessary, like when this guy installed a lock on his the door of his autistic son's bedroom because he was sneaking out of his room in the night and had started a minor fire one night. You gotta do what you gotta do.
But that kind of thinking can also lead to problems. Most anyone who has had a particularly testy baby has had a moment that scared the bejeesus out of them: the moment of recognition where they said to themselves “I really want to do something unspeakable to this baby/child right now.” It happened to me once when I walked past an open second story window with my daughter after she had been screaming for an hour plus. I had the urge to throw her out similar to the urge many people (including me) feel to jump off a cliff if they get too close to the edge. I of course didn’t, but for a moment it seemed like a possibility there, and it was creepy scary.
These feelings thankfully pass, but after breaking down because of my kids’ behavior, I always feel a particular kind of shame, a blend of two wholly different kinds of pathetic. On the one hand, you feel pathetic because a child that’s been on this planet just a few months or a few years has, in some ways, beaten you by getting you so mad that you have to walk away. It’s like you are the one backing down (from a masculine perspective, it is very pathetic to be beaten by such a small creature). On the other hand, you feel pathetic because this is your child, and for some reason you haven’t raised them properly, because they are crying too much, or acting like such a complete jerk. And you’re pathetic for that reason as well.
An odd thing will happen to you when you’ve had a baby for a few months. You’ll be watching the local news and see a story where a father (or boyfriend) kills a five month old baby who just wouldn’t stop crying. And maybe for the first time ever, you’ll actually pay close attention to this kind of story. You’ll be interested in it. If you’re honest with yourself, maybe you’ll … in some bizarre way … realize that you can in some way relate to the guy.
In the criminal law, if you kill a guy in the heat of the moment after catching him in bed with your wife, that’s supposed to get you a lesser prison sentence than if you plot and kill some guy in cold blood. And there have been times that I would have strongly considered letting my wife cavort in bed with someone else if it meant that the baby in my arms would just stop crying. So if catching your wife doing it with the neighbor is a mitigating circumstances when it comes to murder, it makes you wonder why a baby crying for two hours can’t be mitigating as well.
July 4, 2008
Sandra Tsing Loh in the Atlantic
This article, part book review, part essay, is perhaps the best thing I've ever read about working moms and the like ("so many roads lead to a wet wipe" is a classic.)
In fact, looking over Loh's last half-dozen articles, she's on a tremendous roll.
In fact, looking over Loh's last half-dozen articles, she's on a tremendous roll.
The Pattern of Life
I think I may have figured out how life goes.
Once you become a preteen up until you’re age 15 or 20 or 25 or 30 or even 35, you spend a decent chunk of your life developing principles and thinking that there is a particular way that you like to live your life and molding your personality into the kind of person that you want to be.
At various ages, you decide whether religion matters to you; whether staying in shape via exercise or diet matters to you; whether you’re going to try recreational drugs or not (and whether you are going to continue to “try” them each and every morning after you wake up); whether you want to go to college and ultimately do with your life from a career standpoint; the types of things you save up for and spend your money on; what your political beliefs are; what clothes you wear and how that expresses who you are; what sports you’ll play; what clubs to join or hobbies to have; whether you’ll play video games or not; how to wear your hair; what car to drive; what music to listen to; what books to read; what TV to watch; what bars or clubs to hang out in.
But you don’t just choose religions and philosophies and art and material goods. You choose the people that you will live your life with. You choose your friends. You choose a boyfriend or girlfriend.
Lots of these decisions are big and lots are small, but in the 21st Century, your identity is no longer determined by who your family is, or what “class” you’re from. Who you are is based, in large part, by the choices that you make. Lots of people take this seriously, spending thousands of hours deciding who they are; making choices that they can respect the rest of their lives.
What no one tells you when you’re 20 is that you shouldn’t spend so much time figuring this out, because you ultimately just give it all away.
For men, I think it starts with the girlfriend. Specifically, I think it starts with the first chick flick that a guy goes to see with his girlfriend. It continues when she buys him his first shirt with a designer label (yuck!) and gets him to stay home instead of going out with the boys. When I got married I was a little horrified to find my wife going to Jazzercise classes.
But the spouse or girlfriend is nothing compared to the children.
Earlier this week, I was flipping ahead on Turner Movie Classics and AMC, to see if there were any movies I wanted to TIVO this week. And I saw “Look Who’s Talking” come up and I thought “oh, the kids might like that” and I hit the Record button.
And it didn’t even hit me (that's probably the worst part). I didn’t even notice that I had, completely without irony, chosen to record “Look Who’s Talking.” I couldn’t help but flashback to the teenaged version of myself, when I believed Look Who’s Talking to be so odious and held it with such disdain as to not be worth mocking (since everything is worth mocking to a teenager, this means I held it in such low regard as hair metal bands, the song “I Just Can’t Get Enough” by Depeche Mode, my sister's Jelly shoes and people who didn’t like Catcher in the Rye). The teenaged me wouldn’t recognize the man who just chose to record Look Who’s Freakin Talking without irony.
I think most people in their early twenties realize that on some level they’ll get more tolerant when they get older, or they start to realize this as they actually start to get more tolerant.
What I’ve just come to realize is that it’s your own damn kids that largely do this to you. You may have always thought playing with dolls and barrettes are silly, but you don’t think your daughter is silly, so if she cares about that stuff, ultimately you do too on some level. So I’m a 35 year old man that has opinions about the merits of different kinds of barrettes now. You might have thought, pre-children, that “People that have kids are just making excuses about not working out and I am going to work out six days a week after having kids” and then, when you have kids, that goes out the window (at least when they’re real young, it has to).
You start watching absolutely ridiculous TV hows, like that new show Wipeout or American Idol or (the worst) America’s Funniest Videos with the kids, simply because the kids love it. And after watching them crack up at 10 ridiculous videos of people falling off three-wheelers, it will be tough to maintain your dislike for that damn Tom Bergeron (or Bob Saget, if watching reruns). I mean, I’ve used flash cards with my kids. I’ve said “because I said so.” I’ve worked at a job I’m pretty damn ambivalent about for 9 years.
Hell, half the crap I write about in this blog is exactly this: me surrendering principles at the altar of my children.
You might hate McDonalds and fast food. But your kids won’t and they’ll mellow you out about it. You may have chosen certain sports to play in high school or at least favored those sports (I played tennis and would’ve loved to play football had I weighed over 140 lbs). And you probably thought some sports were silly (for me volleyball and, later, lacrosse). But when your kid is out there playing, your prior opinions will go out the window. So if my kids like it, it’s LAX for me baby!
The increasing-tolerance principles-out-the-window affect even applies to serious stuff. While there are certainly horror stories from the gay community about parents rejecting gay children, the more common outcome these days is for the gay child to convince the parents that there isn’t really anything wrong with being gay. And you hear a lot about parents and children fighting over politics only to come to terms with the other’s political beliefs a few years later.
It is a cliché how parents complain about how their grandparents coddle their grandchildren and how “things weren’t like that when they were raising me.” It is similarly cliché how “the first child has it the worst” when it comes to discipline. And while simple fatigue is part of the reason for this, half of this is simply because, at age 60, you don’t have the principles that you had at age 30. Maybe at age 60 you don’t think hitting someone because they took your toy isn’t really so bad; you don’t think kids making a little too much noise in a restaurant is such a big deal; and you realize that giving a kid extra candy now isn’t going to spoil them and ruin their life 20 years hence, making them so lazy as to be unemployable or something.
So that’s it. You gather up principles for the first quarter or third of your life and you spend the rest giving them away.
Finally, you whittle it down to just one principle.
And that last principle you give up is the principle that you like life more than death.
Once you become a preteen up until you’re age 15 or 20 or 25 or 30 or even 35, you spend a decent chunk of your life developing principles and thinking that there is a particular way that you like to live your life and molding your personality into the kind of person that you want to be.
At various ages, you decide whether religion matters to you; whether staying in shape via exercise or diet matters to you; whether you’re going to try recreational drugs or not (and whether you are going to continue to “try” them each and every morning after you wake up); whether you want to go to college and ultimately do with your life from a career standpoint; the types of things you save up for and spend your money on; what your political beliefs are; what clothes you wear and how that expresses who you are; what sports you’ll play; what clubs to join or hobbies to have; whether you’ll play video games or not; how to wear your hair; what car to drive; what music to listen to; what books to read; what TV to watch; what bars or clubs to hang out in.
But you don’t just choose religions and philosophies and art and material goods. You choose the people that you will live your life with. You choose your friends. You choose a boyfriend or girlfriend.
Lots of these decisions are big and lots are small, but in the 21st Century, your identity is no longer determined by who your family is, or what “class” you’re from. Who you are is based, in large part, by the choices that you make. Lots of people take this seriously, spending thousands of hours deciding who they are; making choices that they can respect the rest of their lives.
What no one tells you when you’re 20 is that you shouldn’t spend so much time figuring this out, because you ultimately just give it all away.
For men, I think it starts with the girlfriend. Specifically, I think it starts with the first chick flick that a guy goes to see with his girlfriend. It continues when she buys him his first shirt with a designer label (yuck!) and gets him to stay home instead of going out with the boys. When I got married I was a little horrified to find my wife going to Jazzercise classes.
But the spouse or girlfriend is nothing compared to the children.
Earlier this week, I was flipping ahead on Turner Movie Classics and AMC, to see if there were any movies I wanted to TIVO this week. And I saw “Look Who’s Talking” come up and I thought “oh, the kids might like that” and I hit the Record button.
And it didn’t even hit me (that's probably the worst part). I didn’t even notice that I had, completely without irony, chosen to record “Look Who’s Talking.” I couldn’t help but flashback to the teenaged version of myself, when I believed Look Who’s Talking to be so odious and held it with such disdain as to not be worth mocking (since everything is worth mocking to a teenager, this means I held it in such low regard as hair metal bands, the song “I Just Can’t Get Enough” by Depeche Mode, my sister's Jelly shoes and people who didn’t like Catcher in the Rye). The teenaged me wouldn’t recognize the man who just chose to record Look Who’s Freakin Talking without irony.
I think most people in their early twenties realize that on some level they’ll get more tolerant when they get older, or they start to realize this as they actually start to get more tolerant.
What I’ve just come to realize is that it’s your own damn kids that largely do this to you. You may have always thought playing with dolls and barrettes are silly, but you don’t think your daughter is silly, so if she cares about that stuff, ultimately you do too on some level. So I’m a 35 year old man that has opinions about the merits of different kinds of barrettes now. You might have thought, pre-children, that “People that have kids are just making excuses about not working out and I am going to work out six days a week after having kids” and then, when you have kids, that goes out the window (at least when they’re real young, it has to).
You start watching absolutely ridiculous TV hows, like that new show Wipeout or American Idol or (the worst) America’s Funniest Videos with the kids, simply because the kids love it. And after watching them crack up at 10 ridiculous videos of people falling off three-wheelers, it will be tough to maintain your dislike for that damn Tom Bergeron (or Bob Saget, if watching reruns). I mean, I’ve used flash cards with my kids. I’ve said “because I said so.” I’ve worked at a job I’m pretty damn ambivalent about for 9 years.
Hell, half the crap I write about in this blog is exactly this: me surrendering principles at the altar of my children.
You might hate McDonalds and fast food. But your kids won’t and they’ll mellow you out about it. You may have chosen certain sports to play in high school or at least favored those sports (I played tennis and would’ve loved to play football had I weighed over 140 lbs). And you probably thought some sports were silly (for me volleyball and, later, lacrosse). But when your kid is out there playing, your prior opinions will go out the window. So if my kids like it, it’s LAX for me baby!
The increasing-tolerance principles-out-the-window affect even applies to serious stuff. While there are certainly horror stories from the gay community about parents rejecting gay children, the more common outcome these days is for the gay child to convince the parents that there isn’t really anything wrong with being gay. And you hear a lot about parents and children fighting over politics only to come to terms with the other’s political beliefs a few years later.
It is a cliché how parents complain about how their grandparents coddle their grandchildren and how “things weren’t like that when they were raising me.” It is similarly cliché how “the first child has it the worst” when it comes to discipline. And while simple fatigue is part of the reason for this, half of this is simply because, at age 60, you don’t have the principles that you had at age 30. Maybe at age 60 you don’t think hitting someone because they took your toy isn’t really so bad; you don’t think kids making a little too much noise in a restaurant is such a big deal; and you realize that giving a kid extra candy now isn’t going to spoil them and ruin their life 20 years hence, making them so lazy as to be unemployable or something.
So that’s it. You gather up principles for the first quarter or third of your life and you spend the rest giving them away.
Finally, you whittle it down to just one principle.
And that last principle you give up is the principle that you like life more than death.
June 27, 2008
Socially Retarding Your Oldest Child
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.
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 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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