peein like a boy, or the follies of fathering

Note: Just a quick announcement that I will be going up the Northwest doing readings with artnoose of the zine ker-bloom. Along the way will be one of my daughters and her best friend. Here are the dates:

Fri. 3/30 Arcata CA - 8 pm - Muddy's Hot Cup

Sat. 3/31 Portland OR - 6 pm - Laughing Horse Books

Sun. 4/1 Seattle WA - 7 pm - Z.A.P.P.

Mon. 4/2 Seattle WA - 6 pm - Left Bank Books

Tues. 4/3 Vancouver BC - 7 pm - Spartacus Books

Thur. 4/5 Victoria BC - 7 pm - Solstice Cafe

Sat. 4/7 Olympia WA - 7 pm - Last Word Books

Sun. 4/8 Eugene OR - 5 pm - Wandering Goat Café

Please come out and say hello! It will be a fun-filled night of storytelling. Oh, and rad dad 6 is out!

***

I love being a dad; I feel like I need to say this because over the past few rad dad columns, I've realized that I've been writing about some of the more difficult topics, the ones that challenge my sense of self, my politics, my own securities: things like drug use, ethnicity, pornography. Believe me, it's been very helpful to talk about these things with others and to force myself to consider intimately and deeply how I want to parent, the relationship I want to foster with my children. But I gotta tell you for all the difficult times and moments I deal with, my experiences parenting have been the funniest of my life. Nothing makes me laugh, brings out the kid in me, or makes me realize how lucky I am more than the follies of fathering.

With that said, however, nothing really can prepare you for your youngest daughter announcing:

"Dad, I'm gonna stand and pee into the toilet. So do I need to lift the lid?"

Thankfully I was brushing my teeth, which allowed me to spit the contents of my mouth into the sink with little explanation.

"Ah, well, I don't think so."

And with approval given, she lets it fly. Literally.

I will now defend the ability of men to aim with pretty good accuracy after seeing the torrent of urine released by my daughter and the sheer span of toilet and floor and wall it showered.

"Well, that didn't work," I say.

"Why?" she asks very amazed and slightly embarrassed.

"I don't know. Did you aim?" I kinda stammer as my son sticks his head and demands, "What the hell are you guys talking about?"

Ella screams, and I take the distraction to consider what just happened. Assuming there is no book broaching the subject at the public library and trying to be a caring, supportive father, I remember a zine at the local infoshop on how to pee standing up.

Sure enough, it's there. I buy it for a quarter and pass it on to my nine-year old who tosses it in her room without thinking anything of it as if it was no big deal.

Later, sitting with some friends of mine, we all laugh at this story as well as at our recollections of how difficult it was to potty train our kids, working with angles, strategically aiming body parts, and of course the unavoidable contact with certain bodily excretions. We shared other stories of how parenting never fails to put you in positions of having no answer to queries and in territory totally foreign to anything you've experienced. But it sure was interesting and very entertaining to have every woman I know share some bit of advice for me to pass on to my daughter about the techniques of pissing standing up. "Tell her it's in the way you squeeze your butt cheeks."

So the next time, my daughter tells me, as I'm standing in the shower, that she's decided she no longer wants to pee like a boy, I say, "Well, if you ever try again, there's people who can help you, but you gotta promise to wipe the lid after."

Somehow I felt strangely satisfied saying that.

And that's the easy stuff. My headstrong 11-year old has decided she wants a bra-lette; now I have never heard of this word before (talk about foreign territory), but I have already told her when she feels ready to get a training bra (she rolls her eyes at my archaic language), I'd take her.

"No way!" she screams.

Apparently, I can see her in a bathing suit, I can still take a shower with her, but I am forbidden to see her in a bra-lette. I am promptly banished from any part of the store that she's in when we all next venture to Target to get some swimming supplies for a camping trip.

Trying again to be the understanding, supportive father, I keep my distance and watch from afar as my partner and her pick some out bras while Ella and I play with axes and solar showers. Ella holds my hand and shakes her head and says, "I think she's going into the pre-teen years, Dad."

When we all meet up again in the check out aisle to pay and I start taking the colorful assortment of bra-lettes out; I hear her plead, "Dad" as her older brother walks up. I quickly put them back in the bag as he demands again, "Hey, what are you guys buying?"

"Nothing," I say, "go see what your mom's doing."

He leaves and she smiles and leans her head on my waist and says, "Thank you." And it is then I see her again as the wild middle child and simultaneously as a young woman coming into her own. I feel honored to have been a part of that transition. I hug her back.

It is when that transition is almost complete that those moments of secret hugs and childhood flashbacks count the most.

My son at 16. My son, too busy to talk. Too busy to hang around. Never too far away though to ask for cash, for rides, for more time away. I won't lie; the last few years have put me to the test and as my dad used to say, "He been on the wrong side I right for too long now." So when it came to taking a two-week trip with just my son, I was scared shitless. Little did I know, shit would be the thing to bring us together.

Now let me segue to something seemingly irrelevant. I have lost more friends over my assertion that Dumb and Dumber is one of the great movies of the last 10 years than any other faux pas I've committed. And I realize why they disagree; most of them are kidless; anyone who has gone through the obsessive banter about poop from kids at each stage of development either must become apathetic to bowel humor or jump in and enjoy the fun.

Back now to our trip to Chiapas where the look on my son's face as he walked up to the door of our hostel was pure terror and fear. Big time. He nodded to his leg, and his chalky complexion gave it all away. To make matters worse, we were about to venture to a village in the jungle on horseback for the next four hours. But he's a trooper (and a pooper, I tease) because he held it together. Literally.

It was on this trip that I made a startling discovery: the mind of a two-year old and a fifteen-year old are eerily connected. Especially when poop is the subject. My son couldn't stop talking about crap. And I was like a new father in love with changing diapers making cutesy little doo-doo sounds along with him. It's true; we bonded over poop banter.

We spent two wonderful, ruin-filled, Zapatista-focused weeks in Mexico and many of these days seemed to also take place in various bathrooms. Dylan's favorite phrase was, "It feels like I'm pissing out of my asshole." Now I don't know why, but we laughed ourselves to sleep many a nights over this phrase as well as devised ways of bringing back bottles of water and tricking various friends and enemies as well as his sisters into consuming said water to share the pleasures of "pissing out of one's asshole." And, of course, the toilet scene in Dumb and Dumber came up repeatedly as a measuring stick to our own bathroom experiences.

But it wasn't until the end, on our way home, we sat next to each other on the plane, and he looked over at me and smiled and said, "Thanks, Dad. This was a pretty good trip." Nothing more, but it was enough to remind myself just how damn lucky I am to have him in my life. To have all them in my life even if I'm never sure if the lid should stay up or down anymore, even if I am banned from parts of their life and certain departments in stores, even if I lose friends over shit jokes. For them, it's all worth it.

Stay-at-home parenthood: a privileged debate?

I hear it a lot: the debate over stay-at-home dads (and moms) is a privileged one, since, some say, most couples must work two jobs just to stay afloat. "The whole idea of there being just one person who earns the money is so foreign to most families now," writes Jeff at Feminist Allies, in response to my March 2 post on breadwinning moms. "Perhaps there are some class issues around couples who are having the sorts of problems that Jeremy is talking about?"

I used to think so--and I said as much in my very first post to Daddy Dialectic: "Dads-at-home will be a tiny minority for as long as parents have to scramble to keep their heads above water, trying to make enough money to survive and give their kids the best life possible, under the circumstances."

At the time I wrote that, I had thought about the issue for all of two seconds: like Jeff and many other people who should know better, I just reflexively assumed that stay-at-home parenthood is a luxury of the affluent. Since then, I've interviewed dozens of families with a stay-at-home parent, read scores of empirical studies and books, and spoken with leading family researchers.

As a result, I discovered that the reality is complex--as it almost always is, when closely examined. Let's start with the numbers. Men are sole breadwinners in 39 percent of families with children under the age of six. Meanwhile, seven percent of families are supported primarily by women. That means at least 46 percent of families with young children are supported by one breadwinner.

Even if this was a relatively privileged group, it is certainly not, as Jeff implies, a marginal group. That number represents millions of people, almost half of all families, and they are facing real and difficult trade-offs when it comes to balancing home with work. Mostly, of course, it's moms who stay home, and in recent years, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more moms are quitting their jobs to take care of kids. "The biggest percentage-point declines in work-force participation," reports the Wall Street Journal, "did come among mothers with a bachelor's degree or more, followed by women with husbands in the top 20% of earners." This confirms the impression that families with a stay-at-home parent are relatively privileged--that is to say, educated and affluent.

However, the same Bureau of Labor Statistics study cited by the Journal reveals that once the decision is made for one parent to stay home with the children, those same affluent families take a very serious financial hit. They lose the ability to save, invest, buy homes, or make discretionary purchases--in short, they are no longer affluent. They are simply getting by.

That by itself is important. But focusing on families who sacrifice affluence so that one parent can stay home obscures the experience of a huge number of families that are poor and working class to begin with. Almost a quarter of minimum wage workers are the sole breadwinners for their families. Many low-wage and even many middle-income workers find that childcare is too expensive; they crunch the numbers and discover that it's cheaper, or nearly, for one parent to stay home.

Others simply make life choices that put family and children first, based on a combination of (sometimes sexist) ideology and values: these are often immigrants or people of color. Recently I interviewed sociologists Ross Parke and Scott Coltrane, both at UC Riverside, about their five-year longititudinal study of how Latino and Anglo families in Riverside cope with economic stress. They are finding that Latino families are often willing to accept much higher levels of economic stress in exchange for time with children. "The middle-class profile of the Latino families would make them poverty level among the Anglo families," Coltrane told me. "A lot of the mothers are not employed. In one sample, only a third of the mothers, in another, only 40% of the mothers, are employed, and that’s very different from the Anglo families where 80% of the women are employed." Though we might arrogantly (and perhaps also rightly) see this as a sign of how much more patriarchal Latino communities are, I think the simple truth is that working-class Latino parents and educated Anglo parents want the same thing, to be the ones to take care of their own children.

Here's where issues of inequality arise: when more women than men opt to stay home, women as a group lose economic power and independence. Which is why the debate over stay-at-home dads matters: it is not a privileged, marginal debate, but one central to the real lives of millions of people, and key to building a more equitable society. "Will women ever achieve real equality with men?" asks Rhona Mahony in her classic 1995 book Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, and Bargaining Power. "I propose that the answer to that question is another question: Can a father raise babies and can a woman let him do it? This is a key question, because in order for women to achieve economic equality with men, men will have to do half the work of raising children."

---------------------------

Update: A bunch of people just emailed me to say that I was personally attacked yesterday by Linda Hirshman. Go check it out; I'll respond sometime in the next couple of days, when I have more time.

Have you loved your at-home parent today?

I just stumbled across this really sweet list of "Ten reasons why I love my stay-at-home dad." Then I ran across this just-as-sweet appreciation of a stay-at-home mom by a working dad. So, yesterday I reminded all our readers, both of you, to enjoy your kids; today's reminder is to appreciate your spouse. As if you needed it...OK, I'll stop now...

Liko vs. Binary Gender, Part II

Said this evening, apropos of nothing: "I'm a pretty working man!"

Don't forget to enjoy your kids today!

Values Check

I just came across a list I made earlier this year, detailing the values I'd like to be teaching Cole. I like to write these things down every once in a while -- it helps me make sure that the life I'm living doesn't stray too far from the life I'd like to be living. Anyway, here's my list -- how's it compare to yours?

Core values I’d like to communicate to Cole
-----------------------------------------------

He should learn that he is loved unconditionally, always, and doesn’t need to do anything or behave any certain way to earn that love.

He should learn that food is something that should be enjoyed and appreciated, and he should always be provided with a variety of healthy, nutritious things to eat.

He should learn how to build a rich, diverse social community, and be encouraged to find common threads of connection with other people.

He should learn that our bodies are our own, and that no one should be hugged, kissed or touched without their permission.

He should learn that his ideas are important and that we will listen to his thoughts. When problems come up, he should be encouraged to help develop solutions as much as possible.

He should learn that animals should be treated with respect and care, and that they shouldn’t be hurt or killed unnecessarily.

He should learn that playing, fun and laughter are important.

He should learn that when he says he’s going to be somewhere or do something, he should actually follow through.

He should be encouraged to use his imagination, and value creativity over passive entertainment.

He should learn that it is important to find fun and enjoyable physical activities, and he should be encouraged to do some physical activity or exercise every day.

He should learn that violence, yelling, put-downs and threats are not effective tools for solving interpersonal conflicts.

He should be encouraged to do as much as he can to help other people.

Housework vs. the Rest of Life

Rebeldad points to this study that says dads do about 7 hours of housework and moms do twenty-one--which is consistent with other recent studies of domestic labor.

"From a gender equity standpoint," writes Rebeldad, "it's bad that dads are lagging behind moms... but 21+ hours a week on housework--no matter who is doing the work--seems like overkill. Surely there are better ways to spend three hours a day."

Here's how I responded over at Rebeldad:

Does my family do at least 21 hours a week of housework?

Let's see: my wife and I each do about 4 hours of housework over the weekend, and I spend about a half hour in the morning and a half hour in weekday evenings doing dishes or picking up clutter. I can only guess how much my wife does during the day (most of her time is consumed with childcare/playing), but let's say at least one hour (mostly picking up toys or washing dishes), plus an additional two hours one morning a week. I'm excluding cooking, which my wife does most of.

So we're doing at least 20 hours a week cleaning and maintaining our two-bedroom apartment (that's a pic, at top, doll in foreground), and we are not neat freaks. I can easily see how a rural/suburban residence would involve more hours of housework. So I guess those numbers don't seem unreasonable to me.

But I think the key line from the source report is this one: "Girls spend more time doing housework than they do playing, while boys spend about 30 percent less time doing household chores than girls and more than twice as much time playing."

In many respects, this is the thing that needs to change. If we can equalize those hours (and there's no reason why we as parents couldn't) then we might really see equality down the road, when our children have children. For me, this is a reminder that my son needs to learn how to do housework--something that I wasn't really raised to do, and when I got to college, it showed.

----------------------

After reading this post at Rebeldad, I scrolled down to see what I've been missing--and was surprised to see that Rebeldad nominated Daddy Dialectic for "best new daddyblogger," a contest being run over at the At-Home Dad site. From what I gleaned, the actual voting won't happen until the end of 2007.

That's good. Thanks, Rebeldad, and to everyone who has ever supported Daddy Dialectic by telling a friend or linking over here.

--------------------

Update: After coming home and reviewing our housework hours with my wife, I have to revise my estimate. In reality, I think we do an average of about 15-16 hours per week.

Breadwinning Moms vs. Alimony

More signs of the times:

The idea that men can receive spousal support from their wives may feel like a freakish concept, but as women have become higher earners, it's increasingly common.

And as men set their sights on women's earnings, women have become more protective of those dollars. In fact, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, 44% of attorneys included in a recent survey said they've seen an increase in women asking for prenuptial agreements over the last five years, where in previous decades, prenuptial agreements were almost always sought by men.

A lot of women are indignant now that the shoe is increasingly on the other foot, says Carol Ann Wilson, a certified financial divorce practitioner in Boulder, Colo. "There's this sense of, 'What's yours is ours, but what's mine is mine,'" Wilson says. "My first response to that is, 'All these years we have been looking for equality; well, this is what it looks like.' I think women get angrier about having to pay than men do."

...

Wilson emphasizes that it's not just actresses or the wealthiest women who are seeking prenuptial agreements or paying spousal support. "I've seen thousands of clients," she says, "and almost every time I've seen a stay-at-home dad seek alimony, the wife--she's usually a software executive--goes ballistic."

...

Just as some women object to men's request for spousal support, some men are particularly uncomfortable seeking it. Either they find it emasculating to ask, or they find the idea of receiving an allowance from their ex-wives humiliating, according to divorce attorneys.

"The fact is that you still don't see too many cases where men seek alimony," says William Beslow, a divorce attorney in New York City. "One reason is that although women may earn more than men, they often wind up with custody of the children, and when a woman takes up primary responsibility for the children, men don't request maintenance."

The Measure of a Father

From the Guardian in the UK, courtesy of frequent Daddy Dialectic tipster Susan:

Children are more likely to suffer development problems if their fathers do not take paternity leave or spend enough time with them when they are very young, according to an analysis of thousands of babies born around the turn of the millennium.

A report published today by the Equal Opportunities Commission and based on research tracking 19,000 children born in 2000 and 2001 found emotional and behavioural problems were more common by the time youngsters reached the age of three if their fathers had not taken time off work when they were born, or had not used flexible working to have a more positive role in their upbringing.

Previous research has highlighted the importance of a mother's involvement when a child is small, but the EOC says this is the first study to confirm that the close involvement of a father also has a significant impact on a child's future...

The EOC points to a "social revolution in fatherhood", in which fathers are increasingly involved with their children's upbringing and feel confident as carers, yet 63% felt they did not spend enough time with their new baby.

That fathers are being studied at all is part of the revolution. I recently interviewed UC Riverside Sociologist Scott Coltrane, author of many studies and books on fatherhood. In the past, says Coltrane, researchers looked only at whether the father was present and married to the mother. They might also have looked at demographic or economic information about the fathers. But they did not study how fathers interacted with their children or what impact fathers had on children's development. Until the 1970s, it was (unconsciously?) assumed that mothers were solely responsible for child outcomes.

Coltrane describes how "in the late Seventies researchers started saying, 'Wait a minute, why don’t we measure what the fathers are actually doing? How do they parent? What do they do?'" Today scholars "tend to include father variables in their studies, so we are doing a better job of tracking the father participation that is occurring. And we are considering that men might be doing housework beyond taking out the trash and mowing the lawn. And because women are more likely to be employed and earn good wages, more families are sharing more of the family work - so when we look we see shifts." Applying the same measures of mothers and fathers, says Coltrane, is still "relatively novel, as simple an idea as that is."

The Guardian article concludes: "The government last night pointed to moves including the introduction of paid paternity leave and more than doubling of maternity pay as evidence of commitment to helping families balance work and caring responsibilities."

Ah, sounds lovely.

Mom vs. Herself

There's something in the air. After a wave after MSM articles about stay-at-home dads, we're now hearing from the other side: their wives. And boy, are they pissed--or so we are led to believe.

I found too many pieces to list, but I'll cite some articles and blog postings:

One blogger (a "life coach," whatever that is) finds "feelings of resentment, jealousy, frustration" on the part of breadwinning moms. "Many of the women I know who are the bread-winners of their family tend to be controlling. Not necessarily a 'control-freak' or not necessarily consciously but by default. Husbands in the role of a stay-at-home dad may relinquish their role and behave in a subservient manner. The frustration for women comes when they not only work long hours in their career but are also expected to oversee or manage the household despite having someone capable at home."

In "A Breadwinner Rethinks Gender Roles," M.P. Dunleavey writes that breadwinning moms "are seething--with uncertainty, resentment, anxiety and frustration." While her own husband "cooks, cleans, shops and takes care of our son," Dunleavey is filled with "terror that I'll be the breadwinner forever."

But the mother of all these pieces is this essay in the women's magazine Marie Claire entitled, "Why I Left My Beta Husband." Initially author Amy Brayfield loved it when her first husband Mark stayed at home with their daughter, which allowed her to focus on the career she loved. Then she found herself "mortified" when co-workers discovered that her husband was a stay-at-home dad. "I had it all back then," she writes, "including a gorgeous toddler and a cool job. What I didn't have was a husband I felt proud of." She continues:

I felt guilty about being glad to go back to work, and in my head, I made it Mark's fault. Because he couldn't find a job, I blamed him when I was working late and had to miss the baby's bedtime; it was his fault I had to go in early every day, since the fact that he couldn't find a job meant that I couldn't afford to lose mine.

And when I got home, I seethed. I couldn't walk across the living room without tripping over some plastic toy or container of wipes. The baby was in the same little nightgown she'd slept in the night before. There wasn't a hint of dinner on the horizon. He was home all day—couldn't he at least run a freaking load of laundry?

Eventually, communication between Mark and me deteriorated to the point where all we talked about was the baby. Had she gotten enough sleep? What had she eaten for lunch? How could she have run through an entire value pack of diapers in one weekend? "Wait till I tell you what she did," he'd say every once in a while, as we gazed adoringly at the baby and at each other. In those moments—watching him gently rock her to sleep while singing "Punk Rock Girl"—I was reminded why I had once thought Mark was the sexiest man in the world.

But our sex life was in ruins. I chalked it up to the transition period all new parents go through. Then one day, I realized it had been almost a year since Mark and I had made love.

Perhaps we should stop there, before it gets uglier. Amy divorces Mark, and gets custody of their daughter. But there's a twist ending: "Nobody was more surprised than I was when I went ahead and fell for another stay-at-home dad."

Which, of course, allows her to continue to pursue her high-powered career.

Many breadwinning mommy bloggers disowned the image of the "seething" working mom who doesn't respect her "subservient" stay-at-home husband: see, for example, Elizabeth at Half-Changed World or Rebecca at Adventures in Applied Math. But we should not dismiss the feelings expressed by Brayfield and Dunleavey--there's obviously a parallel between the fish-out-of-water feelings they express and the angst of a new stay-at-home dad who finds himself alone on the playground.

So what should we think?

Let me tell you a story. One day I was talking with another stay-at-home parent on the playground. While our kids chased each other around the slide, we got to commiserating. I told her how overwhelmed I felt by the daily routines of childcare and housework.

"Well, now you know how women have felt for centuries!" she said, almost cheerful.

Right. I get it. It's a good perspective. And so, to all you ladies out there in reverse role families, let me return the favor.

When I read about women who "seethe" with resentment against the obligations that supporting a family forces on them, or when I hear that they live in "terror" that they'll be the breadwinner "forever," I'm afraid that there's only one response.

Get ready.

You can feel it coming.

Here it goes:

"Well, now you know how men have felt for centuries!"

So there. This is not to imply that we exist in a state of equality. Women still face the glass ceiling, the double shift, sexual harassment, and so on. Men are still the privileged group. We still run the world, though our overthrow is well on the way to happening.

But do women like Dunleavey and Brayfield (elite members of the East Coast media) really carry more burdens than, say, an African-American dad who works as a custodian in a place like East St. Louis or perhaps a Latino migrant worker dad who sends money back to his family in Mexico or a gay dad in Lincoln, Nebraska who works every day to support his husband and children, despite all the obstacles society throws in their way? Or even just a regular Euro-American dad in a regular Midwestern city whose life has thrown him one too many curve balls?

Dunleavey and Brayfield sound to me like they have (or had) damn good husbands, not to mention good jobs and happy, healthy kids. The husbands' main failing is that they don't measure up to Dunleavey and Brayfield's image of traditional fatherhood: "Someone who walks out the door with a pressed shirt on, a leather briefcase, and a confident gait. Someone who wins bread." But whose failing is that, really? As their writing makes clear, the problem here is not that their husbands are failing as partners and parents. The problem for Dunleavey and Brayfield is that their image of the father and their image of the mother are both stuck in the 1950s, a long-gone era.

My simple point is that when we talk about these things, we need some perspective and we need some empathy--and we need to look forward, to what we really want and where we're really going.

When I read stuff like this, I just want to take these women gently by the shoulders and tell them this is the way it is. "I write here a fair amount about what I call 'reverse traditional families'--families with working mothers and at-home fathers," says Half-Changed World. "One of the strains on women in these families is that we rarely give ourselves mothering credit for being breadwinners. We often beat ourselves up for the things that we don't do, without giving ourselves corresponding brownie points for the things we do. Maybe we should stop worrying about whether we're good enough mothers, and decide that we're damned good fathers."

These are wise words. It's certainly better than the angry and unhealthy alternative described by Dunleavey and Brayfield. To them I say, as a working father: Welcome to the club! Stop by and talk anytime! We're all in it together!

-------------------

Readers should also see my February 28 post, "Shelley's story," for another perspective on being a bread-mommy.

Family vs. Political Involvement

Naazneen Barma reports:

Julianna Sandell Pacheco and Eric Plutzer analyzed the effects of three important teen life transitions—adolescent parenthood, early marriage, and dropping out of high school—on later political engagement. In a paper published in American Politics Research, Pacheco and Plutzer report that the three transitions “can contribute to a pattern of cumulative disadvantage because experiencing one teen transition often leads to another.” Teen parents are much more likely to drop out of school, which in turn sets of other chains of events that dampen political participation, making it unlikely they’ll be able to advocate effectively for their needs and opinions.

Interestingly, the scholars find that the effects of these life transitions on voter turnout differ across racial and ethnic lines, with the impact of teen parenthood applying more to Whites than to Blacks or Hispanics. They suggest that the differences across racial groups may reflect divergent norms about educational achievement and early parenthood and marriage. This hints that providing the right kinds of social support to teens could offset the negative impacts of their life transitions...

The authors demonstrate that supposedly “nonpolitical” life events can have an influence on political behavior. From a harm reduction viewpoint, it may be possible to cut into the causal chain to prevent one bad choice from leading to another. Their results suggest that efforts to help teen parents in a way that makes it easier for them to stay in school could carry great benefits—both for their immediate educational success and their lifelong political engagement.

I have been thinking recently about how tough it is, period, to be a parent and stay politically active. This past weekend I attended a board meeting for an organization that I've been involved with for about a year, and as I sat there looking at spreadsheets I had a revelation: it's not just me volunteering my time, it's my entire family. I normally take responsibility for Liko over the weekend, which allows my wife to do whatever she wants (hanging out with us is one option, but it's her choice; she spends a lot of time cleaning the house and doing laundry, I'm afraid). When I go to a weekend-long meeting, my wife loses the break from caregiving, and of course my son loses my company. I've started to recently think that maybe it's just not the right time in my life to be politically active, but I fear that if I drop out completely I'll never go back. (I also just had a short story published, "What Do We Want? When Do We Want It?" that touches on this topic--one of my few stories to be available online!)

Ted’s Story: Not his father's son

I am in the process of interviewing Bay Area families for a series of writing projects on stay-at-home fathers and non-traditional families. For the next year or so, I will periodically post sketches of the families based on the interviews, as a kind of public notebook of the work I am doing. What follows is the story of Ted, a stay-at-home dad in Oakland, CA. All names have been changed.


Johnny lifts rock after rock, small two-year-old face focused, searching.

“Bug!” he says triumphantly, pointing to a salamander. “Bug!”

His dad Ted squats down. “It’s a salamander. That’s a kind of amphibian, Johnny.”

Ted plucks the finger-length salamander off the ground and slides it into Johnny’s hand.

“Gentle,” he says to his son. “Be very gentle.”

Tell me about your dad, I say.

Ted laughs sarcastically and doesn’t say anything. In another person, it would seem like a self-dramatizing gesture. I sense, however, that Ted is only thinking. Ted is 43 years old, but he’s boyish and stocky and he has a scholar’s face, quiet and a little bit sad. Words come slow to him.

I prompt him: What kind of role model is he for you, as a father?

“He saw himself as a breadwinner and not much else. His attitude was, I’m your father and you will respect me, because of all the things I’ve done for you. He didn’t see our relationship as going two ways. It was more of a one-way thing, from him to me.”

Ted’s parents divorced when he was eleven. At first he and his sister lived with his mom, then one day when he was fourteen, Ted was caught smoking marijuana. It was decided that he would go live with his father.

“I have a lot of fond memories from before, but after I went to live with my dad, I don’t know. It was a closed atmosphere. I didn’t have a lot of friends. The attitude about me was, he’s done drugs before, so let’s keep him in a cage so that he’ll never have a chance to do drugs again.”

What was your father like, during this period? I ask.

“My dad was an alcoholic….”

“Look at me, daddy!” cries Johnny. We look: he’s standing up on a pile of wood chips, legs spread, with one foot propped on a nearby fence, smiling as though he just completed a triple somersault.

“Way to go, Johnny, good job!”

About your father… I continue.

“He was a mean drunk. He picked on the family…”

Ted stops talking.

What do you think he did well? I ask.

Ted thinks. “I can’t think of anything right now. I don’t have a good relationship with my dad.”

When Ted went to college, he became a serious bicycle racer. He’d take classes for a semester, then race for a year. This went on for twelve years, until he got his undergraduate science degree.

“I wasn’t getting rich, but I’d make a couple hundred dollars a week, enough to get by with some other work, and I raced with professionals—some pretty famous guys. My dad wasn’t supportive, except when I won a race. I won about fifty races. I think winning was the only thing that made it worthwhile to him.”

One day he met Shelley, the roommate of the girlfriend of another bike racer. They married and two and a half years ago they had Johnny. The family spent Johnny's second year in China, where Ted worked as researcher for the United Nations on a conservation project. While in China, Shelley was offered a job as communications director of an international development organization in Oakland, CA. On their return to the Bay Area, the couple decided that Ted would stay home with Johnny while Shelley worked.

What does your dad think of you staying at home with Johnny? I ask.

"He’s insulting about it. Not so much about me taking care of Johnny. More about the fact that I’m not having a job right now. He’s in his sixties, his health is deteriorating, so he just lashes out at anything.”

Johnny wanders over to concrete steps that lead down from their street to next neighborhood. Ted lets him stand at a railing, looking down at a ten-foot drop.

I say: My wife would never let my son stand there.

“Shelley’s terrified of the stairs. She won’t let him go near stairs like that.”

Are you more careless than Shelley? I ask.

“I wouldn’t say careless…”

We both laugh.

“He is more likely to get hurt with me…well, not, like, hurt. I’m careful with him, but I like to give him a little bit more room to, you know, experiment, see what he can do. He’d never learn to walk down the stairs otherwise.”

What are some things a good father does? I ask.

For once, Ted doesn’t hesitate. “A good dad is close to his kids. He’s there emotionally. He’s supportive and encouraging, whatever the kids want to do, within reason.”

He pauses.

“But I think the most important thing is for a dad to set a good example. You have to be the kind of man you want your son to grow up to be. You can’t impose your ideas on him. You have to be the idea and just hope he gets it. If they see you being kind to other people, they’re more likely to be kind to other people.”

We stop talking, both of us pondering his words, watching Johnny, who squats for a long time, intently watching another salamander traverse the landscape of his tiny hand. Johnny starts to poke and prod at the salamander.

“OK, Johnny,” says Ted. “Let the salamander free.”

He squats down next to his son and helps the salamander back into its home under the rock.

“You don’t want to hurt him,” says Ted, taking his son’s hand.

You know, I say, Johnny really looks like you.

For the first time that afternoon, Ted really smiles: at that moment, he is the man he wants his son to be.

Liko vs. Binary Gender

After Liko and his mom set up a hummingbird feeder on the back deck:

"I'm not a girl or a boy!"

"What are you?"

"I'm a hummingbird!"

"Really? Cool."

"I'm a hummingbird woman!"

Which reminds me: I recently did a blog search for "feminism" covering the previous 24 hours and found that eight and a half of the ten most recent posts were anti-feminist rants. I say "eight and a half," because of this politically curious post on the politics of daycare in the U.K. -- the only one I'll link to, because it is serious and thought-through and contains some ideas that I think are good.

Two noteworthy things here: the apparent prevalence of antifeminist hatred on the Internet and the bankruptcy and misogyny of antifeminist politics, as represented in these posts. Sample quote: "Businesses are there to make money. All this forcing of businesses to ensure people (primarily women) get their work/life balance in order is fucking the economy up... The old way was pretty good. Men worked and made money, thus able to do their jobs and provide for the children. Women stayed at home and ran the home, thus able to devote themselves to the kids... Businesses, men, women and children were happy."

Uh, sure. Everyone was happy. Here's a guy who has never read a novel published prior to 1962.

Alpha vs. Beta

More reasons to feel guilty: a new study says insecure infants are probably screwed for life. "The kid learns, 'I can count on my parents to calm me down,'" says a researcher. "They learn to turn to others. Whereas insecure kids learn that my parent is either rejecting or they learn my parent is neglectful. Or 'I have to protest to get attention.'"

But the upshot of the study has some interesting social implications:

Contrary to the popular American myth that people left to fend for themselves become strong and independent, the psychological research seems to show exactly the opposite is true: It is the people who are confident enough to reach out to others for help -- and to whom help is given -- who become truly capable of independence.

Meanwhile, Robert Sapolsky, professor of biological sciences at Stanford University and of neurology at Stanford's School of Medicine, has some good advice for young men:

For the humans who would like to know what it takes to be an alpha man—if I were 25 and asked that question I would certainly say competitive prowess is important—balls, translated into the more abstractly demanding social realm of humans. What's clear to me now at 45 is, screw the alpha male stuff. Go for an alternative strategy. Go for the social affiliation, build relationships with females, don't waste your time trying to figure out how to be the most adept socially cagy male-male competitor. Amazingly enough that's not what pays off in that system. Go for the affiliative stuff and bypass the male crap. I could not have said that when I was 25.

We vs. Me

Over at the Greater Good blog, Christine Carter McLaughlin and Kelly Corrigan continue their dialogue on childhood happiness, this time with a focus on social connections:

Kelly: So about connection. You know how there's this prevailing desire for space and privacy? People dream of a home with a long driveway on five acres but if and when they get there, it's too quiet, too isolated, too removed from the comforting sounds of a neighborhood. At least for me, the thing I like most about my home is seeing people walk by as I do my dishes or bumping into friends as I walk my kids to school.

Carter: This is what sociologists call social integration, and the upshot of all the research on it is that social connectedness is so closely related to well-being and personal happiness the two can practically be equated. Robert Putnam wrote a really interesting book, Bowling Alone, about how we Americans are becoming less and less connected to one another.

"Countless studies document the link between society and psyche [he writes]: people who have close friends and confidants, friendly neighbors, and supportive co-workers are less likely to experience sadness, loneliness, low self-esteem, and problems with eating and sleeping…The single most common finding from a half century's research on the correlates of life satisfaction, not only in the United States but around the world, is that happiness is best predicted by the breadth and depth of one's social connections (Putnam 2000, p. 332)."

Many people would love to have the kind of connections Putnam talks about, yet still find themselves living lives of lonely desperation. "Families are isolated," says Carolyn Cowan, a research psychologist with the UC Berkeley Institute of Human Development (also my employer). With her husband Philip, Carolyn studied 200 nuclear families and found that up to a third experienced "tension, conflict, distress and divorce in the early years after the arrival of a first child," conditions that thrive in social isolation.

"Increasingly, new families are created far from grandparents, kin, and friends with babies the same age, leaving parents without the support of those who could share their experiences of the ups and downs of parenthood," write the Cowans. "Most modern parents bring babies home to isolated dwellings where their neighbors are strangers."

Sounds dire, yes? And probably familiar to many readers.

At the moment I'm working on a set of interlocking writing projects, all of which involve interviewing families with young kids, all in the Bay Area. I'm struck by two things: 1) how isolated many of them are; and 2) how differently individuals react to the isolation. One stay-at-home dad I interviewed knew that he was isolated, but he only worried that his son wasn't being properly socialized--he honestly didn't care that he had few parent friends (important caveat: he's only three months in to his stint as a SAHD). I've also talked with people who have what appear to be busy social lives--but they lament the quality of their social contacts, which they feel lack the kind of intimacy they found in school-age friendships.

But what's most interesting is that many new parents seem to have chosen lives that leave them isolated; for example, by moving away from parents and hometowns. Why? When I quiz people about this, the kneejerk response is that people in general are following jobs. But when I drill down and ask, "Why don't you live in the place where you grew up?" I find the answers vary a great deal.

Some people did indeed follow jobs and careers. Others (this applies to me) grew up moving from place to place, and don't have any one town to call home--often, their relatives are dispersed. The most interesting group consists of people who came to the Bay Area seeking some degree of social freedom--this is true, for example, of many gays and lesbians. Here many such people discovered, for the first time in their lives, communities in which they were not the outsiders.

Then they had kids, and found themselves once again on the outside, but this time they were far away from family.

Last week my short story, "Same Street Twice" appeared in the literary magazine Instant City. (Sorry, the story's not available online, but you can order the magazine at its website. You can also find Instant City on sale in fine bookstores like Pegasus in Berkeley or Adobe in San Francisco. It's a publication well worth supporting.)

In the thinly fictionalized "Same Street Twice" I document the experience becoming a parent, but I also unconsciously dramatize the social trends I'm now writing about: our young urban couple, Rachel and Graham, find themselves saddled with a baby, far from family or friends, and uncertain of their new roles and responsibilities. They're surrounded by the raunchy street life of the Castro, but it comes to seem like a "slightly boring play" that they can only watch.

It had been a while since I read the story and there's something about seeing your work in print that makes it seem like it was written by someone else: this allows me to feel some degree of pity for the writer. I wrote "Same Street Twice" while in the thick of the experience being described, two and a half years ago. Reading it today, it seems to me that at certain points the story is about to collapse from exhaustion and anxiety.

Ah, so sad. But there's a yet-unwritten sequel: the young urban couple survive the experience of becoming parents. They meet other parents on the playground who are exactly like them. They form playgroups; join community associations; rendezvous every Saturday at the neighborhood Farmer's Market; hold parties. They start helping each other out. Their kids get older and the kids become friends. The couple grows to accept their new identities and the limitations the identities impose, and they craft roles for themselves that make sense and seem fair. In the wreckage of their lives, they build new lives and create new social capital.

"Sure, kids'll destroy your life," someone once told me. "But don't worry: you'll get a new one."

This might also be the sequel to the Cowans's study, though happy endings are not as common as we'd wish. The happy ending (what is that anyway? a good death?) might even be the exception. Many of the couples they studied ended in divorce; many doubtless continue to struggle, even if they stay married. A great deal, I suspect, depends on geography, the community's existing social capital, and individual circumstances too numerous to mention.

If we're honest with ourselves, I think many of us will admit that we gain a certain amount of freedom in our modern isolation: it's part of the landscape of our lives and therefore we, tough little monkeys that we are, learn to love it. But I've discovered, slowly, that Christine and Kelly (and Putnam) are right: social connections are key to happiness, if happiness is something that we want.

Knowing that is small comfort to people who are lost in the city, or the suburbs, or anywhere. It's not so easy to find those connections, when a thousand obstacles, many of them self-imposed, some of them not, cut you off from your neighbors and co-workers and relatives--and community, once achieved, is by no means an unmixed blessing. But, you know, if you're struggling, all you can do is keep going. Don't stop. You're probably not as alone as you think you are.

The U.S. vs. the Rest of the Post-Industrial World

The Council on Contemporary Families released a new study of how the U.S. ranks in family-friendly work policies. The study found that the U.S. ranked high in protecting the right of all people to work, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, age or disability. The study also found "marked success in lowering the poverty rates of the elderly, although they have been less successful than other affluent nations in protecting children from poverty...In addition, the U.S. is also one of 117 countries guaranteeing a pay premium for overtime work."

All to the good, and thank your lucky stars for the labor, feminist, and Civil Rights movements. Beyond that, however, the U.S. left much to be desired:

Out of 173 countries studied, 168 countries offer guaranteed leave with income to women in connection with childbirth; 98 of these countries offer 14 or more weeks paid leave. Although in a number of countries, many women work in the informal sector, where these government guarantees do not always apply, the fact remains that the U.S. guarantees no paid leave for mothers in any segment of the work force, leaving it in the company of only 4 other nations: Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland.

65 countries ensure that fathers either receive paid paternity leave or have a right to paid parental leave; 31 of these countries offer 14 or more weeks of paid leave. The U.S. guarantees fathers neither paid paternity nor paid parental leave.

107 countries protect working women’s right to breastfeed; in at least 73 of these the breaks are paid. The U.S. does not guarantee the right to breastfeed, even though breastfeeding is proven to reduce infant mortality.

137 countries mandate paid annual leave, with 121 of these countries guaranteeing 2 weeks or more each year. The U.S. does not require employers to provide any paid annual leave...

145 countries provide paid leave for short- or long-term illnesses, with 127 providing a week or more annually. More than 79 countries provide sickness benefits for at least 26 weeks or until recovery. The U.S. provides only unpaid leave for serious illnesses through the FMLA, which does not cover all workers. Moreover, the U.S. does not guarantee any paid sick days for common illnesses.

And so on. I suspect that very few Daddy Dialectic readers will be surprised by these findings. The press release concludes:

There is an enormous payoff to improving working conditions -— from lowering long-term family poverty to improving population health and education and increasing their associated economic and social benefits. The comparative data do not support the common notion that establishing good working conditions leads to job loss. Our studies found that none of these protections is associated with higher unemployment rates on a national level. In fact, on a global scale, countries that provide longer parental leave, as well as more leave to care for children, are among the most economically competitive.

At the top of this post you'll see my son Liko, fighting for everyone's right to work...

Mary Cheney vs. Borat

Newsflash:

“Every piece of remotely responsible research that has been done in the last 20 years on this issue has shown there is no difference between children who are raised by same-sex parents and children who are raised by opposite-sex parents,” said [Mary Cheney, daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney]. “What matters is that children are being raised in a stable, loving environment.”

I also read in this article that Ms. Cheney "came 'pretty close' to quitting when President Bush endorsed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage." Way to stand up against evil, Mary! I'm sure the President was quaking in his boots.

Meanwhile, Borat does the right thing.

Yes, I'm in a snarky mood.

Flow vs. Its Opposite

Over at the Greater Good blog (my esteemed employer!), Christine Carter McLaughlin & Kelly Corrigan talk about "flow" and what makes their daughters happy, as part of a series of dialogues on the roots of childhood happiness. To define flow, Christine quotes psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

[A] person in flow is completely focused...Self-consciousness disappears, yet one feels stronger than usual. When a person’s entire being is stretched in the full functioning of body and mind, whatever one does becomes worth doing for its own sake; living becomes its own justification.

I've experienced the state Csikszentmihalyi describes, sometimes for long periods at a time, but when I hit my thirties it happened less and less often--and now that I'm a dad, it's very rare indeed. The irony is that my son Liko seems to spend ninety percent of his life in flow, broken by spasms of inconsolable rage and weepiness. It's as though on his birth my happiness jumped out of me and landed square in his little body, leaving me with only a bit of residue; I can smell it, like resin in a pipe, but there ain't enough to smoke...

I don't write this as an invitation for you to feel sorry for me; it's an empirical fact that most parents of young children feel as I do: self-conscious, enfeebled, unchallenged, displaced. Precisely the opposite of the state Csikszentmihalyi calls flow. "Studies reveal that most married couples start out happy and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives," writes psychologist Daniel Gilbert, "becoming especially disconsolate when their children are in diapers and in adolescence, and returning to their initial levels of happiness only after their children have had the decency to grow up and go away."

Yet most of us, Gilbert notes, will say that our children make us happy--indeed, if you inquired as to my happiness, I would reply that I am, in fact, happy, and that Liko is the poopy, giggling fount of my happiness.

But it's a melancholy, distrait kind of happiness. Yesterday I took him to the merry-go-round. He rode around and around on his horse, up and down, flowing in every sense of the word. I watched his face and I was happy, but it was happiness tinged by a combination of fatigue (I'd been chasing him all day), anxiety (thinking about a looming deadline), and something else that's hard to describe--a feeling of fragility, like this moment couldn't last? More to the point, I was preoccupied with making sure that he didn't fall off the damn horse and break his arm. A moment's inattention, and Liko could be hurt, or worse. It's normal: people who care for little kids are often wracked with moment-to-moment nervousness, and every day we find another gray hair on our heads.

I can feel the reader, especially older parents, rushing to reassure me: it's OK, relax, don't take everything so seriously, get over yourself. It's our American impulse: we don't like to see anyone unhappy, we can't let them just be sad or angry. I share the hypothetical reader's impulse. As we were riding the bus home, Liko asleep in my lap, I looked at the people around me and most of them wore woebegone looks. I wanted them to be happy, for my sake as well as Liko's; who doesn't like to see people smile? It's a noble impulse, but there's also something stupid about it.

Gilbert sets forth three reasons why we insist, against all evidence, that our kids make us happy: 1) kids are, like fine wine or expensive cars, so costly that we actually rationalize their costs and conclude that something so demanding must make us happy; 2) "Memories are dominated by their most powerful--and not their most typical--instances," so that a single "I love you" can wipe out years of sleep deprivation; and 3) "When you have one joy, it's bound to be the greatest"--meaning, because children occlude other sources of pre-child pleasure, such as movies and sex, we demand that our kids give us some degree of happiness, dammit.

This list will doubtless horrify childfree people, and serve as a form of birth control. I think, however, that Gilbert's misses one big one reason why we have children: kids are, to borrow from Chris Hedges, a force that gives us meaning. They structure our lives, create comradeship and community with other parents, and drive us out of bed and into an world of responsibility and interdependence, where, in many ways, our will is not our own. We lose agency and freedom. We gain purpose and wherewithal. The meaning might be illusory, but the brute biology of the situation, and the intrinsic vulnerability of young kids, gives the illusion a massiveness that pushes smaller, weaker illusions aside.

"Our children give us many things," Gilbert writes, "but an increase in our average daily happiness is probably not among them. Rather than deny that fact, we should celebrate it. Our ability to love beyond all measure those who try our patience and weary our bones is at once our most noble and most human quality."

Just so. Here's my point: for adults, happiness is overrated. I'm aware that this opinion puts me in the company of Calvinists and drill sergeants, but I'd pick them over the happiness enforcers any day of the week. Happiness, in my view, is something that happens on the way to something else: not "a skill we can learn," as a colleague once put it, but an evolutionary accident whose pursuit can corrupt us, if we mistake it for an end in itself. "Flow"--that state when "living becomes its own justification"--may well be a kind of happiness unique to childhood, which we shed as we age. Perhaps I am not as able to "go with the flow" as I was when I was younger, but perhaps that is a necessary step towards a deeper kind of happiness.

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.

Kids vs. religion

By Chip -- Do kids need religion?

No.

It really isn't necessary or possible to force children to believe in "god," in either a general or particular way. Moreover, morality, ethics, and being a good person don't depend on religion or belief in god.

I myself was raised in a religious family. I went to church every Sunday from birth until I left home to go to college. I went to a religious elementary school, and went to religious education classes when I was in public middle and high school. I took courses in theology as an undergraduate at a religiously-based university.

But I never felt like I actually believed that any of the stories I was told were literally true. I could see that they were parables and lessons, that they were stories that made philosophical, ethical, and moral points -- not all of which were very moral or ethical (for example the numerous genocides commanded by the Yahweh).

As for the theology, I never actually believed that there is a "god" somewhere out there micromanaging or even watching over humanity, much less having "personal relationships" with individual humans.

But then came kids. My wife was raised in a different Christian faith tradition, but she feels much the same way as I do about religion. We talked a lot about what to do. We ended up having both kids baptized at the church I was raised in -- largely for the sake of my parents and grandparents. And it gave us an excuse to have the extended family get together.

When my daughter reached kindergarten age, we began going to church, and she went to Sunday school, as did my son when he reached that age. My daughter made her first penance and first communion. I think that we both felt it would be good to do this, despite our own non-belief.

But I found this position increasingly untenable. I didn't believe, I had never believed, yet I was asking my kids to go through the motions.

We tried other churches, but we didn't feel comfortable in them either, mainly because they were so religious and were talking about god all the time (of course, what did we expect?).

So we decided that it was best to be honest with ourselves and with our kids. We stopped going to church, and stopped trying to get our kids to go through the motions.

They had early on proclaimed their atheism -- I'd had to ask them not to argue with the Sunday school teachers about this -- which was one of the issues that led us to this decision.

Unfortunately, in this society, I need to add this: My kids are moral and ethical, they have very strong senses of right and wrong, and though they are not perfect, they are great kids and will be wonderful adults.

(Of course, the very fact that I feel like I have to say this indicates how our society views nonbelievers. If I was religious and a believer, I wouldn't even have to tell you about my kids' morality and ethics...)

Morality and ethics do not come out of religion. We all know people who are immoral and unethical who were also believers. And there are plenty of nonbelievers who are moral and ethical.

The sense of ethics, the belief that there are right and wrong ways to treat other people, comes, I believe, from how we see our parents and significant others act as we are growing up. Adults model behavior to kids, regardless of religious belief. As they grow up, children absorb the values of the people raising them. Kids learn by being told, and talked to, and having things explained to them: Why some things are right, and why some things are wrong; why some people do bad things; why others are selfless.

Kids also learn by watching what their parents and care givers do, how they act, how they live their lives, apart from the words.

But I also believe that there is an innate sense of morality and ethics. I know plenty of people whose parents were awful, yet who themselves turned out to be great people.

To me that indicates that there is some level of morality that is part of the package of being human. Perhaps these people also were lucky enough to have other adults in their lives who reinforced their inner moral senses.

Given this, I believe that morality and ethics don't come from believing in god, or from being attached to a particular religious community. Those values come from within, and they are reinforced by the way adults explain what's right and wrong, and how those adults themselves behave.

When I was talking to my 15-year old daughter CB about this, she said she thinks that nonbelievers are actually more moral: they do the right thing not because of a fear of punishment in the afterlife, but just because it's the right thing to do. I wouldn't say that all believers do the right thing only out of fear; but for those who do, I think CB's reasoning is right on target.

That said, I do believe it is important for my kids to be familiar with the various religious mythologies that are part of our cultural heritage. My kids know the Bible stories, are familiar with the Jesus stories, the saints and other aspects of Christian religious belief. They are also familiar with other religious traditions, as well as the basics of the mythologies of ancient Greece and Rome.

I see this knowledge as important for purely cultural reasons. You cannot understand a large part of European literature and art if you don't know the background stories coming out of Christianity and Judaism. You cannot understand the politics of large parts of the US if you don't have some basic knowledge of Christianity.

But kids don't have to believe that the stories of Christianity are actually true, any more than they need to believe the ancient Roman or Greek myths.

Of course we're lucky to live in a community that is pretty progressive, which is not dominated by Christian fundamentalism, and in which my kids know other kids who are also not believers. But given the outright hostility to atheists in US society, I have also had to warn my kids to be careful, to not discuss their beliefs with people unless they know them.

While I have no problem with other people believing whatever they want to believe -- as long as they don't try to force it on me -- I also think it's important to recognize that kids don't need to have a belief in god, anymore than they need to believe in santa claus or the easter bunny. They need to have parents who instill in them their values, a sense of responsibility and empathy towards other human beings, and who walk the walk as well as they talk the talk.

So if you're feeling uncomfortable raising your kids in an atmosphere of religious belief, act on your own beliefs and instincts. Kids are just fine without god or religion.

Crossposted at daddychip2

Science vs. Men vs. Women

I work at a popular science magazine that covers research into the roots of compassion, altruism, empathy, and other prosocial human behaviors and emotions. Last month we reviewed a study by Dutch neuroscientist Erno Jan Hermans (and colleagues) that set out to test whether testosterone can inhibit a person's ability to empathize with someone else.

To find out, the researchers dosed twenty women with either testosterone or a placebo, and then measured their ability to mimic facial expressions, which previous research has shown to be one marker of empathy. Their results showed that testosterone might indeed reduce empathic behavior.

I initially objected to publishing a brief about the study in the magazine. I'm automatically suspicious of the methodologies and conclusions of any study that suggests biology is behavioral destiny. Plus, even if the science is solid, I didn't think it would be useful to our readers. If testosterone really does limit empathy, so what? How does that knowledge help our readers, who are mostly educated lay people?

I talked it over with the other editors, including a psychologist who reviewed the methodologies. He felt they checked out. We agreed that reporting the study fell within the mission of the magazine. And so we turned to discussing ways to report the findings that would not play to social stereotypes about men and women. Looking back, I can see that I was learning something about how we can talk about science in popular forums.

It's first critical to begin with the fact that all human beings have the capacity for empathy; it's fundamental to our psychology, with a basis in evolution. Men are human beings and are therefore capable of empathy. That puts the findings in broad perspective. In addition, we need to keep individual variance in mind; I've met lots of men who are more empathetic than many women, and I'm sure you have, too.

Second, it's important to acknowledge the limits of the study. To get those, you first have to read the study and talk to the scientists themselves. Most scientists are extremely reluctant to speculate or make sweeping generalizations based on limited findings, for good reasons; they're also careful to acknowledge the limits of their methodologies and to suggest further areas of study. This doesn't stop journalists, politicians, and bloggers from seizing on findings and putting them at the service of their personal and political agendas; hell, I've done it plenty of times. (That's our job, but I think we can perform our jobs more responsibly.)

In the brief we are publishing in the magazine, we were careful to reflect the limitations of this methodology, noted by the researchers themselves. "While facial mimicry may be one component of empathic behavior, it is clearly not the defining feature," writes Mario Aceves, a fellow with the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center, in the brief. "Before we conclude that testosterone leaves men at an emotional disadvantage, additional studies must show that testosterone affects the many other dimensions of empathy."

My colleague Jason Marsh asked Erno Jan Hermans for a comment. "[Testosterone] reduces empathetic behavior; we can't say it reduces empathy,” he said. His research also shows that while "testosterone is a regulating factor in gender-specific behavior... obviously you can never rule out that there are cultural differences in play."

Last and certainly not least, scientific findings of this type don't dictate some kind of automatic ethical or political response. They do not prove that men are by nature emotional dolts, and therefore not accountable for idiotic behavior. They do not suggest that women are in essence loving, nurturing, dove-like creatures of ethereal beauty. No woman who wants to live in a more empathetic, compassionate society should plan to launch all-female communes in South America--even if you were to screen out women with high levels of testosterone, you're still not going to achieve a feminine utopia like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland. Human beings are too complex. Attacking complexity is not the path to a better world.

Science is an evolving dialogue, in which new conclusions are constantly modifying old ones. Newton wasn't wrong about how motion changes with time, but Einstein took his ideas to the next level when he showed how mass bends spacetime. When back in the Seventies, Irven DeVore and Robert Trivers launched the field of sociobiology--which sought to find biological bases for human behavior--critics quite rightly raised the specters of Social Darwinism and Nazi eugenics, both of which invoked biological science as justification for policies that ranged from abandonment of the poor, denying rights to women and many other people, forced sterilization, and systematic genocide.

But as sociobiology branched off into evolutionary psychology and behavioral ecology, researchers discovered some things about human beings that directly contradicted the specious, self-serving assumptions of the Social Darwinists. Scientists like Johnathan Haidt, Leda Cosmides, Marc D. Hauser, and many others have found that human beings appear to be hardwired for compassion, altruism, cooperation, and so on. Biology might indeed be destiny, but it's a provisional, sanguine kind of destiny that doesn't automatically lead to pessimistic or destructive views of humanity. Above all, a great deal of new science is demonstrating the degree to which we humans are tough, adaptable little monkeys, defined right down to our neurons by a capacity for continuous growth and evolution.

Whenever we read about some new study about parents and children, men and women, we should remember how searching and tenuous the science is, and refrain from sweeping generalizations that might contradict our deepest moral instincts. We can't ever know where our questions will lead, but we can't be afraid to ask them.

Children and choice

By Chip -- Last week the website Momsrising.org flagged an article and discussion in the Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper about their "Motherhood Manifesto," which argues for, among other things, quality childcare, universal health insurance for children, and other public policies to support children and their parents.

The article attracted an interesting discussion at the paper's website, including criticisms of the notion that society should provide anything to parents and children. The argument was that having kids is a choice: "Why should I have to pay for your choice?"

The most common response, including the main response from MomsRising.org, was a kind of utilitarian logic, that kids are the future of our society, and these policies are "an investment" in the future:

Some Seattle PI readers are calling policies like healthcare for all kids, access to childcare, and paid family leave, "More special rights just for making a CHOICE...." The "choice" being to have children. This type of thinking glosses over an essential fact that children are an investment every society must make; otherwise there won't be a future at all for that society (we'd go extinct!).

But I don't think we should have to justify societal support for children by focusing on their future benefits to individuals or to society as a whole, because doing so opens up a bunch of questions along these lines: are those kids who are destined to go on to be more "productive" more worthy of support than others?

This kind of utilitarian calculation is a slippery slope, and ignores a much more basic and fundamental reason to support kids and their parents.

For me the more compelling argument is that children are human beings who did not themselves choose to come into this world. If we are a society that claims to be civilized, we owe these helpless humans some basic things.

We as a society don't say that disabled adults who are unable to contribute to the economy should just fend for themselves, and that if their families are unable or unwilling to do so, that's just tough luck.

So when it comes to children, I think the most convincing argument is just this: not that they are future economic producers, or that they are "the future of society," but that they are human beings, regardless of what their parents did or did not do, who their parents are, how "irresponsible" they are, which choices they made or did not make. These kids are not themselves responsible for their situation.

That's the most important reason to provide universal health care, quality day care, decent public education, and other "benefits" -- or rather, minimum basic standards -- to all children. That's why these things, far from being "benefits," should actually be seen as basic rights.

Looked at through this lense, those who are whining about "having to support other peoples' kids" should consider that this is about basic standards of decency: how a society treats its most vulnerable.

But even granted this, why should parents, people who "choose" to have children, get "benefits"?

Our society has decided that families are the main support group for children. Part of the way we assure these basic standards for children is therefore by providing support not just directly to the children, but to their families as well.

Through this lense, the question then becomes, what is the best way for us as a society to ensure basic standards of decency to all children? And part of the answer is to provide resources and support to their families.

I think that few people would whine and complain about the fact that parents of severely disabled adults are the beneficiaries of government programs to help them care for their adult child.

So I see it as a very sad commentary on the state of human decency in this country that anyone would be so grudging about providing minimum standards of decency to the most helpless members of our society, our children.

On Edit 12/20: A similar discussion is going on in reaction to two blog posts by Joan Blades of MomsRising.org over at the Huffington Post: Should Societies Support Mothers Raising Children, and Indiscriminate Breeders!?!.

Cross-posted at Daddychip2

Assumption vs. Assumption

Recently I was swapping emails with a group of feminist activists I've known for 15 years. We were talking about progressive family policy.

At some point in the dialogue, I realized that we were starting from two very different assumptions. Theirs was that progressives should fight first and foremost for daycare and preschool, so that mothers could go to work and pursue worldly ambitions.

I couldn't help but feel that my friends saw kids as a burden that public policy should strive to alleviate, shades of Linda Hirshman. And until, oh, about 29 months ago, I pretty much shared their assumption and priorities.

Before Liko was born, we figured that after six months my wife would go back to work and we'd engage some form of childcare. Wrong. Liko didn't want his parents to go to work. This might have been a problem, except that we agreed with him. We didn't want strangers to take care of our son. We didn't think it was best for him or for us.

And so we changed our lives, in various ways I have documented here at Daddy Dialectic. Since then I have thought a great deal about our caregiving impulse and its relationship to our values, and what it might mean for the family policies I'd support as a parent.

Just to be clear: Childcare and preschool are good. High-quality childcare should, like health care, be available to anyone who wants and needs it. Moreover, I believe that daycare and preschool should be guaranteed and heavily regulated by government. It's a matter of equity as well as economic development. More women (and men) in the workforce is good for the economy.

Good for the economy, but is it good for children? Is it necessarily a good thing for all mothers and all fathers to march off to work every morning? There are literally hundreds of empirical studies that answer no to these questions; taken together, they suggest that parents working outside the home too much, too early in a child's life is bad for the kid as well as the parents.

Numerous studies, writes Jane Waldfogel in her new book What Children Need, indicate that "Children whose mothers work long hours in the first year of life or children who spend long hours in child care in the first several years of life have more behavioral problems...Children do tend to do worse [in health, cognitive development and emotional well-being] if their mothers work full-time." The effects of paternal employment have hardly been studied; social science firmly places the burdens and joys of caregiving on moms.

Does this mean that conservatives are right? Are working moms guilty of neglect and responsible for America's social ills? Emphatically: no. First of all, we need more men to contribute more to taking care of kids: there's no evidence at all that dad can't do it just as well as mom.

We need to be careful in interpreting these results [writes Waldfogel], given that in nearly all cases studied the fathers were either working full-time themselves or were not in the household at all. These results tell us the effect of having two parents working full-time or a lone mother working full-time. And so their clearest message is that children would tend to do better if they had a parent home at least part-time in the first year of life. They do not tell us that the parent has to be the mother.

Second, the studies also show that parental sensitivity and responsiveness "is the most important predictor of child social and emotional development--more important than parental employment."

Third, we need genuinely family-friendly policies that respect parents' choices and will allow parents of any gender to stay at home as much as possible with their kids for at least the first year. To my mind, this needs to be the progressive policy priority. The shape of such policies is well-known and widely implemented outside of the US, consisting of paid parental leave and wage replacement, job and legal protections, guaranteed health care, requiring employers to consider requests for part-time work, etc. As usual, the social democracies of Scandinavia set the standard. As usual, the United States looks like it watches too much Fox News.

It should be acknowledged that support for parents to stay home can help keep parents out of the workforce or inhibit career growth. There are solutions to this problem. Sweden combines support for parents to stay home with comprehensive daycare and preschool programs for when they go back to work, with good results. But I don't want to move to Sweden. It's too damn cold.