My wife and I recently had a kid. Despite all of our
planning, the little bugger decided to come out about 7 weeks early. The first
few weeks were rough, visiting the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit; code
blue shit for newborns), spending the night in the hospital, not sure if our
impatient offspring would really make it… but he did. Our baby boy is now
bouncing around and eating us out of house and home like he should. I’m only
planning on paying for two years of college, because I figure he’ll quit that
on us, just like we did to our parents.
Our kid actually made it into the world before we even had
our baby shower. When the sudden posts went up on Google+ and Facebook, all of
our friends were as surprised as we were. “What do you need?” they asked.
“Everything!” we replied, because, well, we planned on doing our nesting and
baby shopping the week AFTER the little bastard actually clawed his way out. So
gifts started arriving via Amazon.com and other places. We told people we
didn’t want a lot of baby shit in our apartment. We wanted to keep the physical
acquisitions low, because we live in a moderately-sized place in New Jersey,
and it turns out that we’re going to move soon, so having a bunch of kid toys
to pack up was untenable. So we told people: buy books. Children’s books,
classics, whatever they want. We want our kid to have his own library he’ll
have to complain about schlepping heavy boxes of books from apartment to
apartment, just like his folks used to do.
So, sometime around the baby shower, one of the other men in
the room asked me, “what is the first book you’re going to read to your son?”
My answer was, “whatever I’m reading, I guess.” I don’t particularly like most
children’s books or TV shows. Maybe I don’t really understand child development
very well, but I generally just want Dora the Explorer to get lost in the
desert somewhere. I wasn’t really subjected to that crap as a kid, and I don’t
know that I have to subject my kid to it. Sure, I had Mr. Rogers and Sesame
Street and a host of Saturday morning cartoons that were targeted at me as a
kid, but I was never really restricted from the grown-ups’ entertainment. I
read Daffy Duck comics the same year I started reading Stephen King. I don’t
think I want to keep my kid in some kind of baby jail for the first 12 years of
his life. I just want my child to develop on his own, to become the person he
is ultimately going to be. I don’t want to be a helicopter parent or a tiger
mother or anything that vests my own success or sense of self on the success or
achievements of my offspring. The kid will rise and fall on his own, and I will
do my best to guide him, but not control him. At least, that’s the plan.
So, how do I go about this? How do I guide a kid without
force-feeding him stuff? How to I ensure that he has the tools to survive and
prosper without dictating some kind of program or protocol? I don’t want to be
a taskmaster, but I don’t want to be an absentee hippie parental unit. I want
to be a guide and example.
So the plan is to just involve the kid in all the stuff that
I do. If I’m reading a book, he’ll read it with me. If I’m playing a game,
he’ll play it, too. And through our interactions I hope to instill him with
creativity, persistence, and understanding. I want him to see the world clearly
and learn how to interact with it. And I hope that he can take some of these
lessons from literature and film and games just like I did, and I’ll do my best
to guide him toward the right and the good, just as my mentors did for me.
This goal has made me examine the choices I make in choosing
entertainment a lot more closely in the last few months. I look for the lessons
to be taught by the protagonist in House of Cards, the pathos felt in Zone One
(by Colson Whitehead), and consider the consequences of my actions in games
like Civilization V. I expect that this column will be a meditation on how the
entertainment I consume and participate in might affect the development of my
kid and the lessons I take away from it. I’ll make a prediction in that I hope
my consumption doesn’t change too much. I hope I don’t trade in Game of Thrones
for Blue’s Clues or whatever kids watch these days. I hope I can read the
Silmarillion to my kid as easily as Flat Stanley. We’ll see how it unfolds.
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