House of Eratosthenes

I live in a suburb with a killer rep for “being a good place to raise kids”; some of the parent-child interaction I see is encouraging, and other stuff I see is sad. I see fathers working harder at being non-threatening, than they do at their real job, which is showing their children how a grown man is supposed to behave.

They speak in phony falsetto. They make a point of never, ever making any declarative statement about anything, other than that what someone else said is “okay” and “alright.”

When they place a food order on behalf of someone else — which is very often — they are careful to decide nothing. Presented with an option that hasn’t been anticipated, they ask the cashier to hold on, relay the options to the wife or kid who will be consuming the food, wait for a selection to be made, and relay it back to the cashier. They live out their entire domestic lives as sort of a non-threatening, non-deciding, soft-voiced tennis ball.

They’re not trying to raise monsters or to trash masculinity. Just trying to avoid conflict, and interact successfully with the environment that has been poked and prodded and deconstructed and reconstructed by others.

Which makes it easy to develop weaknesses in their offspring, and hard to encourage strength.

Other pot bellied middle-age geezers like me have prophesied doom in the generations immediately ahead…perhaps for millenia they/we have been doing this. But that thought doesn’t offer me much encouragement. I see lots of inter-dependence and co-dependence, lots of champagne tastes and beer budgets. Lots of debt. Lots of narcissism, lots of people stumbling around laboring under the most tragic of presumptions: That the whole point of life is to be brought things, to be entertained, to be happy. Not much ability.

As a father to two daughters, I feel obliged to comment on this posting. First, I think it is important to distinguish between communicating and dictating. Also between deciding by collaboration and deciding by fiat. To raise girls to be strong women I think means encouraging them to assert their views and preferences, to argue the validity of their positions/choices, and to see an example of a man who respects them for doing so, which sometimes requires a man willing to meet them halfway or even concede something altogether every now and then in the spirit of compromise. Second, I’d like to know what is the harm in fathers asking their kids what kind of food order they might like when other options are available. I’d appreciate the same courtesy from them. I also think that it’s probably a bit of a stretch to think that incidents such as these mean that these fathers aren’t more forcefully decisive regarding other matters that they think are really more important. The fact is that there are more self-assured and confident and strong women these days than there were 60-70 years ago, when men were always the “deciders” about everything that affected the family. So, to say that the behavior of today’s fathers makes it “hard to encourage strength” compared to some other time in the past I think is simply not born out by the facts on the ground.
- huckupchuck | 10/31/2010 @ 00:54
Huck,

I think it’s great you’re doing your bit to encourage your kids to think on their feet and interact with the world around them, that’s what it’s all about. My criticism is toward the father — parents, actually — who act as a “buffer,” taking on that hard chore of approaching that spooky, oh so intimidating person at the cash register. As I wrote, that is quite appropriate during the younger years. Where I live things are a bit over-suburbanized, and there are a lot of parents who carry this into the teenage era & beyond. This entirely defeats the purpose of the exercise, and it also does something worse: It starts to alienate the waitress or point-of-sale person in the mind of the child. They lose the incentive to see the world as a community of people coping with challenges & trying to make it, and start to see it as just themselves, with their needs, and “service” people bringing things to fulfill the need. They’re two entirely different configurations, one community-oriented and the other more selfish, hub-and-wheel oriented.

One of the things I’ve found to be most challenging as a parent is that, in the moment when things are happening, it’s impossible to achieve a complete command of knowledge of all the little things you’re doing & not doing to affect how your child is maturing. This is one that I’m convinced a lot of parents are ignoring. Such an easy trap to fall into: You don’t want to hold up the line, because none of us want to teach our kids it’s okay to make all those people wait. But when you do things for the child, the child might see it as “Dad’s doing this, there’s no reason in the world I can’t learn to do it” — or, the child might see it as “I don’t need to do this, someone else will do it for me.” The point is, just because you want the child to see it as one way and not the other way, doesn’t mean that’s the way it’s gonna happen.

The other point I’d like to make is that we lately don’t have a shortage of self-assertive kids with a gusto for involving themselves in decisions, especially on the female side. I’m really not sure where this concern came from. We all come out of the womb wanting things to go the way we want ’em to go; what we need to be taught, is when to take a break from expressing our preferences about every li’l thing, watch others, pay attention, figure out what’s really happening, and adapt.

As far as asking the tyke what he/she would like, there is an implied exemption from the rule if you’ve all agreed to try out some new experience. I left this unstated because I tend to err on the side of defining every little thing and sometimes it makes my drivel hard to read. Now, if you’re going to McDonald’s or some other place you’ve been taking your children for the last decade plus, there is NO excuse for requiring a quick in-the-car mini-conference about which flavor of McNugget sauce would be the preferred one. I’m sure you’re not doing something like that…but trust me when I say this…around here, there are some things that will irritate you if you pay attention to them, and after awhile all you can do is stop paying attention to them.
- mkfreeberg | 10/31/2010 @ 07:51

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Withdrawing Fathers
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010