The Essential Mom

What makes a good mom? We might as well talk about "what makes a good person" . . . but still, there are some essential things a good mother does:

• Set the expectation for how the world will treat us. While we come into the world with lots of our own nature, we do not come into the world with any self-concept. The way we learn to think of ourselves is the way we are regarded by our mothers. It's the only model we have. My mother gave us the most remarkable thing, which was her time. We sensed it when we were young, but I've grown to know it as I became older: my mother could do anything she wanted to do . . . but she chose to spend her time on us. And she pretty much expected us to be the same way. I grew up really believing I could do most anything, too. Sure, I had my share of neurosis as well (if you could do anything, you better not screw it up) but that seems a small price to pay for confidence-at-the-core.
• Set the template for all human relationships. The relationship with your mother is the first relationship you ever have. It is the template upon which all other relationships are based. Ours was not a very touchy-feely, intimate sort of home, but there was a prevailing sense of respect and dignity. We were spoken to with respect, and we freely gave it back. I wasn't even aware of it until I was at a friend's house and I saw him behave like a total ass to his mother. I remember thinking, "I would never treat my mother that way," closely followed by, "Nor would she ever stand for it." My mom cultivated an iron-fist-in-silk-glove reputation, or what Augie would describe as: "She's a really, really nice person; just don't piss her off." That basic attitude -- to be fair to all, but nobody's doormat -- is still my ideal (though temperamentally I'm much softer than that, for all my occasional shrillness.)
• Set the example for how to meet the world. Our parents' ways become our own. Both may parents are paragons of frugality and ingenuity, a sort of Depression-era MacGyver. I prefer to do for myself, and when I can't to do without. I save money rather than spend it. Middle-class to our bones, we are embarrassed by extravagence, unless it is particularly clever extravagence. We have faith in work.

So, what do mothers do? They are, quite literally, our World. How we see ourselves, others, and the whole of existence begins in that one essential relationship.

I think mine did a pretty good job.

Mr. Mom

A friend of mine from college, a brand-new parent, is contemplating becoming a stay-at-home dad. His wife has stable job that she really loves; he has a job that he hates, though he makes more money. He knows his mother will give him a hard time about it, if he does.

Here was my response to him:

Sounds like you've thought it through fairly well, but here's my take:

• I agree with your starting assumption that one full-time parent is required for at least the first four years.
• If you're still in the programming/consulting line of work, absolutely you'll have an easy time reentering the job market. In IT the only thing people care about is whether you can do the job. So no sweat there. Plus, it's relatively easy to work out of your home as a programming consultant, so you have a good path to resuming work when you're ready for it.
• Full-time parenting can be stressful job, mostly because it's a 24/7 gig. You are always, always on call, and the client is very unreasonable and demanding, and you have little or no control. Your ego will get crushed into dust. If you ever believed that life was about you, this child will drive home the fact that what you want doesn't matter anymore.
  My wife never muched like work either, or at least she never found a job she really, really loved. She was happy to leave the workforce. But at the same time, she went through a profound change in her identity by being a mom. If you're used to defining yourself by what you do, parenting is going to be hard, because you have no visible accomplishments. Because parenting is a 24/7 gig, it tends to suck the oxygen away from any extracurricular activities as well. So be prepared for the psychological hit.
• No matter who stays home with the kid, GET SUPPORT. All that "Gotta have a Group" stuff that Augie pounded into our skulls applies to parenting as well. You need peer support, at an intellectual and emotional and practical level. Janet is an Attachment Parenting leader, they're pretty good at supporting more enlightened child-raising. In California, you could probably find a group that specifically supports stay-at-home dads.
• You wife does have one advantage as a full-time parent, which is her biology. Breasts are extremely useful for the first couple years of raising a child. I'm not being sexist here but . . . Well, I am being sexist. Millions of years of evolution have made a remarkable mechanism for instantly feeding the perfectly appropriate food to a child, whenever they need it at a moment's notice. To say that a bottle is the same thing is like comparing a real human leg to a prosthetic leg. There is a stunning amount of scientific evidence for significant physical, intellectual and emotional benefits for extended breast-feeding. Not to mention the sheer convenience . . . Mixing up formula in the middle of the night is a pain in the ass. Now, the advantages of breast-feeding may not outweigh the benefits of having a full-time parent in a stable and supportive home situation, so this is not a deal-buster, but it IS an important factor to consider.
• Your parents . . . Well, nothing to be done about your parents. I don't know anything about your mom. If she's the kind who will kvetch about the same thing endlessly, then I would not hestitate to tell her that you don't want to hear it. Period. As in, go home and don't come back until you can shut up about the job thing. Parenting is hard, and the last thing you need is someone with emotionally privileged position in your life telling you that you shouldn't be doing it. I suspect she will be willing to keep her opinions to herself if she sees that it is necessary in order to have a relationship with her grandson. Again, GET A GROUP to support you through that sort of thing.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

Creeks and Romans

Easter was cold this year. The sun shone brightly on a clear blue sky with white clouds and green grass; if you stayed inside and looked out the window you would have declared it to be the most Easter-y of days. And then when you stepped outside into 28 F, the world would seem like a giant Easter bouquet kept in a florist's chilly refrigerator. It's a little hard to have a spring-time festival of rebirth and renewal when you feel like going back inside and hibernating. Yes, it's the resurrection of Christ that we're supposed to be celebrating, but our heathen blood is still warmed more by sunshine than philosophy.

And yet we still had the Easter egg hunt, bundled in jackets and hoods and gloves. The kids seem to be impervious to cold. The anthroposophists insist that children have underdeveloped temperature regulation systems, so they literally don't realize how cold they are . . . which is why parents are constantly chasing them around and insisting they put on a coat. I was not inclined to believe it, until now.

The boys are old enough now that the cuteness of toddlerhood is giving way to the loudness and brashness of true boyhood. The egg-hunt, and following chocolate-bunny binge, was still fun, and Aidan did an especially good job of helping his younger brother in the hunt. But the day as a whole had more "did-not-did-too" squabbles, especially while they are cooped up inside with their thin-blooded parents. The high point of the day, the time of greatest brotherly love and spring-time zeal, was when we finally went back outside to play in the creek. Sunlight on natural water is magical; sand, mud, rock, grass, all primative and beautiful. Even the hacking at mud with sticks, the futile attempts to build dams and bridges, is a part of the natural beauty. All our spirits were resurrected.

Toys that make noise

Some toys are supposed to make noise: clacking, whirring, popping, banging. That's to be expected, and it's as ancient as toys themselves. Equally ancient are parents screaming for their kids to play more quietly, and the urge to kill all the toy-makers who needlessly amplified their children.

When I was growing up, a new sort of noisy toy came on the scene: the electronic toy that made roars, shrieks and whistles. My favorite was the Star Wars blaster, a black plastic match for Han Solo's pistol. It made a buzz-saw-like shriek that was supposed to sound like a blaster, but really sounded like a dentist's drill underwater. It drove my mom nuts.

Now my kids have a number of electronic toys, but unlike anything I had growing up. These are toys that talk and play music. Now, talking and playing music is not that unusual; we had "Operation," talking Barbies and toy pianos in my day. But no one had yet to dream up completely superflous music and speech. If you told me, "Let's put an electronic speaker in this truck so it can have an engine sound and back-up beeper," I wouldn't have agreed but I could at least understand the urge. But if someone said, "Let's put an electronic speaker in this truck so it can play 20 seconds of electric guitar riffs and have some masculine voice holler 'Catepillar Power!' ", I would have been speechless. But such noise-for-noise's-sake is now so common-place it's hard to find a simple Big Wheel or Sit-n-Spin that is not equipped with its own prosthetic enthusiasm.

What's going on here? My guess is that such things are geared at getting the attention of toy-buyers, not the kids themselves. The toys lining the shelves thrash and scream, as if to say, "Buy me! Buy me!" And the confused adult, not really knowing what's cool or interesting to kids these days, will be easily swayed to grab the biggest, loudest, brightest item they can find.

Or, more depressingly, it may be that the toys are competing with other loud, bright, annoying things like, oh, say, the television set. Perhaps the average parent is not annoyed by these screaming music monstrosities, since they long ago learned to tune out the background noise of their TVs.

For our household, it is now a rule: all toys must be capable of quiet play. That doesn't mean the play will be quiet, of course, but at least all shrieks, explosions and roars are human-generated.

A really truthful engine

We were visiting my brother-in-law last week, seeing their new baby boy, and I among the books I was reading to the kids was "Thomas Breaks a Promise." What was curious about it was the subtitle: "(previously published as 'Thomas Tells a Lie')". That was enough to pique my interest: what was the lie, and what was the promise, and why did they change their minds about the title?

Sir Topham Hat tasked Thomas the Train Engine with checking all the signal lights on a new stretch of track. Thomas started the job but then became distracted when he came across a carnival. Thomas only remembers his lapse when he hears Sir Topham Hat talking to another engine about the new route at the end of the day. Thomas doesn't volunteer the information that he didn't finish checking the track. If he had fingers, we would probably have crossed them, and hoped that nothing bad would happen. But, as it happens, something bad does (almost) happen, and Sir Topham Hat dresses him down for his lapse, and Thomas is a reformed, safety-obsessed little train after that.

"Telling the truth" and "keeping a promise" are two principles that are frequently confused. Witgenstein came up with the whole notion of "language games" to help explain the difference. He found the language of science to be an incomplete way to engage the world, because sometimes we care about more than just descriptive truth. The rules for keeping a promise are similar to the rules for telling the truth -- both require a certain kind of integrity -- but they aren't the same.

So: is it more important that you tell the truth, even when it's painful, or that you do what you say you're going to do? It's a toughie, because you want your kids to feel free to tell you the truth, even when it might compromise their position, so you might be tempted to focus on the disclosure and not the original shortfall. People will always "sin", in the original sense of the word ("missing the mark"), but at least they can be honest and forthcoming about it. And yet, in the end, what you do matters a lot more than what you say, truthful or otherwise, and you could view the entire endeavor of raising kids to be teaching them how to make and keep committments. On the other hand . . . a lot of commitments get broken because people weren't honest enough to face the truth to begin with.

I think I'll go with the publisher's revision: the original sin, and the more significant one, is that Thomas failed to keep his commitment. The cover-up was secondary. If you keep your commitments, you won't find yourself in a position of needing to lie about it.

Next time: "Thomas Commits Perjury," previously published as "Thomas Fails to Fully Disclose."

Six Years of Aidan

Today my son Aidan will be celebrating his sixth birthday at school. A part of the birthday ritual at his school is that the parents come in and show pictures and tell stories about their child's life, at least one per year, as they light the candles on the birthday cake. So I started thinking about my talking points for the event. [Maybe later I'll have time to fill in some actual photos . . . ]

• Year One. We have a "baby's first year" frame, with pictures of Aidan from birth through is first birthday. It's kinda cool to see a person go from the "baby" look -- kinda lumpy and alien-looking -- to the first year, when they really start to acquire their recognizable face. I remember it was only a few days before his first birthday when I was trying to videotape Aidan playing at Janet's piano, and instead of doing so he walked off . . . but he had never walked before. Miraculously his first steps were captured on film, and ironically (and appropriately) because he was doing something other than what we expected. I remember he was a slow to start eating solids, too . . . at his party he didn't eat cake, but he did enjoy his first pretzels.
• Year Two. Aidan started playing music, strumming on a guitar his uncle gave him for his second birthday. [Oy, this is embarrassing . . . I'm scrambling for pictures to try to remember what was going on then . . .]
• Year Three. Aidan always had a special connection with animals. Before he could even talk, he enjoyed howling like our dogs, when they would join together with the neighbors' dogs to make a chorus of bays. His favorite toys were tiny animal figurines. We have pictures of him riding on his Aunt Meredith's horse Mac, and scattering cracked corn for Granny's chickens.
• Year Four. This was the year that Aidan had to learn how to be a Big Brother. So much has happened between the two of them that it's hard to remember what that was like, at first. I seem to recall that it became a lot more challenging once Mal was big enough to start getting into his stuff . . .
• Year Five. This was a big year for beeswax. I remember when we first suggested that he could make his own small animals, he was shocked and offended . . . but after a while he became a beeswax fanatic, making elaborate figures and scenes with colored wax -- literally hundreds of little figures scattered through the house. Some of my favorites: an archeological dig, complete with the bones of dinosaurs curled up in lifelike repose; a red fox, complete with a white-tipped tail, rowing a boat while smoking a pipe; a monkey reaching out with pruning sheers to cut off a holly berry from a holiday sprig.
• Year Six. This was the year of physical skills maturing. He started going hand-over-hand on the monkey bars at home. He got a scooter for Christmas, and after a few weeks of wizzing around on two wheels, suddenly he could ride his bike without training wheels, too. I came home one day and Aidan said, "Hey, Dad, watch this," and he took off. I was flabbergasted. And he learned to swim, too -- after taking lessons for most of the year, he swam the entire length of the pool, and earned his "swimming star". It was also around now that his creations went from tiny to huge: he started digging big holes in "the digging spot" in the yard, and erecting substantial teepee frames with eight-foot long fallen limbs.

Corporatations defend use of spanking in the workplace

A representative in the California legislative assembly proposed a bill that would outlaw spanking of children under four years of age. The legislation drew fire from lots of religious and privacy organizations, as well as from corporate America, where the practice of spanking unruly or disrespectful employees is commonplace.

"I mean, what if some new hire doesn't get his quarterly report in on time? His whole company might miss its SEC filing. Clearly, you have to hit him to make him understand the importance of the matter. How else are they going to learn?" said Yoyodyne CEO John Boutee.

Boutee believes that a "lax and permissive corporate culture" could lead to "rebellious and impulsive employees." Boutee dismissed so-called "alternative management" practices such as appealing to reason or withholding salary as "wrong-headed and wimpy."

"When I was new clerk, my boss smacked me across the face in front of my peers if I questioned his judgement or was slow to comply with his directives. I'm here to tell you that I'm a better person for it," said Boutee. "Clearly, if a middle manager physically violates and humiliates an employee, it's just another expression of his concern."

Employees who are corporally disciplined reaffirmed that the practice "totally underscores the need to not get caught," said Yoyodyne regional account manager Jeff Metzner. "You quickly learn not to show any disrespect to that sadistic fucker [Boutee] and find more subtle, creative ways to defy him."

Baby Watch

My usual writing time got preempted by a phone call at 1:30 am. "Heather says this is the real deal. No hurry, but could you come over?"
Oh. Yeah. Sister-in-law. Pregnancy. We were on call. Right.
"We'll scramble the jets," I said, squinting at the clock again. I pull clothes on over my pajamas, hoping against hope that the kids will be asleep and I can just crash at their house. I try to strike a balance between being awake enough to look supportive and happy, and sleepy enough to go right back to sleep as soon as convenient. There is a part of my brain saying chirpy enthusiastic things to me about a new life coming into the world, and how important this day will be to their family, etc. etc. but it evoked nothing in me at that moment. The emotional centers had already rolled over and gone back to sleep.

Fifteen minutes later I'm lying in someone else's bed, listening to a baby monitor with someone else's kids snoring. It felt a little disorienting. I settle into light sleep, but the monitor rattles with coughs from time to time and my parental habits keep twitching. Finally one of the boys, the younger, pushes his way into the room and walks business-like to other side of the bed. His head appears above a mountain of blankets and body pillows. "Where's Mommy?"

I explain that Mommy and Daddy have gone to have the baby, and they called in Uncle G to be with them tonight. The little guy didn't even miss a beat; he burrowed into the covers, curled up next to me, coughed a few times, and fell asleep. For the first time that night, I smiled a real smile.

Older brother Mason came next -- he a few more questions but was still cool with everything, and he feel asleep in the big bed too. A few hours later, another rousing phone call: Beth, the boys grandmother, was at the door, arriving from Wilmington. "It's Izzie," I told Mason, and he frowned. "I'm sad because I wanted it to be Mom," he said, and he shlumped back into bed.

I slept. I dreamed I had bought the house I was sleeping in, and now it was raining and great gushing leaks were coming in everwhere. One pipe was throwing off so much water the kids were playing in it like it was a sprinkler. I woke to see Bill coming into the room; he told me the doctors had sent them home again, and he was going to crash in the other room.

I sleep in; no five o'clock writing time for me. By 7 pm the kids are waking up, ready to seek out Izzie now that their brains are revitalized. Bill looked wasted. Yeah, I remember now, how exhausting that was, to be rushing around in the middle of the night, waiting for a baby to come. I take my leave of them. By the time I get home it's feeling more like a weird dream, the kind that makes your waking life feel odd.

First joke

Malcolm had an array of dishes, cups, bowls, and smoothie bottles in front of him. He had eaten a little of his broccoli-and-rice casserole, but mostly he had become absorbed in carefully spooning it into his half-full smoothie bottle.
"Mal . . . . !" his mother quailed in annoyance.
"It's good this way," he insisted, with three-year-old earnestness. He did take a hit off his concoction, a tiny dribble of orange wrapping around his chin. He plunked down the container, now drained of smoothie but still holding plenty of yogurt-slimed broccoli, and he declared, "I want ice cream."
"You need to finish all the stuff in that bottle, Mal, before I would give you any ice cream."
"Oh," he said, composing his face and tone into one of patient tolerance, as if he was the one talking to a three-year-old, "That's way too much."
"Well, if you don't have room for that, there's no way you have room for ice cream," said Janet.
"I have room!" he said brightly, "See, riiiiight heeeere..." and he pointed to the one spot of bare table in front of him that doesn't already have a bowl or a plate occupying it.
I cracked a smirk, trying not to laugh out loud, and failed miserably. Janet shot me the mock-anger "how-could-you" glare, which only made me dissolve into giggles and nearly fall out of my chair.

Ah, the dawn of word-play with ironic intent!

Blue Goo Stew

Aidan pulled me away from my newspaper, a big grin on his face. "Daddy, come see! We're making Blue Goo Stew!"

Next to the couch in the living room Aidan and Malcolm had corralled all the dining room chairs into a circular clump. "So, so, so, here's how you play. You run around in the circle, until someone ... TAGS you. And then . . . we tie the jumprope around you, and we throw you into the Blue GOO!" And he collapsed into giggling. "BLUE GOO!" echoed Malcolm enthusiastically.

"Here, we'll show you," said Aidan, suddenly business-like. And he and Malcolm danced around on top of the chairs in a mock chase until Aidan tags Malcolm. Aidan tied the red jumprope around Malcolm's middle, and Mal, like the youngest bungee jumper alive, hurled himself onto a pile of pillows on the couch.

"Ok, I'll play," I said.
"And YOU," said Aidan, "You sit right . . . right . . . HERE," indicating a tiny kid chair next to the sofa, "And you . . . mix up Malcolm . . . into the Blue Goo! And that's how you make . . . Blue Goo Stew! And then, and then, and then, and then . . . you EAT! the BLUE GOO STEW!" And he dissolved into laughter again.

So we played Blue Goo Stew, with Aidan and Malcolm alternately hurling themselves into the pillows, and me stirring the pillows around with a long buckwheat pillow, and me scooping up a child in a ticklish embrace and pretending to eat them, chanting "Stew MEAT! Stew MEAT!"

We had a lot of fun.

* * *

So where did THAT come from? I have no idea. But that's exactly why I loved it so much. It was the result of unstructured play. They started with a bit of spontaneous young-boy wordplay and gross-out humor, and expanded it bit by spontaneous bit, putting rules together like so many tinker toys. They were peacefully, enthusiastically collaborating (which is challenging for a six-year-old and a three-year-old), all without any input from me at all.

I can't begin to describe how important unstructured play is. When you see it happening, you realize that this is it, this is what kids that age are supposed to be doing. They are clearly firing on all cylinders; physical, mental, emotional, and social aspects are fully engaged, and they are enjoying it more than anything else they could be doing.

I recently heard a lead-in on a story on NPR about how unstructured play was gradually being displaced by TV, video games, and structured activities like music lessons, dance lessons, and sports. Having witnessed the beauty and wonder of my own kids in unstructured play, I can fully conceive of the loss. I have explicitly given over part of my Schedule to unstructured play time with the kids, because I want to be a part of that world.

It also influenced me to declutter my own schedule. How much room do I have in my own life for unstructured play? How much creativity, enthusiasm, and development is lost because I'm so busy all the time? The comparison doesn't completely hold up; adults are not children, and their need for re-creation is not the same. But I have noticed that, when I structure time away from work, to be with my family or work around the house or write, that I am noticing more. I am doing things better; fixing things spontaneously; making tiny improvements. Little things, mind you; making a bed that otherwise would not have been made, or tightening the screws on a doorknob. Because I have given myself over to the moment, because I have lavished time on these things, they are becoming more alive for me.

The end of the Little Gibbon era

About a year ago, I went on a business trip that took me through the Pittsburgh airport, and I stopped in at one of the best gift shops that ever emerged from the airport bardo. (I say "one of the best" only because it actually carried something other than the 32 kinds of Pittsburgh-themed shlock that the other 32 gift shops in the airport carried.) I was looking for the Holy Grail of business travels -- the small gift to give my kids. Evidently, no one told the Chinese manufacturers that there is a market for small, yes-it-will-fit-in-my-suitcase, no-it-will-not-hog-the-living-room toys -- everything was either huge and plush, or tiny and fragile with a Steelers logo on the side.

But here, in a gift shop forgotten by time, nestled away in a Brigadoon retail space half-way between either end of a mechanized walkway, was a palm-sized stuffed ape with magnets in his hands and love in his heart. He came home with me, along with a moose finger-puppet made a felt.

I presented the little ape to Aidan the next morning, his little head popping out of my bathrobe with a concealed nudge. Aidan was way into primates at the time, and his face lit up. The new acquisition was dubbed "Little Gibbon," and he became Aidan's best friend for the next year. He was small enough to be easily carried whereever Aidan went, and so he did. Many mornings began with Aidan screetching in dismay because he couldn't find Little Gibbon in the tangle of sheets when he woke up. Many times we warned Aidan to leave Little Gibbon at home when we went out, because we did not want him to meet the same bad end that Claire the Little Duck had met. Little Gibbon was the protagonist of most every story Aidan made up. He even had a theme song, set to the tune of Johnny Cash's "Get a Rhythm":

Get a gibbon
When you get the blues,
C'mon get a gibbon
When you get the blues,
He's a lesser ape, swingin' through the trees,
He'll brachiate wherever ya' please,
Get a gibbon,
When you . . . get . . . the blues.

Miraculously, Little Gibbon survived the vicissitudes of life as a preschooler's best buddy. He underwent surgery to restore an arm and holes in his hands, and was machine-washed to restore his coat to its original luster, but otherwise his mischeiviously wise countenance remained a fixture of our lives.

A day or two ago, after the rush of Christmas gift receipts had subsided, Aidan announced, in a voice tinged with quiet finality, "You know, I've kind of drifted away from Little Gibbon. I'm not into primates so much any more. I think I'll give him to Malcolm." And so Aidan's younger brother walked around with the house with Little Gibbon that day, the totem of coming-of-age for both of them. There were no tears, but my wife and I were in shock. It was like someone had died. "It's OK," said Aidan, "It's more fun for Little Gibbon if he's with someone who wants to play with him."

Sigh.

Teaching violence, teaching control

I heard on NPR the other day that a program was doing a "violent-toy exchange," in which kids brought in their toy guns and violent video games and exchanged them for constructive or cooperative games: craft kits, puzzles, sporting equipment.

For all of my familiarity with Attachment Parenting and our continuous committment to shield our children from media as long as possible, I still feel a strange ambivalence about these sorts of events. True, I am convinced that the popular culture has immersed itself in extreme violence, and that such constant exposure to ever-more-graphic displays will have an inevitable corrosive affect on sensitivity and sensibility of developing minds. But I also feel like the counter-culture, the anti-violence activists, have yet to come up with a coherent philosophy to handle the reality of violence in human nature and in life.

This local event, at least, had the right idea to emphasize the alternatives to violence. Most of our political and social problems in the world are one long, unending quest to get people to consider alternatives to violence. And it is perfectly rational to say: "Look, building things with Legos is every bit as 'boy' as running around with guns." And so it is. But once the building is done, it is every bit as "boy" to explode the Lego buildings with Richochet Racer mortar fire. While they encourage the constructive, pro-social elements of human nature, they fail to acknowledge the aspects of violence that are built into human nature itself. Boys are not "infected" with violence from outside entities; they only fail to develop the capacities to control and channel violent impulses that were always there to begin with.

Recently, when I was wrestling with my two small sons, I spontaneously started to show them some basics of aikido. I encouraged them to experiment with different ways to push me over, and showed them what worked and what didn't. I showed them some ways to roll and fall without getting hurt. That they enjoyed it was not surprising; but I was shocked at how much they paid attention. Usually slow and casual in responding to my requests, Aidan was obedient to the point of being crisp. His violent impulses, thus far only finding release in playground stick fights, was now getting official sanction and direction. He loved it. More importantly, I think he was ready for it. He needed it.

I do not believe we can take all the violence out of our kids, nor even that that is a worthwhile goal. I believe it needs to be channelled, schooled, and controlled. The pro-social-non-violent moms might be shocked when I call, not only for more Legos, but for boxing, wrestling, martial arts, archery, and hunting. Our children will be schooled in violence. Our only choice is whether we will do the schooling, and incorporate principles of restraint, discipline, respect, sportsmanship, and honor -- or whether we will let their schooling come from Grand Theft Auto and The Sopranos.

Time-stopping technology

Listen to the advertising for cameras, and it always boils down to two taglines: "Capture the moment. Share the magic." You take pictures (or video, as is much more common now) to preserve a moment in time, and to share that moment with others.

Ever since I was quite young, I always felt a little uneasy about this quest to "capture the moment." I'm not like my son, who usually resists all efforts to photograph him, nor like my grandmother, who actively removed and destroyed all photos of herself when she found them. I think they both, to different degrees, could not stand the self-consciousness induced by seeing themselves. But I feel is a certain futility in the quest. Even as young as ten, I remember seeing all the Kodak ads of smiling grandmothers mooning over photo albums, and thinking, "Is that all you get at the end of life? A big book of pictures? But that's not real."

I am a parent now, and I probably take as many pictures as the next guy. I do not think taking pictures is futile. I have no doubt that I will treasure these pictures the rest of my life. But philosophically, I do question the notion of life as one long effort to "capture moments." We have extended our greed for things into a more subtle form of materialism: a greed for experience. We want more experience, better experience, and we want to capture it, keep it, hold it. Most people believe they will be able to take those memories and experiences with them into the afterlife . . . after all, what's the point of living, if not to accumulate experience? Isn't that what God is doing here? Piling up mountains of Kodak moments, to hold forever in heaven?

We have all seen the zealous docu-moms and docu-dads, videotaping every birth and birthday and milestone. At times we admire them for their dedication to "capturing the moment." Perhaps their kids will appreciate it someday. But when I see such parents spending their lives stooped, walking backwards, and perpetually separated from their children by a viewfinder, I feel a visceral rejection. This is not what life is about. I imagine nobody is videotaping soccer games in heaven. If life is to have meaning, it must have its significance in the moment it is lived, and not only in retrospect. Memory is not the meaning of life.

The Subversive Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle

I remember, when I was in elementary school, we had some regular story-reading. Or, at least, I assume it was regular, but I don't remember enough of it to know for sure. Either I don't remember much, or it didn't happen much, because the only two books I ever remember us reading was E.B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.

I remember that Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle must have been unusual and rare, because none of the other kids had ever heard of it, and the old teacher who was reading it to us was reading it with a fondness that could only have come from many long years of use. The stories were funny, moralistic in a peculiar way, and always memorable. They almost always involved a child with some bad habit or character flaw -- lying, forgetfulness, bad table manners, etc. -- and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's unusual cure for the condition. I remembered a story where a little girl hated to take baths . . . and so Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle let her go without a bath for so long that dirt caked to her skin and her parents planted radish plants in her.

I never gave those old stories much thought until I had kids of my own, and suddenly they were putting me on the spot to "tell a story." Now, telling a story to a five-year-old is a especially challenging feat, because finding something of appropriate theme and length is extremely hard. I never much cared for the classic fairy-tales and couldn't bring myself to tell them; besides, Disney had already ruined them. But my other stocks of fantastic stories had thematic limitations: mythology has some initial promise, except that adult themes of violence, treachery, adultery, and more violence was woven into almost all of them. And so, after telling a much-doctored version of the Illiad and snippets of Tolkein, I found myself telling a few Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories from memory.

Oh, they were a hit. Something about them had stopping power for the five-year-old set. We sent off for a few of the books, and they became instant favorites. But what struck me most was how much I was enjoying them. They mixed in some subtle jokes for the parents, the way "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show" used to do.

But, even more interestingly, they were quite subversive for their time. They were written in the late 1940's, in a time when conformity and discipline were highly prized and not even a whiff of the 1960's freedom was anywhere to be found. And yet, here was Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle in her upside-down house, with a chandalier on the floor (how trippy is that?). Her relationship to children is based on (gasp) genuine respect and gentleness, and her cures are largely (can it be?) letting children discover the natural consequences of their actions. Her style is so much in the realm of Attachment Parenting and Non-Violent Communication that I can think of no better portrayal . . . and yet she was conceived sixty years ago.

Michaelangelo?

"Dad, I'm sad."
"Why?"
"Because mom says I can't take the beeswax to bed."
"But Aidan . . . it's not like you're going to model something in the middle of the night!"
"Yeah . . . but I hold it in my hands when I'm sleeping, so when I wake up in the morning it will already be warm and ready to make something."
"Wow . . . so you're can't even stop when you're sleeping, huh?"
"I don't waste any time! Either I'm looking at a book, trying to decide what to make next, or I'm making it."

I want Alfie Kohn's job

I heard Alfie Kohn on the radio today, plugging his new book The Homework Myth. He is moving alongside Malcolm Gladwell as one of those freelance writer/thinkers who is doing wonderful intellectual work, just examining the published results of others and asking really interesting questions. By "interesting questions," I mean those questions that seem ludicrously obvious in retrospect, like "does homework improve school performance?"

One of the things that lets Kohn do this sort of thing is that he's operating outside the System. He can afford to be a lot more critical of the educational establishment because he's not one of them. I did notice the caginess on his website about his credentials; obviously lots of people who disagree with him are eager to say, "See! See! No PhD! He can't possibly have anything worthwhile to say!" I'm thrilled to see another intellectual succeeding in getting his message out without having to play the game . . . and a little saddened to see that even eleven books is still not enough for him to get completely past the whole credentials thing.

Parenting: Just don't screw it up

The studies in Freakonomics had a decidedly anti- bias in parenting. They used the term "obsessive parenting," which I found to be quite inadvisable since it betrayed their bias before they even started laying out the data; they could just have easily said "parenting-focused" and not lost any meaning. But then again, they were probably deliberately tweaking our noses, since it sells more books.

I still find myself somewhat confused by the data. After using such a loaded term I thought they would come loaded for bear, as Pinker did, to show how much parenting didn't matter. But their most solid data concerned the correlation between poor, single parents and high-crime outcomes with their children, so much so that they could attribute much of the drop in crime in the 1990's to the legalization of abortion. They seemed to be quite keen on pointing out that unwanted children were more likely to be be neglected or abused, and of course it makes sense that those kids would be more likely to be criminals, right?

But then they turn right around and start discounting every other influence of parental behavior. They were quite sad to confess that Head Start was ineffective, but they blamed it on the poor education and scant attention of poorly-paid Head Start teachers (i.e. the surrogate parent.) So, does that mean that good schools matter? Well, maybe . . . they cite one study that says schools choice makes no difference in outcomes (bad obsessive parents, BAD!) but then turn right around and try to explain the black-white performance disparity on bad "black" schools. (And, interestingly, what makes those schools bad is, essentially, an environment of insecurity: gang violence, drug dealers, etc.)

To their credit, the authors do a very good job of distinguishing between correlation and causation, and make it clear that it's virtually impossible to distinguish the two in some circumstances. But while kicking around in Correlation Land, they seem to make a big deal about examining some correlations without addressing others. Blacks entering school perform just as well as whites when entering school when you control for socioeconomic factors -- so hooray! we don't need to be racists when we confront racial disparities. But wait a minute . . . why do we have such a strong correlation between race and poverty? Oooo . . . let's not go there. No, wait a minute! It's the schools, bad schools, yessiree. And the schools are bad because of the crime. And the crime is bad because of single-parent families that don't value education. But just remember, parenting doesn't matter . . . as long as you get married, love your children, encourage them in their schoolwork, don't neglect them, make them feel secure . . . nope, parenting doesn't matter at all. W . . . T . . . F.

It occurred to me, reading all this, that an excellent control for the socioeconomic factors would be lottery winners. The profound majority of lottery players are very poor, so I imagine that most of the lottery winners would be very poor, too. So how much do their outcomes change when they suddenly (and arbitrarily) have lots of cash?

Tantrumland for Number 2

My younger son Malcolm is two and a half and has entered a stage of near-perpetual tantrums. He's still cute enough that his tantrums would be endearing, were it not for his dedicated persistence in asking for really inconvenient things. Yesterday there was a pair of extra socks that he carried with him throughout the day -- in the car, to the pool, into the pool -- and he would not relinquish them. Then when he got home, he wanted to wear said socks (now soaking wet) through the house. When denied, he laid himself out on the floor in classic tantrum pose, ams and legs flailing. His tone is less angry than Aidan ever was, a sort of inconsolable hysteria.

When you're constantly dealing with someone who's losing their shit, you look for any way to lighten the tone. It's not really fair to the kids to make fun of their tantrums, since you want to acknowledge their emotions and guide them to acceptable ways of expressing it. But we can't help ourselves; Janet and I start improvising on songs to describe the situation:

(sung to the tune of "How can I keep from singing")

My soul is lost in endless wants
And calming words are useless
I want it so, but you say "No"
My parents are so clueless.

The tears flow down my flush-ed cheeks
And from my eyes are streaming.
Since all conspire 'gainst my desire
How can I keep from screaming?

My hope is that most of it is going over their heads.