Comment of the Day: Or the Truth Revealed!

This, from DadWagon reader JF, responding to the post “Asian Woman  + Jewish man: The New Math”:

I am a Jewish American man living in Singapore. Your satirical post is spot on. I am newly, seriously involved with a native Singaporean of Chinese descent. Besides being beautiful physically, she is probably the warmest, most thoughtful, most open woman with whom I have ever been involved. And of course, she loves me because of my huge schlong.

Truth hurts, goyim. Happy New Year.

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When Do Kids Need a Fig Leaf?

JP takes swimming lessons once a week at a pool in our neighborhood. This is New York, so, of course, space is limited, the pool is something of a disgrace, and the locker rooms are worse. But we come so that he won’t drown, and to kill time on the weekend, and we crowd in with close to 100 other parents and their children, a sea of parental anxiety, childlike delight (and fear), and floaties.

At the end of class this weekend I made the strategic decision not to take JP back to the locker room to help him change his clothes, instead having him strip down poolside. Was this appropriate? Is he, at 5 years old, too old? When is too old for kids to go naked in public?

I don’t really know, but I know this: JP has yet to come to any awareness of the concept of nudity. He is at times clothed and other times unclothed. These states of dress mean something to him in a physical sense: warm, cold, whatever. But they do not yet have any social, sexual, or moral connotation. He remains, in this regard, a boy in the state of nature, which is a kind of nice place for him to be, I think.

Eventually, though, he does need to come to an understanding about how society views dressing. I would let it happen of its own accord, but I am not the only parent in the equation, and I don’t really know what his mother thinks (I’m guessing she’s on the side of modesty).

In the Book of Genesis, it is written that Adam and Eve are naked and that they “felt no shame.” This is, of course, before they eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, at which point “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.”

The awareness of nudity is the awareness of shame, and lust, and embarrassment, and adulthood, and our bodies, and many other things. JP will come to these in time. We all do. I am in no hurry to educate him in these subjects, either, although I will soon enough, I suppose, and in so doing, educate myself.

What Almost Made Me Cry Today: ‘Love You Forever’

Looks so funny, doesn't it? Reader beware!

The other night, at bedtime, I sent Sasha to her “library” (what she calls her bookshelf) to select some reading material. She returned with Mercer Mayer’s “All By Myself,” a stack of idiotic Corduroy books, and a book I’d seen floating around the house but had never actually opened, “Love You Forever,” written by Robert Munsch and illustrated by Sheila MacGraw. Where had this book come from? I wondered. What’s it about?

Well, DadWagon readers, I can now reveal to you that this is the most manipulative, depressing children’s book I’ve ever come across. The conceit is that a new mother waits till her baby is asleep, then sneaks into his room, rocks him “back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,” and sings to him this little ditty:

I’ll love you forever

I’ll like you for always

As long as I’m living

My baby you’ll be

Throughout the book, the baby gets older, growing into a 2-year-old, then a 9-year-old, then a teenager, then a grown-up man. Ha ha! There’s Mom, sneaking into her grown son’s house to rock him in his sleep! How funny!

But I knew something was up, and as both parent and child grew—and aged—it became harder and harder for me to read aloud. That line—”As long as I’m living”—was carrying with it dreadful implications that eventually became explicit: The mother is finally too old and sick to rock her son, who rushes to her nursing home to cradle her and sing the song he’s heard all his life. Then he goes home to rock his own newborn daughter and sing to her.

I read the ending in a choked whisper. Tears were rolling down my face. Sasha barely noticed. What kind of horrible book was this—so relentlessly rolling toward its bittersweet finale? How could they do this to parents, let alone children? What kind of monster are you, Robert Munsch?

After that, the bland adventures of Corduroy—look at him go fast on his scooter!—were a welcome salve.

Oh, Crap, We’re Old; Or, DadWagon Kids Growing Up!

Joanna Fan, who runs Sasha's preschool chain.

Astute DadWagon observers (there must be two or three of you by now) will have noticed that things have changed slightly around the site, both in recent weeks (we’ve been tweaking our design in anticipation of a bigger tweak) and over the now nearly two years of our existence.

God, two years! Can you believe it? It seems like just yesterday that we were… talking about the connection between sippy cups and impotence? the benefits of dirt? flirting with bartenders? I guess it’s not really that different from today.

One of the corollary effects of DadWagon’s senescence is that my daughter, Sasha, is now just about the age that Theodore’s JP and Nathan’s Dalia were when the blog launched. Which means I’m about to begin covering all of the subjects that those two have been maundering over since 2009. Awesome! And today’s subject is: universal pre-K!

Now, Nathan and Theodore have explored this quite thoroughly, with the former questioning whether 3-year-olds actually need an education, and the latter telling him he’s stupid. Between the two of them, I’m sure they’ve discussed everything I need to know now that Sasha is herself approaching the 3-year mark, but somehow, even though I read every word those dudes drunkenly typed up, none of it sank in.

Which is how I found myself, last week, at a pre-K/kindergarten workshop run by Joyce Szuflita, at some maternity-clothing shop on Court Street in Brooklyn. Frankly, the whole pre-K thing terrifies me: Somehow it feels like this is the first choice I’ll have to make for Sasha that will really start determining how she turns out as a person. I know that’s not entirely accurate, but the fear remains. At the same time, going into the workshop I was totally skeptical about the information I’d receive. After all, shouldn’t I be able to figure this stuff out myself, and not have to pay $25 for someone else to tell me?

And yet… dear readers, I learned! For example, I learned—at last!—the difference between Districts and Zones. I mean, these were terms I’d heard bandied about for years, but I didn’t realize they referred to different things. Now I know! And I guess I learned other things, too, although I’ve mostly forgotten them by now. Oh, right: gifted and talented. As Nathan remarked one whole year ago, G&T is evil. Or, maybe not evil, but strange: Preschoolers take an inane, inaccurate test of their intelligence/willingness-to-put-up-with-adults in order to get into an elite program featuring the same class sizes, same funding, and same curriculum as their ungifted-and-nontalented peers get.

The one real benefit, Ms. Szuflita said, is that the curriculum is more flexible. That is, if all the G&T kids can grasp fractions in a day or two (whereas their normal peers take weeks, if not months), then there’s more time for them to build an Indian sweat lodge. Um, okay.

In the end, the universal pre-K decision for me came down to one single thing: the school day is only six hours long, ending around 3 p.m. Since Jean works and I “work” too, this would not make things easy. We’d have to get a five-day-a-week babysitter, and the cost of that would probably just about equal what we pay to send Sasha to Preschool of America, which handles her from 8:30 to 5:30 and feeds her three meals a day (plus snack!). So, we’ll skip city pre-K, right?

Well, there’s one further complication: Joanna Fan, head of Preschool of America, was indicted and arrested about 10 days ago on charges she stole $2.5 million in federal funds. The money was supposed to be used for “nutritious meals for preschoolers” at the nonprofit Red Apple preschools, where she’s also executive director, but instead, the authorities allege, she and her husband, Ziming Shen, used “the money to make mortgage payments on several Manhattan condominiums and to benefit their private business interests, which include Preschool of America Inc., a chain of about a dozen for-profit preschools in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.”

Here’s a bit more from the Times:

Audits by the New York State Health Department and the federal Agriculture Department since 2005 revealed a pattern of false submissions to the Agriculture Department, including lying about how many children were getting the meals, the complaint charges. For example, the complaint says, in January 2009, Ms. Fan submitted records claiming that 188 children had consumed 4,700 meals and snacks, when other records showed that 116 children ate 2,900 meals and snacks.

The complaint charges that in 2008, Ms. Fan issued a check for $200,000 from the federal lunch money account to make personal condominium payments, and also withdrew $110,000 to pay her personal income taxes. Between 2005 and 2010, the complaint asserts, $2.7 million went to Supermarnet, a company Mr. Shen owned, to provide meals to the preschoolers. But the complaint said invoices indicate the company spent only $24,000 for food during that period.

In all, according to the complaint, Ms. Fan stole approximately $1.8 million of program funds in 2008 and 2009. She acknowledged in a written statement to the Agriculture Department that she had taken the money, but stated that she had “borrowed” it, the complaint charged.

Okay, so how does a parent deal with this? There are two considerations, as far as I can tell. One is moral: Do we continue to support a school run by alleged thieves, a school where our daughter has allegedly benefited from funds meant for poorer children? Part of me is outraged here, but another part is shrugging its shoulders. (I guess that part is the shoulders.) I mean, what do you expect from mainland Chinese people? Give them money, and they’ll do what they want with it. And the school (at least Sasha’s branch) seems well-run: She loves the teachers and her classmates, and would be devastated if we suddenly switched schools. In other words, we have no stringent moral principles we abide by—whatever’s good for our kid is good for us. Fucking yuppies.

The other issue is more practical: If Joanna Fan and Zhiming Shen are forced to repay what they’ve stolen, how does that impact Sasha’s school? Would there be cutbacks? Tuition increases? Would teachers flee for more stable, less ethically compromised workplaces? Would some branches be closed entirely? Should we get Sasha into a pre-K program just as a backup?

The answer to that last question is, I think, yes. We’ll go through the whole rigamarole of visiting schools, applying to them, fretting over the G&T test, and maybe even arranging babysitters, even though in the end Preschool of America might go humming along and all this preparation might not matter at all.

At the very least, it’ll be good preparation for the real battle: getting into kindergarten.