Alternadad

When I was a kid, the theory of evolution was an accepted fact.

Given my role as a parenting pundit and grumpy crank, I knew I’d eventually begin delivering statements that start with “when I was a kid…” Still, I never thought I’d be wistful about a time when we all agreed that humans came from monkeys.

But times have changed. Back then, evolution was as accepted as the Earth’s rotation on its axis. The Scopes Monkey trial was 60 years in the rear-view. Hard Darwinian science had trumped the skeptics and the nincompoops. I doubted evolution no more than I doubted that my heart pumped blood through my body.

No room for argument: One rationalist's response to a newspaper article seriously debating evolution My son, on the other hand, came down the birth canal into a brave new world, where school boards debate spurious intelligent design curricula, where 66 percent of Americans surveyed by USA Today believe that God created the world in seven days, and where the President of the United States thinks evolution is just one theory. This summer saw the opening of Kentucky’s Creation Museum, a $27 million high-tech “educational” institution determined to teach our children that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark. Now the Scopes Monkey Trial is 90 years in the rear-view, and in some parts of America, it’s like Clarence Darrow never existed.

There’s little chance that Elijah, being raised by secular liberals in Southern California, will learn to believe that people walked with dinosaurs. But such questions weren't even possible when I was in school. Powerful people and institutions are attempting to chip away at rational science. A parent can no longer assume that his children won't encounter anti-evolutionary propaganda. While I’m skeptical about religion, I’m not opposed to faith and spirituality. Elijah goes to a Jewish preschool, after all. But the other side preaches a dangerous ideology. When faith gets in the way of facts, I get angry.

Doesn’t my obstinacy challenge my desire to have my son think for himself? Am I being as ideologically rigid as people who preach intelligent design? Perhaps. But I think the question is a little bit off. I’m not worried about my son becoming a Wall Streeter or, worse, a Republican. The generation gap of Family Ties no longer exists. People who ask me about what I’ll do when my son turns into Alex P. Keaton—a character I revered as a kid—are stuck in an old way of thinking.

This isn’t about an ideological struggle between democratic socialism and unfettered free-market economics. And though I’d argue that there’s a deep sexist component to religious fundamentalism, it’s not really about race or gender issues either. It’s about keeping alive the spirit of discovery, and also preserving essential notions of truth and freedom of thought.

A Creation Museum exhibit of Noah making a sacrifice to God: How can anyone doubt such a convincing diorama? I don’t want Elijah to be a jerk about his beliefs, but he should be intolerant toward faith-based reasoning simply because it’s wrong. So I’ve made it a point to provide him with early counter-tools: a bunch of books about dinosaurs, a comic book about the beginnings of life, and the HD-DVD collection of Planet Earth from the BBC. These range from awe-inspiring to irritating. For instance, our planet itself narrates the comic book, which is just a little too Whole Earth Catalog for me. Still, it’s useful. I deploy these tools much as a gentle, patient creationist father would talk to his son about how God created the world in seven days.

“You can see here in this book,” I say, “that there was a great rain on Earth that lasted millions of years.”

“And then there were bacteria,” he says.

“Right.”

“And they turned into jellyfish which turned into lizards and fish and insects and then they grew legs and went onto land and some of them became dinosaurs and some of them became mammals and then there were monkeys or primates and they became people! Is that right?”

Indoctrination at work. At four years old, Elijah not only knows some basic scientific truths about the world, but he also thinks evolution is cool. It would only be more awesome to him if it somehow involved light sabers.

New Yorker contributor George Packer, who unlike myself isn’t prone to hyperbole, wrote about a recent visit to the Creation Museum that he felt like “a dissident surrounded by the lies of a totalitarian state.” This frightened me. I’m trying to teach my son to question authority, even if he starts with me. He needs to recognize “the lies of a totalitarian state” when those lies are being widely propagated to a willing, paid public. If he doesn’t feel like a dissident in the face of such propaganda, then I haven’t done my job.

* * *

 

We asked David Klinghoffer of the anti-evolution Discovery Institute "What does DI want to teach Jewish-American children about Intelligent Design?"

* UPDATE: Jason Rosenhouse, host of Evolution Blog, weighs in with The Chutzpah of Intelligent Design.

* UPDATE: Computer scientist and civil liberties advocate Jeffrey Shallit of the University of Waterloo blogs this exchange, here.

Want to blog this exchange between an urban hipster parent and the Discovery Institute? Submit a blog post to Jewcy here.

ALSO IN JEWCY:

On Faithhacker, Tamar Fox reported on politicians in Georgia and Texas who tried to discredit evolution by claiming it was dreamed up by the Pharisees. Laurel Snyder looked at why Orthodox Jews, unlike many equally observant Christians, have made peace with evolution. As part of his year living according to the rules of the Bible, A.J. Jacobs visited Kentucky’s Creation Museum.

On the Daily Shvitz, Josh Strawn reported on an NYC businessman who is suing a Seed writer for $15 million for calling him a “crackpot” in two reviews of his book challenging the theory of evolution, and Francois Blumenfeld-Kouchner panned the Darwin exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum.

Sometimes the best nontraditional engagement ring isn’t a ring at all; one Indiebride poster’s fiancé proposed with a skee-ball machine. If your sweetie’s not a skee-ball champ, though, you can always go with one of the following options, or pick a design from The Carrot Box, a blog devoted to unusual rings.

1. These wooden rings are simple and environmentally friendly.

 

 

 

2. A silver ring inlaid with poured concrete—yes, concrete—is perfect for Bob-the-Builder types.

 

 

3. These acrylic cube rings from Japan put a ‘60s twist on the meta-ring concept.

 

 

 

4. Geeks who don’t mind spending a little more money can immortalize their love in binary code.

 

 

5. Some antique stones might be "blood diamonds," but at least they’re recycled. Try the lovely art deco rings at Circa1930s.

We were having some trouble with the boy again. In an argument with a classmate, he’d thrown a block at the other boy’s forehead. The block connected. According to reliable observers, a geyser of blood erupted. The other kids in the class screamed.

It wasn’t a serious injury, just a messy one. The other kid sported a Band-Aid for a couple of days, and then it was forgotten. But a point had tipped. That afternoon, the preschool director called us in for a conference with Elijah’s teacher. They didn’t know what to do with him, they said. When he got upset, he stood in the middle of the schoolyard screaming. If, for some reason, his shoes got wet, the freak-outs were even worse.

Discipline and punish: This method not recommendedThis felt familiar: Elijah had already been kicked out of one preschool for biting. He’d also thrown public temper tantrums, usually resulting in him hitting an unsuspecting stranger. Months would go by without behavior problems, but then they’d re-emerge, more powerful than ever. When he acted up, we made fitful, incomplete attempts to keep him under control. Sometime we’d propose punishments, but not follow through. Other times, we’d punish without warning. Regina would punish and I would rescind. Or vice-versa. This happens to a lot of parents when they’re suddenly faced with a child, as opposed to a baby. When kids learn how to think rationally, they go on the attack. Parents must be ready to counter this with love, but also firm discipline. We weren’t ready enough.

“He’s always been an emotional child,” I said.

This, they said, goes beyond emotion.

They referred us to a child psychologist.

*****

Before she met with our son, the psychologist wanted us observe the boy’s behavior and take notes of any patterns. We mentioned his wet-shoe phobia. Also, sometimes he tried to hit his cousin when they argued over toys. This hardly seemed like a behavioral crisis. There hadn’t been any more serious incidents at school. We’d spent $600.

Even in a place like L.A., where it can seem like therapy is required by city charter, people don’t publicize their psychoanalysis. Therefore, it’s hard to find reliable statistics on what percentage of kids actually ends up in counseling. But in a country where 7.8 percent of children were diagnosed with attention deficit disorder as recently as 2003, I’d assume the percentage is pretty high. What if your kid isn’t mentally ill, though? What if you’re just having discipline problems? Sometimes a shrink can help. I’ve seen one myself on and off throughout my life. But therapy can be a crutch. Easier and far less expensive solutions abound.

Honor Thy Parenting Guide: Mogel's bookWendy Mogel had the same thought. An LA-based child psychologist dealing with educated urban liberals, she’d grown frustrated at her inability to help her patients. These children should have been perfectly adjusted and happy, but weren’t. Parents complained that their children were rude, spoiled, and out of control.

In her search for answers, Mogel found surprising solace in the Fifth Commandment. Children were simply not honoring their father and mother, as she explained in her parenting guide, The Blessings Of A Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings To Raise Self-Reliant Children. The book sold more than 100,000 copies and earning her a flattering profile in The New York Times Magazine. She began filling seminars across the country with Jews and non-Jews alike, all of whom were ready for her eminently practical message.

One afternoon, The Blessings of the Skinned Knee arrived in our mail, sent by my mother. She and my Aunt Estelle, who’d raised eight kids between them, had gone to see one of Mogel’s lectures. I ignored it, since I only tend to read parenting-themed books that involve the narrator getting drunk all the time. Regina, on the other hand, refused to deny the fact that we still had some trouble at home. She tore through it in two nights, proclaiming, when she was done, that she had the answer to most of our problems.

So I took to the couch with a beer and soaked in some wisdom. Mogel writes that parents need to be respected by their children, who should treat them as “honored rulers” in their own homes. Parents should demand this respect because children crave authority figures. ”Your children don’t need two more tall friends,” she writes “They have their own friends, all of whom are cooler than you. What they need are parents.”

I didn’t agree with everything Dr. Mogel was saying. For one thing, I am definitely cooler than any of my son’s friends, and I found the opposite assertion a bit disingenuous coming from someone who’s raising her own children with the man who wrote The Player. There’s no way some random teenager is going to be cooler than that guy. But everything else in the book hit Regina and I like lightning bolts of Jewish common sense. Our son didn’t respect us enough.

It was time to implement a new regime.

*****

We took three of her suggestions particularly to heart. The first involved chores. In Judaism, Mogel writes, “the path to holiness lies in human activity. Judaism values deed over creed and learning by doing.” For a four-year-old, this means a chore chart. Elijah woke up one morning to find that he had responsibilities. There were four: He had to feed the fish twice a day, he had to help Regina feed the dogs, he had to put his shoes on the shoe rack when he came home from school, and he had to clear his place after dinner.

Child labor: Judaism values doing the dishesThe second involved dinner itself. Judaism teaches that the family table is a sanctified place, so from now on we would eat dinner together.

The third involved discipline. Everything that Elijah treasured—his toys, his sugary treats, his television programs—were now “privileges” that we could take away if he misbehaved. These misbehaviors could involve major offenses, like repeatedly hitting the dogs, or minor ones, like repeatedly ignoring us when we were trying to talk to him. We’d be fair but consistent in implementing our judgment.

Initially, Elijah met us with howls of disbelief. But within a week, he was performing all his chores happily, without complaint. He was sitting in his place at the dinner table, not trying to eat in front of the TV or in our laps. And he was learning that if he got out of line, he’d lose his Spongebob or popsicle privileges.

We had become more authoritarian, but were we more Jewish? Mogel recommends keeping Shabbat, but our interest in Shabbat, and in all religious ritual, is minimal. We send Elijah to a Jewish day school that stages Passover plays, has a weekly Shabbat sing-along, and celebrates Israeli Independence Day, but many of the families at the school—like many of Mogel’s followers—aren’t Jewish. In the New York Times profile, a non-Jewish woman argues that Mogel’s methods are “about raising good people, not just good Jews.” After all, the Fifth Commandment is important in a certain other major religion, too.

But while we hadn’t tapped into any latent religious fervor, we were discovering one reason traditional Jewish methods have lasted for so long—because they work. In fact, we were raising the boy exactly the way my parents raised me. Growing up, it had never been perfect around my house. I didn’t respect my parents all the time and they weren’t always totally fair. But we ate dinner as a family, I did my chores, and I generally accepted the punishments they doled out. Here I sit, without a prison record, and I’m trying to raise my son using the same time-honored Jewish family methods, with slightly greater emphasis on musical taste.

***

One morning, I took Elijah to school. The director approached.

“I don’t know what you’re doing at home,” she said. “But keep doing it. He’s been absolutely wonderful.”

“We’re teaching him to respect us,” I said.

She nodded in total approval.

“Very good,” she said.

Go, Talmud, go!

I thought I’d endured the last of the TV indignities. We’d passed the false god of Baby Einstein, and my son’s interest in Dora the Explorer was declining. Even Dora’s cousin Diego, the most cynically introduced cartoon spin-off character since Itchy and Scratchy’s “new pal Poochie,” had begun to lose his luster in our household. The vise grip of the twin sickly-sweet new-era Sesame Street gremlins Elmo and Baby Bear had released its hold on my throat, and my child had mercifully been born after the monstrous heyday of the purple dinosaur with the unspeakable name. My sanity was home free, until I met the Backyardigans.

For those of you who’ve avoided visual contact with these animated distortions of all that is good and holy about childhood, please allow me to provide background. The Backyardigans are five child-animals—a beanie-wearing penguin, a moose, a girl hippo, a boy kangaroo, and a female buglike creature named “Uniqua”—who meet in the seemingly infinite backyard of their suburban neighborhood and have adventures that are imaginative only in the most generic way possible. Cowboys say “Yahoo!” while they “ride the range,” and a hunt for “soccer monsters” devolves into a rejected Scooby-Doo script, only without the eye candy and the stoner. Worse, The Backyardigans, like most contemporary kids' shows, incorporates multiple sub-Broadway numbers into every plot, creating 10-minute operettas where none is needed. The songs usually end up sounding like rejects from the original score to Wicked.

Upon first beholding this abomination, my adult mind quaked with horror. My child, on the other hand, Life on Mars: Nick Jr's crime against natureloved the show beyond measure. This was hard for me.

“How can he like that show?” I asked my wife. “It’s crap!”

“The more you tell him that,” she said. “The more he’ll want to watch it.”

I tested this theory.

“Elijah,” I said. “I don’t like The Backyardigans.”

“But I do!” he said. “And I want to watch it right now!”

My wife is such a reasonable person.

You may ask: If you don’t like what your child watches on TV, then why do you let him watch at all? Well, we’re TV people. It’s hard for a guy who spent every Saturday night of his boyhood watching The Love Boat to get overly censorious of his own kid’s tube habits.

But if Elijah is going to watch his hour or so of TV a day, then I’d like to have at least a little say. It’s part of his daily diet. And just like with diet, I want to feed him stuff that’s good. Not necessarily good for him—he’s only 4, and he isn’t exactly going to cotton to Masterpiece Theater’s adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit—but at least well-made.

This reflects my larger parenting philosophy. Why play soppy kids’ music for Elijah when Bloodshot Records puts out its own compilation for kids? Why should he watch The Land Before Time 7 when there are perfectly good Discovery Channel dinosaur documentaries also on DVD? Why should he eat processed pre-bagged popcorn when we can make our own together in just a couple extra minutes? Quality matters, and for the most part, it’s not any more expensive. In the most rudimentary way, I want to teach him to think critically, or at least discerningly. Preferring one TV show to another may not be developing a point of view, but it's a start of sorts.

He eats Backyardigans for breakfast: Ming the MercilessIt was “Mission to Mars” that finally set me off. In this very special episode, the Backyardigans go to Mars with their pretend dog robot, wittily named “Rover,” and find the red planet populated by googly-eyed aliens who sing a bouncy song while doing Martian aerobics. It was the lamest fictional depiction of Mars that I’d ever seen. I found myself simultaneously sad and furious. My childhood Mars had meant Ming the Merciless and the semi-psychedelia of Ray Bradbury. My son’s imaginary Mars deserved much more interesting treatment. The time had come to show Elijah what a real Martian looked like.

Enter the Justice League. Unlike the cheesy, campy, poorly animated Superfriends cartoons of my childhood, with the Wonder Twins and other made-up “ethnic” superheroes, this show captures the reality of comic-book heroes better than any other cartoon, ever, and possibly better than any live-action movie. The fights are exciting, the writing witty, and the animation top-notch. As an added bonus, Justice League strongly hints that Batman and Wonder Woman got it on. Most importantly, Justice League features the coolest Martian in our popular culture: J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter. This guy, the last survivor of his kind, is a shape-shifting badass philosopher, a sophisticated, wise, Yoda-like tutor of the spirit, with the additional draw of terrible personal problems.

A boy could really profit by the Martian Manhunter’s example and his guidance. So I made the editorial decision. Elijah and I would watch Justice League. We’d be father and son, joined for eternity in dorkdom.Tragic hero: J'onn J'onzz from a 2004 DC comic

Regina, on the other hand, thought Elijah was too young. She objected.

“It’s too violent,” she said. “He’s only 4.”

“But it’s awesome,” I said.

As usual, I wasn’t going to be stopped, until I stopped myself.

I chose to start off with an archetypal two-parter where Lex Luthor, acting typically sinister, assembles a team of supervillains to destroy the League once and for all. Elijah drooled with joy for 40 minutes and then began asking important questions. “Why is Green Lantern green? … Why does Hawkgirl fly? …Why does Batman have his hand on Wonder Woman’s back?”

And finally, “Is that what all Martians are like?”

Success!

“Martians can be whatever you imagine them to be,” I said.

“Like on The Backyardigans?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” I said.

Two steps forward.

A few nights later, after watching an episode where the Flash and The Martian Manhunter fight a giant fire-breathing snake that’s been unleashed by otherworldly forces, Elijah woke up crying. He’d dreamed he and a friend had fallen down a hole and were being eaten by moles. That's what I get for trying to "educate" my son by showing him a violent superhero cartoon. Then again, he claimed that he wasn’t scared, that the moles were, in fact, cool. My wife didn’t buy into this line.

Kid-tested, father-approved: Reeve as SupermanAfter we got Elijah back down, Regina said, “That’s it. No more Justice League.”

“You don’t know if there’s a correlation … ”

Her glare annoyed me, but she was right. The giant snake had scared me a little.

The next day, I told Elijah that Justice League wouldn’t be on anymore. He was only mildly upset, and I considered it a small victory that I'd broadened his range of characters a little. At least he knew another Martian, and at least he’d invented an imaginary superhero character called Yellow Lantern. And another named Orange Lantern.

But The Backyardigans continued to rule. We needed a long-term, subtle plan. Over the next few months, I supplemented Elijah's hour-a-day TV diet with other shows. Regina found a few episodes of a Canadian show called Popular Mechanics for Kids, and now Elijah knows a lot about recycling and the medical uses of leeches. We watched the original Christopher Reeve Superman movie, which is simply a chestnut for kids, along the lines of The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars. Gradually, he came to ignore The Backyardigans. I’d like to think it’s because he’d finally learned the difference between good TV and bad.

Meanwhile, I've got a lot of Justice League episodes earmarked on YouTube. They can wait until Elijah is 7.

When I was growing up, Chanukah seemed like a wan, meaningless holiday, albeit a personally lucrative one. My celebratory memories mostly involve the receipt of Atari 2600 cartridges. Some vestiges of old-neighborhood tradition lingered: Homemade latkes, a bag of gelt, and especially my dad’s off-key, droning rendition of Maoz Tzur, which he delivered nightly in a dark kitchen lit only by the menorah on our butcher-block island. But it looks as though Elijah’s going to experience slightly different Chanukah cultural norms.

Last weekend, Elijah’s preschool held its annual Festival Of Lights Chanukah fundraiser. As mandated by an East-of-Hollywood address, quite a few of us have rock credentials. Some of us are even Jewish, or at least married to Jews. There’s a quality “Shabbat band” that plays every Friday morning, comprised of school parents who are working musicians. Their children are going to grow up equally comfortable on the bima and in the mosh pit; these people, I’ve come to realize, know how to throw a party.

Like everything else in this part of town, the Festival Of Lights was grassroots by necessity and slightly downscale by choice. I arrived on Saturday at 9:30 AM to begin my volunteer shift. The parking lot was full of busy parents setting up booths: A dreidel table, a fishing game, a duck pond, a bouncy house, spin art, votive candle making, crown and scepter decorating, hair-spraying, face painting, tattoos, airbrush T-shirts, a used-book sale (where I volunteered), and several holiday boutique tables. There was also a photo booth that featured a wintery background, a machine blowing bubbles that were supposed to look like snow, and a four-foot tall plaster bunny that felt just to the right, aesthetics-wise, of the bunny in Donnie Darko. It looked like a holiday photo exhibit that I might have seen ten years ago in Chicago, at Lounge Ax. Lots of families got their pictures taken.

Around 11 AM, things started to swing. A band called Camp Susannah took the stage. This featured a mom from the school who sang songs written by her mother, the composer of Free To Be You And Me. She also sang Yellow Submarine, a song that’s now required at all gatherings designed for children under age 7, and a pretty catchy tune about going to Mars. Later, my wife came up to me.

“That Mars song from The Backyardigans sounded pretty good when she did it,” Regina said.

“Holy shit,” I said. “That was from The Backyardigans?”

“I know. I barely recognized it.”

“I hate The Backyardigans.”

Really, though, I hated myself for recognizing a song from The Backyardigans, and hated myself even more for being an anti-Backyardigans, especially because Elijah loves the show and doesn’t understand that it’s cloying and terrible. If nothing else, parenting presents lots of fresh opportunities for self-hatred. Anyway, I was saved from having to think too much about this by a plate of latkes and a Hansen’s Natural Soda, which Regina had brought for me.

“Are you having fun?” I asked.

“Elijah was good at the fishing,” Regina said.

“And I was also good at the bouncy house,” said Elijah.

“You’re always good at the bouncy house,” I said.

At that moment, Rocket took the stage. This is a band on an L.A. indie label called Teenacide Records. One of the members is the younger sister of one of the moms from Elijah’s class. Apparently, Elijah is into bands that feature hot young indie-rock chicks playing Iggy and The Stooges covers, because as soon as the band started, he began bopping up and down in his seat.

“Mommy,” he said. “I want to go hear the rock-n-roll.”

“I could take him and you could work the beanbag toss,” I said to my wife.

“Nah,” she said. “This band is good.”

And they were, too. Elijah immediately ran up on stage because, following the long tradition of kids at rock shows, that’s where all his friends were. He parked himself in front of a monitor, and then he froze. By the time Regina realized what was going on, the band was three songs into their set.

Fifteen minutes later, they came back to the beanbag toss booth where I was now volunteering.

“Your son is deaf,” Regina said.

“No he’s not,” I said.

“Try him.”

“Elijah,” I said, shouting for effect, “CAN YOU HEAR ME?????”

“YES!!!!!” he said.

“See,” I said to Regina. “He’s not deaf.”

“He said his ears are ringing,” she said.

“This too shall pass,” I said.

“All these parents have been to so many rock shows that they don’t realize how loud the music is,” she said.

“It’s our generation’s curse,” I said.

“The music hurt my ears,” said Elijah.

“See?” said Regina.

“But I liked it,” he added.

“See?” I said.

The next band was The Lashes, Columbia Records artists from Seattle who happened to be playing a show at the El Rey that night. They’re friends with the girls in Rocket, and therefore friends of the school. As evidenced by the large number of black-clad college-age kids who showed up when their set started, The Lashes had obviously advertised their preschool parking-lot gig on MySpace. Still, they adjusted their set accordingly. During a final-song guitar solo, the lead singer left the stage to go jump around in the bouncy house. The parents seemed to appreciate this gesture. After all, no Columbia Records touring artists had played Chanukah fairs when we were kids.

In fact, the only time I heard Mao Tzur all day was between band sets, as Joey, one of the fair’s main organizers and the school’s most involved and spirited dad, bassoed a few off-key lines while performing his emceeing duties. The similarities to my childhood ended there; Joey was wearing biker shorts and a tuxedo shirt and spent the rest of the festival giving rickshaw rides to three kids at a time.

If this festival is any indication, an admittedly small percentage of American kids will now grow up thinking that Chanukah is, among other things, the Jewish holiday of Iggy Pop covers. But who’s to say a Chanukah fair shouldn’t turn into an indie-rock concert? Personally, I think it’s a style worth developing more widely, because it made a ton of money for the school. Also, it was a damn good time, for kids and parents alike. One dad emailed me later with a simple, and prevailing, sentiment:

“Best….preschool….ever.”

When my son was 18 months old, my best friend from high school came through town on his way to California. He’s a respected physician and my most trusted medical counselor. We went back to my office and looked over my stash.

More Useful than a Bugaboo: The Silver Surfer“Dude,” he said. “You’ve got to stop smoking this shit.”

“I know,” I said. “With the kid around…”

“You need to buy a vaporizer.”

“Oh.”

“You get really high, and you don’t mess up your lungs. Also, there’s no odor. It’s awesome.”

My 35th birthday was approaching, and I needed to get myself a present. So I went vaporizer shopping online. I found a website for a sleek, gorgeous ceramic contraption called The Silver Surfer. New terms entered my stoner lexicon: “heat source,” “mouthpiece,” “whip,” “wand.” It would be the greatest present I’d ever give myself. No more apple bongs for me. I had to consume my THC wisely. I was a dad now.

*****

I’m a man of few vices. Alcohol doesn’t appeal to me, except in very limited quantities. I don’t play a lot of cards or smoke cigars, and I’m really not that into porn. My naughtiness all goes into the herb, and it’s as low-level as naughtiness gets.

Before my son was born, my hobby went like this: When I had weed in the house, I’d do it a lot, and when I didn’t, I wouldn’t do it at all. I could go two months without it, or go two months with daily use. Usually, it moved in cycles. It never really occurred to me to give it up just because I’d become a parent. It didn’t even occur to me that anyone would expect me to give it up. If anything, parenthood meant that marijuana became a larger part of my life. Whereas before the boy’s arrival I’d often leave the house after 9 PM for a party, or a bar, or a movie, now my social life had contracted. By the kid’s bedtime, I’m often exhausted, and even if I’m not, babysitters run $10 an hour these days. A hit off the Silver Surfer and a night of Turner Classic Movies has become, for me, an acceptable middle ground.

Then the morning comes, and I have responsibilities. I don’t Silver Surf when I have to drive Elijah somewhere, I don’t do it when I’m going to be alone with him for any extended period of time, and I’m very rarely baked before sundown. Since all that put together comprises 97 percent of my parenting time, there’s very little crossover with the weed. Occasionally, I’ll be stoned at the wrong moment, which will lead me to misjudge children’s entertainment, like the time I told my wife, “Dude, 64 Zoo Lane is so trippy.” But as far as I’m concerned, weed, in very limited quantities, just improves the parenting experience. Everyone knows that TV is better when you’re high.

Anyone who says it’s impossible to be a stoner and a parent has either never been a stoner, or never been a parent. The dominant attitude among stoner dads—and moms—goes like this: Consuming pot is something, like watching college football or masturbating, that you used to do all the time, but now will do only if it’s convenient and appropriate to the moment. Still, there’s a kind of secret, unspoken society. I’ve been to many backyard family barbecues where another dad and I will discover that pot is a shared habit. The discussion will quickly veer into the familiar. We discuss our favorite varietals. We recount great pot-smoking moments of our past. Someone tells a story about a dude he knows who’s got a medical marijuana prescription. Then things invariably wind down the same way:

Newly Controversial: Time Magazine on pot-smoking parentsDad: So do you have any?

Me: No. Do you?

Dad: Nah. I had some a few weeks ago.

Me: So did I. Give me a call if you ever get some.

Dad: Cool.

Me: Cool.

Pot-smoking parents didn’t use to be controversial. My parents never consumed anything stronger than box wine; my dad was the only soldier in Vietnam, other than maybe John McCain, who didn’t do drugs. But even if my parents had stashed a half-ounce of Maui Wowie in the underwear drawer, I can’t imagine it would have been a big deal around the house. The country was loose about weed then. No one gave it much of a thought.

When I was a kid, a Time magazine cover like the one on Dec. 9, 1996, would never have been possible. An aging Michael Doonesbury sits on his daughter’s bed, while Garry Trudeau’s talking joint character stands in the background. The text reads, “You tried pot when you were young. Maybe you even inhaled. So now what do you say to your kids?”

Even though I wasn’t to be a dad for six years, and hadn’t even met my wife yet, I knew then that the culture had turned. Parenting, rather than just being a natural, if challenging, byproduct of biology, had somehow become a sacred act. And smoking pot was a violation of its sanctity. Well, I never bought into that, and I’m not alone. Society is right to demand that parents treat their kids with respect and love, and provide them with food, clothing and shelter. But sainthood shouldn’t be a requirement.

In a perfect world, or at least a better one, smoking pot would not carry any cultural meaning at all. My casual little habit doesn’t prevent me from fulfilling my parental duties, and no matter what DARE and the DEA might say, it has little or nothing to do with the crack epidemic or the spread of crystal meth. I think that weed should be legal, and I’m not going to lie about that to my kid if he asks me. Someday I’ll have an intelligent conversation with him about the pros and cons of legalization, and about the politics of prohibition. But he’s not ready for such a conversation yet.

In the meantime, I’m downplaying my marijuana use. There’s a little water closet off my office that I use as a peccadillo repository of sorts. The other day, Elijah used my bathroom because the other one was occupied. He spotted the Silver Surfer on the floor.

“What’s that, daddy?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just something daddy uses to help him with his breath.”

“Good,” he said. “Your breath stinks sometimes.”

“Yeah, well, so does yours.”

Before my son, Elijah, was born, in the fall of 2002, I went around trumpeting that I was going to be a “cool” dad, though I had no idea what that meant, exactly, or what effect my determination to be a cool dad was going to have on my increasingly uncool life.

Well, now I know. Over the last year, I’ve become one of several unofficial spokespersons for a social trend that some people find annoying, and others find even more annoying.

I’m talking, of course, about hipster parenting, because as the author of the soon-to-be-published Alternadad, I’m currently incapable of talking about anything else. Here’s the crux of what I’ve been saying: As a generation, we’re gradually moving toward an understanding of parenthood that’s laid-back but not permissive, strict but not authoritarian, involved but not obsessive. In other words, we’re going to fuck up our kids in our own special way. I hope to help that process along.

While I became a dad deliberately, I became an “alternadad” very much by accident, or at least unwittingly. After the critical and commercial failure—which I could not possibly have seen coming—of my satirical novel about dueling rock critics, I flopped about for subject matter, a bylined grunion looking for a place to lay my next batch of literary eggs. Metaphors like the previous didn’t help me much. The publishing world proved indifferent to O,Timeless City!, my novel about a 19th-century Irish-American superhero who traveled through time on a flying pig. A baseball parody called The Balls of Summer also went nowhere. My agent, who had enjoyed my amusing complaints about fatherhood during the disastrous process of not selling those two projects, pretty much ordered me to write a parenting book.

I put together a proposal, which sold. It was, if I may say so, clever and energetic, if a bit scattered and soulless. At that point, Elijah wasn’t yet two years old, and thus my pre-fatherhood self hadn’t been completely eviscerated. The editor who bought the book was wiser than I, though I suppose that’s damning with faint praise. He said I’d grow into the material, which was nearly half about teaching my son to “rock,” and that the book would deepen as Elijah grew older.

“Sure it will,” I said.

I don’t know whether my perspective deepened or not. But I suddenly found myself paying a lot more attention to the parenting world into which I’d inadvertently stumbled, where kids did yoga at Sunday clothing bazaars thrown by a coalition of independent artisan mothers, where fathers straight-facedly proclaimed that their three-year-old son’s favorite band was Devo, and where people came up with their own organic baby-food recipes and posted photos of the results on Flickr. My wife, Regina, and I received, as a baby gift, a black onesie that bore the words “Born to Raise Hell” and featured, as an illustration, a flaming bottle that was spurting little drops of milk. It didn’t just resemble a phallus. It was a phallus.

The gilded era of ironic parenthood had begun. Having already put a Hatch Print Shop poster of Johnny Cash in my son’s nursery, I fit in perfectly. By the time Elijah was two, I was having conversations with him like this:

“Daddeee!”

“Yes, son?”

“I want to hear Ja Cash!”

“Johnny Cash?”

“Yeah! Train song!”

“Which one? Folsom Prison Blues or Orange Blossom Special?”

“Orange!”

“Look over yonder,” I sang to him, as I lifted him out of his crib, “Comin’ down those railroad tracks …”

I gradually started making my hip fatherhood public knowledge. When Elijah got kicked out of a lousy Montessori preschool because he wouldn’t stop biting a little girl—with whom he was in love—I wrote a tortured, somewhat tongue-in-cheek article for Salon about the incident, revealing the horrific fact that Regina and I were a little annoyed with him for doing this. The only other time I ever received such vile hate mail was when I dared state, in a different Salon piece, that Led Zeppelin may not be a relevant rock band anymore. But I’d rather piss off Zeppelin Nation than a million parents with access to email. Letters to the editor attacked us as “people who shouldn’t have children” and worse. Yet not everyone reacted so badly. There were other people who said they appreciated my honesty, that I should keep going, keep writing, keep telling the truth about what it means to be a parent, even though truth in parenting is deeply subjective, and probably impossible.

So then, like every other new American father between the ages of 27 and 40, I started blogging. Only gradually did I discover that I was part of a vast blog network, including Dadcentric, Daddy Types, and The Blogfathers—a network which paled in size next to the even more vast universe of mommyblogging. Meanwhile, a weird, locally based indie rock culture for kids had begun to spring up. In San Francisco, The Sippy Cups played psychedelic hits of the ’60s and ’70s to audiences that reached into the hundreds. A dancer and new mommy in Philadelphia started a party afternoon for families called Baby Loves Disco, which quickly spread to a half-dozen cities. Kids’ clothing boutiques started sprouting on every corner of every gentrified urban neighborhood in America. Hip parenting had arrived, and it was my destiny.

And so I’m going to write about this culture, in this space and anywhere else where I can get paid. My goals with this column aren’t really political. There are other people who understand the “Mommy Wars” much better than I do, and the ethics of nanny hiring are far away from my reality—we’re lucky if we can afford a sitter two Saturday nights a month. Instead, I’ll simply be chronicling, critiquing, and possibly providing a guide to negotiating this neo-parenting culture—and by calling attention to its existence, doubtless destroying it.

That destruction may already be underway. I was quoted as an expert (or “unhinged egomaniac,” depending on how you look at it) in an article in New York magazine a few months ago that described this generation of parents as “Grups,” sort of Peter Pan types in expensive sneakers who refuse to give up youth culture even as it’s passing them by.

There were certainly some truths in the piece, but I think that “alternaparenting” has a lot more depth to it than a trend piece in New York might indicate (shocking, I know). But even if alternaparenting turns out not to be a trend after all, I’ve always got that novel about the 19th-century Irish superhero. Ill-conceived cartoon ideas have a certain timeless appeal, and often make millions of dollars for their creators. On such profound observations will I build my career as a professional parent. I hope you enjoy them.

 

N E X T

Do: Are you an Alternaparent, or do you think Neal Pollack’s definition is way off? Post your comments below.
Go: Pollack's alternaparenting not your bag? Then drop by the Orthodox Union’s Positive Jewish Parenting Seminar in North Jersey on January 10. It’s at the Rosenbaum Yeshiva!!
Read: The New York magazine article that started it all is pretty de rigueur. And Neal Pollack’s blog has cute pics of the Alterna-tyke.