“They see me workout. They see me train. They see the effort I put in. But I’m always Dad to them. If I try to show them how to make a move, they are like, ‘Dad, seriously?’ [Like] I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m just Dad. It’s awesome.”
Q&A: Kobe Bryant talks retirement, playoffs and life after basketball
Since my son was born I realized: soon, he’ll be three-and-a-half. Soon, he’ll be able to see who I was. And shortly after that, what he’ll be reading in the oldest blogs will be closer to his age than mine. Now, I write for him.
Dad Magazine: Thanksgiving Edition. “The Value of a Dollar: Dads Weigh In”. Check out the archives.
Things That Wake Up My Baby:
- the sound of me pouring milk on my cereal
- sneezing
- the door closing
- the dog barking at invisible squirrels
- a spoon stirring cream into coffee
- his own arms moving involuntarily
Things That Do Not Wake Up My Baby:
- the microwave
- the screams of people getting brutally murdered on television
- books falling on the floor
- the dog barking at actual men outside our house
- loud laughter
- power drills being used in the next room
How much can I trust the critical faculties in which I once had so much faith? Now that I see so few movies, every single one is an ecstatic experience. They all become impossibly brilliant and entertaining.
There has never been so much future in my life as at that time.
Economics!
Humans are quite bad at estimating the results of different interventions, if the feedback only comes years later. One needs only to see the plethora of different parenting guides and opposed schools of upbringing thought. Such variety couldn’t maintain itself if it were easy for parents to see which methods worked and which didn’t. Thus parents are poor at knowing what they need, and hence make ineffective consumers from the economic perspective.
Also, “a lot of parenting techniques are procedural, rather than declarative.”
Why are we not much, much, much better at parenting? | Practical Ethics
[…]
He’s hungry, but can’t remember the word “hungry.”
Someone touched his knee.
He’s not allowed in the oven.
I picked out the wrong pants.
[…]
Before having children, and provided we’ve moved on a little from the maelstrom of adolescence, it is possible to think of ourselves as good people: patient, kind, loving, tolerant. A few years of parenthood strips us of these illusions and we see ourselves in the raw: capable of fury, rage, pettiness, jealousy — you name it. For children confront us with the infantile aspects of our own personalities, the parts of ourselves we’d most like to deny, and we can hate them for it. Worse still, they can thwart our wish, even our need, to feel loving and effective.
That’s Edward Marriott on ambivalent parenting. Cf. Megan McArdle:
I wonder if we ought to re-examine our commitment to happiness. It seems to me that there’s possibly some merit – if we persevere and have the sense to learn from it – in the other-orientation that is (good) parenting. It’s fine to go through life happy, in other words, but I suspect we also want to go through life without becoming big fat self-absorbed jackasses. Children really help in that regard.
To be sure, there are too many parents who, despite their children, remain narcissistic nimrods. But the nature of parenting is to beat that out of you. There’s just no time to spend on ourselves, at least not like we would if we didn’t have babies to wash and toys to clean up, usually in the middle of the night, after impaling our feet on them.
People are inherently self-centered, and especially in a peaceful, prosperous society, this easily leads to self-indulgence that in turn can make us weak and ignoble. There’s something to be said for ordeals – like parenting, or marriage, or tending the weak and broken – which push us into an other-orientation. When we have to care for someone, we get better at, well, caring for people. It actually takes practice, after all.
Whenever we invent something new, our neuroses rush over there and get writ large.
George Saunders. And further in his LARB interview:
A definition of parenting: “That state in which, because of the existence of great love, an individual feels that he or she has failed, or is failing, or will soon fail.”
I’d never considered this side of having children later in life. From Julie Shulevitz’s essay excerpted in the link above:
What haunts me about my children, though, is […] the actuarial risk I run of dying before they’re ready to face the world.
Older parents die earlier in their children’s lives. […] A mother who is 35 when her child is born is more likely than not to have died by the time that child is 46. The one who is 45 may have bowed out of her child’s life when he’s 37. The odds are slightly worse for fathers: The 35-year-old new father can hope to live to see his child turn 42. The 45-year-old one has until the child is 33.
I think of children sort of like Voyager probes, except instead of sending them out into space you send them forward in time. They carry messages from your civilization inside them, on into the weirdness of the future.
I’d never thought about this before:
Here’s something to consider: Not everyone is comfortable with the abundance of noise, speech, color, smell, touch — especially touch — involved with small children. They’re in your lap, your arms, they’re tugging your hands, your shirt, your hair. Again, this affects men and women, introverts especially, older more than younger, and leads both men and women to withdraw (though women still tend to be the parent in the thick of it).
6. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.
7. Your parents don’t want what is best for you. They want what is good for you, which isn’t always the same thing. There is a natural instinct to protect our children from risk and discomfort, and therefore to urge safe choices.
By the time kids are 18, at least half of them have already received a psychological diagnosis.
If that’s true… wow. (via)
I missed this interview last fall. Murphy on the selectiveness that wealth affords:
I only want to do what I really want to do, otherwise I’m content to sit here and play my guitar all day. I always tell people now that I’m a semiretired gentleman of leisure, and occasionally I’ll go do some work to break the boredom up.
On parenting:
That stuff, with people disciplining their kids back in the day, it’s totally different. You hear about Joe Jackson, who had, what, 10 kids? You’re whipping somebody’s ass if you have 10 kids, in this little house! Ten kids, one of them is spinning all around and walking backward and shit? You’d be like, “Somebody’s getting their ass whipped” [laughs]. It’s a whole different time.
On transience:
Technology has it to where they gonna play this stuff forever. But the reality is, all this shit turns into dust, everything is temporary. No matter what you do, if you’re around here long enough, you’ll wind up dribbling and shitting on yourself, and you won’t even remember the shit you did.
One purpose of children is to shred parental black-and-whites into gray confetti.
It strikes me as plausible that a world in which kids spend more time unsupervised requires a parenting style more reliant on swift punishment for detected wrongdoing than rewards for good behavior.
This is probably the best summary I’ve ever seen for 1) why I got spanked every so often, and 2) why I don’t really feel bad about that.
Today’s kids seem to be not only supervised but regimented; most of their time is supposed to be spent in some sort of structured activity. This makes it very easy to create elaborate reward systems, because there is all this elaborate surveillance that makes it very easy to monitor compliance.
File under: parenting.
Mark Larson 