You're Doing It Wrong, Baby
When I woke up this morning, I thought, "You know, Fluxy, what the world really needs is another article on parenting written by a childless young person." I'm not one to deny The World, so let's hope I don't step on too many toes with this.
A few months back, some of you might remember hearing about a study showing that Baby Einstein and similar media oriented toward smartifying Very Small Persons did, well, the opposite, reducing language skills by about 10%. It's surprising, you know, since we all know that watching TV makes adults much more intelligent than any other activity. But apparently it's so potentially stunting of little minds that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends against children two and under watching any television at all.
Baby Einstein's response?
...The Baby Einstein Company is aware of the ongoing discussions regarding children and television viewing, particularly as it pertains to infants under the age of two years old. And, while we respect the American Academy of Pediatrics, we do not believe that their recommendation of no television for children under the age of two reflects the reality of todays parents, families and households for example, a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study found that 68% of all babies under two years old watch screen media on any given day. The Baby Einstein Company believes that when used properly, developmentally-appropriate video content can be a useful tool for parents and little ones to enjoy together.
Really, you guys? You're using the "but, moooooom, everybody's doing it!" defense?
But perhaps we are being too judgmental of the Baby Einstein™ subsidiary of Disney™. What do those nasty academics poo-pooing the trend of video parenting suggest? Well, interacting and talking with your baby. This is, of course, absurd, as we all know that discussion with our elders only makes us stupid and weak. That's why college is for chumps.
And now, also, apparently, blocks.
I always thought that building blocks were kind of dorky, but the Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute has found a correlation between stacking blocks and early language skills. Apparently brand names and fancy marketing have no effect on childhood intelligence and happiness. All those pushing Bugaboos and other frou-frou items of the Pants-Pissing Elite may now commence crying into their Cheerios.
Of course, I am not (yet) a mom, and it's a hell of a lot easier for me to say that the Very Small shouldn't be parked in front of the TV, that you should be engaging your kids in age-appropriate, thought-provoking conversation and the building of tiny castles out of preciously retro wooden blocks. I try not to be too much of a sanctimonious mater en potentia.
But convenience culture will be the death of us. Food processed until it contains only the whisper of the essence of life, the triumph of "easy" and "comfortable" over sophistication and self-value, and 68% of parenting through the boob tube? No thanks. I'll be expending some effort.
Flux is actually pretty sanctimonious, but it's not relegated to the subject of children, she promises.
Travis Henry: Not a Trojan Man
Denver Bronco running back Travis Henry only scored seven TD's all of 2006, but it's recently come to light that Henry has fathered nine little running backs from nine different mothers. It's believed to be a modern sports record. From the non-sport pages of The Denver Post:
Broncos running back Travis Henry knows the sports world will not be able to resist having fun at his expense.
If Steve Garvey had to endure "he's not my Padre" teases for fathering two children out of wedlock with two women, then Henry can expect considerable sarcasm now that it has been revealed he has fathered nine children from nine women.
"People can judge me all they want," Henry said as he watched his team warm up for its preseason game Saturday night against the Cleveland Browns at Invesco Field at Mile High. "But only God can judge me."
Henry's personal life was recently revealed after he received a child-support judgment in a DeKalb County, Ga., court. It's not the first time a professional athlete has been involved in such controversy. Former NBA star Shawn Kemp has seven children with six women and Derrick Thomas, the late linebacker of the Kansas City Chiefs, had seven children with five women.
Nine children with nine women is a new standard.
"A lot of stuff that's been put out there isn't true, but I'm not going to get into that right now," Henry said. "The important thing is I want to take care of my kids really and truly. It's all good."
Wow. Once, it's an accident. Twice, it's time to note that it's a habit that may need addressed. More than that, you have some problems understanding the consequences of your actions. This is like once a year since he was 19-years-old.
I am certain nearly all (probably every one) of these women knew he was an NFL player with a sizable income and, from their perspective, it may not have entirely been "accidental". I've heard plenty of rumors of women who prowl around as groupies, hoping to get impregnated by a rich athlete and living off child support the rest of their lives. Not sure if any of it's well-documented or merely rumors, but I find it entirely credible.
I'm not going to judge him on moral grounds, but in terms of just making sound decisions in terms of personal safety, personal finance, etc.
VD risks aside, bareback sex is nice, no doubt, but there's a bit of responsibility involved. If you're gonna be out there with "groupies" or girls you just don't know that well and you don't want to get them pregnant and go broke paying child support, then use protection.
And this quote doesn't strike me as intelligent:
"People can judge me all they want," Henry said ... "But only God can judge me."
Maybe a more intelligent statement would be "people will judge me -- and I'm fine with that -- but only God's judgment matters to me." Even then, bringing up God in this discussion is a bit odd, but it's not my place to judge whether his god frowns upon sex out of wedlock, etc.
Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: The Damn Parents Today
Just before the end of Spring break a few weeks ago, my wife and I took our kids camping for a few days. I'm not the biggest fan of camping, but we've done this since we were dating, because it's an inexpensive way to get away from the real world and all its responsibilities, and force me to get offline for more than a few hours at a time (I'm not the only technophile who gets the shakes after ninety luddite minutes, am I?)
This year, rather than some sort of rustic camping experience on a secluded beach or high up in the mountains, we did some car camping down in Chula Vista, at this campground we used to take the kids to when they were really little. With our oldest heading off to college in a few months, I think it was as much about the nostalgia of those simple days as it was about the convenience of easily-accessible showers and a camp store, but if we were expecting anything like what we saw ten years ago, we didn't find it.
First of all, the campground has WiFi. Wait. What? WiFi? In a campground? Yes, JOSHUA, there is WiFi, and you can play Global Thermonuclear War from the comfort of your own tent. It was hard to believe, but I saw just as many guys sitting at a picnic table playing World of Warcraft as I saw people reading books in the shade of a tree.
There have always been RVs with television antennas, but nearly all the ones I saw this year had portable satellite dishes, so their owners wouldn't miss a single moment of CNBC or the TV Guide channel while they were away from home.
Isn't the whole point of camping to get away from these things? I thought so, but I'm probably out of touch, and the people who choose a well-developed, freeway-close campground probably aren't looking for the most rustic experience in the world, which is entirely reasonable, I think.
However, I did see something in this campground that really grinds my gears. While I played Frisbee with my kids, a bunch of other kids riding bikes around us, I saw one child, probably 7 or 8 years old, sitting outside at a picnic table, playing a gaming console. This kid was glued to his button mashing, oblivious to everything going on around him. His parents brought him camping, where he was surrounded by other kids his age who were all playing together, and there he was, glued to the PS2.
What. The. Fuck.
Now don't get me wrong: I love gaming. I love technology. In fact, I almost wrote a column this week all about the majesty of handeld games in the 70s and 80s (Merlin and Mattel D&D FTW!) and when I was younger, I took my Mattel Football and then Gameboy just about everywhere with me, but my parents gave me limits, (I didn't miss Old Faithful erupting because I was playing Tetris, for example) and they certainly never brought our Atari 2600 with us on a vacation.
I've been ruminating on this for some time, but I've recently concluded that there is, in fact, an entire generation of parents, about my age or just a little older, who are substituting technology for parenting. As a result, there's an entire generation of children who are overstimulated and undersocialized, and in some cases heavily medicated, because their damn parents would rather distract them with a DVD or video game than, you know, interact with them.
Is this the new way we're supposed to raise emotionally healthy and well adjusted kids? I must have missed a memo, because these people are everywhere.
Next time you're in the freeway and you see one of those obnoxious SUVs with the fucking little family sticker on the back window (you know, the one that has the adorable little stick figures of mom, dad, their seven kids and the dog) take a look as you pass them. In four out of five cases, the seven kids are all watching a DVD. On the way to the store. Because god forbid they have ten minutes in a row where they're not watching Dora or The Wiggles.
In restaurants, it's all too common to see parents completely ignoring their kid while he plays a PSP or Nintendo DS, and I've recently seen kids watching an ultra-portable DVD player while they drink Coke after Coke as mom talks on the cell phone, oblivious to everyone around her including her child.
There's a car commercial running right now that is an unintentionally powerful and disturbing commentary on how many people in this generation of parents are raising their kids. It starts in a school lunch room, filled with kids who are jumping and running around, throwing food, and generally raging out of control. A teacher tries to get them to settle down, and is ignored, so he flips down a little display, like you'd see in a car-based DVD player, and the entire room instantly turns into slackjawed, television watching zombies. What's the message here? "If you can't get your kids to listen to you, don't worry, all it takes is a little DVD action to do it for you, so you can get back to the peace and quiet you inexplicably thought you'd enjoy when you had seven fucking kids."
I know this basic phenomenon is nothing new. As long as television has existed, parents have sat their kids in front of it while they did other things, but the current portability of media, and the complexity and depth of handheld video games, is leading to a generation of kids who are so used to its constant presence, when it's taken away, they just don't know what to do with themselves -- and neither do their parents. If you've ever seen a kid running around a grocery store like a ferret on crystal meth, while their hapless parent stands by and avoids eye contact with other shoppers, you know what I mean.
When this generation of kids, who have never learned how to sit still or entertain themselves for more than a few minutes at a time, grow up and meet the creepy home schooled kids whose parents have substituted mythology for science and history, the shit is really going to hit the fan.
When that day comes, though, I have a plan: I'll just carry a portable DVD player with me at all times. If any of them tries to give me shit when I'm collecting my social security check, a little Dora should transform them from annoying Customer Service Jackass into helpful Customer Service Zombie in a matter of seconds.
Wil Wheaton is totally winning this contest he's in with Rob Corddry.
True Stories by Rob Corddry: Your Life is Going to Change.
Every second is a miracle, he said, attempting to flip through the newer Baby Einstein videos while navigating around the three-month-old strapped to his chest. Seriously. Every second. I nodded, pretending to give even an inkling of a shit about any syllable that managed to make its way past his prodigious teeth. A living, breathing miracle! Every single second. He stopped at one particular video and smiled. Or, rather, he smiled more. Im not sure his mouth was built in a way that allowed him to do anything but. I hated him so much.
Wow, youre so lucky. I said.
You will be too, soon! he whinnied at me, and motioned across the store to my then-pregnant wife.
No, I mean, most people have to measure time by seconds. You get to measure it by miracles.
Yeah! Its like that! he brayed, knocking over an entire shelf of videos with his massive front teeth.
I winced. Playing the smart ass to the perpetually stupid is never as satisfying as it should be. Id have to remember to tell my wife how funny I was. Sixty miracles later we were out the door.
My neighborhood in Brooklyn was a hornets nest of children and their horrible parents. I hated every single person with a kid that lived within a twenty-block radius of my childless home. To me, parents seemed nothing more than glazy-eyed automatons intent on getting the next best stroller and quitting their jobs so that they could teach their brood sign language before they could even sit upright. They re-jigger every single aspect of their lives to meet the supposed needs of this tiny mass of unresponsive flesh that they have so willfully given up their spare bedroom/awesome home office for. When these uber-parents finally take a few hours off they brag about not taking epidurals and how much they hate sleeping anyway. An Epidural by the way, is a kick-ass cocktail of Morphine and vagina-Novocaine that actually allows a woman to enjoy the birthing process. Epidurals are shunned by the overly proud and fucking stupid. I stand by this statement. If you refuse the epidural you are a retarded monkey.
Why is it that parents today are, mostly, horrible douche-bags? Its most likely a reaction to their own upbringing; our parents generation failed at absolutely everything. But I hate blaming the whole phenomenon on Hitler, whiskey, Vietnam and Watergate. The world is a little more dangerous than it was when we grew up and we are acutely aware of it. We are afraid of everything in a way our parents werent and we are intensely protective and, I think, competitive. And what inspires competition more than the result of our own co-mingled love juices? Unfortunately, nothing.
I never wanted kids. Im too lazy, self-centered and awesome. Oh but thats perfect! an idiot once told me. Having kids is the ultimate narcissism! Its a little version of you! That seems less like narcissism and more like psychosis to me. While I do tend to think of myself (often) as talented and ruggedly handsome I have no desire to cultivate an army of tiny selves. I would, however, be interested in discussing an army of Zombies. While dangerous, Zombies are easy to kill. Babies are not.
I admit that, since Ive had a child of my own, these people dont bother me as much. I guess Ive learned who to avoid. And these people are much more annoying when you arent a parent. Ive vowed never to be as condescending to prospective parents as these parents were to me. Your life is going to change! is the most common mantra-hammer with which people love to smash the childless. But, when you have a child, your life doesnt actually change all that much. Sure, I wake up earlier, so I cant booze like I used to. Ive also become a little more productive with my time, as it has become slightly more precious. But, essentially, Im still the same functional alcoholic I was before my wifes vagina exploded.
And every second is NOT a living, breathing miracle. Some seconds are boring. A lot are terrifying. Most are merely hilarious.
I apologize if this seems strident and reactionary. I hate the hip, devil-may-care parents almost as much as I hate the robot variety. J.D. Salinger once said something like, Love your children with detachment for they are not yours. They belong to God. Then again, J.D. Salinger is most likely a pedophile. I mean, have you read A Perfect Day for Bananafish? What a freak.
Rob Corddry is an actor. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.
Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: The Next Generation of Geeks
When my stepkids were younger, their hyper-competitive father coached them on baseball and soccer teams. I was shoved right out of the picture, and I never really got to enjoy that sort of interaction with them. I went to all their games, though, and over the course of a few seasons, I realized that I didn't want to share those things with them. I can think of a lot of ways to spend my weekend mornings, and while it's nice to get outside and get some sunshine and exercise, dealing with ultra-competitive, win-at-all-costs parents -- who are screaming at their eight year-olds -- isn't one of them. Rather than engage in a silly pissing contest with their father and make the kids uncomfortable, I backed off, sat quietly in the bleachers, and cheered them on, no matter what the outcome of the game was. I tried my best to instill in them one of my core values: if you only focus on winning, rather than doing your best and enjoying the game, you're setting yourself up to be unhappy a lot of the time. (I developed this philosophy over countless board games when the dice just wouldn't fall my way no matter what I did, and it's served me rather well ever since.)
There was a time when I wondered if I'd ever be able to make strong bonds with my stepkids because I don't have that sports gene that most guys have. "I can't throw a curveball to save my life, but I can throw a d20 to save vs. poison," I once said to a friend of mine . . . and instantly realized that instead of trying to be someone I wasn't, and instead of trying to play into the typical "fathers play sports" thing, I could just share with my kids the things that I love, that made me who I am today. I carefully introduced my boys to the geeky things that shaped my life.
Timing, as they say, is everything, and in this case, I lucked out, because Lord of the rings and Harry Potter opened the door for fantasy games like Talisman, Dungeon, Munchkin, and Heroquest (which, I saw in the store this holiday season, is making a triumphant return, complete with expansion packs!) We have spent hours playing these games together over the years, and I will never forget the day that Nolan (my younger boy) pulled out Talisman, and convinced two of his friends that it was "really cool" and got them all to give it a try.
After I proved to the kids through gaming that I wasn't entirely lame, I showed them how cool backyard astronomy can be. I was helped in this regard, again, because five years or so earlier, when they were really little, comet Hale-Bopp was huge in the Western sky almost every night, and the Leonids had one of their once-per-century peak storms, so they knew there was cool stuff up there, and trusted me when I said I'd show them how to find it with a star chart and the red-cellophaned flashlight. To this day, they point out Orion, Sirius, and find Polaris when the skies are dark and clear enough to see it. They even took it upon themselves to learn some of the mythology (via my bookshelf) surrounding a few of my favorite constellations Cassiopea, Cephus, Perseus and Andromeda.
When League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was in theaters, I pointed out to my boys that the graphic novel that inspired the movie was pretty good, and that I had it if they wanted to read it and decide which was better. They couldn't believe I was encouraging them to read comic books, and that opened another door for me. Ryan turned 17 this year, and I gave him a complete set of Sin City books, while Nolan enjoyed a lot of my old superhero books. This particular area wasn't as successful as I'd hoped, though; neither one of them understood why I like Watchmen so much, and one of them (who will remain nameless for his own protection) even said that it was "boring." Yes, a little bit of me died that day; you can't win them all.
The greatest challenge, which surprised me, was introducing them to geeky movies and TV shows. I thought this would be simple, since they were already into Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings but I made a fundamental mistake. This will actually be a column entirely on its own -- a guide to introducing a non-geek to geeky movies and TV shows -- but I'll just say that The Prisoner and 2001 are not the best place to start, especially with kids. Luckily, the new Battlestar Galactica and Firefly proved to be a much better place to introduce my guys to science fiction that had the perfect balance of story, classic Sci-Fi themes, action, and pretty ladies (hey, I'm dealing with teenage boys, remember. Thank you Number Six and Kaylee, for, uh, various reasons.)
As a parent, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing a little bit of yourself in your kids, and as a geek, it's 3d6+4 times more rewarding to see my geekiness reflected back at me from my boys. Nolan is into Magic: The Gathering, we frequently play Settlers of Catan (with my non-geek wife, no less) and they both embrace all of these things I've shared with them over the years. They're not hardcore (yet) but Ryan was recently accepted into Mensa with an IQ of 159 (!), and with an interest in quantum physics, he's on his way. Nolan never met a gadget he didn't want to take apart, understand, and put back together (occasionally with some spiffy modification) and both of them like to celebrate personal accomplishments by eating Sir Robin's Minstrels, which I'm pretty sure they picked up from me.
They haven't played organized sports in ages, but we play games together a few times a week, and when I was watching movies for last week's column, they watched Logan's Run and Westworld with me. I spared them The Omega Man, though, because one of our jobs as parents is to protect our kids from things like that, right?
Wil Wheaton hopes to attend the Midvale School for the Gifted one day.
Baby Be of Use
Sick of babies not being useful as they sit there and drool and develop mentally while lazily sleeping the days away? Check out Lisa Brown's series of Baby Be of Use books including titles such as Baby Make Me Breakfast, Baby Mix Me a Drink, Baby Fix My Car and Baby Do My Banking. The books are published by McSweeney's in the classic baby board book format, and are delightfully illustrated by the author cover-to-cover. Pick up copies for all your expectant friends and their useless babies here.
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