Everything I Know About Parenting I Learned From ‘Dr. Who’

Apparently, a new season of the BBC’s classic sci-fi series, “Dr. Who,” is about to begin here in the former colonies, which has prompted some people to reflect on how the 50-year-old show, about a time-traveling do-gooder with a funny accent and slightly funnier outfits, is an excellent source of parenting wisdom. And they’re right! So right, in fact, that I’ve compiled my own list of dadding lessons learned from watching the TARDIS whine in and out of existence:

1. You can disappear for years at a stretch, and yet your kids will still adore you. No, I’m not referring to the Doctor’s penchant for bouncing into and out of his companions’ lives at odd moments. Actually, I’m talking about the way the series barely made it to the age of 50: Beginning in the mid-80s, its existence was threatened, and it went entirely off the air for years at a time, returning occasionally for a season or three with a new Doctor before once again failing to find a broad audience and going dark. And yet Dr. Who fans STILL clamored for it, their ardor only growing with the show’s prolonged absence. And when it returned: joy beyond all reasonable measure! So that’s the approach I take to my kids. I leave when I feel like it, knowing that when—if—I return, they’ll be as desperate as ever for my love and attention.

2. Kids will believe anything. If there’s one thing Dr. Who is known for, it’s execrable dialogue and even worse special effects. Easy example: For the show’s entire run, the most evil bad guys of all were the Daleks, who trundled around on roller balls, unable to climb stairs, and were usually limited to the singularly idiotic spoken line: “Ex-ter-min-ate!” And yet I fucking loved that show, and even now, despite my overt knowledge of its shoddiness, tune in to catch new episodes. And so, once again, I’m taking this approach to child-rearing: I tell my kids whatever flits through my brain, no matter how unbelievable, knowing that the little creatures are so credulous they’ll eat it all up. Remember, I’ve just returned from months or years away, and they want my attention, so their defenses are down—I might well have been piloting my spaceship through the galaxy in the company of unicorn princesses.

3. A silly outfit makes everything okay. Of course, for these tactics to work, you have to emulate the Doctor down to his wardrobe, which can be anything from Edwardian to cricket-ready to 21st-century hipster formal. This gives the Doctor a playful, almost harmless aspect, when in fact his arrival usually signals the imminent near-destruction of the planet Earth, and the upending of his companions’ lives. But hey, he’s got a long, silly scarf! And a robot dog! And expertly tousled hair! How much chaos can he—or I—really wreak? (Answer: As much as you’ll let me!)

So there you have it: a primer on parenting based on the adventures of a guy who’s lived 900-some years without ever settling down, acquiring health insurance (what’s the deductible on regeneration?), and time-traveling all the way back to 4:35 a.m. in order to be first on line to register a kid for Universal Pre-K. Trust me, this stuff totally works—at least until the network executives (a.k.a. your wife) cancel the season and the kids all yell, “Exterminate!” After that, you might as well go live at Comic-Con.

Why Men Brag About Their Salaries, Part 1

Posts from our ongoing association with the wizened old gender warriors at The Atlantic. Read all of our previous pieces here

Let me begin by copping to a gender-specific failing: The shopping duties in my household do not fall to me. I did not select our furniture, although I have, on occasion, been required to accompany my wife, Tomoko, on her forays to outlets big-box and small as she determines the future of our seating. I had no say whatsoever in the plates or flatware. When Tomoko first moved in with me, she banished the sheets and pillowcases (bought by my mother at the time of my separation from my first wife), replaced the drapes, and undertook the purchase of clothes needed for the children. I grocery shop, ferry our dependents to the sites of their education and entertainment; ensure the continuing good health of our cat, dog, and car; cut checks from bank accounts as directed; and am responsible for sundry other tasks, chores, and obligations too varied and boring to mention. What weight there is in our home, I pull my fair share of. But shopping I avoid.

All of which helps explain my lack of familiarity with CouponCodes4u, a consumer website that recently conducted a survey of the dynamics of female-male workplace behavior. To wit: 2,671 office-working Americans were (Fine print alert: the survey also included the mysterious labor population not toiling in-office but “an environment with other colleagues.”) asked if they ever discussed their salaries with co-workers. Fifty three percent of male survey respondents admitted to having done so, compared to only 15 percent of female respondents. Of those women unwilling to disclose the size of their, uh, salary, nearly a third said it was because they feared their colleagues earned more than they did. Oddly, another 22 percent said they showed discretion about their pay because they believed they earned more than others.

In those workplaces from which I’ve been fired (basically all of them, but for the current one), chitchat about paychecks hasn’t tracked along gender lines: Either everyone talked about it, or no one did, with the most significant correlation being the overall rates of pay. That is, the more everyone made, male or female, the less the subject was discussed. There’s much to be made of that, but for the purposes of this discussion, I’ll focus on one problematic observation, given what is known of female-male compensation balance in the U.S. Recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show women’s earnings still reach only 80 percent of their male counterparts. The disparity decreases in the relatively educated workplaces silly enough to pay me, but does not—as yet, one hopes—approach true equity. That suggests that if women earn less, one should expect them to talk about money more, in amounts proportionate to the total pay. For example, in the offices of my more parsimonious former employers, ones in which everyone complained of their pay, women should have done with greater frequency, as they were likely earning less than the men. That didn’t happen, though, not to me, and not on the survey.

Pseudo-scientific studies, and myopic opinions based only on personal experience, rarely account for the complexities of actual human interaction. Here’s one factor I believe accounted for by neither the survey nor my sexist judgments: Most women are more polite in the workplace than men. That doesn’t make for superior employees, necessarily; nor does such propriety equate with elevated character. Women just tend to be on better behavior. Dirty jokes; sexual harassment both overt and implied; acts of violence—these are all typically (although not always) the purview of the working male rather than his under-compensated female workmate. If that is true—and who knows if it is—it seems logical, then, that men would be more likely to discuss their pay, a practice that while, if not wrong, is undoubtedly rude.

Male competitive norms may play a part. The survey, for example, found that 55 percent of men who discussed their salary acknowledged being motivated by the “bragging rights.” Bully for any dudes clearing enough to strut about it—as demonstrated earlier on this site, the brain trust of DadWagon has never been so favored. At one former job, however, I happened to work with several fellows lucky enough to have book deals, myself included. The size, heft, and dollar value of those publishing contracts was no secret, and short of whipping out our peckers and measuring, I can’t think of a clearer attempt at securing bragging rights. If women engage in comparable displays of peacockery, I’ve yet to witness it.

In truth, though, the survey indicates more about the sexism extant in our work culture than anything having to do with displaced male locker room bravado. Generally, men enjoy a greater sense of empowerment in the workplace than women. We will, I imagine, continue to feel so, until pay equity has been achieved, if ever it is. Men talk about their salaries because, like most forms of boorishness, they can. Come the day that women achieve fiscal equality with men at work, I’d wager the gender kinetics of this very slim issue will change, although in which direction—more talk or less—I’m uncertain. Until then, when it comes to workplace piggery, men will, as ever, dominate.

DadWagon + The Atlantic, Volume 1: We Take Care of our Kids, Dammit

Originally posted at The Atlantic

Hey, guys,

Several times a day, after my infant daughter, Sammy, finishes breastfeeding, my wife, Jean, will hand her over to me and say, “Can you burp her?” And I will duly pick Sammy up, put her over my shoulder, and lightly pound her back until she emits a belch. Done!

Now, Jean is not asking me to do the burping because she’s exhausted (although she is). No, she’s asking because, frankly, I’m better at coaxing bubbles from the baby’s belly, just as I’m better at certain of the other household tasks I’ve gravitated toward ever since our first daughter, Sasha, was born almost four years ago: planning and preparing our meals, getting Sasha up and dressed in the morning, arranging playdates, putting the kids to bed—all duties that, until not too long ago, were considered a mother’s natural province.

Today, of course, the End of Men has arrived, and we’re hip-deep in the swamp of the stay-at-home-dad trend. From enlightened-liberal metropolises to small-town U.S.A., fathers are voluntarily taking on the challenge of parenthood in ways that previous generations never could have imagined, and decrying media images of men as incompetent, bumbling, or, worse, absent from active parenting entirely. We exist! they seem to cry en masse. And more and more, that cry is being heard.

It’s now time for that cri de coeur to evolve, and for men to proclaim, gently and kindly, that we may be, in some cases, “better moms”—caregivers, that is—than moms. We are—if you believe the classical stereotypes—less emotional and more practical, approaching child-care problems with a perhaps scientific detachment not to be found in women who, having spent those long months pregnant, may take those problems personally. Whether it’s swaddling an infant, precision placement of a princess Band-Aid, or soothing hurt feelings (“Paige said she’s not my friend anymore!”), a little emotional distance, data analysis, and hardheaded strategizing can go a long way. And men are, supposedly, better at that stuff.

As provocative as I’m trying to make this argument, I’d like to think this is, in fact, a feminist stance. That is, if women can be as good or better—and better, as Hanna Rosin argues—as men at certain jobs, then why can’t we say the same for men, too? Equality of the sexes doesn’t mean we’re all actually equal. It means we all have equal potential to excel, independent of the shape of our genitalia. If that means that dads start outmothering moms, we have to look at that as progress. So when it comes time to bake cupcakes for pre-K (oh crap, that’s next week!), the other moms better watch out, because I make a mean buttercream frosting. Just don’t ask me to breastfeed.

–Matt

Some years back, in that gauzy era of irresponsibility and moral turpitude that I enjoyed before making babies, I visited a friend whose wife was pregnant. Now, one unhappy by-product of my current status as a volume kid-maker (I have three) is that I can no longer recall with clarity events that have occurred more than, say, 15 to 20 seconds ago. So I don’t remember how I let myself be drawn into a discussion about children with my friend’s wife. At some point, though, we reached the calamitous moment (for me) when she—a third-trimester, impregnated human female and former child actress with a decidedly still-dramatic temperament—declared that she would love her future child more deeply than her husband would. Indeed, she said, all mothers love their children more than fathers, largely because the twin burdens of pregnancy and childbirth cleaved them together in ways men could not match. The feeling, she further implied, was mutual: Children love their mothers more than their fathers.

Before I proceed with the remainder of this story, I’d like to point out that I’m an idiot. This is something that my fellow DadWagon colleagues will readily confirm, and I won’t belabor the page with substantial proof of this, other than to submit my response to my friend’s wife’s assertion. I laughed—one could even say I chuckled with some condescension—at a woman seven months pregnant, which means I crossed a seething cauldron of anger, resentment, back pain, urinary urgency, and ill restraint. I also let slip these words: Now, now—I don’t remember much, but I do remember that fucking “now, now”—That’s a bad way to think about parenting. Your kids, if they know you think that way, will learn to associate love with pain, and that’s not healthy.”

Do I need mention that she ordered me out of the house? Eventually, she forgave me, or at least she said she did, and now, with time and my own reproductive experiences highlighting my foolishness, I wonder if she was right. My children love me, and yes, like Matt, there are certain things I accomplish with them more easily (putting them to bed springs to mind) than their mother, but the maternal bond is powerful, something hardwired into their psyches, like the Love version of whatever goes on in the amygdala.

Here’s the thing, and I offer this question without truly knowing the answer: So what?

I am their father, I have their love, and they are tied to me in whatever way they are tied to me. If the nine-month swim in their mother’s belly, combined with the whitewater (sort of) rush out of her body and into the world, proffers some greater kinship, what possible difference can it make to me? They remain my children, nevertheless.

Let’s say my wife and I divorced. Would we line the kids up, like dogs, and call to them, vying for their loyalty, and whomever they came to got to keep them? (Efficient, yes, but think of the lawyers! They need to eat, too, no?)

Holding the upper hand in parental competence, affection, or connection strikes me as unimportant when compared to the greater task of raising them to know not to give advice to pissed off pregnant women. There are weightier issues demanding my guidance—who else will teach them dirty jokes, long division, the categorical imperative—and it does no good to get hung up on trying to outdo their mother.

So I don’t care who is good at what, who loves whom more than me, and I never, ever attempt to out-mommy Mommy. It is a game I suspect I can lose only by trying. And idiot or no, I know that however much love I receive is more, far more, than enough.

 

–Theodore

If we’re going to debate Matt’s insufferably squishy thesis that dads can out-mom moms, at least let me start with a memory from my time in construction, where gender issues are notably simplified. I was in my early 20s, installing insulation and sheetrock for $8 an hour in Florida. I had just-longer-than-shoulder-length hair (thank you, Tim Lincecum, for still trying to make that work), and a slight build. In the eyes of my foreman, this combination was downright womanly. He thought up a catchphrase for me. If I took too long on a smoke break, or was otherwise wasting time, he always growled the same thing: “Stop waiting to grow a pussy. Get to work.”

There was plenty to dislike about the guy—beyond the chauvinism and general cloddiness, he stiffed our crew out of a week’s pay and skipped town—but I hear an echo of the foreman’s, um, gender essentialism in Matt’s concept of out-momming moms. For the foreman, long hair=woman. For Matt, good parenting=mothering.

Saying that good fathers—the ones who get on the floor to play with their babies, who pack lunch for their preschoolers and help their second-graders with their homework—are just acting like mothers is demeaning to all sides. If men and women have proven anything in the last decade of bloggy introspection, it’s this chiasmus: Not all mothers are good parents and not all good parents are mothers.

In my post-construction life here in New York, I’ve got a fairly steady routine. I wake early, I pee standing up, I get the kids ready and take them to school. That is, I’m both a man and (hopefully) a decent parent.

I’ll also take issue with Theodore’s anatomical absolutism. I can’t presume to know what special bond arises from carrying, or having been carried, in utero. But there are plenty of orphans and adoptees who form full relationships with non-biological parents. And if you start defining parenting through genitalia, before long, you’re Little Hans’s father, promising your son that you won’t cut his balls off because Freud thought the boy needed to hear that.

And I don’t know of any parent who wants to go there.

–Nathan

Cuckoo for Catholic Puffs

It was the first full morning of school—pre-K for my youngest—and we had been told to go downstairs to the cafeteria, because every morning before class, the Catholic school he’s enrolled in—let’s call it the Church of the Superholy Awesome Ascension—feeds the kids breakfast.

The cafeteria is not an inspiring place. The stairwell down to it is dark and caged off with something that looks a lot like chickenwire. Much of the school, which hasn’t been upgraded since the decades when the Upper West Side and Manhattan Valley were very stabby neighborhoods, has this security fencing inside, as if they have a plan for penning wilding teenagers in if they have to. The cafeteria itself smells like lunchlady at every hour of the day, has big flickering flourescent bulbs, and rickety cateferia benches.

But there, lined up neatly in front of the other per-kindergartners, was something that made me very glad indeed: little plastic boxes of Cocoa Puffs.

This is breakfast at Awesome Ascension. On Tuesdays. On Mondays it’s an off-label cereal called Marshmallow Mateys. I am pretty sure that last Thursday I saw a pancake and a cookie on each plate. On Fridays, I assume, they line up pixie sugar straws so the kids can snort it like blow.

So why would this make me happy?

It’s a long story, but it starts probably from the moment we first got pregnant and began to become, by virtue of demographics alone, a part of one of the most precious and unbearable communities on earth: Manhattan professionals who have children. Our cohort in this group are, to paint them broadly, neurotic and overempowered and hovering and terrified of sugar. If a Whole Foods megastore hadn’t finally come to the Upper West Side a few years ago, I do believe that the hundred thousand yoga moms who were screaming for a way to get more flax in their toddlers diets would have just gone ahead and built it with their own hands, like an old-fashioned barn raising.

These were the people who clearly designed and populated the bloodless, sugar-fearing Montessori school I sent my son to last year. I wrote a little bit about the first hints of oddity from the place here. Suffice to say that things got stranger from there. Enamored with her own sense of order, my son’s teacher rebuffed him when he hugged her, confiscated his jello (too much sugar) and generally was a nightmare of yuppie rulemaking. All at the low price of $19k a year.

So we chose Catholic school. Not because we are Catholic. We are not. My mother-in-law is, but we are unmoved. And I have a beef with any bureaucracy that would harbor child molesters while attacking gay rights inside and outside their church. But there’s another side of Catholicism, one that involves a lot of soup kitchens, righteous stands on immigration, and, generally, lots of mitzvah. Among those mitzvahs, in our neighborhood at least: they offer the only affordable pre-K.

Which brings us to the Cocoa Puffs. I know it’s bad for my kid. Marshmallow Mateys are undoubtedly even worse. My wife was similarly unamused when one of his new teachers suggested that she “pack a few bags of chips” so he would have something to snack on during the long afterschool program.

But there’s something meaningful about all that junk food being presented as breakfast and snack: it reminds me of the schools I was in growing up. I remember thinking this all throughout that long, tetchy Montessori year with my son last year (they had a no refund policy, so we were, quite simply, stuck): screw all this advanced parenting and hyperintentional educating. When I was a kid, I was taught by obese women who loved me. Same with all my friends. We got hugs and little plastic cups of some fluorescent drink they couldn’t even legally call juice. We ate chicken nuggets that probably had no chicken. And breakfast at my public school was always some processed cereal with a little carton of chocolate milk.

In my mind, a little junk food comes with a lot of love. And that, more than a ruthlessly healthy diet, is what I want for my boy.