Busy

You know you're a parent when you've been hard at work for four hours, and you've just gotten to work.

Pregnant and I Know It

Not me, but my lovely wife, who is about to give birth to our third son. She's ready to be done being pregnant, and this one goes out to her:

Deep Thought

It would be really nice to be able to take a vacation from being a parent.

It's a Dad's Life

Got a kick outta this video (thanks Ian!)

No Best Friends Allowed

Continuing the parenting theme of recent days, I've read a few stories like this one denouncing the tendency of some child educators to believe that children should not have best friends, believing that doing so would only cause future pain. As stated in a NYTimes article:

[having a best friend] signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying. […]
“I don’t think it’s particularly healthy for a child to rely on one friend,” said Jay Jacobs, the camp’s director. “If something goes awry, it can be devastating. It also limits a child’s ability to explore other options in the world.”

Yikes. Let me join the party! This attitude is exactly what the excellent book "The Self Esteem Trap" taught me - life is all about dealing with failure and pain, and protecting children from it will only serve to make them more vulnerable to depression and self-esteem issues down the road. This attitude - in educators, no less! - smacks of "helicopter parenting," where parents "helicopter" in to save their kids whenever things are going wrong (problems with other kids, grades, exams, etc.) Humans learn from mistakes, and it's better to let kids make their mistakes when they're kids and able to more easily learn, adapt, and move on then when their adults and mistakes have more severe consequences.

Parental Stress

The NYTimes has an interesting piece out about how fathers are dealing with their new role as not just provider but nurturer as well. As the downer title (Now, Dad Feels as Stressed as Mom) implies, the short answer is: Not very well.

...several studies show that fathers are now struggling just as much — and sometimes even more — than mothers in trying to fulfill their responsibilities at home and in the office. Just last week, Boston College released a study called “The New Dad” suggesting that new fathers face a subtle bias in the workplace, which fails to recognize their stepped-up family responsibilities and presumes that they will be largely unaffected by children.
Fathers also seem more unhappy than mothers with the juggling act: In dual-earner couples, 59 percent of fathers report some level of “work-life conflict,” compared with about 45 percent of women, according to a 2008 report from the Families and Work Institute in New York.
The research highlights the singular challenges of fathers. Men are typically the primary breadwinner, but they also increasingly report a desire to spend more time with their children. To do so, they must first navigate a workplace that is often reluctant to give them time off for family reasons. And they must negotiate with a wife who may not always recognize their contributions at home.

I'm always a bit leery of these articles that take statistical trends and abstract them out to absolutes - in short, anything that states things declaratively. Myself, I've never felt any subtle bias in the workplace about the duties i've needed to provide as a father, but I've always been very upfront about what I feel my parental duties require. I also try, as much as I can, to steer clear of the more damaging gender roles. Having said that, Kelly and I have fallen into a certain division of labor with the kids, and that she spends more time thinking and planning for the future then I, leading to her feeling, in the article's phrase "psychologically responsible, and that’s a burden... That psychological responsibility adds to the sense of feeling like you’re doing more, even though it may be somewhat invisible." But all in all I think that we've worked out a good arrangement - for now, at least. (Who knows what tomorrow will bring as the kids get older!) And both of us certainly try to support and acknowledge each others efforts. Having said that, I know that needing two incomes does put a stress on things - there's never enough time to cook, to put as much attention into the kids after work as you'd like, and daycare is certainly not an ideal way to raise your children, regardless of the quality of the caregivers - but at the moment we're doing the best we can. And I don't feel unduly stressed at any given moment.

On Children

As you may have heard, Barak Obama suspended his campaign for two days to visit his ailing grandmother. (This is in direct contract to John McCain who said he suspended his campaign for two days but in actuality did not. )

This post touchingly muses on the results of having children and sez two interesting things:

1. ...too many black men see child-rearing as "responsibility" and not "personal investment."

2. Obama's mother, a relatively young woman when he was born, will not be here to see him inaugurated, should he win. Whenever, I think of that I just get sad--mostly because she did know the rewards of parenting and threw herself at her kids. There's something unjust in the fact that she won't get to see the results of all her work.

The idea of a child being an "investment", other then a cynical "someone's gotta take care of me when i'm old", is an interesting thought. I've always thought in the back of my mind that bringing a child into this world, with its mass murders, class warfare, and crazy leaders, is implicitly selfish, but this article really made me think that it's really optimistic: you're thinking that your child could really help make things better. Obama's mother certainly realized her dreams of her son making the most of himself - he'll almost certainly be the next president of the United States!

But when Coates writes that Obama's mother "won't bet to see the results of all her work", I think that's unfair. I don't believe she had a child with the goal of having him become president; she had a child out of love, and she did see the results of her work by seeing her son grow up to become a decent human who loved not only her but also others in the world. The rest of it - even being President - is really just whipped cream on top. And to call being president "results" is, I think, to cynically dismiss that accomplishment.