It’s always pretty easy to make fun of the Times’ “Modern Love” column, but I have to say I really liked Sunday’s edition, in which a Brooklyn guy—Larry Smith—details the weekly visits he makes to visit his fiancée at the Connecticut prison where she’s doing time for money-laundering. Along the way he meets other husbands and fathers doing the same thing:

Like at a men’s room at Giants Stadium, where the hedge-fund manager sidles up next to the pipe fitter, we were drawn together for a common cause, feeling exposed, and maybe a little sheepish, but fiercely loyal and basically rooting for the same team.

Anyway, give it a read.

Nathan’s fine post detailing the scourge of anti-male discriminatory practices in our public school system (that’s a fair characterization, no?) made me think of some of the experiences I have been having with my son.

Now, before I get too far into this, I want to make it clear–I don’t subscribe to a Real Boys view of the world. No virulent feminist forces marshaling to crush the spirit of  our little men haunt my imagination. And as someone who can barely change a light bulb, the conventional male prerogatives can go threatened without any great weeping on my part. JP is not now, nor do I sense that he ever will be, a victim of anti-boy bias.

That said, I do notice a tendency to diagnose what seems to be not-abnormal bouts of rambunctious behavior on his part.

At the last parent-teacher conference, JP’s truly wonderful (seriously) pre-school teacher, whom JP adores, basically gave me a sit-down on JP’s inability to sit still, focus on anything other than toys, and essentially implied that he–along with several other male cronies–were an obstacle to the overall educational environment. A lovely child, she said, but just unable to control his impulses physically, particularly in a high-stimulus, group environment. She recommended occupational therapy.

Again, I like this woman and so does JP. But occupational therapy because the kid has ants in his pants? It seemed a rather heavy-handed suggestion, I thought, and I told her so. She replied that she hadn’t intended it that way, and that these days in fact, lots of children (the examples she gave me were all boys) go to occupational therapy. If my insurance didn’t cover it, there was actually a free program through the Board of Education. That program, it turned out, was Pre-School Special Education… because JP couldn’t sit still.

I didn’t know what to make of it. At that age, occupational therapy is mostly just directed play. No harm in that, and if the city wants to pay for it, well, hey, it’s my tax money, right? I feared the slippery slope, however. Now JP couldn’t sit still so he should get therapy; next, he’s having trouble being quiet in class and he won’t wait his turn in the cafeteria, and the suggestion is Ritalin; and so on, until I become one of those over-medicating parents people always sneer at and say man, just anyone can breed, huh?

I don’t have a shred of evidence about this, mind you, but again, this largely seems directed at male behavior that not so long ago wouldn’t even have been noteworthy. Do I think, as Nathan argued, that male teachers might help prevent this form of tracking? I don’t really know. I tend to think dearth of male teachers can be attributed more to the male notion that its women’s work than anything else. If we want more male teachers then more men must want to teach. Besides, I’m less focused on that level of solution than I am on advocating for what I think is best for my son.

So, no therapy for JP. If he can’t sit still in “circle time,” well, then maybe he should go sit in the corner until he’s ready to play nice. I’ll save the therapy for me.

Circus Krone's Colonel Joe, "the world's largest elephant", but still not big enough to keep them from mutilating his tusks

So the circus is in town. Clowns spilling out of tiny cars! Death-defying acts! Stilt-walkers! Lions and elephants! Yay! We’ll be bringing our little guy the moment he’s old enough! An icon of Americana!

Or, no. Call me a grouch, call me a killjoy, but I hate it. I hated it even as a little child. No, I do not find clowns creepy or scary, the way Kramer does–I just find them tedious. Trapeze acts and high-wire walking always seemed to me just dumb: “I am risking my life in order to do something difficult but fundamentally pointless. But I’m doing it with a net, so it’s not really all that risky, either.” It’s as if you took an Olympic event, like skiing or bobsledding, then stripped out the competition aspect. Every performer at the circus gets a medal, just for Not Falling to His Death.

Add to that all the grim stories about mistreatment of animals–whether true or false–and the whole thing takes on a leaden, joyless cast. Plus, as I remember (and as the Times reports in that story linked up above) it’s a rather cynical entertainment enterprise. Ringling Bros. seems hellbent on separating you and your dollars, as rapaciously as George Steinbrenner, whose rapacious nature is at least a little more obvious. Plus there, at least, you get the sense that your overpriced ticket is buying a better shortstop than, say, the Kansas City Royals have, in the ongoing Moneyball backstage game. I seriously doubt that Ringling Bros. is out there trying to pick up an up-and-coming young lion tamer before a competing circus signs her out of Florida State.

The only time I get remotely warm feelings about the circus, in fact, is during the annual elephant parade, when the big gray beasts come into Manhattan through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel on foot. That, at least, connects the event to the New York life,  ever-so-slightly, and feels intimate in a way that nothing else about the circus does. Plus it goes directly past our apartment building–which means, if I have anything to say about it, it will have to be the only circus-attending our boy does until he’s old enough to buy his own tickets.

I’m always a sucker for pseudo-scientific theories about how babies think, so when something actually scientific comes along I get extremely excited. This one comes from my friend Jeff Wise, author of “Extreme Fear,” who observes that his 16-month-old son, Rem, “seems to grasp the purpose of objects more easily than the details of how they must be physically manipulated.” He puts his spoon in his mouth sideways, a dustpan on the porch upside-down, and his snow boots next to his feet.

The infant mind, then, reverses the famous Bauhaus dictum that “form follows function.” An adult dust-pan designer would start by thinking along these lines: I’ll need a surface that can intersect evenly with a flat surface, therefore the leading edge of my dustpan will have to be flat. To Rem, these considerations are incomprehensible. A dustpan works because it is a dustpan. A spoon works because it is a spoon. To him, function precedes form.

Check out his blog—jeffwise.wordpress.com—to learn about “scale error,” watch a cute-funny-freaky video of oversized toddlers, and find out what Rem does with a cardboard box.