Fathering

By Jeremy Adam Smith

Lawrence Kutner had seen his teenage son play video games. But like many parents, he didn’t know much about them.

Then in 2004 the U.S. Department of Justice asked Kutner and his wife, public health researcher Cheryl Olson, to run a federally funded study of how video games affect adolescents.

Olson and Kutner are the co-founders and directors of the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Mental Health and Media. Kutner, a psychologist, had never examined video games, either in his research or in his life as a dad.

And so the first thing he did was watch over the shoulder of his son, Michael, as he played his video games. Then, two years into their research—which combined surveys and focus groups of junior high school students—Michael urged his parents to pick up a joystick.

“I definitely felt they should be familiar with the games if they were doing the research,” says Michael, who was 16 at the time. Kutner played played James Bond games with son. “And he would thoroughly trounce me,” recalls Kutner.

When I was growing up, video games were something new under the sun—this is the 80s’, people—and I played Donkey Kong and Pac Man fanatically. For their part, my parents seemed (to me) to barely know these games existed.

But since I was a lad, it turns out, the video game industry has expanded exponentially—especially among boys and men. And many of those games are a whole lot bloodier than Frogger ever was. (Remember Frogger?) For millions of kids and quite a few their parents—probably for many guys reading this—video games are a pretty big part of their leisure time.

Today the American video game industry makes more than twice as much as movie theaters, and consumers spent $21.4 billion on video-game hardware, software, and accessories in 2009—almost quadruple what they spent in 2000.

But there’s a problem: Unlike movies and TV, which are fundamentally passive viewing experiences, violent video games call for players to actively shoot, stab, or bludgeon enemies to death.

“A movie’s the same, even if you watch it multiple times,” Kutner points out. “You may get additional insights, but it’s the same thing. With video games, you are interacting with the movie and it changes based on that, and so it’s a different way of thinking. In a way, we diminish these programs by calling them games. In other contexts, the same thing would be called a simulation.”

This has led lots of thoughtful people to argue that video games teach kids to kill. Given my generally pacifist tendencies–plus the fact that I now hate playing video games–you might expect me to agree with them.

But I’ve looked hard at the evidence, and I don’t. For example, when the U.S. Secret Service and Department of Education analyzed 37 incidents of school violence and sought to develop a profile of school shooters, they discovered that the most common traits among shooters were that they were male and had histories of depression and attempted suicide. While many of the killers—like the vast majority of young males—did play video games, this 2002 study did not find a relationship between game play and school shootings.

In fact, Olson and Kutner’s analysis (which ultimately involved 1,254 junior high school students) suggests a positive and paradoxical dimension of playing video games with violence in them: helping kids to grapple with life’s scariest experiences. They report that many kids in their focus groups said they liked playing violent video games because they knew the fighting wasn’t happening in real life.

Actually, many of the kids reported being much more scared by TV news. “They told us, ‘The news is real, and that makes me scared.’” In contrast, they could control the violence in video games.

“There are things you can try out in a game that you can’t do in real life,” says Olson. “Some of the boys in our focus groups really liked the fact that you could choose to be a good guy or a bad guy. They can ask, ‘What kind of person would I end up being?’”

Their son Michael says he and his friends do not play games just because of violent content. Instead, they are looking for a compelling storyline, intriguing characters, and interesting choices. “A good game to me makes you feel like a method actor,” he says. “It just draws you into the story and draws you into a character.”

These insights resonate with research into children’s pretend play. In studies of kids with imaginary friends, University of Oregon psychologist Marjorie Taylor has found that kids often create pretend characters who do sinister, nasty, and even violent things.

“Like adults who think things through before they act, this gives children an opportunity to play it through before they encounter the situation in real life,” says Taylor. “If something is bothering you, you can control it or manipulate it in the world of pretending. That’s a way of developing emotional mastery.”

That doesn’t mean that anything goes—and that’s where you, the dad, come in.

Olson says many precautionary steps can be taken to mitigate the harm that violent video games might cause. In addition to setting firm limits on when (e.g., after homework is done) and where (e.g., not in the bedroom) video games can be played, Olson and Kutner say parents need to get to know the games—and talk to their kids about the contrast between game violence and violence in real life.

“I would definitely want to show realistic consequences,” Olson says, when I ask her how she would design a violent video game. “There are a number of games with storylines that show the consequences of violence: Kids are getting orphaned or people are suffering.” She says the violence should never be depicted as funny, or the perpetrators as attractive, and the players should be rewarded for mercy and moral choices—as they are in the game SWAT, for example.

But to help kids make the right choices about video games, dads and moms first need to understand what kids are playing. Kutner and Olson urge parents and researchers alike to learn more about these games, and even play them with kids. This will help both groups develop a more nuanced understanding of gaming and be able to tell the good games from the bad ones.

“It’s a great thing developmentally for the child to teach the parent something,” says Olson. “A lot of kids said they’d love for their parents to play games with them.”

This is based on a much longer article, “Playing the Blame Game,” that I wrote for the Spring 2008 issue of Greater Good magazine. Photo by SanFranAnnie.

By Jeremy Adam Smith

“Keep yer stick on the ice!” yelled one dad, his voice filled with anger.

“Come on, number fifteen!” yelled another. “You skate like a girl!”

Liko and I were watching a youth hockey game at the Yerba Buena rink in San Francisco. We were surrounded by fathers watching their boys play hockey…and, man, was it ugly.

As the kids battled on the ice, you could feel the tension rising among the parents.

Then I heard a lone, small voice from the other side of the bleachers:

“Have fun!” it said.

I looked up, and so did the other parents.

There stood a fellow on the top bleacher, smiling down at us. The smile said, C’mon, guys, lighten up.

I chuckled, and a ripple of laughter spread through the stands. We did lighten up.

One of the (few) moms yelled, “Have fun keeping your sticks on the ice!”

“Have fun skating like a girl!” shouted a dad.

Dads are way more active in sports than moms; in many communities, it’s the main way that fathers play a role in the lives of their kids and other people’s kids. Indeed, sports are the primary path many boys take to manhood.

That’s both a good thing and a problem. It’s a good thing because kids get exercise and they learn about discipline, focus, teamwork, and cooperation. It’s a bad thing because in today’s sports culture, they also learn about misogyny, homophobia, belligerence, self-destructive levels of competition…and the neuroses of their fathers.

“I’ve seen a lot of hardcore, winning-obsessed, hyper-competitive moms,” says Regan McMahon, author of Revolution in the Bleachers: How Parents Can Take Back Family Life in a World Gone Crazy Over Youth Sports. But fathers, says Regan, can be much worse. “It may be more common for men who have grown up playing sports to have certain opinions about how to be a star, or perhaps they want their child to have the success they had, or if they weren’t a star, they want to experience vicariously the stardom they never achieved.”

This leads to the kind of angry heckling I saw in the Yerba Buena bleachers; those guys are angry at their younger selves, first and foremost, and at the loss of their youth.

Inwardly, I was cringing: My son has been skating for two and a half years, and we were there so that he could participate in “Give-Hockey-a-Try Day” that afternoon. It’s something he wanted, that I had resisted. The thought of my son entering this hockey culture, surrounded by these thuggish men, filled me with an old, sickening disquiet.

I know I’m not so different from these men, and I know what Regan is talking about: I often find myself projecting my own athletic anxieties onto my son. I was a decent runner, but in team sports I was mediocre (soccer) to lousy (baseball). I very well remember the shit I got from both teammates and coaches, and I came to dread practices and games. By high school, I had stopped participating, and like millions of other freaks and geeks, I grew to hate sports and jocks. Today, when I see my son trying a sport, my stomach clenches as I watch for signs for failure and weakness.

That’s not so different from the dads who stayed with sports, but never achieved as much as they hoped. While individual ability and commitment vary, the ultimate truth about sports is that, by definition, 99 percent of us won’t become stars. The best we can hope for is fitness and fun, but too often our sports culture ruins our bodies through overtraining or ruins our self-esteem through hyper-competitiveness. That culture has shaped me as well as other fathers.

That afternoon, Liko suited up and skated out onto the ice, stick in hand. All the pictures that accompany this blog entry are from that afternoon.

He was the smallest one on the ice, but I watched in awe, truly in awe, as he held his own. I watched him do his best, overcome obstacles, negotiate problems, recover from mistakes, take coaching, handle aggression from other kids, manage his own aggression, and gain new skills. All on his own.

Did this brave, strong boy really grow from the premature newborn who could fit in the palm of my hand? What a miracle. What a gift. I admit it: I was proud.

Again, that’s a good thing and a bad thing, that pride.

“The father-son relationship is a delicate one, and boys really don’t want to disappoint their dads,” says Regan. “And I’ve seen many boys who seemed to care more about what their dad thought of their performance than their coach. One basketball star I knew would look up in the stands at his dad after every shot, not at his coach. I have heard, anecdotally, about a lot of kids — boys and girls– who want to quit a sport or a team but feel they can’t because their dad doesn’t want them too. That can strain marriages, too, when the dad is gung-ho and the mom isn’t.”

This might be the arena where dads can have the biggest impact in improving and repairing the world. I think about that dad who spoke up in the bleachers: “Have fun!” It really made a difference, that small action; it took the emotion down a notch. Regan tells me that it’s critical for dads to try to “be a voice of sanity in team meetings”–to emphasize the fun, to vote against yet another tournament or extra day of practice.

“Support your child’s love of sports, but don’t push them,” advises Regan. “Keep your ego out of the equation. Keep in mind that your child is playing sports for his or her pleasure, not yours.”

That’s good advice for individual dads. But the issues go beyond behavior; there’s also a policy dimension to the struggle to make youth sports fun again. I’m no expert in this stuff, but Regan is, and so I’ll quote her at length:

Putting policies in place to prevent overuse injuries is an important step. One of the best thing to happen in recent years was Little League finally adopting pitch counts to save young pitchers’ arms. Dr. James Andrews, the orthopedic surgeon who pioneered the so-called Tommy John surgery for baseball pitchers’ elbows, lobbied the national Little League organization for five years before they finally agreed to limit how many balls a kid could throw in a week. Dr. Andrews got tired of seeing injuries in 9-year-olds that he used to see primarily in professional athletes.

I’m an advocate of keeping P.E. a priority in schools, re-establishing intramural sports and encouraging kids to be multi-sport athletes in high school. One of the big changes in youth sports over the past 15 years is that it’s gone from being about fun and participation to a star system that weeds out the weaker players and promotes the stronger ones. So recreational leagues are looked down upon and elite travel teams are seen as desirable. Consequently, kids are specalizing early and playing one sport year round, which can cause overuse injuries.

Some states, like Utah, have mandated downtime for interscholastic athletics, so there can be no training or competition for 12 weeks in a given sport. That guarantees that athletes and coaches get a break, and their competition will not gain an edge because they’re required to take a break, too. And hey, the kid might get to go on a family vacation or attend a cousin’s wedding for a change!

The elite travel teams have gutted high school sports programs to a large extent. So the highly competitive players are missing out on the experience of playing for their schools, because many coaches and parents keep them off the school team because it won’t improve their chances for a scholarship and their is a perceived inferiority of play. I think that’s a shame.

Interscholatic leagues tend to set their schedules so kids can play multiple sports in a school year, but elite club coaches and parents sometimes discourage their athletes not to participate in school sports. One Bay Area high school I know of actually has a stated policy that kids can only go out for one sport, which I think is kind of shocking. Doing multiple sports is a good way to prevent overuse injuries. So I’d support policies that encourage participation in multiple sports.

In general, I think policy makers should recognize the need for balance in chilren’s lives. So any policies that would improve the balance between hard work and free time, sports and and family, commitment to club team and participation in school life, would be beneficial.

By Jeremy Adam Smith

Sure, sharing is caring. Sure, you’ve carpet-bombed your kid’s brain for years with messages about the joys of toy-sharing.

But what do you share? Seriously, dads and moms: How often do you share what you have in your daily life?

Maybe you do it all the time, but I have to make myself share. In my day job, I edit a site called Shareable.net–and let me tell you, it does not come naturally. I’m often uncomfortable when I have to describe our mission to strangers.

“It’s, um, a site about sharing,” I say with a touch of embarrassment. Then trying to impress the listener with the scope of our vision: “It’s about how to design our society so that things are more shareable.”

More often than not, my listener’s eyebrows skeptically rise, perhaps simply because they detect my personal ambivalence.

Sharing sounds simple, doesn’t it? And therefore boring and soft. But as I’ve discovered as both a parent and an editor, it’s not simple or boring, not by a long shot.

The fact that we struggle so long and so hard with our children to teach them to share their freaking trucks and dolls tells us that sharing can be like going to the dentist–and yet it’s essential (not unlike dentistry’s relationship to our bicuspids) to a healthy life and society.

Adults have trouble sharing, too: our fiercest political conflicts are quite often around how much we are willing to share our stuff. (See: Health care debate.)

But look at life in most of our homes. Breastfeeding infants aren’t incurring a debt. We don’t expect our kids to pay us back for all the stuff we buy them.

The intrinsically altruistic nature of family life provides us with a model for a more shareable society. Unfortunately, however, generosity doesn’t often extend beyond our genetic kin: We drive private vehicles instead of sharing transportation, we hoard stuff and generate junk instead of reusing or making what we don’t use available to others, many of us don’t volunteer or donate as often as we could, fathers don’t share parenting with moms, and so on.

In fact, in my experience parenthood makes people somewhat more resistant to sharing, possibly as compensation for the fact that we give so much to our kids.

I know that’s been true for me, and it may be especially true for fathers: A 2009 study by Steven Greene and Laurel Elder found that male support for social welfare programs (such as universal health care) plummeted after parenthood; meanwhile, mothers grew increasingly generous in their social attitudes.

“It may be that the act of nurturing children fosters empathy and caring, thereby generating more liberal attitudes concerning the role of government in helping others,” write the authors. That’s not a “sexist” or essentialist argument: In fact, it suggests that our beliefs are shaped by our day-to-day tasks instead of our biology. (Moms still do at least twice as much childcare as dads, I’m afraid.)

But in many respects, I think the way our society is designed is more decisive than our individual attitudes. Fathers often don’t share parenting because they don’t have any paternity leave or access to flextime. Transportation is not designed to be shareable; on a hundred levels, people are driven into private vehicles. We as Americans are pretty much responsible for our own health care, and fuck anybody who can’t pay for a doctor.

OK, enough with the socialist propaganda. You get it, I’m sure, and you either agree or you don’t agree that we as a society should become better at sharing.

But (paradoxically?) we probably still agree that it’s a very good thing to teach our kids to share. You may see this as simple courtesy; I see it as simple courtesy plus training for building a more shareable society. First the playground, tomorrow the world.

The raw material is there, if we care to look.

Bay Area mom and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Justine Fenwick has spent years watching her two kids battle for ground, leading her to wonder if sharing is innate or something that must be forced down our throats. But, she says, “Yesterday at the school playground I saw a three year old offer up a favored stuffed penguin to a crying child. How could we have survived these thousands of years without cooperation and sharing? Perhaps the question is all wrong and a more fruitful investigation is ‘under what conditions does sharing occur?’”

My own son has done that sort of thing from babyhood, and babies have been observed exhibiting empathic behavior–the foundation of sharing–42 minutes after birth. We are wired to share, but the skill needs to be developed over time, just like any social skill. Here’s my son and some of his five-year-old buddies building a rocket together, as reported by his wonderful teacher:

Liko: “I am building a ground control base that has people in it that talk to the rockets and tell them where to go. Can you help with the rocket?”

Storm: ”I don’t know how to build a rocket.”

Liko: “That’s okay. You can put stuff inside, like the cars.”

Storm: ”The clock is ticking. Soon the rocket will take off.”

Liko: “Yeah, it is a car gas station rocket!”

Noah: “Niko you help Heath and I will work on the spaceship.”

Heath: ”Actually let’s build the spaceship right here.”

Liko: ”Can I help?”

Noah: ”Yeah, actually no!”

Liko: ”But that’s not fair.”

Noah: ”Okay, why don’t you build the big squares?”

Liko: “Oh okay.”

Noah: “You can help make the decisions with us. You can put the different pieces together in different ways.”

Niko: “Just make sure they fit together with us okay?”

Those little dudes are on their way, man. They’re Jedi Padawan Learners in sharing, and they’ll discover the benefits of sharing, too: a cool car gas station rocket!

Of course, the skill of sharing can be underdeveloped, if the child is raised in an environment that discourages sharing. This makes evolutionary sense; social skills should be developed through socialization.

So I think Fenwick’s question is the right one: How can we create the conditions in which sharing can occur? How can we design our families and society so that sharing just sort of happens, because it’s easy and yields results?

Let’s start with fathers: If the Green and Elder study is true, then fathers who behave more altruistically at home, who engage in caregiving activities–who, in fact, share parenting with the mothers–are providing critical role models for their kids (and perhaps helping to create a more sharing society).

Why stop there? Another step: Self-consciously expand your family’s sharing circle. A study published last year in the journal Cognition by Elizabeth Spelke at Harvard found that three year olds deliberately share–but they also discriminate about who is part of the sharing circle.

In the study, two kids were given dolls that were described as siblings or friends or as strangers–and then they were asked to enact a sharing situation. Not surprisingly, the sibling and friend dolls did a lot of sharing, but children isolated the stranger dolls.

Spelke also found that kids were more likely to direct a doll to share if the other doll helped it first–not only that, but if a kid just observed a doll share in another group’s play, that kid was more likely to direct her doll to share.

The takeaways: 1) kids need to see other kids as members of the ingroup in order to engage in sharing behavior and 2) sharing is contagious–witnessing sharing acts makes kids more likely to share themselves. That’s why I think it’s us adults who should first take our own inventory (as they say in AA) before we start yammering about our selfish children. If we want our kids to be sharing people, we have to be sharing people.

I’ll add that I believe that adults need to articulate why we share to kids, not just provide an example. I recently started giving Liko an allowance with the condition that he put aside one third for savings and one third for sharing. A few weeks ago I realized that he had no idea why he was putting aside the money for sharing; I had explained to him that it was for giving to people in need, but, thank God, I don’t think Liko yet understands the concept of true need.

Since then I’ve been going out of my way to note all the manifestations of sharing we see in our lives–for example, how the Jewish Community Center that serves as the hub as his life is supported by donations from people like him. I’ve also made it a point to talk about where I donate money, and why.

We still have a ways to go–the saving part of his allowance will go to a toy rocket he’s been eyeing, and that’s what I hear the most about. But we’re getting there,  I think, and I’m discovering a lot about sharing, too.

By Jeremy Adam Smith

One day I was sitting with four-year-old Liko watching teenagers play pick-up basketball in our neighborhood. “Daddy,” he said thoughtfully, “why do only black kids play basketball?”

My heart skipped a beat and my stomach clenched with anxiety. I looked around the court: In fact, there was one red-headed white girl and one middle-aged white guy, which I pointed out to him, but otherwise, yes, all the other players were black kids.

Liko has grown up in a city, riding public transportation and visiting all parts of the Bay Area, and he’s accustomed to seeing people of many different races. The skin tones of his playmates have ranged from black to freckled pale; Liko himself is a mix of Asian and Caucasian ethnicities, and we as a family are completely comfortable with our mutliracialism. But this was the first time he’d ever seemed to notice race and the first time he’d ever asked about it.

My split-second reaction was to panic, as I know many parents do. But in tackling this topic, I had one advantage that many parents do not: I’m the editor of an anthology called Are We Born Racist?, which Beacon Press will publish in August 2010. It’s about new research into how our brains react to racial difference, and I had spent a lot of time with psychologists exploring about how to talk with kids about race.

“Do kids even see or notice race?” asks child psychologist Allison Briscoe-Smith in her contribution to the anthology. “The answer is yes, they see and notice racial differences from a very young age, even in infancy.” By the age of three, she writes, kids will start sorting themselves into racial groups.

That year I had been seeing this dynamic play out in Liko’s preschool. One day when I went to pick him up, I found his class gathered outside the school, waiting for the mommies and daddies. Something struck me: The white girls huddled in one group and the white boys in another. Where was Liko? He and his three other part-white/part-Asian classmates, boys and girls, were off to one side, hanging out with each other.

A month later, at a parent-teacher conference, Liko’s teachers confirmed my impression: Liko and his mixed-race classmates had indeed formed a posse.

The teachers didn’t put it that way; instead they said, “Liko really enjoys playing with O., A., and L. and they engage in lots of fun activities like…etc.” I was the one who privately noted the racial mix of the posse. I thought about bringing this up in the meeting, but I decided against it. I guessed (wrongly?) that the teachers would greet my observation in a defensive way, as though something bad is going on in their classroom.

But Briscoe-Smith argues that this kind of race-sorting is normal and healthy, and she urges parents to not see their children as instinctive racists:

For children under the age of seven, race—or, rather, physical traits like skin color, language, and hair texture—are just signs that someone is in some way different from themselves, similar to gender or weight. It’s not unusual or unhealthy for kids to gravitate toward the familiar so early in life. Kids’ views only become prejudiced when they start linking these physical traits to flaws in character or behavior. We adults are the ones who ascribe malice to simply noticing racial differences.

She continues:

So in and of itself, recognizing racial difference is not a cause for alarm—quite the opposite, in fact. For years, studies have found that children who recognize these kinds of differences from an early age show a stronger general ability to identify subtle differences between categories like color, shape, and size—which, in turn, has been linked to higher performance on intelligence tests. Researcher Francis Aboud has found that children between the ages of four and seven who show this advanced ability to identify and categorize differences are actually less prejudiced. So parents, rest assured: When children notice and ask about racial differences, it’s a normal and healthy stage of development.

Whew. Remembering that lessened my anxiety about tackling Liko’s question: “Why do only black kids play basketball?”

But how to answer him? Briscoe-Smith notes that many well-intentioned parents opt for a policy of silence on the subject of race. “They assume that if they raise their children not to recognize racial differences, they’ll prevent them from becoming racist,” she writes.

Unfortunately, while parents are saying things like, “Look at the pretty boat!” in an effort to distract their children from the topic at hand, the kids are still noticing race and forming their own ideas on the subject—or getting their ideas from messages in the world around them.

“Instead of trying to ignore race, research suggests that parents should be more pro-active,” writes Briscoe-Smith. Her own research with 67 racially- and ethnically-diverse families found that “talking and answering kids’ questions about race may help them understand racial issues and become more tolerant.”

She also discovered that “the children of parents who talked more about race were better able to identify racism when they saw it, and were also more likely to have positive views about ethnic minorities.” This was true for both the white families and the families of color in her study.

As Briscoe-Smith’s research flashed through my mind, Liko looked at me and he expected an answer. I took a deep breath and said, “Well, it looks like a lot of black kids like playing basketball! Do you want to play basketball with them when you’re older?”

“Yeah!” he said.

Then he said: “Can I have an ice cream?”

And that was that. (Though I really need to do some research on how to say, “No, you can’t have ice cream right now,” in a way that doesn’t result in wheedling or weeping.) In the moment, I felt somehow inadequate, like I had missed some great opportunity to, I don’t know, plant the seed that will result in him one day becoming a perfectly tolerant human being.

But in retrospect, I see that I was just being a stupid adult. He was asking a simple and reasonable question, one of about two hundred he asked me that same day. Knowing of this research is a comfort to me, and should be to all parents, I think. (When I later shared this incident with Allison Briscoe-Smith, by the way, she told me that I had given the “developmentally appropriate” answer.)

This doesn’t mean that Liko and I, and all of us, aren’t facing a perilous racial landscape. Racism is a system of privilege based on race, one that still shapes our society. As Beverly Daniel Tatum points out in her 1998 book, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, when racial segregation combines with cultural misinformation and inequalities of power, the results are toxic for individuals, institutions, and cultures.

Like does indeed usually attract like, but prejudice is not the inevitable result. Other, considerably less innocent and natural, factors are in play. It’s us adults, not the kids, who are responsible for the stereotypes and the power.

There are lots of things children do that we as adults help them to grow out of. We teach them to share, and to say please and thank you, and how to clean up after themselves, and how to cross the street, and much more. All of these lessons are a struggle; our kids resist every step of the way, until they don’t. This is just one more item on that list. No need to hyperventilate, no need to feel guilty.

Of course, I’m not going to tell Liko, or anyone else’s kids, who to play with, but I will do my best to help him expand his world, and try to help him see through stereotypes, and, when he gets old enough, fight against power imbalances. That’s what counts the most, or so I believe.

By Jeremy Adam Smith

I think you should know that conservatives think you’re a terrible parent. I know that it might hurt to hear this. But just listen to what they have to say with an open mind, OK?

Take talk-radio host Mike Gallagher. When he sees a kid pitch a fit in a restaurant and the parents (“well-heeled, well-dressed”) give in, there’s only one possible conclusion: the parents are liberals! Worse, they’re raising a liberal!

Such permissiveness will set that child up for a lifetime of disappointment and misery. Children want to be taught to do the right thing; they expect us to be in charge. Little Henry is going to grow into a person who figures that if he screams loudly enough, he’ll always get his way. He’ll develop into a person with an overwhelming sense of entitlement.

In other words, he’ll become a liberal.

Hearing from parents on my radio show all the time, there’s a clear distinction between conservative parents and liberal ones. Conservatives believe in the power of spanking…. Liberals seem afraid to spank their children… I’ll bet anything that Henry’s parents were a couple of liberal New York Democrats.

Later on in his book, Surrounded by Idiots—I think he’s referring to his listeners, but that’s speculation on my part—Gallagher strikes out at “wacky mothers… who flaunt breast-feeding in crowded places, like restaurants, shopping malls or department stores.”

I wonder if breasts are intrinsically liberal? If so, I’m glad Mike is doing something about them. Mike’s got the breast-beat covered for the conservative movement. He’s their breast man.

Betsy Hart, who has breasts but still boasts back-cover quotes from rock-hard conservatives like William J. Bennett and Laura Schlessinger, takes on the whole “parenting culture,” in which “parents are essentially encouraged to idolize their children, to marvel at their inherent wisdom and goodness…and that’s just for starters.”

In her book It Takes a Parent (as opposed to a village—villages are for liberals!), Hart attacks parents who give their kids choices. Choices are liberal and liberal, as we have established, is bad.

“Children learn to make wise choices by having wise choices made for them,” she writes. She talks about just ordering food on behalf of all four of her kids in restaurants—no perusing the menu for them! Letting your kids pick items on the menu is liberal, and remember, liberal is bad. She spends a lot of time in her book criticizing bad parents who let their kids pick their own sno-cone flavors.

What’s a conservative parent to do when kids keep insisting on making their own choices? For anyone who reads the Bible literally, that’s an easy question to answer. You beat them.

Let’s say, for example, that your two year old insists on getting out of bed after you’ve told him to stay put.

“The youngster should be placed in bed and given a speech,” writes Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, one of the country’s most influential conservatives. “Then when (the child’s) feet touch the floor, give him one swat on the legs with a switch. Put the switch where he can see it, and promise more if he gets up again.”

In some cases, a switch might be too Rockefeller Republican, if you know what I mean. With especially liberal children, you’ll need to head down to Home Depot and buy some quarter-inch plumbing supply line or PVC pipe.

“If you want a child who will integrate into the New World Order and wait his turn in line for condoms, a government funded abortion, sexually transmitted disease treatment, psychological evaluation and a mark on the forehead,” writes pastor Michael Pearl in his book To Train Up a Child, “then follow the popular guidelines in education, entertainment and discipline, but if you want a son or daughter of God, you will have to do it God’s way.”

Though PVC pipe is not specifically mentioned in the Bible, Pearl recommends such “chastisement instruments” as excellent expressions of the Lord’s will.

Too extreme? Not with immortal souls at stake. Children, like liberals, are born demons. “Your child came into the world with an insatiable faculty for evil,” writes Pastor John MacArthur in his 2000 book, What the Bible Says About Parenting. “Even before birth, your baby’s little heart was already programmed for sin and selfishness.”

In other words, your child is a liberal. That’s why you have to beat the little bastards. Keep hitting the rebellious brats until they vote Republican!

*  *  *

Wait…what’s that you say? You don’t want to raise a Republican?

Oh. Well, in that case, try giving your child choices. They may still grow up to vote Republican, but they’re more likely to at least be emotionally health Republicans. The psychological research is overwhelmingly clear: If you involve children in the decisions that affect their lives; if discipline is supportive, not punitive; and  if parents are responsive to children’s needs and thoughts–they’ll grow up being better able to think and feel for themselves. Psychologist Diana Baumrind describes this approach as authoritative parenting.

That’s different from permissive or neglectful parenting, which is what Mike Gallagher thinks he sees in action in that Manhattan restaurant. Authoritative parenting is also quite different from authoritarian parenting—prescribed by Hart, Dobson, Pearl, and MacArthur—which denies choices to children and expects them to obey without question, a style that research has shown contributes to lower self-esteem, poorer social skills, and more feelings of depression.

None of what I’m saying here should be construed as anti-Christian. These folks are right-wing activists who happen to be Christians; I’m not willing to say that they are less Christian than their progressive counterparts, but I do think that their childrearing advice is shaped more by their political beliefs than by the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Indeed, these conservative parenting gurus seem to think authoritarian parenting really will help their kids to grow up conservative. I’m actually not sure if that’s true, but I know I like to have choices, and I think my son grows just up just a little bit every time I help him to pick his own sno-cone flavor.

By Jeremy Adam Smith

I was at the playground talking with some moms.

“I could never ride the bus!” said one. “They’re so dirty and crowded.”

“Taking the bus with a baby?” said another. “That’s just child abuse!”

I hate to think what they would have said about my family, had they known our terrible secret: On the second day of my son’s life, we took him on a bus to see his doctor.

We had no choice. You see, we don’t own a car. In fact, neither my wife nor I have drivers’ licenses. We deliberately gave them up in our twenties, and ever since we’ve walked, rode a bike, carpooled, and taken planes, trains, and buses. And now, so does our son.

When I mention this fact to people who don’t live in San Francisco, New York City, or certain parts of Boston, they look at me as though I am insane. They can’t imagine life without cars; they imagine my carless life as being small and helpless.

But when their cars break down, I notice that it is these folks whose lives become small and helpless. They seem paralyzed, horrified at the thought of walking a mile or even (gasp) taking the bus. Not to be snarky about it, but I can’t help but notice that many of the car-dependent spend inordinate amounts of time worrying about their health and weight.

I confess that in the first years of my son’s life, I did wonder if we shouldn’t get a car–and recently, I have been thinking about getting my driver’s license. It’s fairly easy to be both carless and childless; it becomes fantastically difficult once we become parents. But today I have no intention of buying a private vehicle; instead, I’ll join a carsharing service.

Our reasons for being a carfree family are straightforward: Cars are very bad for the planet, and I believe that they are also bad for our health and our society. “We see cars as freedom, flexibility, convenience,” says University of Toronto engineer Eric Miller. “But the promise of the car, beyond a certain point, becomes nullified by the congestion and pollution it generates.”

You can buy eco-products from here to the end of time; you can recycle and reuse everything you can; you can even buy a hybrid. But most scientists and engineers agree: The single best thing you can do for the Earth, the greatest positive change you can make, is to give up owning a private vehicle altogether.

Many people will see this as a terrible sacrifice. But after fifteen years without a car — five of them as a parent — I don’t think we’ve sacrificed a thing. And in fact, our carfree family has gained a lot:

1. Quality time: When people ride in cars, the child sits in back, restrained in a car seat — quite often whining for attention. That doesn’t happen on buses and trains. We’re right there with my son, talking to him and reading to him and looking out the window at buildings and construction machines and people, and talking about the things we see.

2. Social connection: We don’t just read to him alone on buses and trains. It’s commonplace for other children on board to get drawn into the story I’m reading–and quite often, these are children of other races and cultures. In this and similar ways, we’ve gotten to know a very diverse group of families who travel the same public transit routes we do, and I think that makes our city a better place to live.

3. Community: This is also true for carpooling. I’ve heard at least one person refer to my wife and I as “mooches” because we go to friends for rides when we absolutely need them, but I’ve asked those friends about this and they absolutely don’t mind. We contribute to our community in many, many ways — from babysitting other people’s kids to organizing gatherings to helping out at home when they need it — and sharing rides is just part of that continuum of community. Many of our friends are very well aware that cars hurt the environment; they’re happy to share their rides, knowing that they’re helping take a car off the road.

4. Health, resilience, and patience: Of all the items on this list, I suspect that “health” is the one I don’t need to explain. Most people know that driving everywhere weakens their muscles and adds to their waistline; it’s obvious. If I drove, I’d be pear-shaped. But I’ve found that the benefits to my son go beyond health; he’s also just more resilient and more patient. He doesn’t expect to be carted around everywhere; he’s not spoiled that way (he is spoiled about candy and ice cream, but that’s another issue). He expects that travel will be an adventure involving many steps and negotiations, and I think he’s tougher and more patient as a result.

5. Love of place. Nothing fosters love for a landscape more than walking and riding over it. I see and experience things on a bike or on foot that I never would in a car, and so does my son. If I drove him to the playground, Liko would never have learned to play the drums from those dudes in Golden Gate Park; we’d never have met our neighbors Claudia and Zoe; we’d never have discovered that comic book store in the Sunset. Sure, it might takes us longer to get around the city, but carlessness has allowed us to discover more of it.

Want to know how to live without a car? Check out “How to be a Carfree Family” and “How to Share a Car,” both on Shareable.net.

By Jeremy Adam Smith

I was once on the way to a wedding with two friends, Trey and Manny. We were all twenty years old.

As we roared through a little down in the Florida panhandle, we passed a lone teenage girl walking on the sidewalk.

Trey leaned out the shotgun window and hooted, “God, you have a great ass!”

Trey leaned back grinning, but both Manny and I were shocked. I didn’t say anything, and I probably never would have–but Manny spoke up.

“Trey,” he said, “did that make the world a better place or a worse place?”

Trey’s grin widened. “Hey, I was paying her a compliment.”

“Put yourself in her shoes,” said Manny. He wasn’t angry or self-righteous; he was just having a conversation. “You’re a woman walking alone down a deserted street, and three guys in a car start shouting at you, talking about your body.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t you think that’d be scary?”

Trey was quiet for awhile, and I could see the wheels turning in his head. We were now driving down the turnpike, sawgrass on both sides as far as the eye could see.

Finally Trey spoke up. “I guess I made the world worse, didn’t I?” he said.

It was a difficult moment, but afterward, Trey’s behavior improved markedly. Manny didn’t just affect Trey; he was also confronting my pathetic silence.

I was impressed by Manny’s guts, of course; it’s hard to speak out against male stupidity in an all-guy environment. But I was also impressed by his Socratic approach.

Manny didn’t tell Trey that he was acting like an idiot, which of course he was. Instead, Manny asked questions — and the questions were designed to foster empathy and sense of consequence in Trey’s mind.

It’s an example I’ve tried to follow, more than ever as a father.

Empathy and compassion are skills, not fixed traits. And from birth, research has found, those skills are discouraged in boys and encouraged in girls.

Who does the encouraging and discouraging? Parents, mostly. With my wife, I’ve taught my son to walk, talk, use the potty — and I’ve tried to ask him lots and lots of questions about how other people are feelings and what they’re thinking. I do this when he’s battling another boy over a truck, while we’re reading stories, after he’s kicked me for asking him to brush his teeth…whenever and wherever, in hopes that he’ll never turn into Trey.

And of course, I struggle to foster a sense of empathy for my wife. I won’t lie: This can be tough. I lose my temper. I say shit that I later regret. I’m not always fair; I don’t always see things from her perspective. And every time I fail to do that, I make the world–our world, anyway–slightly worse. Worse for her, worse for my son, and, in the long run, worse for me.

“Couples’ relationships suffer less from a failure of words than from a failure of imagination—an ability to imagine what a partner is thinking and feeling,” write researchers Phillip and Carolyn Cowan.

In an ideal world, having children together should bond a couple into an single loving unit. In reality, the Cowans found, conflict shoots up among two thirds of new parents.

The missing ingredient, they argue, is empathy. Parenthood can send men and women off on different roads of feeling and experience; many couples–at least half, to judge by the divorce rate–never find each other again.

Phil and Carolyn make a number of helpful recommendations for fostering empathy between partners, but the bottom line isn’t complicated: I try my best to listen, and to take my wife’s perspective before I take my own.

Perhaps that seems like small potatoes, as might so many items on my list of twenty-five ways for dads to change the world. But I’m going to keep trying anyway.