DADWAGON

Thanks to the giant vanilla Slurpee that landed on New York this weekend, my flight out of St. Louis was canceled and I have another day in rural Missouri, on a hilltop above the Dickey Bub Farm and Home emporium.

I’d like to thank Continental Airlines, by the way, for being an industry leader in delaying dads who are trying to get home to their kids (and other types of travelers). Yes, worse things have happened on Continental Connection flights. But not answering the 800 number all morning and then informing me by email that you have rebooked me on a flight leaving two days later was a nice touch.

Of course, there are upsides to being stuck here. The Ozark foothills are lovely, with just the right amount of snow on them. And because I was here over the weekend, I read the Belleville News-Democrat, across the river in Illinois, and saw this cry for help from reporter Jennifer Bowen about her occasionally out-of-contol 8-year-old daughter:

I just don’t know what inspires her to be such a brat from time to time. I know her teacher finds herself at her wits end and running out of options with how to deal with her. I feel her pain. We work together to try to come up with solutions but sometimes, we both run out of ideas and we’re left wondering how the heck to get this kid to change her ways.

Usually, hearing about someone else’s bad kid cheers me up a little bit: a sort of Dadenfreude. But this post and the responses to it had the opposite effect, for a few reasons.

First, it’s clear that even in what some in my borough would call the Flyover States, parents are also anxious and disappointed and anxious about their disappointments. Too bad — there’s a part of me that would like to blame some of the complication of parenting on my Zip code. And what urban parent hasn’t had the fantasy of moving to the sticks with their kids and setting things right? Apparently, it’s not a cure-all.

The familiarity of the debate is a downer for another reason. In the reader responses to Bowen, there are some reasonable suggestions: she should take her kid to karate, or buy those special lights for wintertime if everyone’s feeling cooped up and sun-deprived. But most of the comments boil down to a fight between those who think Bowen is spoiling her kids and those who don’t.

That’s depressing because it’s the same argument we have in my extended family, and there are no winners. My almost-4-year-old daughter has her share of willfulness and poor manners, and there are those in the older generation of my family who think she’s spoiled. My perspective: I think they might not understand kids that well, and that the beatings we were all raised on weren’t what made us turn out alright.

But perhaps I’m just making excuses for my own fecklessness.

See? I can’t even decide how I feel about it. I agree with everyone else that kids need to have structure and consistent rules, but there’s more to figure out than that. Such as: If a child is misbehaving, do you just treat the symptoms (having a showdown with her on the spot to get her to stop)? Or do you treat the underlying cause (talk to her about why she is feeling frustrated/angry/stabby)? Both?

Before I had kids, I thought if you were strict enough, your kid would behave well. I tried that and it didn’t seem to work. I guess I’m looking still for Plan B.

That’s the real Missouri dilemma: Not only do I not have a plane ticket home, but I also still don’t have a firm idea of what kind of parent I should be when I get there.