DadWagon Q&A: Jennifer Niesslein of the late, lamented Brain, Child

As editors of a dadblog that rarely produces anything particularly smart, we are keenly aware how little protein-rich writing there is about parenting. So at the end of May we were saddened, along with the rest of the Internet, to hear that the magazine Brain, Child would stop publishing. The magazine, run for 13 years by co-founders Stephanie Wilkinson and Jennifer Neisslein, had a unique style of parental inquiry, often expressed through searing personal essays, that seems quite irreplaceable. And yet, they are no more. Neisslein was good enough to chat with DadWagon about Brain, Child, its demise, and the future of writing about parenting.

DadWagon So let’s start at the beginning. Why did you start Brain, Child?

Niesslein The short answer: it’s something Stephanie and I wanted to read. The longer answer is that I didn’t feel as if I had a community (Steph was literally the only new mother I knew at that point), and I was irritated at the condescension directed at mothers.

DadWagon Let’s talk about that condescension. Where did you see it?

Niesslein Oh, holy hell–everywhere? From the ped office calling me “Mommy” to various dogma-based advice-givers warnings that if you don’t follow these parameters, you will almost certainly screw your kid up. We just really wanted something that was a peer-to-peer kind of vibe.

DadWagon The wonderful (!) thing is that those are completely different kinds of condescension, although they both would seem to add to a sort of forced identity change: you are a mother now, I’m going to call you Mommy and tell you how to raise your child

Niesslein Yep! The whole title is a play on, yes, I have a brain and a child, and it’s, as Steph says, not an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp.

DadWagon So that peer-to-peer conversation, did it tend to have its own tilt? That is, did it advocate for more of a free-range parenting approach, for example?

Niesslein Not really. We don’t have any particular parenting philosophy. Honestly, I couldn’t really live with myself if I thought I had all the answers for every family. Do what works for you. I think that’s one reason people liked the magazine. You get to step inside families like yours and families that aren’t like yours. For me, at least, it’s been a big empathy-strengthening experience.

DadWagon I guess that is a bit of a hallmark of the magazine, that open-mindedness. Do you think it’s still as rare now as it was in 1999 to find that kind of writing on parenting?

Niesslein No, not all. What I think is rare still are places to publish the length of work that we do. If you’re writing under 1000 words, there are some outlets, and if you’re writing a book, it’s possible to find a publisher, but if you’re writing long, meaty essays about parenthood, it’s a tough place to be.

DadWagon It does raise the question: your readers (including folks we’ve heard from) were passionate, you were doing something quite different then and now. Why did it fail?

Niesslein I don’t actually think of this as a failure. Maybe I’m being delusional, but we had a good long run, got to do things and meet people we wouldn’t have otherwise, and actually made a modest living for a number of years. The day we made our announcement, the message we got… that was probably the most gratifying day of my professional life.

I’m thinking of this as a transition to a different business model. Why are we having to transition? I wish I knew the answer. But I think it was a combination of rising postage costs, the simple cost of paper, and the internet. Or not really the internet but the perception that the written word should be free.

DadWagon The idea that something like Brain, Child should be free is amazing, because it was already quite a bargain to subscribe (I’m saying that, of course, as the kind of hypocrite who didn’t actually subscribe). But seriously, you were charging very little for some great content. If you had it to do over, would you raise rates, or is there something else you’d change?

Niesslein Hmm. I can’t think of what. All of publishing, from the big six to small independent magazines like Brain, Child, are in flux, it seems to me.

DadWagon You mentioned in your Transitions letter than e-subscriptions had been going well, but not enough to keep the presses running. Will you keep eBooks going? With your anthologies? What is the afterlife plan?

Niesslein It seems like you have to have an ereader version these days, doesn’t it? We still haven’t worked out all the nitty gritty of the anthologies yet. We’re uploading the Summer issue to the printer today, and then I think the plan is rest and vacation, then work on the new plan.

DadWagon Will you go back to journalism?

Niesslein I’m actually working on a novel now–I’m 25K words in. Who knows if I have any talent for fiction, but I’m having fun. It’s like the lamest mid-life crisis ever.

DadWagon Yes, from editing to writing isn’t exactly sailing around the world for a year, but I understand the vertigo.

Niesslein It’s about my speed.

DadWagon Final question: the world of (ick) “mommy blogging” and “dadblogging” has come into existence almost entirely since you started Brain, Child. What’s your view of the parenting blogosphere in general? What is it useful for, what doesn’t it do well?

Niesslein I’m not very well-versed in it. But I once interviewed Jenn Mattern (from the blog Breed ‘Em and Weep), and she made the point that writing is writing–parenthood is just one lens to look at the human experience. I think that’s true, whether you’re writing for a magazine or a blog. Like everything, the quality of blogs can vary and what people are looking to get out of them varies. Sorry to be so wishy-washy here.

DadWagon I can see the point. But to echo what you said before, longform is not a big strength in the blogosphere. I hope someone picks up where you left off, and pushes it forward. There. That’s my closing wish.

Niesslein I’m trying to think of something pithy to say here.

DadWagon Please let us know when the anthologies come out.

Niesslein Oh, definitely! Thanks for the chat.

To Pre-K or Not to Pre-K, That Is the Question

So, we got the letter: Sasha has a spot in a free pre-K program starting this fall! This puts us in a bit of a quandary—since we never thought she’d get in, we didn’t really figure out how we’d respond to an acceptance.

Let me back up a bit. Universal pre-K, for those of you blissfully unaware of the concept, is, in NYC, a bit of a misnomer. It’s a public program available to everyone (hence “universal”), although so limited in practice that most kids have little chance of being accepted, unless they’re willing to go to a school deemed “not so great” by the hordes of over-ambitious, over-protective, over-sensitive parents who populate the blogs of this great metropolis.

We applied, I think, to six schools, expecting to get rejected from our top choices: the bilingual Shuang Wen in the Lower East Side, for instance. And that’s just what happened, except that we put, as our last choice, the school that is only four blocks from our home in Brooklyn, P.S. 38. And that’s where we got in. Yay.

And so now what do we do? As much as I like the idea of FREE PRESCHOOL, it’s complicated to just say yes. For one, Sasha really likes her current preschool, the bilingual English-Chinese Preschool of America. We like it, too, particularly the fact that it runs from 8:30 in the morning till 6 p.m., allowing both me and Jean to work a full day. Will pre-K at P.S. 38 do the same? Not quite—the school day ends around 3, and we’re not too sure of the status of after-school programs for the pre-K kids. So we’d either need to cut our own workday short, or hire a daily babysitter/nanny, whose cost would totally negate the whole FREE PRESCHOOL benefit.

But then, of course, there’s the possibility that my or Jean’s work situation could change drastically at any moment, either freeing us up to spend afternoons with our precious snowflake or burying us deeper in office dilemmas or sending us packing for Taipei post-haste.

Gah!

Why isn’t there some Web version of those mortgage calculators that could just let me enter in all the details and give me one single answer: Yay or Nay? In the end, I think we’ll register her for P.S. 38 and make our actual decision sometime in August, when my book is done, the second baby is imminent, and we have a better sense of our financial future. Blech. Hey, what do you think?

[polldaddy poll=6314436]

My Child Will Bother You Now

This past weekend, Jean, Sasha, and I made a courageous trip out to our local playground, two whole blocks away. Jean and I were tired, it was hot out, and while we wanted Sasha to get some running and playing in, we weren’t about to participate. Instead, we sat on a bench in the shade and watched as Sasha climbed ladders, slid down slides, and paid a surprising amount of attention to a year-old baby named Bea and her parents. She walked around with Bea, and ran and played and made sure to talk to Bea’s parents—she was performing for them, really, and checking in to see if they were watching.

As I observed this slightly weird dynamic—what did these parents think of this strange kid giving them so much attention?—I was reminded of a post I wrote almost exactly a year ago, in which I was on the other side of the line:

I’m out somewhere, with or without Sasha and Jean, and some child chooses me as a play pal, the adult who’s going to help build a castle out of blocks at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum or play catch in Prospect Park. I don’t mind this, exactly, but it’s disconcerting, and I’m trying to understand why.

On one level, of course, I wonder: Well, why me? Why not your own parents, kid? And then I look around and don’t see the parents, or see them (or the nanny) doing something else, on the phone or whatever, and it’s clear why I’m chosen: I’m available. Also, I’m pretty good at playing. I can be silly, I’m happy to jump and run and roll around, I can still sort of get myself into that frame of mind that seems irrational and erratic to adults but utterly natural to children.

Still I can’t shake this feeling that it’s weird to play with someone else’s kids. I don’t know what the ground rules are: Am I seen as an actual adult, or just a bigger kid? What responsibility do I have for the child? I try to remember my own childhood: Did I approach other, unknown adults to play?

Today, I think I understand this much better. Beyond our being exhausted the other day, we also wanted Sasha to learn to play on her own, to approach and speak to and make friends with other people, both big and small, without our chaperoning her through the process. Independence, I think it’s called.

Bea’s parents may have been wondering, Why us? Why not your own parents, kid? But in a year or two, when they start encouraging Bea to go off and develop her own social dynamics, they’ll get it, just as I get it now. Insight!*

*I promise: No more of this insight bullshit for a while, okay?

The Tantrum: Should Young Men Even Be Allowed to Breed? Part III

(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one question over the course of a week. For previous Tantrums, click here.)

Do you ever get the feeling that everything we think we know about parenting is wrong? Especially all the stuff that is new to parenting, things that our parents didn’t do and their parents didn’t do and nobody’s parents did stretching back to the misty dawn of history when we were all just monkey parents first climbing out of the trees and trudging with our children, who did not have Razr scooters or 50-point shock-resistant child helmets, onto the alluvial plain?

Well, I feel that way all the time. I second-guess a lot of my decisions, especially the bigger ones I’ve made: raising the kids in the middle of the city, choosing a career that often takes me far from home for too long at a time. And this is doubly true of one of the most elemental decisions any family can make: when to have kids.

Our decision, unequivocally, was this: we waited.

You see, I met my wife in the heart of the Fugazi era, the In on the Kill Taker years, also known as the early 1990’s. She spotted me smoking cigarettes on breaks behind the coffee shop where I worked: something about me must have screamed, now there’s a man who is going to have a multi-decade problem with nicotine. I want in on that action, because she finagled an introduction through a mutual friend. And we went from there.

I was 18 years old, and she wasn’t much older than me. That is sort of shocking every time I think about it, not just because I feel incredibly lucky (and anachronistic) to have someone who is, as much as is possible, a life partner. Like, if we don’t mess this up moving forward, we have the opportunity to have been together for nearly a complete human lifespan. It’s also shocking to me because that means that if we had wanted to, or if we had lived in a post-GOP world where there is no birth control for teenagers, we could have had kids in 1994. My child would be 18, about to make some terrible decisions the night of her prom and hopefully still going to college. Instead of DadWagon, I’d be blogging now on EmptyNesters.com. Instead of writing this post while waiting for yet another load of sheets that my preschooler peed on to finish washing, I’d probably have an amazing roast in oven, be decanting some nice red, about to have a group of fabulous creative unencumbered friends over for a dinner party with my wife that will end with some great stories and then—why not?—a few elegant lines of coke and a trip to a rooftop electronica party in SoHo for well-heeled people who don’t need to wake up at 6am tomorrow to get their tiny fucking children to Kindergarten the next morning.

This is the fantasy that I torment myself with. And mind you, I’m not even as old as my fellow-bloggers. I had my first kid at 30. But that means that right around the time that my youngest is set to go to college (inshallah), I will be hit in the forehead with the 2×4 that is Turning 50 Years Old and then soon enough it’ll be time for apply for an AARP card and get ready for eternity in a mouldering grave.

The thing about waiting, though, was that it was technically the right decision. As my fantasy of life-after-children might indicate, I have maturity issues. My teenaged/20-year-old self was a fair bit worse, and I would have had a hard time making good decisions for a child. And then there’s the question of education, and career, and the sacrifices one makes for mammon throughout the 20s. In agrarian or hunter-gatherer societies, I would have had to kill a bear at the age of 18 and eat its gall bladder* then basically my education and transformation into manhood would have been complete. In the information economy, however, I needed to finish my four (okay, five) year degree, follow my wife around the country as she got advanced professional degrees, all the while hanging around on the fringes of a major media organization waiting for my big shot. In short, I was broke and professionally unstable, and now that I’m a highly-paid dadblogger, I’m a better parent.

That’s what I think, at least. The truth is—and here, finally, is where we get to the actual topic of this tantrum—that young parents can be amazing parents. I know that from my middle-aged vantage point, it’s tempting paint younger parents as chronically unfit, the kind of people who make the evening news, who smoke weed and drive off with their baby in its carrier still on the roof of their car. There are those types of idiots, sure, but I’ve seen young parents who also do a great job. and all that chaos and instability that goes with being young can make the bond between parent and child even more elemental. They can be tough for each other, bond more deeply, become a more integral part of a joint life because, at 22 or whatnot, your life isn’t really formed at all yet.

And that gets to the heart of this question of old vs young parenting: Do you want your children to arrive onto a stage that has already been set (older parents)? Or do you want them to arrive early into a life that is still being assembled (younger parents)? I think there are benefits and drawbacks to each, but kids don’t need nice cars or stable incomes nearly as much as they need parents who put them at the center of existence. If a child arrives and is just intruding on what was otherwise a very trim and organized existence, as it seems with some older parents I know, then whom does that help?

Mainly, I long for a touch of anarchism to all of this, and that there’s a powerful case for having them young. Screw conventional wisdom. Be a teen parent. Just to prove Ted and Matt wrong.

*Note: I have no idea what I’m talking about.