Image via Wikipedia

On the 100th anniversary of the first Father’s Day, we’re confronted with a question that probably never occurred to Sonora Dodd of Spokane, Washington, when she pressed the mayor to create a special day for fathers. If lesbians can raise healthy kids, what is dad good for anyway?

Earlier this month, Nanette Gartrell and Henny Bos reported in the journal Pediatrics that the 17-year-old sons and daughters of lesbian mothers were not only doing fine, they were surpassing peers from those musty, too-familiar, traditional heterosexual families. According to mothers’ reports (we might, uh, question their objectivity, but for purposes of the discussion, let’s give ‘em a pass), the teenage kids outdid kids from straight families in social competence and school work, and had demonstrated less aggressive behavior and fewer social problems.

Sounds so good, my wife, Elizabeth, and I have decided to become a lesbian family! Truth is, we can’t afford the surgery, and even if we could, it would be only cosmetic. I’d still be a male inside, if a feckless one.

There’s clearly a serious point here: This study is no joke for lesbian couples who want to adopt a child and need evidence to show that they can do a good job. But the study does raise a question for people like me–that is, fathers. Does anyone still need us?

When Dodd pressed for the creation of the first Father’s Day in Spokane, she had in mind honoring her heroic father, a widower who raised six children in the early 1900s on the windswept fields around Spokane. The mayor, who had evidently heard enough from Sonora about her father,  got her off his back by proclaiming June 19, 1910 Father’s Day. Fortunately for most of us, you don’t have to be a heroic, widowed father of six to qualify for the celebration. Even so, the celebration in Spokane failed to excite the nation the way, say, the St. Louis World’s Fair had a few years earlier when one of its vendors invented the ice cream cone. Father’s Day didn’t become official until 1972, more than 60 years later, when President Richard Nixon, who was not famous for his fathering, signed Father’s Day into law.

Comparing fathers to mothers has always been a downer for fathers, who spend less time taking care of the kids, do less housework, and generally fail on any sort of parenting measure. Fathers generally score well on wrestling around with the kids on the floor (the technical term is “rough-and-tumble play”) and maybe baseball and fishing, although I don’t know of a study to support that. Fathers also are known to regularly punch the umpire, kick dirt, or spit on a player during what you might call over-enthusiastic appreciation of their kids’ Little League games, so maybe we can’t give fathers credit for baseball either.

So maybe, you know, two mothers is a better deal for kids.

I’m all for lesbian families, single mothers, and any kind of family people want to construct–especially when contrasted with the kinds of families that often arise by accident–teenage girls with multiple kids by different fathers, teenage boys with kids they never see, and divorced families, whose kids might turn out all right but are going to take a huge emotional hit.

But I can’t help thinking that fathers are worth something, too. And there is plenty of evidence on that score. In March, Daniel Paquette of the University of Montreal reported that fathers, more so than mothers, encourage infants to explore their environment. That’s not a slap at mothers; it’s part of a case for complementarity. “By stimulating exploration, controlled risk-taking and competition, fathers provide something different to the child who will benefit greatly from this singular contribution.” Even if both parents change diapers and give babies bottles, “they don’t do it the same way,” he said.

In another study reported last year, the children of low- and middle-income fathers who attended a 16-week relationship class were less aggressive and depressed, and more socially adept than the children of fathers who didn’t attend–and that was true whether or not the mothers attended the class. If fathers didn’t matter, then their attention to fathering should have made no difference.

There are other studies, and other discussions, and a thousand points of view in the blogs. But not all the evidence comes from science. When I come home from work and my 7-month-old son, Luke, sees me and starts bouncing around like a ping-pong ball until I pick him up, that’s evidence. When my three-and-a-half year-old son, Henry, takes me by the hand to pull me over to a Lego set-up he’s just constructed, in splendid ignorance of what the instructions say he was supposed to build, that’s evidence.

Fathers have existed since the dawn of humanity, several million years ago, and they wouldn’t still be around if Nature didn’t have a reason for them. Evolution is ruthless; it would have swept fathers away eons ago if they weren’t important.

All of this is a little indirect, I know. I don’t have an ironclad case for why fathers are important. But while we respect other kinds of families and parents, let’s give fathers a break. Not just for Father’s Day, but all the time.

They have their faults. Uh, let me rephrase that: I have my faults. I’m not nearly the father I’d like to be. I make mistakes all the time. I spend many evenings wishing I had–or hadn’t–said something to my kids. Despite all that, I like the job. It suits me. And even if I can’t prove that fathers matter, I have to believe it.

Enjoy.

via Meet the sloths on Vimeo.

Image via Wikipedia

A post unrelated to anything at all…

I remember seeing this reprinted in The New Yorker years ago, and I’m posting because I came across it on the web, and because I find it highly amusing and wanted to be sure I could always find it in my archives. And because I hope some of you–newswomen included–find it amusing, too.

A newsman:

A newsman knows everything. He is aware not only of what goes on in the world today, but his brain is a repository of the accumulated wisdom of the ages.

He is not only handsome, but has the physical strength which enables him to perform great feats of energy. He can go for nights without sleep. He dresses well and he talks with charm. Men admire him, women adore him, tycoons and statesmen are willing to share their secrets with him.

He hates lies and meanness and sham, but he keeps his temper. He is loyal to his paper . . .

. . . and when he dies a lot of people are sorry, and some of them remember him for several days.”

- Stanley Walker, 1898-to-1962, city editor, New York Herald Tribune

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

In a previous post, I railed against a sheriff’s deputy in Port St. Lucie, Florida, for cuffing a 6-year-old girl who was having a “temper tantrum,” and carting her off to “a mental facility.”

Now I’ll confess that I took a certain smug satisfaction in pointing a finger at Florida, while pecking away at my computer in New York City, where we’re far more civilized.

So much for smug satisfaction. New York City school safety officers have apparently topped Port St. Lucie by cuffing a 5-year-old boy. Congratulations, New York!

“In January 2008,” Op-Ed colunist Bob Herbert writes in The New York Times, “a 5-year-old kindergarten pupil became unruly at a public school in Queens. A public safety officer, seeing her duty, pounced. She handcuffed the boy who was then shipped off to a hospital psychiatric ward. A 5-year-old!” (Emphasis is Herbert’s.)

That’s just one of the inexplicable arrests Herbert notes in his column. Two sixth-graders in the Bronx were arrested and taken to the local precinct by an armed police officer after each drawing a line on the other’s desk with magic markers. Erasable magic markers, no less. The students were sent to get tissues to erase the lines when school safety officers seized them. Herbert does not relate what must have been the riveting scene in which the sixth-graders were disarmed of their magic markers.

In another episode, a 12-year-old was arrested for doodling on her desk with an erasable marker. Students are already prohibited from bringing cell phones to school; let’s ban these damn erasable markers. Am I to expect that my tax dollars will be wasted on tissue to clean up magic marker doodles? Lock those kids up!

These incidents have come to light in lawsuits brought by students’ families. How many other incidents have gone unreported because the families chose not to sue or didn’t have the means to sue? Considering the expense and effort required to file a lawsuit, would it be too big a leap to surmise that this situation is far worse for poor kids in New York than for kids whose parents can afford to bring such a suit?

Port St. Lucie’s policy of apparently waiting until its students are six before cuffing them looks enlightened compared to New York’s five-year-old arrest.

What is the phrase I’m looking for here…

Common sense?

But I couldn’t. I lasted 10 minutes.

As soon as I saw the baseball scenario with Max, it was clear where the writers were headed. We’ve already learned Max doesn’t want to go to his little league game. His father, Adam (also his coach–could it get any uglier?) bribes him with escalating ice cream rewards, finally securing a deal with a triple-dip. You know what’s coming: A few moments later, it’s a crucial moment in the game, and Max is up to bat.

He gets the usual encouragement. C’mon Max! Knock it outa here! Max squirms. Finally, Adam says hey, Max, it’s just a game. It’s about having fun. It’s not much fun, says Max, who looks as though he would cry, except that would make his situation even worse.

I left the room. Elizabeth, my wife, stayed with it for the next scene, in which Max was once again in jeopardy, this time with the school principal. It reminds me of Gene Roddenberry’s frequent exhortation to the script writers on Star Trek: “Put the Enterprise in danger!” (“Put Max in danger!”)

The blurb for next week’s episode says, among other things, “Max is diagnosed.” As if things weren’t bad enough already…

One interesting thing, however. Hanna Rosin of DoubleX, who apparently stayed with the show, noted that Parenthood, like the scene I watched, is mostly about fathers. There’s a refreshing switch.

Image via Wikipedia

Last week, A 6-year-old girl in Port St. Lucie, Florida who was disruptive at school, was handcuffed by a sheriff’s deputy.

The police report said the girl “was crying and saying that the handcuffs hurt.” She had pulled one of her hands partially out of the cuffs, so it was around her thumb and hand, rather than her wrist, “causing discomfort,” the report said.

According to a story in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the girl was having a “temper tantrum…hitting school officials, screaming and kicking.”

On Tuesday, after the principal, who is pregnant, said the girl had kicked her in the stomach, the deputy took her to “a mental facility.”

First question: Why were the police called in for what seems like a fairly routine school disciplinary problem? What did the school do before calling the police?

Second question: Did the school check with the school psychologist before calling the police?

Third question: Was there any reason to suspect the girl’s tantrums were evidence of mental illness?

“These people are going to the extreme,” the girl’s mother said.

Surely there was a better way to handle the situation than turning the girl over to police and a mental institution. But this kind of incident is not uncommon. Schools, tragically, so not know how to handle disruptive kids, and they’re all too ready to hand the problem off to someone else.

As I noted in my previous post, juvenile detention centers in New York State are criminally unprepared to handle mentally ill detainees. Schools, incidents like this one suggest, are similarly ill equipped  to handle their charges.

How does one respond rationally to the anecdote of “a 15-year-old girl with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder and adjustment disorder…sent to a juvenile prison last February. Since then, she has not received proper mental health treatment, and has been restrained by the staff more than 15 times, her lawyers said.”

That’s a year ago. A child desperately in need of help has been, in essence, chained to the dungeon walls. These are not prisons. Let’s drop the euphemism (yes, in these circumstances, “prison” is a euphemism) and call them what they are: insane asylums, dumping grounds no more sophisticated than the Victorian asylums where the mentally ill were warehoused and ignored. These are not correctional facilities, they are not prisons, they are not hospitals. They are nothing more than places where we can put a wall between us and what we’re afraid of, and give no thought to the welfare of the children.

Where are the relief agencies? The Red Cross? Doctors without Borders? The United Nations?

Imagine your child seriously ill, troubled and confused about the cause and meaning of it all, locked away in some cinder-block hell, unable to get treatment for weeks or months at a time? Or seeing, according to the Times, “staff members at the jails who run group therapy sessions despite often having no qualifications beyond a high school degree.”

It would be nice to think that this exposure on the front of the Times would change things, but based on the initial response, that seems unlikely. Gladys Carrión, the commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services, the state agency that administers the juvenile prisons, wouldn’t speak to the Times.

Her spokesman, hastily trying to provide some kind of response, said Carrión was hiring a chief psychiatrist. Say what? He wouldn’t even promise that this would be a staff psychiatrist; it could be simply another contract hire. And would this new hire work nights and weekends? Not likely.

The federal Department of Justice and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York have investigated and sharply criticized New York for not providing better care.

My outrage is tempered only by my concern for the kids. Tonight, at 9 or 10 pm, when you’re settling into your chair to post, or read, or catch a flick, think about the kids in New York jails who, with the fall of night, are entering a crisis, terrified of their demons, lashing out at perceived enemies, screaming and crying. Think about them being tied up by a couple of beefy security guards.

And think about them lying in the dark, unable to move, frightened, desperate and alone. So alone.

Image by Stephen Cochran via Flickr

The British government is proposing up to six months’ paternity leave for fathers, three months of it paid.

Mothers already get nine months of maternity leave. The proposal would give fathers three months, and enable mothers to hand three months of their leave off to fathers. The result, however they carve it up, is that they get 12 months’ leave between them.

This is a luxury only wealthy countries can afford, which is why we don’t get anything like it in the U.S.

That’s why I’m sitting in Starbuck’s with my three-month-old son sitting beside me–thankfully asleep in his stroller at the moment–while I scratch out this post.

This is a small thing when considered against the broad canvas of issues, problems, and solutions President Obama discussed in last night’s State of the Union speech. Indeed, while we heard a lot about jobs and working families and the middle class, and even education and college, we didn’t see the kind of enlightened focus on family issues–such as parental leave–that seems routine in Europe.

The term “family values” has, thankfully, dropped from the prominence it had in American political discourse over the past couple of decades. You might think I’d favor more discussion of family values, not less. And I do, if we’re talking about parental leave, day care, preschool education, affordable college tuition, and after-school programs. If we truly valued families and children, we would have far wider access to these things, which put family values into practice.

I understand the concern that many Americans have with big government. I don’t like bureaucrats; nobody likes bureaucrats. But tax and spending cuts will never get us to paternity leave or affordable preschool education. Nobody in what’s antiseptically called “the private sector” is going to make money from affordable preschool or reduced college tuition. If government doesn’t encourage these things with real financial incentives, they won’t happen.

Putting parents back to work is now undoubtedly the single most important thing we can do for our children; poverty is devastating to kids. But as we get that under control, we should look at England’s parental leave policy and see what it might cost us and how we might be able to make it work. Obama’s proposals to make college more affordable were commendable. Anyone want to bet on whether they will happen?

I’m happy to hear politicians say they support family values. I say, show me the money.

Image via Wikipedia

This is probably the first of a series, because I can no longer suffer these mysteries in silence.

I just called a McDonald’s near where we’re headed today, trying to find out if it had an indoor play area for our son.

I forgot to dial 1 when I called. I got the usual message: “You must dial 1…”

The system knows I didn’t dial 1. It knows that I need 1.

Instead of telling me I need 1, and forcing me to dial again, and clogging the network with a second, needless call–why doesn’t the system just add the frickin’ 1?

As in: “I see you forgot to dial 1. I’ll add it for you this time, but please remember to dial it next time you call! Have a nice day!”

It’s a mystery.