I swear, perhaps too often. My default frustration lines are typically "for fuck's sake" or "are you fucking serious?" And yet my first reaction to obvious bad behavior on the part of Garbage McWoof was to open my mouth and let one of my mother's favorite phrases come flying out. Apparently, it's a fairly common phenomenon. According to the Daily Mail, "eight out of ten of today's mothers admit they use the very same cliches to discipline their children that they had to endure from their own parents." Granted, I have a dog, not a child, but the phenomenon still applied. When it came to laying down the law, I went with one of Mom's old standbys, followed by another one of Mom's old standbys: "You're skatin' on thin ice, Mister!"

Kathryn Crawford of TheBabyWebsite.com tells the Daily Mail that mothers often revert to cliched sayings because we've seen them work before: "The funny thing is that many mums will insist they are nothing like their own mothers," she says, "But the reality is that we can't help but teach our children as our parents taught us, and that means using old sayings and routines which worked for our parents." Naturally, there are learned behaviors, and instantaneous reactions that one picks up during one's own childhood. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. (After writing that sentence, my mother's voice popped into my head again to say, "Isn't. The word is Isn't. Don't say ain't. You weren't raised in a barn.")

According to Crawford's site, the Top 20 sayings passed on from parents to children include "Wait and see," "Because I said so," "I've told you a thousand times," and "That's for me to know and you to find out." "Cripes Almighty," isn't on the list, though it certainly makes my Top 20 Momisms. Feel free to add your own parental hand-me-downs in the comments.

Are We Turning Into Our Parents? [The Baby Website]
Because I Said So: Eight Out Of Ten Mothers Admit To Repeating The Old Adages Their Parents Used On Them [DailyMail]

Babble's list includes such archetypes as "the bragger parent" and "the obsessed parent." (Still mired in the mostly-childless morass of people's snack updates and song lyrics, I can only yearn for a time when anyone will have anything as actually important as a baby to discuss, but I can only imagine that for the more restrained parents amongst us, such exhibitionism might grate - and, apparently, worse.) What the author seems to be really objecting to, though, is the assumption of equal fascination that characterizes both many Facebook users and many new (and newish) parents. For a new parent, Facebook and its ilk are a boon - both a connection to the world and to those doting relatives who are hungry for info. But these same qualities might have others reaching for "block status."

And that, of course, is ultimately the point: Facebook, Twitter, they're all optional - you don't need to see or hear anything you don't want to, and the truth is many of us love being annoyed. Facebook giveth, and Facebook taketh away. (Mostly it giveth, and giveth, and giveth, it's just that sometimes it's giving you "Jack-o-lanterns" and witticisms and invitations to join groups of middle-school-level irony.) We all love to grumble about the vagaries of various populations, be it the enthusiasms of our parents' generation, the narcissism of our own, the absorption of new parents. It's silly to complain, but it's just as unreasonable for the article's readers to huff, "then don't join!" All of these are part of the fabric of modern living, all necessary and vital. How anemic would life be with only restrained reports of moves or New York Times links? It's the Great Conversation. With pictures.

Facebook's Five Most Annoying Parents [Babble]

Writes the New York Times' Hilary Stout,

incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells..."I've worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking," said Amy McCready, the founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, which teaches parenting skills in classes, individual coaching sessions and an online course. "This is so the issue right now. As parents understand that it's not socially acceptable to spank children, they are at a loss for what they can do. They resort to reminding, nagging, timeout, counting 1-2-3 and quickly realize that those strategies don't work to change behavior. In the absence of tools that really work, they feel frustrated and angry and raise their voice. They feel guilty afterward, and the whole cycle begins again."

So, those unenlightened generations who did hit their kids maintained a calm silence at all times? Doubtful. Yelling is apparently traumatic for kids, but having come from such a family - no hitting, plenty of exasperated yelling - at least part of the issue seems to be that it's so ineffective. Yeah, it might mean Mom's mad, but in our house, that was as bad as it got...her being mad. Yelling implied a lack of control that wasn't scary, but certainly didn't suggest authority. On Supernanny, a show to which I'm addicted, if only because she makes parenting look so deceptively easy, Jo arrives at a house full of screaming, ineffectual adults and insolent brats and with a little consistency, plenty of hugs and a few rounds on the Naughty Mat, gets the house running like a well-oiled Duggar machine. (And say what you will about Michelle Duggar, the woman doesn't raise her voice.) The issue isn't "corporal punishment" versus "total lack of discipline," and it seems a little problematic to make the choice seem so diametric. Indeed, isn't that parenting coach (!) kind of implying that spanking is the only solution that "works" - albeit "socially unacceptable?" Many a formerly slap-happy Supernanny success story could tell you otherwise - at least as of two weeks after filming.

For Some Parents, Shouting Is The New Spanking [NYTimes]

What impact this had on our sex lives I don't know, but I do know that as adults my brother and I obviously have to scream this at random intervals whenever we're together. These things make an impression. A piece on MSNBC talks about the dynamics of watching TV together. And forget Where the Wild Things Are. New findings suggest that watching TV with parents can freak kids out.

While it seems logical to protect a child from something scary by watching together, in fact a lot of kids take their cues from parents, and a skittish mom can only add to anxiety. (Like, even flinching; you don't need to be terrified by Dumbo, although some of us are.) "The researchers suggest that well-intentioned parents might be inadvertently turning up the volume on fear. That can happen simply because children are watching their parents' reactions." This logic applies to many facets of childrens' fears, and a lot of it's pretty intuitive: we've all seen a small child "decide" how bad a fall or scrape is - what might have been a small incident if dealt with matter-of-factly can become a screaming tantrum if an adult reacts with excessive concern or panic.

The piece details the various ways coddling can reinforce fears, the way a parent can communicate his own neuroses - and makes the point that the opposite "tough-it-out" extreme's not great, either. Common-sense stuff, for the most part. The TV findings are really interesting though because it's fascinating to think how much of fear is natural and intuitive, how much it's influenced by circumstance. I've seen young children in the same family react completely differently to The Wizard of Oz, and for that matter I have strong memories of being so terrified in a theatre showing of The Black Cauldron that my aunt had to take me out of the theatre; to this day I think of it as the scariest movie in the world.

The article doesn't get into it, but it's hard not to think about that other scary parent-movie scenario, sex scenes. I wonder how much of that squirming discomfort is natural, and how much is communicated by our parents. A friend tells me that sitting between her parents through Don't Look Now remains one of the more traumatic memories of her early-teen years. "But that wasn't even just the normal squirm," she writes, "because my parents kind of looked like Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, so it was doubly awful." Scary indeed.

Mom And Dad Make Scary Movies Even Scarier [MSNBC]

Janzen's publicizing her book Mennonite in a Little Black Dress with interviews in both Time and Marie Claire, and in both places she emphasizes the conservatism of her Fresno upbringing. In Marie Claire (interview not online), she says,

My mom wouldn't let me wear jeans. She sewed me polyester pants with the crease down the front and an elastic band. Oh, my lord, were they modest. She would lengthen them with different-colored panels, like burgundy. We had a TV but couldn't turn it on unless Mom and Dad were in the room; if anyone on a show or a commercial ever kissed — even in a marital context — my dad would change the channel and say, "Smut!"

In college, Janzen "began to read about other religions and read philosophy and literature," and she ended up leaving the faith. But after her husband left her for another man and she got in a car accident, she went back to live with her parents and discovered that she respected their way of life. She writes that her mother forced her to be active instead of "hol[ing] up out of self-pity," and that "trailing one's seventy-year-old parents around town is an excellent and under-discussed cure for heartbreak." She also says,

I had remembered the Mennonites of my youth as congenial folks, so it wasn't a surprise that I loved them as an adult. What was a surprise was that I loved what they stood for - I loved the faith itself, and the way they consistently demonstrated what they believed. For instance, when my mom learned that an elderly woman from her church was recuperating from a surgery, it wasn't a question of if she would visit. It was a question of whether to bring homemade zwiebach or a tray of platz. It was the genuine human warmth of this community that set me thinking about faith in new ways.

I lived with my parents for about a month and a half this summer, after some shitty life events of my own, and although my parents are professors and not Mennonites, my experience was in some ways pretty similar. The media has been buzzing for at least five years now with stories of helicopter parents who coddle their children through an "extended adolescence" that lasts long past college, and maybe it just shows that I'm getting old, but this wasn't my experience. Going to college for me involved a pretty big break with my parents, an instant transition from living with them to talking to them once a week (on Sundays), unless I was in some kind of major crisis. It was a time when I did things even when my dad asked me not to (he had, very graciously I later realized, decided he could no longer tell me what to do), and a time when I decided I could never spend more than two weeks at home because we were too different and there was too much fighting.

And then I grew up for real — or at least, a little more. I realized not only that home is where they have to take you in — a motivating factor for Janzen also — but that my parents aren't actually all that different from me. They do the things I couldn't do in front of them as a teenager — like say "fuck" and drink beer — and they disapprove much less of my personal life than I'd always assumed. In fact, I probably had to assume that they disapproved in order to feel like I was forming my own identity, but the one I've formed turns out to look like theirs in a lot of ways, and I'm not freaked out about it — too much.

I recognize that I'm very lucky to have parents who've given me both freedom and support, and that some people's relationships with their progenitors can be painful and disastrous. I also know that I come from a generation and a class that's said to have a lot in common with its parents, and that some people think this indicates insufficient progress. But my mom is the one who showed me how to donate to micro-lending organizations when I got my first job, who makes sure I recycle, and who calls me on my shit when I start blaming men for all the problems in the world (although my brother has gotten pretty good at this too).

There are still things my parents and I don't agree on, and there's a reason I moved out again — no matter how well we got along, living with them still made me feel like an overgrown kid, especially after I realized I no longer had any keys. And Janzen doesn't seem to have actually rejoined the Mennonite faith. It goes without saying that people need to separate from their parents to a certain extent in order to lead independent lives. But the idea that my generation represents some kind of unprecedented crazy closeness may be based on little more than the break many baby boomers made with their parents in the 60s and 70s. If Janzen's experience teaches us anything, it's that defining what's normal when it comes to family relationships is pretty fruitless, and that going back home can be an eye-opener, not just an ordeal.

Rhoda Janzen: From Modern To Mennonite [Time]

If ever there was a convincing case for parental divorce, it was Barrymore, who, after getting clean, legally distanced herself from an exploitative manager-mom who used her to get into clubs, and a dad who only called to ask for money. It seems to have worked out. And when reading about other cases in which parents seem - ahem - more parasitic than protective, the need for distance seems like a necessary means of achieving a healthy and functional adulthood.

But these are the extreme cases - neglect, exploitation, substance or emotional abuse. Likewise, a psychiatrist in today's New York Times discusses a case in which he took the extreme step of urging a patient to cut off contact with his parents after meeting them - they deemed the patient's homosexual "lifestyle" sinful and had told him it would have been better had he died in a car accident rather than his brother. Obviously, his doctor felt - as did the judge handling Barrymore's "divorce" - that this was the only chance, a process he likens to removing a gangrenous limb.

He's right when he says "the assumption that parents are predisposed to love their children unconditionally and protect them from harm is not universally true." This is why, theoretically, we have social workers and judges (who decide whether balloon-hoaxes and Nazi names are grounds for child removal, rather than the well-intentioned mob). The problem is when it's not so clear-cut - and when someone's an adult. The Times encouraged readers to talk about their own experiences with such untenable relationships, and they did flow: stories of abuse and wrenching decisions to cut off family as adults for the sake of emotional well-being. Much as I feel for those who've experienced real horrors - and there are plenty - I also couldn't help the niggling thought that a lot of it comes down to temperament and, yes, what people are willing or able to endure.

When I decided to see a therapist for the first time, I visited someone who'd come highly-recommended by several family friends. I told her about pressures I felt from my dad, fights with my mom, growing pains. After several sessions she looked at me gravely and said, "Your family is toxic. And I really think you need to cut them out of your life." Huh? Maybe we had some dysfunction, but toxic? Really? I was stunned. Even had this been an option - which it wasn't - I didn't want to cut my parents off! Later, I learned that two of the people who'd recommended this same therapist had, indeed, severed their ties with their families and were the happier for it, but I didn't see her again. Most families are somewhat difficult, and dealing with that - to a reasonable extent - is part of being an adult, surely, not an impediment to growth. I have a friend who's cut off her mother because her mom's drug addiction has turned her into someone she doesn't know, and, for that matter, someone who's drained her bank account. She says she hopes they reconcile, but at the end of the day, this wasn't a choice for her. And I guess that's what it comes down to.

Drew Barrymore [CBS]

Divorcing Your Parents [NY Times]
When Parents Are Too Toxic to Tolerate [NY Times]
60 Minutes: Drew Barrymore [CBS News]

In today's NY Times, Dr. Perri Klass tells the story of a family she treated. The oldest of the three children was very high-achieving. Klass writes,

She is the oldest, her mother would say, so she gets lots of attention, and she works very hard. When her younger sister turned out to be an equally good student, the proud mother explained that naturally she wanted to be just like her older sister.

Then a long-looked-for baby boy was born. When he was a toddler, I began to worry that his speech seemed a little slow in coming. His mother was perfectly calm about it. He is the only boy, she said, so he gets lots of attention, and he doesn't have to work very hard.

Klass uses this example to illustrate that "birth order can be used to explain every trait and its precise opposite." But that doesn't keep parents from making assumptions about their kids based on which one popped out of the womb first. Klass talked to Dr. Peter A. Gorski, who says, "Too many parents are haunted by experiences both good and bad that they identify with their birth order." They may then "classify their own children according to birth order [...] which in turn can lead to a sense of identification or even rejection and to 'self-fulfilling prophecies.'"

Last week we learned that parental perceptions may amplify gender differences — now it seems they may exaggerate, or even create, the influence of birth order as well. Of course, it's no surprise that how parents see their kids changes how those kids grow up, or that parents draw on their own good and bad memories. But what's the solution here? Should parents refrain from drawing on their own experiences at all, to avoid unduly influencing their kids?

Making the issue a lot more complicated is that kids, even babies, aren't just passive bags of influence. They're human beings, and they influence their parents right back. Not only that, but what they take from their upbringing may be totally different from what their parents think they are giving. My mom, for instance, is always shocked by the things I remember her saying (whether or not she really told me that "when you die, everything just goes black forever" is a big bone of contention). Klass quotes an old saying that "no two children grow up in the same family, because each sibling's experience is so different" — by that standard, parents don't really live in the same family as their children either.

So how can parents avoid making their assumptions about their kids into "self-fulfilling prophecies?" Obviously, it's a good idea not to underestimate children, or to treat them according to gender or birth-order stereotypes. But anyone who believes that parents' "prophecies" wholly dictate how kids turn out is giving parents a lot of credit. If that were true, the world would have a lot more Einsteins and a lot fewer assholes.

Birth Order: Fun To Debate, But How Important? [NYT]
Does Birth Order Matter? [NYT]

Earlier: Do Parents Create Gender Differences?

Recently we linked to a CNN article in which a mom discussed her preference for a boy over a girl baby. Now Tori Spelling is admitting to the same feelings, prior to giving birth to daughter Stella, now a year old. The product of a famously contentious relationship with her own mom, Candi, Spelling apparently worried about replicating the dynamic. "How was I going to handle a girl?" She asks in Cookie.

Of course, now that the daughters exist, both moms have come around, presumably appreciating the differences - and, more to the point, appreciating them as individuals rather than simply defined by their sex. But soon enough, apparently, that sort of journey won't be necessary. Says Babble,

Now, according to a Swedish medical ruling, if a mother or couple discover the gender of their baby and decide "that's what we were hoping for" they can get an abortion on that basis

It seems sad to think that people like Wilson or Spelling who take advantage of this won't get the chance to challenge their assumptions and maybe have something unexpected and wonderful happen - and what's with no one wanting girls? (Selective pregnancy for boys is, after all, chillingly familiar.) Then too, this seems like a very slippery slope: what of those who want to isolate the "gay" gene to guarantee heterosexual offspring?

On the other hand, perhaps any parent who is that single-mindedly eager for a son or daughter might let the disappointment (?) color a child's life, and if that's the only way they feel capable of parenting well, then...But: there's so much chance in having a child at all that the sex is surely almost the least of it! Having children seems to be largely about giving yourself over to a loss of control: to love, to fear, to the unexpected. Control is futile - isn't that the tragedy and the beauty of giving birth to another human being? - and any parent is going to learn that soon enough. Sex would seem like a good place to start.

Don't like Your Baby's Gender? Sweden Rules 'Gender-Based' Abortion Legal [Babble]
Tori Spelling Was Worried About Raising a Girl [Cookie]
Earlier: This Mom: Brave Enough To Admit She Wanted A Boy, Not A Girl

While last week we learned about the travails of potty-training, now we learn the pitfalls in store for those who've mastered the bathroom: consuming obsession. The little boy's obsession with urinals becomes a tyranny that makes any foray out of the house protracted and urinal-centric, and because it cuts down on urinal time, the child refuses to let his mother take him to the bathroom.

"I have to pee."I wanted to say, "No, you don't have to pee; you just want to see the urinal, and you know what, it's the same urinal as the one at the last gas station. I'm not stopping, Boo. I am not stopping." And I would have said this, but my wife thinks our son is a god, and so if he said he had to pee then we had to honor the signals his body was giving him...I knew I couldn't win with her, so I told myself it was OK, this fixation of his.

I don't know about a god, but the kid is, like, a urinal savant! At the fancy Parker Meridien Hotel, the little boy says, "Probably they do have urinals. Probably the urinals have pink deodorizing disks inside of white baskets over the drain. Probably they have a low urinal for kids and a high one for grown-ups." Oh, and he also loves Stereolab.

After a while, the little boy gets over the urinal stage and moves onto Beethoven's piano sonatas. The parents are relieved, and still confused. The essay i, obviously, s a paeon to the mysterious fixations of childhood, and a good evocation - albeit a perhaps unintended nod to the strains such things place on the parental relationship and the push-pull of discipline versus self-expression. We've all known kids with odd fixations: pipes, shards of glass (no! dangerous!), meerkats, fine tailoring. This author is clearly very proud of his little boy, and rightly so: he seems smart and interesting and fun to hang out with, and one can pardon a bit of parental boastfulness (because I'm sure this whole first grade Beethoven thing doesn't make the other parents feel inadequate!) At the end of the day, despite his confusion, a urinal fixation makes total sense - they're fascinating! And completely disgusting and sort of primitive and weird! And, something the author doesn't address, they're just for boys, part of a secret male world that women cannot penetrate.

Off-topic: When I was very little, I had a tiny plastic dollhouse urinal. I don't know why. Big Leon, the albino baby doll with the functioning penis [What? -Ed.], was far too big to use it. Freddy and Drano, the little plastic brothers who came with the flea market motorboat, were the right scale, but had wet-suits permanently molded to their bodies, nullifying the need for evacuation. One day, I decided to pee in that tiny urinal, the only chance I'd ever have to use one. The results were predictably disastrous, and the end result was, my mom, apparently not considering me a goddess, threw it away. As a result, they've always retained a certain fascination; the author is wise to give into his child's vagaries.

Life Of The Potty [Salon]

Related: Once Upon A Potty

The problem arises when three-year-old Jessi begins bath time-grabbing William's six-year-old member. Presumably fearing both antisocial tendencies and a Flowers in the Attic dynamic, Mom is alarmed. Writes Katherine Ozment in Salon,

But knowing William didn't really mind his sister's incursions, I had to come up with a reason for him to stop making himself so readily accessible. I crafted the half-baked explanation that he should discourage her from touching him, or she might start grabbing the penises of all the boys in her preschool class and then she wouldn't have any friends.

While this succeeds in forestalling the grabbing issue - although I'm really surprised it didn't just result in a flurry of 'Whys,' which I'd sort of like to hear the answer to - it prompts a wicked case of penis envy, as the eminently-grabbable appendage begins to loom as forbidden fruit. So mom decided to let the three-year-old in on a secret.

"You, Jessie Joan, have a vagina."

At that she smiled wide and proud, as if shocked by her good fortune, though I don't think she had any idea what I was talking about. But it didn't seem to matter.

The next moment, Jessie walked over to William, put her hands on her hips and, swaying back and forth, sang to the tune of nana-nana-boo-boo: "I have a vagina! I have a vagina!"

While it seems late to learn the term - or isn't "vagina" among every little girl's first words? - this is one of the most heartening distillations ever committed to paper or screen. We applaud this little girl for grasping early the essential pride in her femininity we'd like to see in every baby, girl and woman. May she never lose it! After she, you know, realizes what it means.

Mommy, What's A Vagina? [Salon]

First there's "I'm A Better Dad Part-Time," by Richard Seely , who claims that from the moment his daughter was born, she and her mother were forming a bond "and I was, to some degree, excluding myself." As she grew older, Seely's daughter would go into "theatrics" in the absence of her mother. Seely writes:

I lost patience with this behaviour, and ultimately with many of her imperfections.

I became more and more of an ogre. I would snap at her. Tell her "no" sometimes for no other reason than to distinguish myself from her mother. If she got an A on a report card, I'd ask why it wasn't an A-plus. Unconsciously, I would intimidate her. Once - I can't even remember what she had done - all I had to do was look at her and my expression sent her running to her room, afraid of me. I never hit her, and have never contemplated any form of physical response toward her or anyone else, but what mattered was that I made her afraid of me.

And so, when he and his wife got divorced, he was fine with the mother getting custody of the child. He says of his daughter:

Because I don't see her every day, I have much more tolerance for the behaviours that used to frustrate me. I offer comfort instead of scorn if she misses her mother when she's away on a business trip. I celebrate the time we spend together, be it an hour or two after school or a weeklong camping trip in the summer.

I'm happier and more secure in my role as a parent than I ever was before.

But: Does any of this seem like a cop-out? Of course it's easier to be "tolerant" and happy when you've only got to deal with a kid part time; instead of being awakened in the night by fevers or managing tantrums, you're only there for ice cream and games and camping. Fun! But is that parenting, or is that just "hanging out" with a child, like an Aunt, Uncle or family friend would do?

The guy referenced in Strollerderby's post A Dad's Point of View: Am I Selfish? Or Just a Jerk? at least seems self-concious enough to realize he's selfish. Bruce Sallan writes about a ski trip taken with his wife and 12-year-old son. Blogger Keri summarizes his story thusly:

Son got a bad nosebleed. Dad tended to him, called the hospital, found out what to do, and sat with the boy until the blood stopped, almost 30 minutes later. Dad wanted to take turns with Step-mom going skiing, so that one would be with the kid and one on the slopes at all times. Step-mom volunteered to stay with the boy the whole time. After 45 minutes on the mountain, nosebleed recommences, Step-mom calls Dad, and Dad returns to Son. Son wants to go home.

Did the dad take the kid home? No. Sallan explains: "I gave him a relatively stern talk on being a man, learning to deal with some pain, as there will be some pain in life... I explained that running away would only teach him how not to deal with life's crises… We give in to our children's whims and complaints too easily. Sometimes, we as parents need to take care of our needs... [Step-mom] chose to be over-the-board careful and I chose to be, what some might say, selfish..." Beyond the fact that teaching your kid to "toughen up" is soooo 1950s and reinforces some nasty stereotypes about what it means to be a man, don't both of these stories make you wonder why these dads feel no shame about being so selfish? And don't you wonder what the mothers think of such behavior?

I'm A Better Dad Part-Time [Globe And Mail]
A Dad's Point of View: Am I Selfish? Or Just a Jerk? [Strollerderby]
Related: A DAD'S POINT OF VIEW: Am I A Selfish Parent? [HuntingtonNews.net]

PMS time? Maybe. How else to explain weeping at the end of Jennifer Finney Boylan's
"Modern Love" essay on becoming a transgender dad? Because, I mean, this was hardly tragic; rather, it's like the Ozzy and Harriet of transgender dad stories, when you think about it. Jim has always felt trapped inside his man's body, and years into his marriage, begins his transition. His wife and sons are totally cool with it.

Because of the love of my spouse, Deedie, not to mention that of my boys, I found the courage, somehow, to traverse the weird ocean between men and women, to make the voyage not only from one sex to another, but from a place where my life was defined by the secrets I kept to a new one, where almost everything I'd ever held in my heart could finally be spoken out loud.

Deedie, he finds, "decided that her life was better with me in it than not" and their domestic routine continues, seemingly as untroubled and enviably organized as ever. Recently, the author relates, their older son came to them with a confession and the parents, Mommy and Maddy, brace themselves for a seismic revelation about gender identity. But, poignant family sitcom style, the boy just wants to become a pacifist, take up the Irish fiddle, and give up the tuba. Later, this son (who is apparently perfect) pens the following essay for school:

Once the transition had taken place, I was comfortable with it. But I was worried what my friends would think. I kept it secret for a little bit, but eventually they found out. They all accepted it a lot better than I thought they would...Maddy is funny and wise. We go fishing and biking. We talk a lot, about anything that is on our minds. One night this spring, Maddy and I had a fancy dinner at a restaurant in Waterville. It was a special night. I wore a jacket and a tie. I had a steak. It made me feel like Maddy and I were really close. Maddy said that she thought I was growing up and that she was proud of me.

In my progressive, aggressively secular elementary school, we had a bi-weekly class called "Ethics" in which we read stories, discussed them, and came to mutually satisfactory conclusions about what constituted a good person. The stories were often like this, with saintly kids undergoing family changes that other kids Don't Understand, but ultimately helping other people grow and change and appreciate difference. I was invariably moved to tears. As indeed, I was reading this. My friend returned from getting our coffees at the mediocre 60s-tinged spot where we had escaped the heat and asked me what was wrong. "This transgender father..." I choked out, and wordlessly handed her the paper. She read it and looked at me blankly.

"What?" she said. "It seems pretty straightforward. Feel-good. But isn't it pretty cliched?"

Well, yeah. Isn't that kind of the point?

‘Maddy' Just Might Work After All [NY Times]

Harris tells Scientific American's Jonah Lehrer that she wrote her 1998 book The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do in part to show "that parenting didn't have to be such a difficult, anxiety-producing job, that there are many different ways to rear a child, and no convincing evidence that one way produces better results than another." While many people assume that everything you do as a parent marks your child forever, Harris claims that the two most important influences are actually peers and genetics, not parental nurture. She points out that when she was a child, in the thirties and forties, parents used lots of corporal punishment and didn't worry about their kids self-esteem. And, she says:

All these things have changed dramatically in the past 70 years, but the changes haven't had the expected effects. People are the same as ever. Despite the reduction in physical punishment, today's adults are no less aggressive than their grandparents were. Despite the increase in praise and physical affection, they are not happier or more self-confident or in better mental health.

Harris does note "that children learn at home how to behave at home (that's where parents do have power!)," but she also says "they learn outside the home how to behave outside the home." This point of view is upsetting in some ways, especially for parents who think they can raise a model citizen just by trying really, really hard. Middle-class parenting in America has a lot to do with control — over what your child eats, where she goes to school, how much time she spends with you. But if Harris is right, much of this control is an illusion, and maybe parents can back off a little. And for kids who are disadvantaged, maybe we need more school and after-school-based programming, as Harris recommends, rather than putting the onus on mom and dad. In the thirties, Harris says, "parents didn't feel they had to sacrifice their own convenience and comfort in order to gratify the desires of their children." Few would advocate a return to corporal punishment, but the rest of it — an end to potentially useless parental sacrifice — actually sounds kind of nice.

Do Parents Matter? [Scientific American]

Here's the deal: this woman - a friend-of-a-friend of the author's - is unhappy in her marriage. But because she's got kids, and kids "need a father," she's lining up a new one before the divorce. Says Babble's Jeanne Sager,

But what does this teach your kids? That it's OK to lie? That your daughters need to have a man around at all times. . . and at all costs? The idea that a woman needs to have a man is as outdated as that old quote about fish and bicycles. So too is the idea that a single parent can't provide for a child what a couple can - or that, say, two lesbians can't provide for a child what a heterosexual couple can.

Also...their father's still going to exist, right? I mean, does he need a "replacement?" And won't having a brand-new daddy be kind of...jarring? Sager adds that kids won't learn anything about the realities of divorce this way: that sometimes things don't work out and life goes on. Obviously, this plan is, to say the least, flawed, and it doesn't exactly need us pointing that out. If this is for real, the kids are going to have bigger issues than understanding what constitutes a typical divorce. "I cheated on your father for you" will make for a hefty therapist's bill, to say the least. So: we are going to go on the assumption that this is an isolated situation and not a standard rationale for unhappy people who are afraid of being alone. Because otherwise it's going to be really hard to get through the week.
Would you Cheat FOR the Kids? [Babble]

94% of girls studied said they used a computer or laptop at home, while only 88% of boys did. Interestingly, both boys and girls preferred to turn to their moms for tech help — 50% of kids said they asked their mothers for such assistance, while only 22% asked dads. Parents take note: 40% of kids said they wanted their parents to be more involved with their technology use. My mom used to keep me busy at grown-up parties by giving me broken electronic equipment to take apart (I remember one mouse particularly fondly). Were you a techie kid? Are you raising one? [ScienceDaily]