Stupid super dads suck

Three of my friends built tree houses for their children.

One (and maybe two) are minor death traps, but still. These men designed and built things with wood and nails.

I can’t tell you how impossible that sounds to me.

My daughter wants a tree house. Knowing that I have twice asked a friend to fix lamp only to find that it needed a new bulb, she is saving her money for one rather than asking me to build one, which makes a lot of sense and also hurts my feelings.

Tree houses are one thing. Spacecraft simulators like the one this man built for his sons are an entirely different thing.

He sucks. I hate him. 

I hereby release myself of all parental guilt regarding the iPad. It was shortsighted, stupid, and purposelessly nostalgic.

I brought my son downstairs for breakfast. As we stepped into the kitchen, he saw the iPad on the counter and said, “iPad! Chair! iPad! Chair!”

This is the two year-old version way of saying, “Father, I would very much like to take a seat in my favorite chair and make use of that glorious device.”

A large part of me wanted to deny him the use of the iPad. Breakfast would be ready in five minutes. There are a thousand toys in our home that he loves.

More importantly, I was suffering from iPad guilt.

I should avoid sticking my son’s face into a screen as much as possible, including now.

Charlie continued to beg, and so I surrendered, handing him the iPad. “Thank you, Daddy!” he said, as if knowing that a polite remark of appreciation would improve his chances of getting the device again in the future.

I started to make breakfast, feeling the weight of parental failure on my shoulders. I had done the modern day equivalent of what my parents did to me: Stick the kid in front of the television so he would stop whining.

I was ruining my son’s life. Destroying his attention span. Stealing his boyhood creativity. Taking the easy road.

Breakfast complete, I returned to Charlie to extract the iPad from his tiny clutches. I looked down. I saw this:

  

Charlie was sitting in his chair, scrolling through the hundreds of photographs of the family, calling out his sister’s name and touching his mother’s face and whispering, “Momma” whenever he saw it.

In that moment, I dispensed, once and for all, with iPad guilt.

For some incredibly stupid reason, I had decided long ago that smashing a toy fire truck into a toy bus while making growling sounds was an infinitely  more valuable use of my son’s time than using an iPad.

Why is that?

My son sat down in his chair with the tablet, and of all the choices he had (and there were a lot), he opted to peruse the photo album. Had he come downstairs and demanded an actual photo album from the shelf, with real photographs, I would’ve been pleased. Ecstatic, even.

But on a screen? Not as good, or at least I used to think so.

I left Charlie on the iPad, scrolling through photos, while I folded the laundry. About ten minutes later, he closed the photo album and opened an interactive book. A narrator reads the fairy tale aloud as Charlie touches the characters to make them speak and act.

I realized that had Charlie grabbed a physical book and flipped through the pages, I would’ve been pleased.

But reading an interactive book on an iPad? Not as good.

This point of view, however, is insane. Charlie can’t read yet. Charlie flips through books on his own all the time, calling out colors, letters, and the names of objects. The poor boy wanted to actually hear the story read aloud, but for some inane reason, I saw this as a failure on both his and my part.

No more. No longer will I be sucked into this nostalgic, idealized, moronic view of parenting. As I’ve written about before, Charlie knows all of the letters of the alphabet thanks to the iPad. Without my wife or I encouraging, directing, or participating in any way, he learned to identify every letter, upper and lowercase. and knows the sounds that many of these letters make.

In a million years, I couldn't have taught my two year-old son this skill, and I’m an elementary school teacher. But a cleverly designed app, that is both fun, interactive, and deceptively instructive, did the job.

How could I ever think of this was time wasted?

No longer will I view my children’s childhood through the lens of my own childhood, valuing the choices of my childhood over the rest.  My children are growing up in a world in which they will do the vast majority of their writing and reading on a screen. They are growing up in a world where technological ability and efficiency are no longer prized. They are required.

I should not be worried that my two year-old son can operate the iPad, finding photo albums, music, books, videos, and learning games without our help.

I should be thrilled.

Please don’t get me wrong. We don’t let him use the iPad often, and this release of guilt will not change that. We don’t allow him to use the iPad for long stretches. We limit his time, say no to his requests for often than not, and believe that his day should primarily be filled with physical activity and time spend looking and listening and communicating with his family.

But some time spent with technology when his father is making breakfast, folding the laundry, writing an important email, emptying the dishwasher, sweeping the floor, or driving long distances?

No guilt. Not any more.

I don’t love bathing my kids. Except I often do.

I am not a huge fan of bathing the kids. I don’t mind shampooing their hair, and I don’t mind scrubbing their feet, but once the actual work is done and the playing commences, I become much less interested in the bath.

Perhaps it’s because of the way my dictatorial daughter demands that I play with her bath toys, elevating her preferred princesses over my second-rate charlatans and placing their words in my mouth to repeat again and again. 

Or maybe it’s the way I am forced to sit on the floor at the base of the tub and get drenched with bathwater as we play.

Or maybe it’s the sheer frequency of the baths. When I was growing up, we took baths once a week. In accordance with my wife’s wishes, my children are bathed every other day or so.

Whatever the reason, bathing is one of those things that I know I will miss when my children are bathing themselves, but it’s also something I really don’t enjoy very much.

Until I see moments like this.

  

As a parent, I have discovered that as important as my happiness may be, my children’s happiness often supersedes my own, and their happiness almost always results in my happiness.

I know this sounds like a fairly obvious statement, but this was not something I understood or perhaps really believed until I had children.

Even the stupid bath, with its stupid toys, is pretty fantastic when my kids are enjoying themselves.

It’s just a table with some crayons and paints and paper, but in a surprising way, it’s changed the course of my children's lives.

It’s rare that a simple change can alter the course of an entire household, but our recent decision to turn an otherwise unused table in our home into an art table for our children has made all the difference.

Almost instantly, the table pulled our children into its sphere of influence like a Russian dictator warmed with nuclear weapons. Crayons, paints, markers, stickers, and cut paper littered the table and floor in seconds and self-started art projects began to leap forth from their little hands. Without an ounce of guidance from us, the kids began creating things solely from their imagination.

A month later, little has changed. Every two hours, I find myself sweeping the floor beneath the table and reorganizing the construction paper and coloring books and sticker books. I grumble and complain about doing this, because it’s annoying, but I kind of love it, too. The table is now covered in marker and paint and is permanently ruined, but the projects that my children have envisioned and created on their own astound me.

More importantly, they can sit at that table for endless amounts of time, happily occupied by their work. My daughter has learned to use scissors. She’s coloring in the lines now. Her grip on crayons and markers have improved. And the kids can sit opposite each other with rarely a complaint.

If I remember correctly, the art table was my idea and Elysha’s execution, which is to say that I had a random idea that never would have happened had Elysha not actually done something about it.

Parental teamwork at work.

 

Declare your parental pride. Make the world better for the parent of a newborn.

I saw a friend last week who recently had a baby. She told me that of all the advice she received prior to giving birth, my warning about all the parents who will attempt to make parenting sound miserable and ruin her day was the most helpful.

“I can’t believe it, but you were right. So many people are awful.”

A great majority of parents are exceptionally skilled at complaining.

A great majority of parents feel the inexplicable need to dampen the enthusiasm and optimism of less experienced parents.

An even greater majority of parents fail to give themselves and other parents the credit that they deserve.

I’ll never understand it. My friend doesn’t understand it. When someone asks her how parenthood is going, she tells them how happy she is. How wonderful her baby has been. How joyous she and her husband are.

The typical response:

“Just wait until she can walk. Then things will change.”

“You’re in the honeymoon period. It’ll end soon.”

“It’s the second one that will kill you.”

Parents of newborns should walk around with a roll of duct tape to silence these pessimists and idiots up.

Actually, I should do the same. I can’t tell you how many times a parent has warned me how difficult my sweet and happy daughter will become once she is a teenager, forgetting that I once raised a teenage stepdaughter and forgetting that it takes a special kind of jackass to make a comment like this.    

In order to combat these naysayers, I propose that all rationale parents take a moment today and acknowledge all the excellent parenting that we have done this far. Stop for a moment and reflect upon the outstanding decisions,  the astounding restraint, the brilliant planning, and the remarkable sacrifices, that you have made as a parent.

Forget the errors and the flubs. Put aside the guilt and regret.

Be positive. Be self-congratulatory. Share you kick-ass moments.

Then go to the hardware store and purchase a roll of duct tape.

If you’d like to join me in this crusade, make your own list of excellence in parenting. If you are so inclined, post it in the comment section below. Tweet your list. Post it to Facebook. Write it on a slip of paper, wrap it around a rock, and throw it through the window of one of these jackasses who can’t stop telling you that “When it comes to kids, one plus one equals three!”

Take a stand against all those parents who can’t stand the thought that there might be happy, effective parents in the world with a sense of balance and perspective.

To this end, I offer you my list of parental successes.

1. My son has never peed on me while I was changing his diaper.
2. I have never yelled at my children.
3. Other than live sporting events, I have never watched television while my children were awake.
4. I have never failed to follow through on a warning to my daughter.
5. My children have never slept in my bed.
6. I have never skipped a night of reading to my children.   
7. I try like hell to avoid telling my daughter that she is smart. I praise her for hard work, persistence, grit, listening, and a willingness to learn, but I avoid saying “smart” whenever possible (though I’ve still said it hundreds of times).

In the future, I will make a point of highlighting the success of other parents as well.

What's the Hardest Part of Parenting?

Slate recently published a piece that asked this question, and the answers  varied quite a bit, as I would expect them to. 

I have been a parent for a long time.

I have a five year old daughter and a nearly two year-old son.

Years ago, when I was married to the wrong woman, I raised a step-daughter from the ages of 6 until 16.

As a friend recently noted, “You have all the ages of a kid covered now.”

Though parenting can be challenging at times, I have never found it to be especially hard. I think this has a great deal to do with my experience as a teacher and the life experiences that I bring to parenting.

After 15 years of managing classes of students as large as 28 students, I’ve developed a multitude of strategies that are extremely useful as a parent, as well as a level of patience unmatched by almost everyone I know.

This, combined with an often impossibly difficult life, makes almost nothing about parenting seem all that bad. After robberies and homelessness and near-death experiences and extreme poverty and unwarranted arrests and trials and public persecutions, there is little that my children can do that will phase me.  

Perhaps there will come a time when this changes. Based upon the constant and desperate assurances of naysayers whose very existence seems to depend on their ability to project impending doom on otherwise happy parents, it is very likely to change.

I’m not so sure. These seem like the same kinds of people who loved to tell me that publishing a book without already knowing someone in the publishing industry would be impossible.

Either way, Slate asked what is the hardest part of parenting. Though I may not find parenting overly difficult, there are certainly parts that are certainly harder than others. So I made a list.

The hardest parts of parenting, in my estimation.

I plan to revise this list from time to time as things change.

I’d love to read your list, too.
_______________________

The Hardest Parts of Parenting 

• The poor design and overall aggravation associated with car seats
• The stickiness of children’s television show theme songs
• The unspoken, constant fear of sudden infant death syndrome
• The unpredictability of infant and toddler wake-up times
• The inability of small children to dress and bathe themselves
• The cost of preschool
• The time required to exit the house
• The terror associated with a seriously injured or ill child
• The cost of babysitting
• The inability of other parents to discipline their children

We don’t always treat kids fairly when it comes to food and choice

Mark Oppenheimer writes a piece in the New York Times entitled Let Them Drink Chocolate, in which he argues that parents are not fair and just when it comes to our decisions to limit our children’s diet, television consumption and the like.

He writes:

As a parent, I think that it’s time to declare a period of benign neglect when it comes to food. Today, too many Americans make a virtue, even a fetish, of monitoring what goes into our children’s mouths. Rather than raising our children to consume in moderation — whether food, drink, drugs or screen time — we forbid them pleasures that adults take for granted.

We serve them juice boxes rather than soda, fruit rather than ice cream. Yet grown-up dinner parties, which begin with glasses of wine or cocktails, end with rich desserts. Children are deprived of television, or limited to a couple of hours a week, but after the kids are in bed parents catch up on “Game of Thrones.”

I often think the exact same thing.

My wife and I do not monitor everything that goes into our children’s mouths. Because my daughter has a peanut allergy, we are cognizant of what she is eating, but we are not a family hell-bent on only serving organic fruits and vegetables and artisanal breads. We have never kept a written recorded our children’s food intake (which is more common than you might think) and do not stress over high fructose corn syrup.  

But when it comes to choice, our children are like most. They eat what we serve, even when we are catering to our daughter’s somewhat limited, vegetarian palate. They may have choices in restaurants, and there are times when my daughter can choose between a yogurt and an applesauce or an apple and a pear, but there are many times when the children have no input whatsoever in the food being served.

As a result, there are days when our daughter (and even our not-quite two year old son) express displeasure in our caloric offerings.

In these moments, I often find myself thinking how exceedingly rare it is for an adult to be required to eat a food that he or she has not specifically chosen.

I may like spaghetti, but if I’m not in the mood for spaghetti on a given day, no one requires me to eat it.

I may love prime rib, but if I happen to want ice cream for dinner, that’s what I eat.

Even though adults understand and accept that there are days when we are not interested in eating even our most favorite foods, we discount a child’s same inclination. We believe, for reasons that perhaps harken back to a time when food was more scarce, that children should eat whatever is placed before them, or at least try it, damn it, even if it smells terrible to them or reminds them of the salamander that they saw earlier that day smeared on the driveway.

We’re not always so nice to kids.

As a kid, I remember feeling this way often. I felt like I didn’t have enough control over my life, which is astounding given the fact that I grew up in a time when I could leave the house on a summer day at 8:00 in the morning and return at 6:00 that evening without encountering a single adult for the entire day.  

Still, I had little control over what I ate. Even when it came to school lunch, there was no choice. 

And food was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of adult control over my life. Perhaps this feeling of constant adult intervention was the reason I was not always the most well behaved boy and sought ways to rebel.

I’ve never liked to be told what to do. I think most people feel this way.

Kids, too.   

I understand that parents must make many choices on their child’s behalf. We use our wisdom and life experience to guide our children in making good choices. We try to teach them to make what we define as good choices. This often means limiting our children’s choices altogether.

All of this is a necessary part of parenting.  

But I think it would be wise to try to remember what it was like to be a kid, with little control over your life.

You may not allow your child to suddenly choose ice cream for dinner, but you may be less frustrated and slightly more understanding when your child says that he’s not in the mood for carrots tonight, even though he was thrilled with carrots last week.     

As adults, we do the same thing. Why expect any less from our children?