Giving Hockey a Try

“Keep yer stick on the ice!” yelled a dad, his voice filled with anger.

“Come on, number fifteen!” yelled another. “You skate like a girl!”

Liko and I were watching a youth hockey game at the Yerba Buena rink in San Francisco. We were surrounded by fathers watching their boys play hockey...and, man, was it ugly.

As the kids battled on the ice, you could feel the tension rising among the parents.

Then I heard a lone, small voice from the other side of the bleachers:

“Have fun!” it said.

I looked up, and so did the other parents.

There stood a fellow on the top bleacher, smiling down at us. The smile said, C’mon, guys, lighten up.

I chuckled, and a ripple of laughter spread through the stands. We did lighten up.

One of the (few) moms yelled, “Have fun keeping your sticks on the ice!”

“Have fun skating like a girl!” shouted a dad.

Dads are way more active in sports than moms; in many communities, it’s the main way that fathers play a role in the lives of their kids and other people’s kids. Indeed, sports are the primary path many boys take to manhood.

That's both a good thing and a problem. It's a good thing because kids get exercise and they learn about discipline, focus, teamwork, and cooperation. It's a bad thing because in today's sports culture, they also learn about misogyny, homophobia, belligerence, self-destructive levels of competition...and the neuroses of their fathers.

"I've seen a lot of hardcore, winning-obsessed, hyper-competitive moms," says Regan McMahon, author of Revolution in the Bleachers: How Parents Can Take Back Family Life in a World Gone Crazy Over Youth Sports. But fathers, says Regan, can be much worse. "It may be more common for men who have grown up playing sports to have certain opinions about how to be a star, or perhaps they want their child to have the success they had, or if they weren't a star, they want to experience vicariously the stardom they never achieved."

This leads to the kind of angry heckling I saw in the Yerba Buena bleachers; those guys are angry at their younger selves, first and foremost, and at the loss of their youth.

Inwardly, I was cringing: My son has been skating for two and a half years, and we were there so that he could participate in "Give-Hockey-a-Try Day" that afternoon. It's something he wanted, that I had resisted. The thought of my son entering this hockey culture, surrounded by these thuggish men, filled me with an old, sickening disquiet.

I'm not superior to these guys, and I know what Regan is talking about: I often find myself projecting my own athletic anxieties onto my son. I was a decent runner, but in team sports I was mediocre (soccer) to lousy (baseball). I very well remember the shit I got from both teammates and coaches, and I came to dread practices and games. By high school, I had stopped participating, and like millions of other freaks and geeks, I grew to hate sports and jocks. Today, when I see my son trying a sport, my stomach clenches as I watch for signs for failure and weakness.

That's not so different from the dads who stayed with sports, but never achieved as much as they hoped. While individual ability and commitment vary, the ultimate truth about sports is that, by definition, 99 percent of us won't become stars. The best we can hope for is fitness and fun, but too often our sports culture ruins our bodies through overtraining or ruins our self-esteem through bullying and hyper-competitiveness. That culture has shaped me as well as other fathers.

That afternoon, Liko suited up and skated out onto the ice, stick in hand. All the pictures that accompany this blog entry are from that afternoon.

He was the smallest one on the ice, but I watched in awe, truly in awe, as he held his own. I watched him do his best, overcome obstacles, negotiate problems, recover from mistakes, take coaching, handle aggression from other kids, manage his own aggression, and gain new skills. All on his own.

Did this brave, strong boy really grow from the premature newborn who could fit in the palm of my hand? What a miracle. What a gift. I admit it: I was proud.

Again, that's a good thing and a bad thing, that pride.

"The father-son relationship is a delicate one, and boys really don't want to disappoint their dads," says Regan. "And I've seen many boys who seemed to care more about what their dad thought of their performance than their coach. One basketball star I knew would look up in the stands at his dad after every shot, not at his coach. I have heard, anecdotally, about a lot of kids -- boys and girls-- who want to quit a sport or a team but feel they can't because their dad doesn't want them too. That can strain marriages, too, when the dad is gung-ho and the mom isn't."

This might be the arena where dads can have the biggest impact in improving and repairing the world. I think about that dad who spoke up in the bleachers: "Have fun!"

It really made a difference, that small action; it took the emotion down a notch. Regan tells me that it's critical for dads to try to "be a voice of sanity in team meetings"--to emphasize the fun, to vote against yet another tournament or extra day of practice.

"Support your child's love of sports, but don't push them," advises Regan. "Keep your ego out of the equation. Keep in mind that your child is playing sports for his or her pleasure, not yours."

That's good advice for individual dads. But the issues go beyond behavior; there's also a policy dimension to the struggle to make youth sports fun again. I'm no expert in this stuff, but Regan is, and so I'll quote her at length:

Putting policies in place to prevent overuse injuries is an important step. One of the best thing to happen in recent years was Little League finally adopting pitch counts to save young pitchers' arms. Dr. James Andrews, the orthopedic surgeon who pioneered the so-called Tommy John surgery for baseball pitchers' elbows, lobbied the national Little League organization for five years before they finally agreed to limit how many balls a kid could throw in a week. Dr. Andrews got tired of seeing injuries in 9-year-olds that he used to see primarily in professional athletes.

I'm an advocate of keeping P.E. a priority in schools, re-establishing intramural sports and encouraging kids to be multi-sport athletes in high school. One of the big changes in youth sports over the past 15 years is that it's gone from being about fun and participation to a star system that weeds out the weaker players and promotes the stronger ones. So recreational leagues are looked down upon and elite travel teams are seen as desirable. Consequently, kids are specalizing early and playing one sport year round, which can cause overuse injuries.

Some states, like Utah, have mandated downtime for interscholastic athletics, so there can be no training or competition for 12 weeks in a given sport. That guarantees that athletes and coaches get a break, and their competition will not gain an edge because they're required to take a break, too. And hey, the kid might get to go on a family vacation or attend a cousin's wedding for a change!

The elite travel teams have gutted high school sports programs to a large extent. So the highly competitive players are missing out on the experience of playing for their schools, because many coaches and parents keep them off the school team because it won't improve their chances for a scholarship and their is a perceived inferiority of play. I think that's a shame.

Interscholatic leagues tend to set their schedules so kids can play multiple sports in a school year, but elite club coaches and parents sometimes discourage their athletes not to participate in school sports. One Bay Area high school I know of actually has a stated policy that kids can only go out for one sport, which I think is kind of shocking. Doing multiple sports is a good way to prevent overuse injuries. So I'd support policies that encourage participation in multiple sports.

In general, I think policy makers should recognize the need for balance in chilren's lives. So any policies that would improve the balance between hard work and free time, sports and and family, commitment to club team and participation in school life, would be beneficial.

This was originally posted to my series for Mothering magazine, "Twenty-Five Ways for Dads to Change the World."

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!

Dads, girls, and sports

Lisa Belkin has a perspective I share:

A study released this week, called “Go Out and Play: Sport and American Families” finds, not surprisingly, that kids who are physically active are healthier and happier. Their family lives are more satisfying and less stressful too, according to the survey of 2000 students (third grade through 12th) and 850 of their parents by the Women’s Sport Foundation.

Also not surprising, in a less welcome way, is the finding that things are still not equal for girls and boys when it comes to resources for athletics, particularly in urban areas.

And somewhat surprising, and very welcome, is the suggestion in the report that there is a real role for dads in setting the ratios right.

When girls were asked to name their mentors when it came to sports and exercise, they mentioned coaches and physical education teachers. In other words, people outside their families. When boys were asked, the top two answers were coaches and fathers. Forty-six percent of boys, compared with 28 percent of girls, credited their father for teaching them “the most” about sports and exercise.

My response to news like this is complicated. As a former middle-school girl, back in a day when we wore “bloomer” uniforms for gym and weren’t really expected to ever break a sweat, I root for the girls and the new expectation that they can be strong, too.

But as the mother of two sons who are still in the middle of the sports-centric world that is adolescence, I am troubled by the emphasis on athletics, particularly for boys.

One of the surprises of parenting is how hard it is to keep a child physically active if they are not athletically talented. Both my kids have sports they enjoy, but they aren’t stars in the sports that have currency here in suburbia – soccer, baseball, football, basketball.

Back when I was a kid, you didn’t have to be the best in order to play. There were pick-up games and informal neighborhood play, most of which is now gone. Any time a child older than 7 or 8 takes the field in many neighborhoods, it is with an adult and wearing a uniform. The message comes early — in third grade, maybe fourth — that if you aren’t good you shouldn’t really be on the team, and if you aren’t on the team there’s no place to play. Those fathers who are trying to coach their sons are most likely doing so for a team, not just for the joy of running fast and breathing hard.

There is an interesting finding in the foundation’s 180-page report, which says that girls enter sports (read: organized sports) at a later age than boys (7.4 years old compared with 6.8 years old in general) and that girls also drop out sooner than boys. “Girls’ late start may set them up for failure in sports during the middle-school years,” the report says.

Failure? By sixth grade? Because you didn’t start at age 6 instead of age 7? That can only be true in a culture in which the only definition of success is making the team. And if, as the foundation finds, our children really are emotionally and physically healthier when they are physically active, then that’s not a definition that is helping them.

I understand the lifelong lessons that can be learned on teams. But there are others, which last as long if not longer, that can be learned without them.

I didn’t discover that I had muscles, nor the exhilaration of using them, until I was an adult and found a trainer at a gym who dragged me out of my psychological bloomers. My husband, always athletic, did not get on a racing bike until he was 40, and now he rides every chance he gets. My sons, in turn, discovered tennis in their teens, and while they probably won’t be playing Wimbledon, it is a central part of their lives.

If fathers want to prepare their daughters for a lifetime of health, then coaching their teams is not the only way. Sometimes it might even be the wrong way. Take your girls for a bike ride. Or on a hike or a run. Or just throw a Frisbee for the fun of it. It counts as a victory, even if nobody wins.

Peeing in the Bath

I've been thinking about posting on this topic for a while now. I just haven't had the courage. It wouldn't be about me peeing in the bath, you don't have to worry about that. It would be about Spot peeing in the bath. But it would also be about much more.

It would be about the body. It would be about water. It would be about bodies, water, freedom and youth. It would be about the Phallus and Lacan. Well, maybe not so much about Phalluses and Lacan , although I'll keep them both in the subtext for those who are interested. It would be about having a son and not a daughter, being an at-home-dad with a boyhood of his own to project onto someone else, who happens to be a son, and a projected boyhood that included peeing in the bath. And other places.

There is no story or plot, just an event: some happy splashing in the early evening, and then that perky little arc that emerges from the surface, rises, and falls back down again into the clear water with the little yellow duckies. I don't know why I think it's so cool that Spot pees in the bath. Maybe if I bathed more often, I would. It seems wonderfully life-affirming, a sign of riches, of male fecundity, and of Peter Greenaway's outrageous and mind-bending Shakespearean meditation, full of acrobatically pissing cherubs and called by some the worst movie of all time, Prospero's Books.

Because Spot pees in the bath, and because it makes me chuckle, and think about all the times I've gone skinny-dipping, peed on a mountain top or in the trackless reaches of some Canadian forest, it makes me wonder what sort of bond I would have if Spot were a girl. I have a script for Spot peeing in the bath. In this script, there is a long list of things I want to do with Spot, various places we can go to pee in the woods as he gets older. They are mostly replays of things I did, loved, and haven't been able to do much since, but they also include new things. A lot of them are boyish things. It's not the rupture in expectations and familiarity it would have been if Spot were a girl. There must be some equivalent for girls to peeing in the bath, but I confess I don't know what it is.

But oh, the freedom to splash and be free and not worry about what you should be wearing. Or having to frantically race through a foreign city looking for a culturally appropriate place to relieve yourself. I know some people who home-school their kids and live on a farm where the children run around naked. I suppose that's the logical extension of what I'm talking about. But I'd be satisfied with much less. A little skinny-dipping here and there, the unforgettable jump into the icy waters of Lake Superior, or marking a desert rock somewhere else.

Spot may turn out not to have the same childhood concerns that I had, doing my best to replenish the Midwestern prairie soils by peeing in the grass out under the astounding starry sky that enclosed my parents' backyard every evening. It's all part of the negotiated future that lies ahead of us, as he writes he own script, and I try to remember the lines from my own.

At the very least, I seem to remember, happily, that a few of those lines cue for "peeing in the bath."

Power Peas and Colassal Corn

When I read the article on picky eaters in NY Times earlier this week, I was especially intrigued by this line in the sidebar:

"Giving food cool names can help. In one experiment, Dr. Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, found that when peas were renamed ''power peas,'' consumption doubled."

I thought this was a simple and intriguing idea, so I decided to try it with Cole, my 5-year-old, last night. I told him we were going to have some "Colossal Corn" and "Super Sweet Potatoes" along with soup for dinner, and his eyes decidedly widened. And when the food arrived on the table, he did indeed eat significantly more than usual.

He hesitated about eating the carrots and onions in his bowl of No-Chicken Noodle, but I told him they were actually flavor packets that exploded to release delicious tastes when they entered someone's mouth. After hearing that, he enthusiastically slurped them up. (I guess that last one was a bit of a fib, but then again, isn't the main reason we add onions to soup to make it more flavorful?) Overall, I'd rate this experiment a resounding success, and I expect I'll be rebranding a lot of foods over the next few weeks. Awesome apples, anyone?

My son's top five imaginary characters

1. Frank Lloyd Wright: During a visit to Chicago, we took Liko to see two Frank Lloyd Wright houses. We bought him a Frank Lloyd Wright doll. We had no inkling of what forces this would unleash: The kid is now obsessed with Frank Lloyd Wright. During a later trip to New York City, he insisted that we see the Guggenheim--which he'd seen in posters and books. When he rushed into the lobby of the Guggenheim, he ran in ecstatic circles and tossed his Frank Lloyd Wright doll into the air and spoke in toddler-tongues. Now, when he builds things out of blocks and so forth, he becomes the personification of Frank Lloyd Wright. One of his favorite songs: Simon and Garfunkel's "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright," which Liko listens to thoughtfully, making tight little circles with his hands. What's the source of his fascination? I can only guess, but I think Liko finds it amazing that people design houses and buildings, as opposed to them just growing right out of the ground like trees. I also believe that Liko just thinks that Wright's buildings are really neat.

2. Sally: That is to say, Sally from the very first 1969 episode of Sesame Street, the DVD of which my father gave Liko as a present. Liko becomes the little girl Sally (that's her, above, standing between Big Bird and Mr. Hooper) when he wants to be cuddled or put to bed. It's very sweet. I'm not sure why he fixated on Sally, the new girl in school whom Gordon shows around Sesame Street, introducing it for the very first time in the history of the world. As far as I know, Sally was never again seen on Sesame Street (foul play?), but Liko has shown no interest in becoming such beloved characters as Oscar the Grouch, Big Bird, et al.--though Cookie Monster has made a few appearances at our dinner table. I should add that in that first episode you can see how very cool Sesame Street used to be: the cast consists almost entirely of African-Americans and Latinos, set on a gritty urban street (as opposed to the usual bucolic or trippy settings of children's TV), with TV's first openly gay couple -- I speak of Bert and Ernie, naturally. Plus, the music and graphics are terrific, vastly more creative that anything you see in today's Sesame Street, which is just a pale shadow of its former self.

3. Liesl von Trapp: Who the hell is Liesl von Trapp? She's sixteen years old and she don't need no stinking governess. She's the eldest daughter of the Trapp Family Singers, whose origins are fancifully depicted in the 1965 musical The Sound of Music. For two weeks after first seeing The Sound of Music, Liko would wake up in the morning, announce that today he was Liesl, belt out a few lines of "Do-Re-Me," and leap gracefully about the room. Liesl still makes regular appearances in our home. What's up with that? No idea. I just hope he doesn't decide to become family patriarch Captain Georg von Trapp and start singing "Edelweiss." If that happened, I'd have to jump out of the nearest window.

4. Mozart: This fantasy was triggered by Peter Sis's beautiful children's book, Play Mozart, Play. In Liko's mind, Mozart is some kind of MacGyver-like superhero. Last week, Mozart, as channeled by Liko, built (by hand!) a cargo plane out of couch cushions, filled the bay with musical instruments, flew it all to Africa, unloaded the plane, draped at least four instruments around himself using various straps, and gave an epic concert, performed on the stage that is our bed. Amazing. Ten times better than "Cats." Fifteen times better than "Phantom."

5. Spider-Man: Liko can pretty much do whatever a spider can. Spins a web, any size. He catches thieves just like flies. Look out, readers! Here comes Liko the Spider-Man. I once asked Liko why he likes Spider-Man so much. "I like his costume," said Liko. "And I like how he shoots things out of his hands and flies through the sky." I've since noticed that quite a few little kids like Spider-Man and I've started asking them the same question, and the answers are all more or less the same as Liko's. I also think Spider-Man is cool, but that has more to do with his origin as the world's first anti-authoritarian superhero and the wonderful emotional and philosophical dynamics of the series' main characters. Also, the costume. And the way he shoots webs out of his hands. During the aforementioned trip to New York, I kept imagining Spider-Man swinging around over our heads...and so did my son.

Runners-up: The Wicked Witch of the West; Glenda, the Good Witch; a "mean, scary pirate"; Superman; Doctor Baker (from Curious George Goes to the Hospital); Nurse Carol (Ibid.); Sigmund Freud (Liko has the action figure).

The Funny Button

The Spot has a funny button. Finding it is one of the things that makes my day worthwhile. What makes it interesting is that the funny button changes size, shape and location on what can seem like a daily basis, making my best efforts of the previous afternoon stale or ineffective the next morning.

Sometimes the funny button is activated by getting on my stomach and barking like a seal. Sometimes I hit it by tugging his legs when he's strapped into his stroller. There's the classic Pillsbury Dough Boy push my belly-button button, and the occasional inexplicable "What's so funny?" button. So far, the most famous funny button, and one that has become legendary in our family, with possible life-altering ramifications, is Spot's joy at playing the piano. Or, more precisely, sitting in my lap with his hands on the table while I move them around as if he were playing the piano. This elicited such cackles of glee the first time around that Spot's grandmother is now convinced he is destined for Carnegie Hall and his grandfather is compiling a list of local piano teachers. Neither seem deterred by the fact that once Spot's recital is over he attempts to eat the tablecloth.

The potentially subversive implication is that I have found a socially sanctioned time and space within which to act like a total goofball. The goofier the behavior, after all, the higher the hit rate. He certainly seems interested and stimulated when mom and dad have a conversation, or when dad is joshing with his friends. But for the big-points, flashing pinball machine pay-off, hitting a funny button is required, and these often seem to involve some deviation from what to us, and maybe even already to him, is "normal" behavior.

My wife is very tolerant of what I call my "inner goofball," and I would argue that this is one of the main reasons our marriage works. Most men have one, I think; at least according to the occasional essay in Parenting Magazine: What Matters to Moms. In fact, the male goofball seems to the one item that shows up consistently in the rather thin lists of male parenting contributions whenever Parenting or similar magazines decide to take an inventory. Occasionally it's linked to negative tendencies, like the failure to mature, or to a false sense of lightness resulting from too much time watching the game and not enough time doing housework. But the mommy mags seem to recognize, in their good-faith effort to find reasons for women to keep their husbands, that a little goofiness may be one of dad's more worthy feats of parenting.

For a while now I thought my inner goofball had more or less retired, scorned one too many times by past romantic partners and beaten down by the grim realities of a sad and violent world. But, though she may loathe to admit it, my wife has played her part in keeping the goofball on a survival diet for several years now, just long enough for it to find its true purpose: spending time with Spot. Spot doesn't judge the goofball. Spot doesn't (yet) get embarrassed by the goofball. Spot really seems to dig the goofball, and in a wholehearted, unselfconscious way that my wife is capable of only when she's tipsy.

There may be a clinical name for the adult goofball phenomenon: pscyhological neotony. A few psychiatrists argue that adults -- men and women -- are retaining traits that we associate with childishness long into biological maturity. What is rewarded most of all in modern society is adaptability -- to changing social and economic circumstances, to new information and behaviors. What was once thought of as a state of unfinishedness -- childishness -- is now as asset in the form of plasticity. Its behavioral mark can range from the unflattering traits of short attention span and lack of depth, to a more appealing interest in novelty and enthusiasm. In a review of Ashley Montagu's book on neoteny, Growing Young, a commentator on the neoteny buzz writes:

"[T]he human organism is designed by nature to retain the experimentalism and flexibility of the child all through life ... We have traditionally rushed, he says, into what we call maturity, but what he describes as psychosclerosis, or hardening of the psyche. We can hardly wait to get rid of our spontaneity and our sense of wonder, in order to acquire the cool restrictive lineaments of sophistication or ''maturity''... Most adults, the author says, are deteriorated children and genius is ''the recovery of childhood at will.''"

After many years in the wilderness, my inner goofball can now be hitched to a respectable social scientific wagon. There are probably far goofier parents in the generations coming up behind me, if the neotenologists are correct. They may be great parents of infants and young children.

I do know, however, that the goofball will have a limited lifespan. It's one habitus out of many, one role we play in the course of a day, but not something that necessarily casts the form of our personality. Spot's great gift to me right now, among other things, is a chance to step outside my narrow, adult way of being. It opens up a window on a dormant sensibility that is deeply refreshing. This should be no surprise -- any grandmother at the play park that eagerly accepts an offer to hold your baby and spend a few minutes cooing along with it knows all about how to be forever young.

system error

This is an essay from the latest issue of boxcutter:

Going through her eleven year old's new Christmas purse, Andee exclaims that the entire thing is filled with nothing but technological devices: two tamagotchis, one ipod nano, one nintendo ds, one digital camera, one piggy flashlight, and a game holder with three different games. All of us sitting with her kinda laughed and snickered about `these kids these days,' shaking our heads. `Why do they want all this stuff,' we wondered, but soon we fell eerily silent: three sets of parents, three minds realizing how our kids' worlds are just so different than ours was. For example, my kids all wanted technology for christmas, and my partner and I at first balked, thinking we were gonna give them only books and do-it-yourself science toys; you know Good Toys, but soon we gave way to pleas about what all the other kids were gonna get, and we found ourselves saying, `we might as well just buy them what they want, if we're gonna get them anything at all.' Right? What would you do?

So there we were christmas morning, and under the tree appeared so barren, looked so empty because all the presents were in these little boxes; it looked like they barely got any presents. It seemed so pathetic. By the time we got up, got coffee, got to the sofa, they made these tiny piles in front of them. I suddenly got all worried that they didn't get enough. Perhaps though we were the pathetic ones, so caught up in wanting our kids to be happy, to feel loved, to be satisfied. Because presents do that, right? Why on earth do we bother to give presents at all? I hate it. Not just with kids. I was stressing out trying to find things for the adults in my life. How did I get like this: I, who make things. I, who think of myself as so creative, so anti-corporate -- rushing around the day before christmas, so worried that my lover would not like her jacket or if I spent enough on my partner for fear she spent more. And there sat my kids' little frilly boxes underneath the tree. The only thing that saved the apparent lack of presents was the two gifts I bought basically for myself but wrapped anyway -- a basketball and a board game.

This is a panic created by consumerism and technology, but what should we have done? What would you have done? How to fight it when everyone around you especially your kids is so in to it, is so content to participate in our crazy, self destructive culture? It's easy to blame the youth of today but that is wrong. As for technology, this is what they know; it's not the way we grew up, wanting all these little devices. Were there any devices when we were kids? Yes, walkmans, and soon pagers, but did kids want them like they want a cell phone? So do we just say no to anything because it wasn't the way we experienced childhood (I mean who back then could walk around with an Atari and play it on the bart). We live in a different world. Take myspace which seems the utmost in prefabricated realities where you get a list of a hundred or so friends most of whom you don't know; I immediately want to hate on it, but I also realize that in this world of constant surveillance and monitoring, with a lack of public space to hang out in, without getting hassled, watched, where can kids turn to to reclaim there own autonomy: yep, cyberspace. It may be owned by Rupert Murdoch but it is something that they can create, control, invent, talk smack in, try to foster an identity.

So I try to relax while they rip open their presents; as they each squeal and laugh and scream and shout thank yous, I inwardly smile. A few hours later after the techno stuff is pushed to the side, after the cyber pets are sleeping in their little cyber houses, and the music is turned off because the battery needs to be charged, my daughter asks, `what's this game like?' Soon we are all sitting around playing and laughing together.

And then I opened my other present: the basketball and at the end of the day we all stepped out into the street and played with a ball, a real ball, and with our real dog, and we laughed and got angry and teased each other and had a great old time as the sun set on our real lives. Next year though I promise to do something different.

If you need some game suggestions these games have all been played and enjoyed for hours with our neighbors and friends -- get them because they don’t need batteries:

Dominos -- I got my ass spanked by a student in my english class a few semesters ago and have been wanting a rematch ever since, so when my son and I traveled into the jungle of mexico all we brought were books and a set of dominos -- we had monster games, created new slang for ridiculous decisions we made while we both learned to play. It has been a continued source of pleasure to set up and play in our house. It lasts for about 30 - 45 mins...it's cheep to buy, easy to bring along, and perfect for talkin all kinda smack. Oh and I still lost the rematch...

Gobblet – This is an awesome looking game as well – made of wood and really easily set up and stored. It is like a crazy tic-tac-toe and connect four love child. The object is to get four in a row and you can gobble your opponent in the process. Hella fun and good for all ages and easy to learn.

Blokus – It’s a perfect way to kill an extra 20 minutes between cooking dinner and eating or after bath and before bed. Four people can play and as you get to know it more, you can get more strategic, but it is easy to learn and doesn’t take too long to finish. The main idea of Blokus is to get more of your pieces into play than anyone else. It is kinda like tetrus. Since the rules can be explained and learned in less than two minutes anyone can join in the fun with ease.

Worming Into Books

Cole has always been nuts about books. He's not quite 4, but already he's begging to keep the lights on at night so he can look at "just one more book." He can't really read yet, but he likes looking at the pictures, sometimes narrating the story to himself as he flips the pages.

The teachers at his preschool close the day with story time, and if they are in the middle of one story when I arrive to pick him up, Cole will barely acknowledge my presence until that last page is turned. Any attempt to interrupt will be met with emphatic protestation. The funny thing is, he doesn't like any of the songs or finger plays or clapping games that people tend to intermix into storytime. He just wants the stories, and couldn't care less about any of that other stuff.

One thing I would have never even thought to look for are audiobooks, but my friend Annalee passed along one of Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Treehouse CDs, and Cole was mesmerized by it. He picked out several more stories from the series at the library, and will sometimes sit for more than an hour listening to them. This interest in stories and storytelling is one childhood habit I hope he keeps.

When I took him back too his preschool last week, I saw some of the new parents struggling with sobbing, clingy kids who didn't want them to leave. I was reminded of Cole at this time last year, when most every school drop off was concluded in tears. Often the teachers would have to pull him off of me so I could get to work. It's such a contrast with how he is now, racing into school, taking off his own shoes and jacket, and having to be reminded to give me a hug and a kiss before he zooms off to his friends. The changes sure do come, don't they?

Boys, toys and militarism

It's hardly controversial to argue that war and instruments of killing are glorified in our society, and that young boys are a particular target of this promotion.

Just walk down the "boys" aisle of any toy store and you see that a huge proportion of toys are military-themed or military-related. My local dollar store, in fact, in its toy section, carries nothing but military toys for boys. Some video games also promote the sense that warfare is fun. And I do believe there is a connection between this promotion of military toys and the tendency of many Americans, especially men, to cheer and support US military action abroad without thinking about the costs to those on the receiving end of US military action, without thinking of the costs to the US soldiers who take part, without thinking about what war really is.

When my son BK was born we began facing the question of how we wanted to raise him, what kind of man did we want him to become. Part of the concern was the hyper-militaristic boy culture in our society, which was reinforced by the typical macho stereotypes foisted on boys from a very very early age.

But then we started to see that our son liked to shoot at things, even though he had no toy guns, even though he did not watch television or violent movies. He found a stick and would use it as a gun. We were quite concerned about this kind of thing.

One day I ran into the son of friends of ours who was about 20. His parents had been active in the peace and feminist movements from the time he as born. He himself is a very cool kid, not at all militaristic or macho; in fact, I'd be thrilled if my own son turned out like this kid.

I talked to him about my concerns -- BK was probably about 5 years old at the time. And he told me his own story. He'd grown up in a feminist, peace-activist household.

Yet he loved to play army and war, he loved to play violent video games. It seemed like such a contradiction.

But he explained that he knew the difference between fantasy and reality. Because his parents had actually talked to him about war, warfare, killing, and militarism, he understood that the fantasies of playing army or playing violent video games were very different than actual warfare.

And as I thought about it, I realized that as a kid I also played army. We'd divide up into opposing armies, and roam the neighborhood "killing" each other with pretend guns. Although there were no video games back then, we watched plenty of tv shows and movies that glorified military action.

And yet, I did not become a militaristic, violent guy.

The point here is that the attitudes of our kids come from many different places. Yeah, there's a lot of pressure and opportunity for our boys to adopt a militaristic mindset, to think of war as "cool" and of violence as normal. But as I wrote earlier in my post about politics and kids, we parents are our kids' first teachers.

Given this societal environment, it's so important that we actually talk to our sons about militarism and war. Of course we need to talk to our daughters about it. But our sons are the main targets, and when they turn 18, the sons of those of us in the US are required to sign up for "selective service" (military service registry).

Given US foreign policy over the past several years -- actually, over the past half-century -- and given the extent to which US military action is glorified in the news, in history books, in newspapers, it's especially important for us as Americans to talk openly and frankly with our kids, and especially our sons, about militarism.

My wife and I have done that. From the time he was little we made sure BK knew what war actually was, putting it in very human terms.

We explained the difference between doing something to defend yourself, and doing something that is closer to bullying. We explained what fighting a war means for people on the receiving end of our missiles and bullets -- not just soldiers but moms and dads and kids. We explained exactly what happens in a war -- people actually get killed and maimed, homes are destroyed -- conveying the immense sadness and tragedy that comes with violence. We explained that unfortunately sometimes leaders, including our own, do not obey the most basic rules of nursery school -- use words, not your hands.

All of this helps make it clear that playing war and "shooting" with sticks, pushing buttons on a gamecube or watching a dvd are not war. They are fantasy. And war is fundamentally different.

Our kids have to know that war is not a game, and that violence should only be used as a very last resort. They have to know that our society tries to create the false impression that war is exciting and fun and bloodless. They have to know that our leaders try to deceive us into believing that we are always justified to use bombs and guns.

Of course BK has a lot of non-violent toys, and he and his friends do a lot of other kinds of play that does not involve war or guns. But when BK plays army, when he plays with his plastic army guys, when he and his friends -- including a good friend whose parents are feminist and pacifist and pretty much on the same page as we are on those issues -- have gunfights, with sticks, with supersoakers, with toy guns (yes, BK somehow has a toy revolver, the kind I had as a kid, and his friends do too), he understands that this is not war.

BK plays with the toys, but he understands that the reality of war is not a game.

Cross-posted at daddychip2

Cars Stink, Ride a Bike!

I don't have a car, and ever since Cole was old enough to wear a helmet, he and I have made a lot of trips by bike together. Riding provides a great opportunity to see and learn about the city, a practical way for busy parents to stay in shape, and an active and visible way to cut pollution and oil demand. Plus it's usually faster (and definitely more fun!) than taking the bus.

Unfortunately, I know a lot of parents, especially urban parents, are scared to take their little ones out on the road. If you fall into that category, I encourage you to take a look at the new Family Biking site The San Francisco Bike Coalition just put up, which has some really clear, practical information about equipment, safety, and good places to ride. It also includes a discussion forum where you can ask questions, like the ever-pressing "Will the Xtracycle fit in a MUNI bus rack?"

Hope to see you on the road!