Showing posts with label Pop Culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pop Culture. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Princess Parenting!
My newest collaboration with DadLabs.com...
Are you a princess parent? Does your baby girl have more princess paraphernalia than you can fit in your mini van? As a parent, it’s nearly impossible to avoid the inevitable onslaught of princess culture. In this episode of The Lab, Daddy Brad and Daddy Clay compare who is the bigger princess parent by adding up their daughters’ princess gear. From Disney games and Disney princess toys to princess costumes and unicorn stuffed animals, the two Dads compare who is the bigger Cinderella father. Author Jeremy Adam Smith discusses the impact that princess mania is having and the steps to maintain a healthy father daughter relationship.
In preparation for this episode, I chatted with a number of psychologists. "Many preschool girls go through a kind of princess phase," said Stephen Hinshaw, chair of the UC Berkeley psychology department and author of the new book, The Triple Bind. "At the 'right' time, this is not deleterious or promoting of narcissism. But if it becomes a preoccupation [i.e., an obsession], and if the 'princess treatment' begins to extend to the girl herself, and if it lasts beyond the 'normative' time, could be problematic." For a solid and interestingly neurotic feminist take on princess mania, see Peggy Orenstein's 2006 piece in New York Times Magazine.
Incidentally, today's USA Today mentions me and DadLabs and an all-star line-up of fatherhood researchers in a piece entitled, "New daditude: Today's fathers are hands-on, pressure off." It's well worth a read.
Thanks to Axel Hausemann for his camera and sound work here at DadLabs West!
Saturday, March 07, 2009
The sad inevitability of Kelsey Grammer
Get ready, here it comes:
Will Americans be able to laugh about the scariest recession in recent memory? Will brands be willing to take part in such potentially perilous merriment?
ABC hopes the answer to both is yes, as the Walt Disney TV network readies two comedy pilots about the recent Wall Street carnage and the sad toll it's taken on that once-mighty warrior, the investment banker.
One is an untitled project starring Kelsey Grammer, who plays a Wall Street millionaire unhorsed by the collapsing economy and forced into a "Mr. Mom"-like role at home with the family he hardly ever saw. The other is "Canned," a pilot about several younger Gen X friends fired from their lofty perch at an investment bank.
Friday, October 31, 2008
The Beautiful Melancholy of Peanuts Holiday Specials
This is great:
The whole thing is worth a read. I love watching these specials with Liko.
What sound is most evocative of autumn? The crackling of dry leaves? The singsong chant of trick-or-treaters? The zip-zipping of corduroy jeans as you walk down the street? For anyone who remembers watching the original Charlie Brown Christmas special in 1965—or in any of the 42 years it's aired since—the single best aural reminder of the waning year has to be the bouncy piano vamp of Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy," better known as the Peanuts song. The Van Pelts' theme doesn't appear until midway through A Charlie Brown Christmas, but it was so instantly and indelibly associated with Charles Schulz's characters that it became the opening song for subsequent specials...
The whole thing is worth a read. I love watching these specials with Liko.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Mad Men vs. Mr. Moms
OK, this is kind of funny: Hey, Mr. Mom: Your Wife Wants To Bang Don Draper. (And here's the funniest reader comment: "I think you're preachin' to the converted, dude. Mr. Mom wants to fuck Don Draper, too.") C'mon. Laugh. You know it's funny.
I just started watching Mad Men, largely on the recommendation of my pal Jessica (who is getting married this weekend! yay!).
The writing and characters are gripping, but Mad Men is also a fascinating sociological and historical study of womanhood, manhood, and gender roles at a dramatic point of transition.
It made me think right away of Susan Faludi’s 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man--in fact, the parallels between the POV of both the series and Faludi’s book makes me think that Stiffed must be required reading for Mad Men’s writers.
In both, traditional masculine values like self-reliance, steadfastness, and dedication to community welfare are steadily undermined by the encroachments of a culture that prizes image and performance over principle and real accomplishment.
It's a process that pushes both the interview subjects of Faludi’s book and protagonist Don Draper of Mad Men into a state of spiritual free fall.
At the same time, however, we’re reminded by both works that we cannot go back: Thanks in part to its terrific attention to the details of its characters’ lives, Mad Men makes a sexist social order real and concrete, and reminds us of how far we’ve advanced from the “good old days” when women were prisoners in their own homes.
I just started watching Mad Men, largely on the recommendation of my pal Jessica (who is getting married this weekend! yay!).
The writing and characters are gripping, but Mad Men is also a fascinating sociological and historical study of womanhood, manhood, and gender roles at a dramatic point of transition.
It made me think right away of Susan Faludi’s 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man--in fact, the parallels between the POV of both the series and Faludi’s book makes me think that Stiffed must be required reading for Mad Men’s writers.
In both, traditional masculine values like self-reliance, steadfastness, and dedication to community welfare are steadily undermined by the encroachments of a culture that prizes image and performance over principle and real accomplishment.
It's a process that pushes both the interview subjects of Faludi’s book and protagonist Don Draper of Mad Men into a state of spiritual free fall.
At the same time, however, we’re reminded by both works that we cannot go back: Thanks in part to its terrific attention to the details of its characters’ lives, Mad Men makes a sexist social order real and concrete, and reminds us of how far we’ve advanced from the “good old days” when women were prisoners in their own homes.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Kindie Rock III
The Mighty Sippy Cups:
The Sippy Cups are San Francisco's house band for the post-kid hipster set. They cover old Velvet Underground and Ramones tunes (e.g., "I wanna be sedated" redone as "I wanna be elated"). Most of their messy, exuberant shows are held in Mission district bars. See all those kids in front? Where are their parents? They're at the bar, doing shots. It's a punk-rock win-win.
The Sippy Cups are San Francisco's house band for the post-kid hipster set. They cover old Velvet Underground and Ramones tunes (e.g., "I wanna be sedated" redone as "I wanna be elated"). Most of their messy, exuberant shows are held in Mission district bars. See all those kids in front? Where are their parents? They're at the bar, doing shots. It's a punk-rock win-win.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Kindie Rock
The first time Liko heard Frances England's first CD, Fascinating Creatures, he stopped dead in his tracks. As the hypnotic first song, "Sometimes," ended, Liko asked, "Who is this?"
"It's Liam's mommy, Frances. Remember her?"
"Yeah."
"What do you think of her songs?"
"They're good," he said, and plopped down on the floor. He sat through the entire CD, listening intently.
Weeks later, I put on the CD and as "Sometimes" started to play, he cried out, "That's my favorite song!"
Weeks after that, I brought Frances's new CD, Family Tree, along on a vacation with another family.
As little kids swarmed around the living room of our vacation house, I put on Family Tree. The commotion stopped and they all stood still, listening.
"Who is this?" asked Jody.
"Our friend Frances. It's her new CD."
"Wow, this is really good."
"I think so."
"It sounds like grown-up music," said her husband Alex. "This reminds me of Sarah McLachlan. Or maybe Nora Jones?"
"I always think of Ricki Lee Jones and Lisa Loeb and Aimee Mann," I said. "But not as dark."
In fact, the opposite of dark: Mellow, happy, content.
And a few weeks after that, we were playing with our friends Molly and her little boy Linus. I played Family Tree and Molly asked who we were hearing. I told her and mentioned that it was a kid's CD.
"This is tot music?" asked Molly incredulously. "No way."
Fascinating Creatures and Family Tree aren't the only children's CDs we own that also appeal to adults: Justin Roberts rocks, and so do the Sippy Cups. It appears to be something of a movement...music for kids and parents alike, with songs that speak to children's mindsets while remaining creatively interesting and thematically complex.
But even among kiddie-indie (kindie?) rock peers, Frances's music really stands out. These are not so much kid's songs as songs that address family themes: new siblings, playing in the dirt, getting older, all that stuff. Her best songs evoke childlike feelings in adults, while children listening to her music might find their kid's eye view of the world expanding.
Here's a video of "Tricycle," from her first CD (one of her more kid-oriented songs):
You can listen to Fascinating Creatures and buy it here; you can do the same for Family Tree here.
[Originally posted to my Mothering magazine blog.]
"It's Liam's mommy, Frances. Remember her?"
"Yeah."
"What do you think of her songs?"
"They're good," he said, and plopped down on the floor. He sat through the entire CD, listening intently.
Weeks later, I put on the CD and as "Sometimes" started to play, he cried out, "That's my favorite song!"
Weeks after that, I brought Frances's new CD, Family Tree, along on a vacation with another family.
As little kids swarmed around the living room of our vacation house, I put on Family Tree. The commotion stopped and they all stood still, listening.
"Who is this?" asked Jody.
"Our friend Frances. It's her new CD."
"Wow, this is really good."
"I think so."
"It sounds like grown-up music," said her husband Alex. "This reminds me of Sarah McLachlan. Or maybe Nora Jones?"
"I always think of Ricki Lee Jones and Lisa Loeb and Aimee Mann," I said. "But not as dark."
In fact, the opposite of dark: Mellow, happy, content.
And a few weeks after that, we were playing with our friends Molly and her little boy Linus. I played Family Tree and Molly asked who we were hearing. I told her and mentioned that it was a kid's CD.
"This is tot music?" asked Molly incredulously. "No way."
Fascinating Creatures and Family Tree aren't the only children's CDs we own that also appeal to adults: Justin Roberts rocks, and so do the Sippy Cups. It appears to be something of a movement...music for kids and parents alike, with songs that speak to children's mindsets while remaining creatively interesting and thematically complex.
But even among kiddie-indie (kindie?) rock peers, Frances's music really stands out. These are not so much kid's songs as songs that address family themes: new siblings, playing in the dirt, getting older, all that stuff. Her best songs evoke childlike feelings in adults, while children listening to her music might find their kid's eye view of the world expanding.
Here's a video of "Tricycle," from her first CD (one of her more kid-oriented songs):
You can listen to Fascinating Creatures and buy it here; you can do the same for Family Tree here.
[Originally posted to my Mothering magazine blog.]
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Wife Swap!
This sounds amusing:
Haven't seen the episode (don't own a TV!), but from what I've gleaned from the blogosphere, each family came away with strong feelings of disgust for the other. This reminded me of another second-hand description of Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days, which had a Christian fundamentalist mom join a household of gay fathers for a month. That's the happy trio above.
My friend Jodi (a fan of 30 Days, which, similar to Wife Swap, specializes in putting social opposites together) says that participants normally come away with newfound respect and compassion for people different from themselves. Not so with the Christian fundamentalist, according to Jodi: She left the gay dad family with her prejudice intact.
"Part of what’s so fascinating about this episode is how this woman, who is clearly neither stupid nor insane, can hold two sets of absolutely contradictory views: that foster care is terrible for kids and that Dennis and Tom are fantastic parents, but that all gay couples, including Dennis and Tom, should not be allowed to adopt, forcing more kids into foster care," writes the entertainment site AfterElton.
I know from a great deal of empirical research that evangelical families are much more flexible on the ground about gender roles that we might expect, with many stay-at-home dads among them--nothing gives me more hope that gender egalitarianism is the wave of the future.
But "evangelical" is an umbrella term that covers a lot of different traditions and variations. There is definitely a hardcore of believers who will never accept non-traditional gender roles or the gay and lesbian families in their midst, no matter how much contact they have with each other or what evidence suggests the parents are doing a good job.
Has anyone seen these episodes? Care to comment?
IT'S A BATTLE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS WHEN A LIBERAL CHRISTIAN CAREER MOM WHOSE STAY-AT-HOME HUSBAND COOKS AND CLEANS SWAPS LIVES WITH A CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN HOUSEWIFE WHO OBEYS HER HUSBAND'S EVERY COMMAND, ON ABC'S "WIFE SWAP"
This week on "Beckman-Heskett/Childs," a theologically liberal high powered corporate executive mother with a stay-at-home husband swaps lives with a born again Christian mom who believes women are created to be men's help-mates, on "Wife Swap."Each week from across the country, two families with very different values are chosen to take part in a two-week long challenge. The wives from these two families exchange husbands, children and lives (but not bedrooms) to discover just what it's like to live another woman's life. It's a mind-blowing experiment that often ends up changing their lives forever.
Kim Beckman-Heskett (42) of Colorado is one of only three female vice presidents in her company. She works while her husband, Randall, stays at home and takes care of all of the chores, cooking and cleaning. A former preacher, Randall is now a self-professed modern Renaissance man, artist, poet and mystic who speaks 12 languages and possesses masters and PhD degrees in religion and theology. He is still a man of faith, but is skeptical of others he calls "bible thumpers" after 30 years of preaching and witnessing religious fundamentalism. Both Kim and Randall are devout Christians, but strongly disagree with literal interpretations of the Bible. They have a liberal approach to their faith, and Randall often incorporates humor in his beliefs and prayer. Kim doesn't believe that women should stay at home, "barefoot and pregnant," and encourages daughter Allison (12) and stepdaughter Hannah (12) to follow in her footsteps. The girls aren't required to do chores and are exposed to dating.
Kim travels to Rhode Island, where the Childs are born-again Christians who interpret the bible literally and use it as a guide for life. In the Childs' family constitution, God comes first, husband Christopher comes second. The family have to serve God at all times with a cheerful heart, and they follow the words of scripture to the letter. Lee-Ann is a stay-at-home mom who home schools her children, Laurie (18), Chrissy (18), Coburn (16), Columbia (12), Daisy (10) and Cambria (2). Christopher is an ultra traditionalist father who is head of his household and calls himself the "gatekeeper," setting the rules, enforcing discipline and expecting cheerful obedience. The children all must do a five-minute power clean before Christopher gets home from work. Mom is molding Coburn to be the man of the house so he can provide for a wife and family. As for the girls, she's training them to be stay-at-home moms who will live out God's calling in marriage and motherhood. Dating is not allowed for any of the children. Instead they pray daily for God to send them a spouse when the time is right. Lee-Ann is happy to be her husband's "help-mate," and says that women are the weaker link. The children feel it's ok to be at home as they feel safe, sheltered from the corrupting influences of the outside world.
Haven't seen the episode (don't own a TV!), but from what I've gleaned from the blogosphere, each family came away with strong feelings of disgust for the other. This reminded me of another second-hand description of Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days, which had a Christian fundamentalist mom join a household of gay fathers for a month. That's the happy trio above.My friend Jodi (a fan of 30 Days, which, similar to Wife Swap, specializes in putting social opposites together) says that participants normally come away with newfound respect and compassion for people different from themselves. Not so with the Christian fundamentalist, according to Jodi: She left the gay dad family with her prejudice intact.
"Part of what’s so fascinating about this episode is how this woman, who is clearly neither stupid nor insane, can hold two sets of absolutely contradictory views: that foster care is terrible for kids and that Dennis and Tom are fantastic parents, but that all gay couples, including Dennis and Tom, should not be allowed to adopt, forcing more kids into foster care," writes the entertainment site AfterElton.
I know from a great deal of empirical research that evangelical families are much more flexible on the ground about gender roles that we might expect, with many stay-at-home dads among them--nothing gives me more hope that gender egalitarianism is the wave of the future.
But "evangelical" is an umbrella term that covers a lot of different traditions and variations. There is definitely a hardcore of believers who will never accept non-traditional gender roles or the gay and lesbian families in their midst, no matter how much contact they have with each other or what evidence suggests the parents are doing a good job.
Has anyone seen these episodes? Care to comment?
Sunday, May 25, 2008
The Dad Jeans Problem
One of two things has happened since I bought my last pair of jeans a few years ago.
Either a) I have experienced a late-onset growth spurt, in which an elongation of my lower spine has increased the distance between my crotch and waist, making it impossible to insert myself into a pair of men's jeans without damaging my genitalia, or b) the corporate couturiers at GAP have decided that I, almost-40-full-time-father-of-one, need to wear my jeans about an inch below the crack of my ass.
And so a quiet revolution has transpired: I've given up jeans. More than that: I've passionately rejected them. They can go to hell. I've switched entirely to chinos. It's not a perfect solution, but it's no longer the anatomical crisis it was shaping up to be. And it most certainly marks the end of a long, denim-clad era.
It wasn't an easy process. At the end of it, I basically gave the finger to the GAP-J.Crew-Express-Levis-Diesel global conglomerate dedicated to making men look like this:
Now, one of the privileges of youth is to freely choose to look like a fool, but not really know it; one of the privileges of maturity is to know that young people look like fools, several decades before they figure it out for themselves, as they inevitably will when they consult their yearbooks at future high-school reunions.
But to stick to my point: it seems to me that there is a dad jeans problem. It arises when you reach that fork in the road between low-rider/girl jeans, or boxy jeans with the capacious fly that zips up to your navel. I didn't like the choices, so I opted out of the game.
This is interesting only because it allows me to challenge the notion of mommy particularism. What is mommy particularism? It's the idea that, to paraphrase my wife, there is a certain unspoken social threshold with moms beyond which men (or dads) just can't pass, because they don't get certain things.
"So there's an analogy to the problem of moms and mom jeans," I propose, thinking this might help close the phenomenological gulf between motherhood and fatherhood.
"There's no analogy. You don't want to look like the guy in the picture. You're happy with your chinos. The mom doesn't want to wear mom jeans because it means she's not sexy anymore."
"But the common problem," I reply as our dialectic unfolds, "is that neither the mom nor the dad can find jeans that fit once they hit parenthood. So their fashion changes and it's a rite of passage. They're squeezed out of one style and can't stand the prospect of fitting into another."
She's still not convinced. I could have gone to L.L. Bean, I remind her. I could have walked into Eddie Bauer and come out looking like George Costanza. I could have gone for the full-comfort, baggy crotch in powder blue. Part of me still wants to. Her friends would be pulling her over and asking, "What happened?" and she would then understand the problem of dad jeans.
The controversy was settled the other day with a late-morning trip to "the mall," where Spot's mom saw for herself the reality of the dad jeans problem.
But it's not really the dad jeans problem I care about, since I've found my "third way", my chinos. What I care about is throwing another bridge between the allegedly separate spheres of mothers and fathers, comfortable in their mommy ghettos and daddy ghettos, talking about things that only authentic members of each ghetto can understand.
But the mom jeans-dad jeans problem can't be segregated.
The issue is not the jeans problem in and of itself. The jeans problem clearly transcends gender lines. The issue is who we decide we're going to discuss the problem with.
Either a) I have experienced a late-onset growth spurt, in which an elongation of my lower spine has increased the distance between my crotch and waist, making it impossible to insert myself into a pair of men's jeans without damaging my genitalia, or b) the corporate couturiers at GAP have decided that I, almost-40-full-time-father-of-one, need to wear my jeans about an inch below the crack of my ass.
And so a quiet revolution has transpired: I've given up jeans. More than that: I've passionately rejected them. They can go to hell. I've switched entirely to chinos. It's not a perfect solution, but it's no longer the anatomical crisis it was shaping up to be. And it most certainly marks the end of a long, denim-clad era.
It wasn't an easy process. At the end of it, I basically gave the finger to the GAP-J.Crew-Express-Levis-Diesel global conglomerate dedicated to making men look like this:
Now, one of the privileges of youth is to freely choose to look like a fool, but not really know it; one of the privileges of maturity is to know that young people look like fools, several decades before they figure it out for themselves, as they inevitably will when they consult their yearbooks at future high-school reunions.
But to stick to my point: it seems to me that there is a dad jeans problem. It arises when you reach that fork in the road between low-rider/girl jeans, or boxy jeans with the capacious fly that zips up to your navel. I didn't like the choices, so I opted out of the game.
This is interesting only because it allows me to challenge the notion of mommy particularism. What is mommy particularism? It's the idea that, to paraphrase my wife, there is a certain unspoken social threshold with moms beyond which men (or dads) just can't pass, because they don't get certain things.
"So there's an analogy to the problem of moms and mom jeans," I propose, thinking this might help close the phenomenological gulf between motherhood and fatherhood.
"There's no analogy. You don't want to look like the guy in the picture. You're happy with your chinos. The mom doesn't want to wear mom jeans because it means she's not sexy anymore."
"But the common problem," I reply as our dialectic unfolds, "is that neither the mom nor the dad can find jeans that fit once they hit parenthood. So their fashion changes and it's a rite of passage. They're squeezed out of one style and can't stand the prospect of fitting into another."
She's still not convinced. I could have gone to L.L. Bean, I remind her. I could have walked into Eddie Bauer and come out looking like George Costanza. I could have gone for the full-comfort, baggy crotch in powder blue. Part of me still wants to. Her friends would be pulling her over and asking, "What happened?" and she would then understand the problem of dad jeans.
The controversy was settled the other day with a late-morning trip to "the mall," where Spot's mom saw for herself the reality of the dad jeans problem.
But it's not really the dad jeans problem I care about, since I've found my "third way", my chinos. What I care about is throwing another bridge between the allegedly separate spheres of mothers and fathers, comfortable in their mommy ghettos and daddy ghettos, talking about things that only authentic members of each ghetto can understand.
But the mom jeans-dad jeans problem can't be segregated.
The issue is not the jeans problem in and of itself. The jeans problem clearly transcends gender lines. The issue is who we decide we're going to discuss the problem with.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
I Am A Porn Star
It's true. I just found out yesterday. Spot was with me, and I didn't even have to take my clothes off. All I had to do was pick up this lovely little book that I'd like to share with other at-home dads, who may already be porn stars without even knowing it.
(All you Bay Area folks may already have checked this out, as it's published by Chronicle Press in San Francisco. Those may even be your kids in the pictures. Curiously, amazon.com lists it under "parenting" rather than pornography.)
So I was being pornographic, in public, without quite knowing it, lugging the Spot around in his backpack, when I decided to duck into a local independent bookstore to pick up some short stories by a guy who is supposed to be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Of course I quickly forgot all about that -- as I sometimes also forget that I am but a palace eunuch whose current task is to transport the Emperor along his morning rounds -- when I notice this title at the cashier's desk and start flipping through it.
"This is hilarious," I tell the 20-something blond behind the cash register.
"You're the embodiment of that," she said.
"Whoa," I thought. She just called me the embodiment of mommy porn. This is a good day.
Her comment reminds me that Spot is still dangling there. I turn my head around. "Spot, did you hear that? She just said daddy's a porn star!"
"Bah!"
I didn't really say that, but thought that since he is part of the whole effect, he might want to bask in some of the glory.
I could get into all sorts of semiotic and cultural analyses about what's going on in this witty piece of cultural candy, but I'll spare you my nonsense and just wrap up with a pic that didn't make it into the original collection, but should probably go into the second volume.
The great thing about porn for moms is that you can keep your clothes on. This pic is from February, and Spot looks like whatever was in his shorts just froze, but you get the idea. I'm sure at home dads across the country have loads of pics just like this. You're all porn stars, each and every one.
Speaking of which, Spot's starting to wake up from his afternoon nap. Gotta go be the hottness.
(All you Bay Area folks may already have checked this out, as it's published by Chronicle Press in San Francisco. Those may even be your kids in the pictures. Curiously, amazon.com lists it under "parenting" rather than pornography.)So I was being pornographic, in public, without quite knowing it, lugging the Spot around in his backpack, when I decided to duck into a local independent bookstore to pick up some short stories by a guy who is supposed to be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Of course I quickly forgot all about that -- as I sometimes also forget that I am but a palace eunuch whose current task is to transport the Emperor along his morning rounds -- when I notice this title at the cashier's desk and start flipping through it.
"This is hilarious," I tell the 20-something blond behind the cash register.
"You're the embodiment of that," she said.
"Whoa," I thought. She just called me the embodiment of mommy porn. This is a good day.
Her comment reminds me that Spot is still dangling there. I turn my head around. "Spot, did you hear that? She just said daddy's a porn star!"
"Bah!"
I didn't really say that, but thought that since he is part of the whole effect, he might want to bask in some of the glory.
I could get into all sorts of semiotic and cultural analyses about what's going on in this witty piece of cultural candy, but I'll spare you my nonsense and just wrap up with a pic that didn't make it into the original collection, but should probably go into the second volume.
The great thing about porn for moms is that you can keep your clothes on. This pic is from February, and Spot looks like whatever was in his shorts just froze, but you get the idea. I'm sure at home dads across the country have loads of pics just like this. You're all porn stars, each and every one.
Speaking of which, Spot's starting to wake up from his afternoon nap. Gotta go be the hottness.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
The Queen's Consort
I occasionally get to dress up in drag once in a while. It involves putting on a tie and a dinner jacket, sometimes even a suit, and going downtown for a night at the opera with my wife. She usually drives.
It seems only appropriate that the Civic Opera House, a gloriously enclosed Art Deco box where fantasies are staged and worlds are invented, becomes a theater for the enactment of my occasional performances as a Man. Or what I imagine might look like a Man to the crowds milling about, beneath the luxurious salmon and rose-colored ceilings by Jules Guerin, the kind of Man that I so often associate with Gregory Peck, doing the things a Man does, the way he does in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
Of course, Gregory Peck didn't go to the Opera in the movie, and in fact such an extravagance would have been out of place in that stark tale of post-war moral compromise, as much as a gray flannel suit would be out of place at the Lyric Opera. But if he ever did set foot, I'm sure he would look more a Man than anyone there.
So it's always interesting when, as I'm indulging in this play-acting in a suit at the opera, being Gregory Peck and being swept away by musical tales of heroes and heroines, we meet someone and the reality comes out that I change diapers for a living.
"You mean you're not a high-power lawyer?" "Nah," I reply. "It's the suit." Not quite as jarring as a stage light falling onto the set during the closing aria, but something similar.
Unless we meet another queen-and-consort combo, which is what happened one snowy Saturday night about a month ago. Then it all starts to feel kind of natural. Up to a point.
A couple approached us, and it was clear that my wife knew the other woman. They worked together. I recognized her but had no idea who she was, and smiled at her husband, who did not look like Gregory Peck, and in fact looked kind of freaky in his heavy brown sweater.
In a sideways whisper I ask my wife, "So who is this person?" after a minute or two of chit-chat.
"She is my boss's boss's boss."
At that moment my play-acting took on an entirely new dimension. It was a Rorschach moment, when the hourglass stops looking like an hourglass and starts looking like two human heads. I went from Gregory Peck being a Man to Gregory Peck's wife charming her husband's boss.
"Cynthia's husband here is also a stay-at-home-dad," my wife resumes at conversational volume. We shake hands. He's affable, and looks like he has just returned from a cross-country ski expedition to the North Pole.
"How long have you been at it?" I ask him.
"About 10 years."
Three individual trains of thought then lurch forward in my mind. The first was that this fellow was not enjoying the same fantasy I was. The second was that Cynthia, I now realized, was the person who had just fired one of my wife's respected colleagues the week before.
The third was that I could learn a lot from this other at-home dad, who had been going at it for so much longer than I had. But that probably wouldn't happen, because as interesting and nice as everyone was, this dad's wife could fire my son's mom tomorrow.
It was a lot to process between the second and third acts of Eugene Onegin. I had spent the last hour or so transported to the birch forests north of Moscow. Now I realized that this consort might lose his crown, just as suddenly as things had changed in St. Petersburg on a certain day in October a long time ago.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Harvey Milk for President!
Harvey Milk was the first openly gay politician "in the history of the planet," to quote Time magazine. He represented my neighborhood on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and was killed in 1978 (along with Mayor George Moscone) by city supervisor Dan White, a seemingly nice guy, by some accounts, who turned out to be a raving lunatic.
But when White was sentenced to a mere seven years for the crime, there were riots at City Hall and in the Castro. Here's some (murky) footage:
Now director Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Paranoid Park, etc.) is making a film of those events, staring Sean Penn as Milk, and much of the shoot occurred during the past several months on Castro Street, where I live on the border between the Castro and Noe Valley neighborhoods.
It's fascinating to watch a film put together: the facades of many Castro businesses were torn down and rebuilt to appear as they were in the 1970s; we saw famous people loitering around coffee shops; we watched staggering amounts of preparation for scenes that appeared to last for two minutes; and we residents were herded like cattle to avoid stumbling into scenes where our clothing would have made us anachronisms. Here's a little video someone did on the transformation:
But it was also interesting to hear gray-haired gay men reminisce about those days--and to hear the Castro's children ask about this Harvey Milk person. Liko wanted to know what all the fuss was about, of course, and I explained as best I could.
He gets that some of his friends have two mommies or two daddies, and it doesn't seem weird to him. I don't need to explain "gay" to him, though he doesn't know that word. He just knows that kids have different mixes of parents, and that boys can be affectionate with boys and girls with girls, just like his mom and I are affectionate. That's not so complicated, is it?
But it was painfully difficult to explain that there was once a time when the parents of his friends could not be parents--they couldn't be anything. They were invisible. And people like Harvey Milk helped create a place for them in playgrounds, schools, neighborhoods, and every area of life.
Love is easy to explain; hate is hard. It's not really suitable for children. One early morning I walked with Liko down Castro, and they had apparently just finished filming scenes of the "White Night Riots." The Castro was once again transformed, now with smashed windows, burned-out cars, and graffiti.
"What's going on, daddy?" Liko asked. I didn't say anything and I was just thankful that this was the reenactment of the riot, not the real thing. It was genuinely chilling to see the neighborhood in a state of ruin, however temporary and imaginary.
This history is often news to children of both queer and straight parents--both are learning about Harvey Milk and what he meant for the neighborhood. One afternoon during the shoot I heard this conversation between my friend Lisa (a lesbian mom) and her oldest son, about 9:
"Why was Harvey Milk so important?"
"He helped stand up for the rights of gay people."
"But what does that mean?"
"It means that we can take care of you and not be afraid of anyone taking you away."
Which is really cool, in every single way. I'm glad Van Sant is making this film, and I'm looking forward to seeing it, and I'm proud to live in a place with such great history.
By coincidence, the video of an updated version of Wyclef Jean's "If I Was President" was shot in the neighborhood at the same time as Milk. Liko and my wife Olli got roped into it one afternoon and they cheerfully participated, and now the video is out and they're in it, with many amusing San Francisco street scenes. They appear (for about a second in front of the Castro Theater) at the three minutes, eleven seconds point, near the end:
It's an accidental, personal juxtaposition, but it seems to me that "If I Was President" has a lot to say to Milk:
But when White was sentenced to a mere seven years for the crime, there were riots at City Hall and in the Castro. Here's some (murky) footage:
Now director Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Paranoid Park, etc.) is making a film of those events, staring Sean Penn as Milk, and much of the shoot occurred during the past several months on Castro Street, where I live on the border between the Castro and Noe Valley neighborhoods.
It's fascinating to watch a film put together: the facades of many Castro businesses were torn down and rebuilt to appear as they were in the 1970s; we saw famous people loitering around coffee shops; we watched staggering amounts of preparation for scenes that appeared to last for two minutes; and we residents were herded like cattle to avoid stumbling into scenes where our clothing would have made us anachronisms. Here's a little video someone did on the transformation:
But it was also interesting to hear gray-haired gay men reminisce about those days--and to hear the Castro's children ask about this Harvey Milk person. Liko wanted to know what all the fuss was about, of course, and I explained as best I could.
He gets that some of his friends have two mommies or two daddies, and it doesn't seem weird to him. I don't need to explain "gay" to him, though he doesn't know that word. He just knows that kids have different mixes of parents, and that boys can be affectionate with boys and girls with girls, just like his mom and I are affectionate. That's not so complicated, is it?
But it was painfully difficult to explain that there was once a time when the parents of his friends could not be parents--they couldn't be anything. They were invisible. And people like Harvey Milk helped create a place for them in playgrounds, schools, neighborhoods, and every area of life.
Love is easy to explain; hate is hard. It's not really suitable for children. One early morning I walked with Liko down Castro, and they had apparently just finished filming scenes of the "White Night Riots." The Castro was once again transformed, now with smashed windows, burned-out cars, and graffiti.
"What's going on, daddy?" Liko asked. I didn't say anything and I was just thankful that this was the reenactment of the riot, not the real thing. It was genuinely chilling to see the neighborhood in a state of ruin, however temporary and imaginary.
This history is often news to children of both queer and straight parents--both are learning about Harvey Milk and what he meant for the neighborhood. One afternoon during the shoot I heard this conversation between my friend Lisa (a lesbian mom) and her oldest son, about 9:
"Why was Harvey Milk so important?"
"He helped stand up for the rights of gay people."
"But what does that mean?"
"It means that we can take care of you and not be afraid of anyone taking you away."
Which is really cool, in every single way. I'm glad Van Sant is making this film, and I'm looking forward to seeing it, and I'm proud to live in a place with such great history.
By coincidence, the video of an updated version of Wyclef Jean's "If I Was President" was shot in the neighborhood at the same time as Milk. Liko and my wife Olli got roped into it one afternoon and they cheerfully participated, and now the video is out and they're in it, with many amusing San Francisco street scenes. They appear (for about a second in front of the Castro Theater) at the three minutes, eleven seconds point, near the end:
It's an accidental, personal juxtaposition, but it seems to me that "If I Was President" has a lot to say to Milk:
[chorus]
If I was president,
I'd get elected on Friday, assassinated on Saturday,
and buried on Sunday.
If I was president...
If I was president
An old man told me, instead of spending billions on the war,
we can use some of that money, in the ghetto.
I know some so poor, they use the spring as the shower,
when screaming "fight the power."
That's when the vulture devoured
[chorus]
If I was president,
I'd get elected on Friday, assassinated on Saturday,
and buried on Sunday.
If I was president...
If I was president...
If I was president...
If I was president
Tell the children the truth, the truth.
Monday, March 03, 2008
What About Dad?
I enjoy reading Parenting magazine, about the same way I enjoy reading Cosmopolitan or sitting around kibitzing about the stuff of daily life: parking, the weather, corrupt politicians, the movies, and corrupt politicians.
It's a cheap pleasure -- as it should be, considering I didn't pay for it, but cashed in some frequent flier miles for this and a subscription to Wine Spectator. And I have to admit that, all in all, Parenting has yielded more useful care giving tricks than Wine Spectator has helped me become a true connoisseur.
Like Cosmo, Parenting: What Matters to Moms gives this Dad a cozy and sometimes reassuring feeling of already knowing what everyone is talking about -- with the exception of breastfeeding and postpartum issues. Though, if you pay attention to your partner (assuming this person is a woman), it's not hard to get this stuff either. Aside from that, it's pretty basic. Feed your children. On a regular basis. Don't drop them, and make sure they have clothes. Do this every day for about 5 to 10 years, sometimes longer. Et cetera.
Of course, Parenting sometimes has very useful information that satisfies my desire not to read a 300 page book on every developmental issue known to the American Academy of Pediatrics. When, for example, children will begin to want privacy, all about food allergies, or what to do when Spot has a fever. In the end it's all fairly simple.
But unlike Cosmo, with which I have a fairly straightforward reader relationship, of being either completely uninterested in a given topic (I will never use that line of cosmetics), or feeling able to judge a matter based on some degree of personal experience ("13 Tricks to Jump-Start Your Sex Life"), when it comes to the place of "Dad" in Parenting, it's a much weirder relationship. As the title makes clear, they're not really talking to me, though they do try to keep me in mind.
Which is why, in just about every monthly issue, there is at least one article in which Dad makes an appearance, mostly as a sort of Appendix to whatever is being discussed.
One instance of Dad-As-Appendix appeared in an article on how to bond with your baby. Certainly something every mom wants to know. The article runs through some crazy and discredited theories from the 70's, and then, inducing a sigh of relief from the reader, goes on to summarize the current less-crazy theories. Part of what makes the new theories less crazy than the old ones, it turns out, is that they make room for dad -- a little bit. As the heading of the last section asks, "What about dad?"
Yes, well, what about dad? The answer is basically that "bonding can (and should) occur between father and child." Once that principle has been absorbed, the next thing to remember is that you can't be afraid to "dumb it down" a little bit. If mom really wants to make some progress, she should let go and just leave once in a while to let dad sort things out on his own.
I don't disagree with any of it, of course, except the "dumbing down" part; how difficult is this, really? To its credit, the Parenting piece recognizes that most dads have to go back to work shortly after their child's birth, and so aren't around to figure everything out through experience. But that's nothing that a little eagerness to be with your new, tiny hominid won't cure. And chances are it really doesn't have to be dumbed down that much; it's much easier than advanced calculus, or trying to get the perfect risotto.
But more importantly, I wonder what would happen if the editors of Parenting and similar magazines tried out a different marketing strategy: if they moved from being magazines about What Matters to Moms, with articles dealing with Dad-As-Appendix, to What Matters to Parents, with articles dealing with Dad-As-Half-The-Family-Situation. Would they lose the interest of the majority of their readers, or would they gain new ones? Does the orientation of Parenting magazine to Mom reflect the demographic reality, or reproduce it? Would it make business sense for anyone to launch a print "Dad" magazine?
It's nice to see yourself reflected somewhere in the culture, more or less accurately, once in a while. I don't expect to all the time, especially not in mass media. I can't afford the $500 bottle of Bordeaux that Wine Spectator wants me to know about, I don't really need Cycling to tell me how to train 50 miles a day for a criterium or which space-age composite bike to get. I'm not really into having my aspirations egged on, just my reality reflected back a little, once in a while.
It's a cheap pleasure -- as it should be, considering I didn't pay for it, but cashed in some frequent flier miles for this and a subscription to Wine Spectator. And I have to admit that, all in all, Parenting has yielded more useful care giving tricks than Wine Spectator has helped me become a true connoisseur.
Like Cosmo, Parenting: What Matters to Moms gives this Dad a cozy and sometimes reassuring feeling of already knowing what everyone is talking about -- with the exception of breastfeeding and postpartum issues. Though, if you pay attention to your partner (assuming this person is a woman), it's not hard to get this stuff either. Aside from that, it's pretty basic. Feed your children. On a regular basis. Don't drop them, and make sure they have clothes. Do this every day for about 5 to 10 years, sometimes longer. Et cetera.
Of course, Parenting sometimes has very useful information that satisfies my desire not to read a 300 page book on every developmental issue known to the American Academy of Pediatrics. When, for example, children will begin to want privacy, all about food allergies, or what to do when Spot has a fever. In the end it's all fairly simple.
But unlike Cosmo, with which I have a fairly straightforward reader relationship, of being either completely uninterested in a given topic (I will never use that line of cosmetics), or feeling able to judge a matter based on some degree of personal experience ("13 Tricks to Jump-Start Your Sex Life"), when it comes to the place of "Dad" in Parenting, it's a much weirder relationship. As the title makes clear, they're not really talking to me, though they do try to keep me in mind.
Which is why, in just about every monthly issue, there is at least one article in which Dad makes an appearance, mostly as a sort of Appendix to whatever is being discussed.
One instance of Dad-As-Appendix appeared in an article on how to bond with your baby. Certainly something every mom wants to know. The article runs through some crazy and discredited theories from the 70's, and then, inducing a sigh of relief from the reader, goes on to summarize the current less-crazy theories. Part of what makes the new theories less crazy than the old ones, it turns out, is that they make room for dad -- a little bit. As the heading of the last section asks, "What about dad?"
Yes, well, what about dad? The answer is basically that "bonding can (and should) occur between father and child." Once that principle has been absorbed, the next thing to remember is that you can't be afraid to "dumb it down" a little bit. If mom really wants to make some progress, she should let go and just leave once in a while to let dad sort things out on his own.
I don't disagree with any of it, of course, except the "dumbing down" part; how difficult is this, really? To its credit, the Parenting piece recognizes that most dads have to go back to work shortly after their child's birth, and so aren't around to figure everything out through experience. But that's nothing that a little eagerness to be with your new, tiny hominid won't cure. And chances are it really doesn't have to be dumbed down that much; it's much easier than advanced calculus, or trying to get the perfect risotto.
But more importantly, I wonder what would happen if the editors of Parenting and similar magazines tried out a different marketing strategy: if they moved from being magazines about What Matters to Moms, with articles dealing with Dad-As-Appendix, to What Matters to Parents, with articles dealing with Dad-As-Half-The-Family-Situation. Would they lose the interest of the majority of their readers, or would they gain new ones? Does the orientation of Parenting magazine to Mom reflect the demographic reality, or reproduce it? Would it make business sense for anyone to launch a print "Dad" magazine?
It's nice to see yourself reflected somewhere in the culture, more or less accurately, once in a while. I don't expect to all the time, especially not in mass media. I can't afford the $500 bottle of Bordeaux that Wine Spectator wants me to know about, I don't really need Cycling to tell me how to train 50 miles a day for a criterium or which space-age composite bike to get. I'm not really into having my aspirations egged on, just my reality reflected back a little, once in a while.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Mr. Mom Revisited
I had never seen Mr. Mom, the 1983 film that marked the screen debut of the stay-at-home dad. Long-time readers (both of you!) might recall that I have never had a problem with the term "Mr. Mom," which many stay-at-home dads see as a knock on their masculinity. Nonetheless, the arguments against the film seemed likely to have a grain of truth: Hollywood depictions of caregiving dads tend to be problematic at best, hostile at worst.
But there I was, grinding away at my book, when I realized that I had to see Mr. Mom. I'm writing an entire book about stay-at-home dads; I couldn't not see the first movie devoted to the subject. So I went out and finally rented the thing.
Here's the premise: Jack Butler, played by Michael Keaton, is a Detroit assembly-line engineer who loses his job in a wave of corporate downsizing. His wife returns to work in the advertising industry, after eight years of taking care of their three children.
Before I go on, some historical perspective. Had this film been made in the 1930s, Mr. Mom would have been a tear-jerking melodrama: Jack would have sunk into alcoholism and domestic violence while his wife endured the humiliation of employment. Men of that period would not merely lose a job; they lost their very identity. Chronically un- or underemployed men did not turn their energies to the care and rearing of children and maintenance of a home, even as their wives took jobs; instead, they built walls around themselves.
“He loves kids and plays with them all the time, except when he’s out of work,” testified one mother in the 1920s. “Then he won’t play with them, but just says all the time, ‘Don’t bother me, don’t bother me.’ And of course the kids don’t understand why he’s different.” In his 1994 book Fatherhood in America, historian Robert L. Griswold provides example after example of early 20th century fathers who were utterly destroyed by unemployment. These fathers may as well have died or abandoned their families, as many did.
Back to Mr. Mom, which was made at the height of the Reagan recession--I actually lived in Michigan at the time, where the movie takes place, and many people there called it a depression. In real life, thousands of auto-industry employees like Jack were being thrown out of work. But unlike most men during the Great Depression, Jack turns his energies to taking care of kids and house.
The stay-at-home dads of today often resent the Mr. Mom caricature of a bumbling dad-at-home, but I found the film to be much more complex than this stereotype suggests. Jack certainly does struggle with the tasks of being a househusband--his clumsy efforts to cook, clean, and change diapers are milked for slapstick comedy. But as the film goes on, Jack and his wife both grow into their new roles--they even help each other along, trading advice and support in crucial moments, drawing on their respective experiences--and by the end, Jack is a very competent and confident homemaker and his wife is a successful advertising executive.
The real significance of Mr. Mom lies in the fact that it tries to teach guys how to behave when faced with domestic responsibilities: the film preaches that family men must embrace, not run away from, housework and childcare when those tasks fall to them. When their identities as breadwinners are destroyed by economic change, argues Mr. Mom, family men must build new identities as homemakers. Moreover, it argues that men ought to support their wives economic power and career aspiration—-especially since life-long male employment was no longer guaranteed and a middle-class lifestyle was no longer affordable on one income. In this way necessities are turned into virtues, as they almost always are.
Mr. Mom was marketed as a light comedy, but in retrospect, it marks a cultural watershed: the stay-at-home dad was now a part of the landscape—-as a real option, not just as the butt of a joke. In a 1990 Time magazine poll, 48 percent of men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four claimed that they would consider staying at home with their children. When my mother and father were born, such a question could not even have been asked. When I was born, it could only be raised in jest. By the 1980s, however, the definition of fatherhood as breadwinning, secure for a century, was suddenly on the ropes. Mr. Mom reflects that and the anxieties that come with it--but crucially, it also suggests that there might be something better around the corner, a new idea of fatherhood that embraces both breadwinning and caregiving.
I liked the movie. I don't think it's something that stay-at-home dads should feel ashamed of.
But there I was, grinding away at my book, when I realized that I had to see Mr. Mom. I'm writing an entire book about stay-at-home dads; I couldn't not see the first movie devoted to the subject. So I went out and finally rented the thing.
Here's the premise: Jack Butler, played by Michael Keaton, is a Detroit assembly-line engineer who loses his job in a wave of corporate downsizing. His wife returns to work in the advertising industry, after eight years of taking care of their three children.
Before I go on, some historical perspective. Had this film been made in the 1930s, Mr. Mom would have been a tear-jerking melodrama: Jack would have sunk into alcoholism and domestic violence while his wife endured the humiliation of employment. Men of that period would not merely lose a job; they lost their very identity. Chronically un- or underemployed men did not turn their energies to the care and rearing of children and maintenance of a home, even as their wives took jobs; instead, they built walls around themselves.
“He loves kids and plays with them all the time, except when he’s out of work,” testified one mother in the 1920s. “Then he won’t play with them, but just says all the time, ‘Don’t bother me, don’t bother me.’ And of course the kids don’t understand why he’s different.” In his 1994 book Fatherhood in America, historian Robert L. Griswold provides example after example of early 20th century fathers who were utterly destroyed by unemployment. These fathers may as well have died or abandoned their families, as many did.
Back to Mr. Mom, which was made at the height of the Reagan recession--I actually lived in Michigan at the time, where the movie takes place, and many people there called it a depression. In real life, thousands of auto-industry employees like Jack were being thrown out of work. But unlike most men during the Great Depression, Jack turns his energies to taking care of kids and house.
The stay-at-home dads of today often resent the Mr. Mom caricature of a bumbling dad-at-home, but I found the film to be much more complex than this stereotype suggests. Jack certainly does struggle with the tasks of being a househusband--his clumsy efforts to cook, clean, and change diapers are milked for slapstick comedy. But as the film goes on, Jack and his wife both grow into their new roles--they even help each other along, trading advice and support in crucial moments, drawing on their respective experiences--and by the end, Jack is a very competent and confident homemaker and his wife is a successful advertising executive.
The real significance of Mr. Mom lies in the fact that it tries to teach guys how to behave when faced with domestic responsibilities: the film preaches that family men must embrace, not run away from, housework and childcare when those tasks fall to them. When their identities as breadwinners are destroyed by economic change, argues Mr. Mom, family men must build new identities as homemakers. Moreover, it argues that men ought to support their wives economic power and career aspiration—-especially since life-long male employment was no longer guaranteed and a middle-class lifestyle was no longer affordable on one income. In this way necessities are turned into virtues, as they almost always are.
Mr. Mom was marketed as a light comedy, but in retrospect, it marks a cultural watershed: the stay-at-home dad was now a part of the landscape—-as a real option, not just as the butt of a joke. In a 1990 Time magazine poll, 48 percent of men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four claimed that they would consider staying at home with their children. When my mother and father were born, such a question could not even have been asked. When I was born, it could only be raised in jest. By the 1980s, however, the definition of fatherhood as breadwinning, secure for a century, was suddenly on the ropes. Mr. Mom reflects that and the anxieties that come with it--but crucially, it also suggests that there might be something better around the corner, a new idea of fatherhood that embraces both breadwinning and caregiving.
I liked the movie. I don't think it's something that stay-at-home dads should feel ashamed of.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
You Tell 'Em, Rush!
I just finished a long essay for Public Eye magazine on the ideal and reality of Christian Right childrearing, which will be published sometime in the next month. I discovered that while Christian Right parenting ideals--primarily about the supremacy of fathers, subordination of mothers, and inborn wickedness of children--are simple and often frightening, the actual behavior of conservative evangelicals is pretty complex.As I write in the article, conservative evangelical homes must confront the same problems as their nonevangelical counterparts: the erosion of real wages, the rising costs of necessities like health care and education, the ubiquity of electronic media, and the declining rights of workers, to name a few. This explains why, for example, rates of teen sex and divorce are not significantly lower in these homes. In fact, divorce is especially high in Bible Belt states, due at least in part to higher unemployment.
In an interview, the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, who studies the impact of conservative evangelical faith on the behavior of both men and women, urged that I distinguish “between what elite evangelicals [like James Dobson] say and what average people are doing.” While elites may rail against the social and economic changes of recent decades, Wilcox said that “your average evangelical takes all that with a grain of salt.” That’s in part because most evangelical wives work. “Part of that is a class issue,” Wilcox said. “Evangelicals are more working class, than, for example, mainline Protestants, [and] they have less economic flexibility. And so the reality on the ground, with gender issues, is more flexible than some might expect.”
I immediately thought of Wilcox's point when I stumbled across this recent broadcast transcript from right-wing blowhard Rush Limbaugh. In it, Rush grumbles against fathers cooking for their families and parents buying toy kitchens for boys. "This is not men reshaping and rethinking their roles," says Rush. "That's being done for them with various sorts of pressure being applied if the behavioral model that is demanded isn't met"--and the pressure, he says, is coming from "feminazis."
This is all par for the course, and not really worthy of comment. But then the calls start coming in from listeners. Here's the first:
RUSH: To the phones, to Fort Wayne, Indiana. This is Steve. Nice to have you on the program, sir.
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush. I absolutely love you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I'm a stay-at-home dad. I run a small business out of my home, and my boys -- I got two boys -- are great cooks. Now, I haven't bought 'em a kitchen set, and it's not on my short list of toys to buy, but they can make a mean batch of cookies, but they're in wrestling, and they'll kick somebody's tail with a sword -- playing swords with them -- and I wouldn't have a problem with them cooking at all. That's not a... I cook every meal in our house.
RUSH: How old did you say that these two boys are?
CALLER: My boys are eight and five.
RUSH: Eight and five, and they bake cookies?
CALLER: They do. They buy a brand-name mixer and...
And so on. As he listens, Rush is obviously confused. It's hilarious, ironic--and a perfect illustration of Wilcox's research. It's also a measure of the degree to which conservative ideologues are being left in the dust by their followers--who must, after all, live in the same 21st century as the rest of us.
Monday, November 12, 2007
who's your daddy?
Hello -- it's been a while since I posted, and since rad dad 8 is taking shape, I thought I’d post something from rad dad 7 as a way to say, "hey come on, I know you all got something to say, so say it -- write for rad dad 8!"
It’s been so difficult to get father's to write birth stories! In fact, I received no birth stories, so I’d love to get someone to write one for this issue out at the end of November.
Also I really like Jeremy's post about his own blog "where we are writing from." It reminded me why I enjoy writing about all this craziness called fathering. This piece is about how fatherhood gets represented in the media, and well I apologize in advance for the tone; it's a bit much but I tried...
Tomas
Some of you may know this about me, but for those of you who don't, let me just spill the beans: I am a media whore! I'll be the first one to own up to my obsession with romantic comedies, with horribly bad TV dramas, with power ballads; in fact, I can identify the various stages or periods of numerous cultural pop icons—there's the Hugh Grant evolution pre or post his blowjob bust, there's the musician turned actor careers of J-Lo, Justin, and a slew of others. There's the progression of TV shows to the big screen…you get the picture.
However, I also consider myself an astute critic, ready to recognize gender stereotypes, to point out class issues, to call out racist tropes; my favorite is Justin Timberlake himself. How the fuck can Justin bring sexy back when it never went anywhere? What a perfect example of white entitlement? But I was kinda shocked the other day when my daughter said something that made me laugh but soon started gnawing at me like one of them zombies in Evil Dead.
"Dad, you should be in a TV show," Ella said innocently, and then of course added, "with your belly and your dog and you always making chili."
"Hey, don't be saying nothing about my mean vegan chili!" I replied.
And we went on to the next subject. However, the next day I was working on an essay about how men can challenge patriarchy, and I was bouncing ideas off my Official-Idea-Bouncer-Offer Andrea, and we came up with the idea of exploring stereotypes about fathers. It clicked; Ella was putting me into the category of so many images she has seen of how this society views fathers. Why had I never seen it before? But wait a second here, I'm no stereotype. Ella knows that…right? Perhaps though I hadn't noticed because even while I adamantly disagree with these images of fathering, I may in fact benefit from them, even play into them? I began to think back to early parenting roles my partner and I fell into. Most of the time we clearly processed who did what and why, what felt fair, and when we felt overwhelmed or overburdened. But it's true; I almost always would watch the kids while she would cook. And then I'd clean the dishes. How often did I mop or do some other big house-cleaning project while she took the kids to the park? Looking back on those first few years, not as often as would like to admit.
And when I was in public with my son, I remember the constant reproaches from usually older grandmotherly women about the way I held my baby, the way he was so damn dirty or the way I dressed him, especially my keen ability to never have socks on my kid's feet. But hey, who can keep track of socks, I argued. With all the advice and suggestions and snide looks I received, I often marveled at what I was doing, particularly because I didn't have that many male role models to fall back on. Was I really that weird, that unmanly, that lucky to be able to parent my kids and keep them alive or at least warm?
We need to ask ourselves why so many in our society don't trust men to be competent at parenting, to be trusted to handle a newborn without being watched over by the mother or the grandmother. And a good place to start would be to start questioning the images of bumbling fathers we're inundated with. It is the butt of our parenting jokes: men fucking up, dressing kids, trying to feed kids, trying to be both macho and cool, because parenting in our society equals mothering. Not fathering or fathers. And is not cool.
So I decided to do a little investigative research: how are dads represented in the media? It took me only like five seconds to come up with a slew of movies all reinforcing the loving but clearly not primary parent material father: Daddy Daycare, and the new sequel coming out Daddy Day Camp, the Ice Cube movies, the Adam Sandler movies, it just goes on and on. Or there's the action adventure movies in which you threaten a Real Man's family and then you'll see what Real Fathers are like—you know the male protector/patriarch and all.
But it has gotten even worse now as parenting has become a trend with more pop icons having babies because with celebrity comes a market for cool hip parenting stuff. Sure enough, along with designer sippy cups and bibs, there has been a bunch of new books on fathering. And they all seem to have one common premise, which is how to maintain gender privilege, those traditional notions of men and masculinity, and still parent; how to be that cool dad, that hip dad, that (gulp) rad dad.
So I decided to read one and peruse a few others. I chose Alternadad by Neal Pollack because it was in my library. For a taste of some others, I moseyed on into a bookstore and, as I am walking through the aisle, I see the new GQ and pick it up (yes, because it had Jessica Alba on the cover). I kid you not, but I flip it open and come to a spread of nine famous fathers all dressed up with their kids. The headline was something like: How to Still Dress like a Winner When You Have Kids. Because of course kids make you a loser, make you so not stylish, ruin your cool life (assuming of course that the point of life is to be cool). I was shocked and turned to go find the other books when I saw Parents Press' new issue, the only free parenting newspaper in the baby area, and what is one the cover, I kid you not, but the picture of a new daddy book by some pop-punk rock singer and his three kids.
Aghhhhh!
Now there is nothing wrong with being interested in fashion, with telling your story, with connecting punk rock and parenting (in fact that can be a key politicizing event for parents; check out China Martens' new book The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends and Others) but something seems so disingenuous, so exploitive, so apolitical about these books. As if fathering is simply a trend.
Low and behold, as I move into the kids section they had a little display of other papa books seeing as how Father's Day was coming up (because that's the only time fathers ever speak up about parenting and it's all about being fucking cool anyways). I'll be the first one to tell you never judge a book by a cover, but I actually did in fact judge the store by their display. There were five books in the Celebrate Fathers floor display: Alternadad, Punk Rock Dad: No Rules, Just Real Life by Jim Lindberg, Dadditude: How a Real Man Became a Real Dad by Philip Lerman, and Dinner With Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family Table. All by white men. All by very upper middle class white men. All by upper middle class, white men with wives at home. Wow. After I mention this to the children's section coordinator, she was aghast and immediately put out a Bill Cosby book!? Somehow I felt too bummed to do anything else.
So I grabbed the books and set out to skim them as best I could. Now I will admit that most of them brought up interesting points about struggling with discipline, creating honest lines of communication, trying to maintain a healthy relationship with a partner. So I want to acknowledge that their stories are worth sharing, that I did smile at times, despite my best intentions, that I did nod my head in agreement with their struggles, that I did find connection with some of their points. But as I said they were just so similar, so privileged, with no mention of race or recognition of class differences or anything substantive outside of individual family struggles, which of course are extremely important.
However, there is not much to say for the book about making a yearlong commitment to, and I kid you not, come home at least six days a week to help make dinner with his family. See, men, we should make such a huge, committed, life-changing commitment to actually spend time with our families. His conclusion—it really changes your relationship with your family. Do people really buy these books? Ah, but cynicism is never revolutionary I remind myself, so let me take the plunge and actually read a whole fathering book.
After a month of toting it around, it became overdue and I had read only about half of Alternadad and felt like I couldn't finish it. But knew I had to. To his credit he is hella funny, and we connect as I think all parents do on the issues of poop. He relished it like a true veteran and told some very funny stories. However, Alternadad, like the other books, is just another one of those cynical, nauseatingly self-justifying stories of how a once-privileged white male aware of the issues around him chose to forgo all political and systemic critique in the wake of becoming a dad. Pre-parenthood, he always lived in neighborhoods in the edgy parts of town or places where cars had booming bass, which, of course, 'booming bass' is code word for 'young male of color,' but as a father, he's not so sure. When it comes down to it, he'd rather opt for white flight than stay in shitty neighborhoods because he can leave. He has that privilege to pack up and move cross country. Yes, he loves his neighbors, but he just wants things safer, calmer, cleaner. He knows he doesn't belong there. He ends the book with a story of enrolling his son in a hippie/hipster daycare and celebrates moving to Los Angeles because of the last straw in his old neighborhood in Austin: four youths spray painting Vatos Locos in his neighborhood. Ah, people of color again; I hope he knows they are in LA too.
Okay, I know I'm being too mean, too sensitive perhaps. And in the end I realize it actually is very important to have books out there about fathering. But man do we need other stories, other views, other perspectives about fathering that go beyond the stereotypes we see in the media all the time: the bumbling fools, reformed womanizers, and amazed businessmen about how fun being a daddy can be, golly.
So from books to TV to films, I still haven't changed my wicked ways and will probably be the first to see Transformers on my block, but I will also no longer allow the parenting/father stereotype to go by unchecked. Adam Sandler better watch out! Perhaps one day a few other fathers and I can write a script for a movie about ordinary dads from various backgrounds and ethnicities trying to parent in conscientious ways who, en route to a fun camping trip in the woods of Califas, get lost and end up in the vile clutches of the mean patriarch called Walt and are forced to rely on wits, trust, and patience to foil his plot at global domination and destroy his nefarious, dangerous alternate world called Disneyland…hmmm someday.
It’s been so difficult to get father's to write birth stories! In fact, I received no birth stories, so I’d love to get someone to write one for this issue out at the end of November.
Also I really like Jeremy's post about his own blog "where we are writing from." It reminded me why I enjoy writing about all this craziness called fathering. This piece is about how fatherhood gets represented in the media, and well I apologize in advance for the tone; it's a bit much but I tried...
Tomas
Some of you may know this about me, but for those of you who don't, let me just spill the beans: I am a media whore! I'll be the first one to own up to my obsession with romantic comedies, with horribly bad TV dramas, with power ballads; in fact, I can identify the various stages or periods of numerous cultural pop icons—there's the Hugh Grant evolution pre or post his blowjob bust, there's the musician turned actor careers of J-Lo, Justin, and a slew of others. There's the progression of TV shows to the big screen…you get the picture.
However, I also consider myself an astute critic, ready to recognize gender stereotypes, to point out class issues, to call out racist tropes; my favorite is Justin Timberlake himself. How the fuck can Justin bring sexy back when it never went anywhere? What a perfect example of white entitlement? But I was kinda shocked the other day when my daughter said something that made me laugh but soon started gnawing at me like one of them zombies in Evil Dead.
"Dad, you should be in a TV show," Ella said innocently, and then of course added, "with your belly and your dog and you always making chili."
"Hey, don't be saying nothing about my mean vegan chili!" I replied.
And we went on to the next subject. However, the next day I was working on an essay about how men can challenge patriarchy, and I was bouncing ideas off my Official-Idea-Bouncer-Offer Andrea, and we came up with the idea of exploring stereotypes about fathers. It clicked; Ella was putting me into the category of so many images she has seen of how this society views fathers. Why had I never seen it before? But wait a second here, I'm no stereotype. Ella knows that…right? Perhaps though I hadn't noticed because even while I adamantly disagree with these images of fathering, I may in fact benefit from them, even play into them? I began to think back to early parenting roles my partner and I fell into. Most of the time we clearly processed who did what and why, what felt fair, and when we felt overwhelmed or overburdened. But it's true; I almost always would watch the kids while she would cook. And then I'd clean the dishes. How often did I mop or do some other big house-cleaning project while she took the kids to the park? Looking back on those first few years, not as often as would like to admit.
And when I was in public with my son, I remember the constant reproaches from usually older grandmotherly women about the way I held my baby, the way he was so damn dirty or the way I dressed him, especially my keen ability to never have socks on my kid's feet. But hey, who can keep track of socks, I argued. With all the advice and suggestions and snide looks I received, I often marveled at what I was doing, particularly because I didn't have that many male role models to fall back on. Was I really that weird, that unmanly, that lucky to be able to parent my kids and keep them alive or at least warm?
We need to ask ourselves why so many in our society don't trust men to be competent at parenting, to be trusted to handle a newborn without being watched over by the mother or the grandmother. And a good place to start would be to start questioning the images of bumbling fathers we're inundated with. It is the butt of our parenting jokes: men fucking up, dressing kids, trying to feed kids, trying to be both macho and cool, because parenting in our society equals mothering. Not fathering or fathers. And is not cool.
So I decided to do a little investigative research: how are dads represented in the media? It took me only like five seconds to come up with a slew of movies all reinforcing the loving but clearly not primary parent material father: Daddy Daycare, and the new sequel coming out Daddy Day Camp, the Ice Cube movies, the Adam Sandler movies, it just goes on and on. Or there's the action adventure movies in which you threaten a Real Man's family and then you'll see what Real Fathers are like—you know the male protector/patriarch and all.
But it has gotten even worse now as parenting has become a trend with more pop icons having babies because with celebrity comes a market for cool hip parenting stuff. Sure enough, along with designer sippy cups and bibs, there has been a bunch of new books on fathering. And they all seem to have one common premise, which is how to maintain gender privilege, those traditional notions of men and masculinity, and still parent; how to be that cool dad, that hip dad, that (gulp) rad dad.
So I decided to read one and peruse a few others. I chose Alternadad by Neal Pollack because it was in my library. For a taste of some others, I moseyed on into a bookstore and, as I am walking through the aisle, I see the new GQ and pick it up (yes, because it had Jessica Alba on the cover). I kid you not, but I flip it open and come to a spread of nine famous fathers all dressed up with their kids. The headline was something like: How to Still Dress like a Winner When You Have Kids. Because of course kids make you a loser, make you so not stylish, ruin your cool life (assuming of course that the point of life is to be cool). I was shocked and turned to go find the other books when I saw Parents Press' new issue, the only free parenting newspaper in the baby area, and what is one the cover, I kid you not, but the picture of a new daddy book by some pop-punk rock singer and his three kids.
Aghhhhh!
Now there is nothing wrong with being interested in fashion, with telling your story, with connecting punk rock and parenting (in fact that can be a key politicizing event for parents; check out China Martens' new book The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends and Others) but something seems so disingenuous, so exploitive, so apolitical about these books. As if fathering is simply a trend.
Low and behold, as I move into the kids section they had a little display of other papa books seeing as how Father's Day was coming up (because that's the only time fathers ever speak up about parenting and it's all about being fucking cool anyways). I'll be the first one to tell you never judge a book by a cover, but I actually did in fact judge the store by their display. There were five books in the Celebrate Fathers floor display: Alternadad, Punk Rock Dad: No Rules, Just Real Life by Jim Lindberg, Dadditude: How a Real Man Became a Real Dad by Philip Lerman, and Dinner With Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family Table. All by white men. All by very upper middle class white men. All by upper middle class, white men with wives at home. Wow. After I mention this to the children's section coordinator, she was aghast and immediately put out a Bill Cosby book!? Somehow I felt too bummed to do anything else.
So I grabbed the books and set out to skim them as best I could. Now I will admit that most of them brought up interesting points about struggling with discipline, creating honest lines of communication, trying to maintain a healthy relationship with a partner. So I want to acknowledge that their stories are worth sharing, that I did smile at times, despite my best intentions, that I did nod my head in agreement with their struggles, that I did find connection with some of their points. But as I said they were just so similar, so privileged, with no mention of race or recognition of class differences or anything substantive outside of individual family struggles, which of course are extremely important.
However, there is not much to say for the book about making a yearlong commitment to, and I kid you not, come home at least six days a week to help make dinner with his family. See, men, we should make such a huge, committed, life-changing commitment to actually spend time with our families. His conclusion—it really changes your relationship with your family. Do people really buy these books? Ah, but cynicism is never revolutionary I remind myself, so let me take the plunge and actually read a whole fathering book.
After a month of toting it around, it became overdue and I had read only about half of Alternadad and felt like I couldn't finish it. But knew I had to. To his credit he is hella funny, and we connect as I think all parents do on the issues of poop. He relished it like a true veteran and told some very funny stories. However, Alternadad, like the other books, is just another one of those cynical, nauseatingly self-justifying stories of how a once-privileged white male aware of the issues around him chose to forgo all political and systemic critique in the wake of becoming a dad. Pre-parenthood, he always lived in neighborhoods in the edgy parts of town or places where cars had booming bass, which, of course, 'booming bass' is code word for 'young male of color,' but as a father, he's not so sure. When it comes down to it, he'd rather opt for white flight than stay in shitty neighborhoods because he can leave. He has that privilege to pack up and move cross country. Yes, he loves his neighbors, but he just wants things safer, calmer, cleaner. He knows he doesn't belong there. He ends the book with a story of enrolling his son in a hippie/hipster daycare and celebrates moving to Los Angeles because of the last straw in his old neighborhood in Austin: four youths spray painting Vatos Locos in his neighborhood. Ah, people of color again; I hope he knows they are in LA too.
Okay, I know I'm being too mean, too sensitive perhaps. And in the end I realize it actually is very important to have books out there about fathering. But man do we need other stories, other views, other perspectives about fathering that go beyond the stereotypes we see in the media all the time: the bumbling fools, reformed womanizers, and amazed businessmen about how fun being a daddy can be, golly.
So from books to TV to films, I still haven't changed my wicked ways and will probably be the first to see Transformers on my block, but I will also no longer allow the parenting/father stereotype to go by unchecked. Adam Sandler better watch out! Perhaps one day a few other fathers and I can write a script for a movie about ordinary dads from various backgrounds and ethnicities trying to parent in conscientious ways who, en route to a fun camping trip in the woods of Califas, get lost and end up in the vile clutches of the mean patriarch called Walt and are forced to rely on wits, trust, and patience to foil his plot at global domination and destroy his nefarious, dangerous alternate world called Disneyland…hmmm someday.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
The Rug Rat Race
A few days before my high school reunion, I was down on the rug, face to face with Spot, watching him execute his favorite pilates routine while I sang the following lines from a Police tune:
De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da
Is all I want to say to you
De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da
repeat, etc., etc.
I'm not a big fan of The Police, though I do like a few of their tunes. My dentist loves them, and if I were more of a fan, and more inclined to hang out with my dentist, I would have jumped on his offer to see them in concert last fall. But these lyrics were not idle. They were sung with a purpose. Spot had to learn his consonants.
This was my first conscious intervention in the spontaneous flow of Spot's development. It was prompted by a certain concerned look on the pediatrician's face the week before, when she had asked us if Spot was making consonant noises. "Like what?" I asked. "Like da-da," she replied. I said no, and could see that her roving intelligence immediately halted and fixed on this point. We scheduled a follow-up visit in a month's time.
So there I was on the rug, worrying about Spot's developmental progress, when a classic marker of dad's developmental progress, his high school reunion, was a few days away. Spot was a little late with his consonants and, so it seemed, I was a little off with my career. Spot made plenty of noises; quite often he whistled and sang like a deep-space radio transmitter from a 50s sci-fi movie. As for myself, I had plenty to do, and had done a lot. But neither of us, from a certain perspective, was where we "should" be.
This set of bench-mark pressures had already set in on the young Spot; it was entering its fourth decade with his father. Was I ready to face the crowds and tell anyone who asked, "I'm an at-home dad. It's my wife who makes all the money"?
I was vaguely aware that there are developmental milestones that pop up at certain intervals -- the classic Hallmark moments -- but hadn't worried too much about their sequence or rate of succession. Spot, I assured myself, was a non-conformist: he had been a breach baby, and came out four weeks early -- clearly an individual with his own agenda. Now he was lingering on his vowels before moving on to the harsher elements of language. So be it.
But despite my own and Spot's insouciance, the world keeps wanting to know how things are going, and how he ranks. "Can Spot sit up yet?" asked a neighborhood grandma after greeting us in the restaurant one afternoon. "Alvin can, and he's two months younger." I'm not usually at a loss for words, but this comment silenced me. Now it was abdominal coordination; soon it would be reading ability, and then SAT scores, colleges, and salary figures. Was there any way to not go down that road?
One of my many former therapists once told me, "Only people who consider themselves successful go to their class reunions." People, in other words, who can sit up, hold their bottle, and make consonant sounds. Strangely, I've found myself among them on several occasions, though this reunion -- number twenty -- seemed more symbolic than those previous. By now, I ought to have amounted to something. I should be holding my bottle. The difference between my situation and Spot's was that he wasn't worrying about it, and I was.
As it turned out, the reunion went well. No one -- as far as I know -- questioned what still sometimes feels like the eccentricity of my situation. I found myself in league with my former, now-lesbian high school girlfriend, revved up for a gender-bending confrontation with the world of sexual-social expectations in Middle America. It failed to materialize. Instead, I approached my own situation the same way I tried to approach Spot's -- with the exception of his consonants: we're both of us, like my lesbian ex, doing our own thing.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Supernanny (and my dog)
Spot's mother does something that I call "the stare." It's a technique of intimidation, overlooked by the Pentagon, but legal and quite effective in civilian life, that she whips out in public places like restaurants or at the mall. The first few times I saw her use it, long before we got married, it scared me. So you can imagine the effect it has on kids whose parents are too busy with their cell phones to keep them from pulling all the shoes off the table at Macy's.
Our discussions about "the stare" were our first real discussions about parenting, over the course of which I learned that we came at the issue from the same angle. Children should be expected to behave in public, and if this was impossible, then children should be removed from public. From these two axioms an entire ethical system was evolved, in which the fundamentals of raising a small child turned out to be not that different from the fundamentals of training a dog -- something we happen to have some experience doing. Reward positive behavior, withhold rewards for undesirable behavior, and provide a firm framework of consistent rules. I can't tell you how many times I've caught myself asking my wife, "Honey, should I put Spot in the crate?"
It turns out that this micro-philosophy of parenting, like most things involving the details of how we live our daily lives, is not quite common sense. If it were, then reality TV shows like ABC's Supernanny wouldn't have become so popular. I tuned in to Supernanny a few months ago on the advice of fellow blogger Jeremy Smith, and subsequently had the strange experience of spending an hour every week with what seemed like most of my friend's children.
I exaggerate, of course. The kids on Supernanny are awful, but the family resemblances were striking. In my own anecdotal way, I had seen the same scenes from Portland to New York, from Paris to Taiwan, across cultures and continents. Children that simply would not behave like anything less than the rescue dog you just brought home from the pound, who peed in the middle of the rug, ate your cell phone, and would not stop counter-surfing. Yet people have been training dogs for thousands of years and seem to have gotten the hang of it. What happened to raising children?
That's the great unanswered question posed by the Supernanny shows. Jo Frost, the down-to-earth and supremely confident "parenting consultant" on the show, typically swoops down upon the doorstep of families at wit's end: almost always with 3 kids or more, very often with one parent who is for some reason gone most of the time, and usually living in a low-density, suburban area where there don't seem to be too many people around to help out. The parents readily confess that they are overwhelmed and don't know what to do. Unlike the Rebel Without a Cause teenager of the 50s, the kids aren't out of control; they have taken control.
How did we get here? The most obvious explanation, and the one that jumps off the screen in each of the Supernanny episodes, is that it's not the kids who are the problem, it's their parents. Like dogs, the kids want to know what the rules are. But the parents have forgotten how to be the Alphas. That's the message, in a nutshell, and there's no escaping its conservatism. Or at least, the message is conservative from the perspective of the trend of ever-greater unraveling of social hierarchies in American culture since World War II -- which is not to say it's bad. In fact, as I see it, it represents a swing of the pendulum back to the middle, someplace between the unstructured "free to be me" philosophy of baby-boomer child-rearing, and the iron discipline of their predecessors.
The picture I get from Supernanny is that, yes, a lot of parents have forgotten how to train, nurture, husband, and shape something over the long haul. Partly it's a breakdown of consensus in the larger society as to what the best practices are. Where ethnic or religious traditions have weakened, the empire of TV and paperback self-help techniques grows up to fill the void, by first pointing it out.
As the anthropologist Ruth Benedict argued in her 1934 book, Patterns of Culture, the only way for any patterns to emerge in human behavior is for some combinations to be neglected or ruled out. This requires the existential iron stomach needed to say, "We're going this way, not that." Where the parents on Supernanny might think discipline equals damage, from the perspective of cultural anthropology, discipline equals possibility.
In a parent's terms, that's the possibility of getting a good night's sleep, of not having to wrestle your child to the floor to enforce the smallest request, of a family meal without voluntary regurgitation, of eliminating back-talk, and public wildness. Helping to restore this depleted repertoire of social wisdom is indeed one contribution, as I see it, of the Supernanny phenomenon. Not as good, of course, as having grandma or grandpa around, or the full participation of two parents, but certainly better than nothing, and more than a lot of people have.
Our discussions about "the stare" were our first real discussions about parenting, over the course of which I learned that we came at the issue from the same angle. Children should be expected to behave in public, and if this was impossible, then children should be removed from public. From these two axioms an entire ethical system was evolved, in which the fundamentals of raising a small child turned out to be not that different from the fundamentals of training a dog -- something we happen to have some experience doing. Reward positive behavior, withhold rewards for undesirable behavior, and provide a firm framework of consistent rules. I can't tell you how many times I've caught myself asking my wife, "Honey, should I put Spot in the crate?"
It turns out that this micro-philosophy of parenting, like most things involving the details of how we live our daily lives, is not quite common sense. If it were, then reality TV shows like ABC's Supernanny wouldn't have become so popular. I tuned in to Supernanny a few months ago on the advice of fellow blogger Jeremy Smith, and subsequently had the strange experience of spending an hour every week with what seemed like most of my friend's children.
I exaggerate, of course. The kids on Supernanny are awful, but the family resemblances were striking. In my own anecdotal way, I had seen the same scenes from Portland to New York, from Paris to Taiwan, across cultures and continents. Children that simply would not behave like anything less than the rescue dog you just brought home from the pound, who peed in the middle of the rug, ate your cell phone, and would not stop counter-surfing. Yet people have been training dogs for thousands of years and seem to have gotten the hang of it. What happened to raising children?
That's the great unanswered question posed by the Supernanny shows. Jo Frost, the down-to-earth and supremely confident "parenting consultant" on the show, typically swoops down upon the doorstep of families at wit's end: almost always with 3 kids or more, very often with one parent who is for some reason gone most of the time, and usually living in a low-density, suburban area where there don't seem to be too many people around to help out. The parents readily confess that they are overwhelmed and don't know what to do. Unlike the Rebel Without a Cause teenager of the 50s, the kids aren't out of control; they have taken control.
How did we get here? The most obvious explanation, and the one that jumps off the screen in each of the Supernanny episodes, is that it's not the kids who are the problem, it's their parents. Like dogs, the kids want to know what the rules are. But the parents have forgotten how to be the Alphas. That's the message, in a nutshell, and there's no escaping its conservatism. Or at least, the message is conservative from the perspective of the trend of ever-greater unraveling of social hierarchies in American culture since World War II -- which is not to say it's bad. In fact, as I see it, it represents a swing of the pendulum back to the middle, someplace between the unstructured "free to be me" philosophy of baby-boomer child-rearing, and the iron discipline of their predecessors.
The picture I get from Supernanny is that, yes, a lot of parents have forgotten how to train, nurture, husband, and shape something over the long haul. Partly it's a breakdown of consensus in the larger society as to what the best practices are. Where ethnic or religious traditions have weakened, the empire of TV and paperback self-help techniques grows up to fill the void, by first pointing it out.
As the anthropologist Ruth Benedict argued in her 1934 book, Patterns of Culture, the only way for any patterns to emerge in human behavior is for some combinations to be neglected or ruled out. This requires the existential iron stomach needed to say, "We're going this way, not that." Where the parents on Supernanny might think discipline equals damage, from the perspective of cultural anthropology, discipline equals possibility.
In a parent's terms, that's the possibility of getting a good night's sleep, of not having to wrestle your child to the floor to enforce the smallest request, of a family meal without voluntary regurgitation, of eliminating back-talk, and public wildness. Helping to restore this depleted repertoire of social wisdom is indeed one contribution, as I see it, of the Supernanny phenomenon. Not as good, of course, as having grandma or grandpa around, or the full participation of two parents, but certainly better than nothing, and more than a lot of people have.
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