Playground SAHDness

When I take my son to the playground - the ubiquitous playground - we are sometimes the only people there. My son is stuck with dad as his only playmate and dad doesn't get to park himself on a bench and catch-up on his reading. That's called "quality time". On those occasions when we aren't alone, when my son joins the platoon of tots going through maneuvers, I usually end up chatting with some of the other parents, so I don't do any reading then, either. I should just stop taking a book. In any case, I am usually the only father in a coterie of moms. Though becoming less rare, stay-at-home-dads (SAHD, yeah, we get our own acronym) such as myself, are still infrequent members of these groupings.

Playgrounds are like labs where all manner of interesting observations can be made regarding childhood development. How do kids learn to navigate obstacles? How long can a particular activity hold their interest? What is the average time between booboos? How much sand can a two year old eat? All interesting things to study, mind you, but it's the parents that really need to be looked at; specifically the differences between how men and women, fathers and mothers, react to their children.

A couple of months back San Francisco Magazine had an article about SAHDs, the Bay Area being home to more freethinking, gender-myth-busting folk than most places - or just more unemployed dudes. In the piece several dads were interviewed and they discussed all the basics; how they love the time they can spend with their kids, how the outside world can still be a little unaccepting of this choice, how little support there is for them, ad infinitum. I enjoyed reading it, if only to get a sense of comraderie, even at a distance. There was, one portion that I found particularly interesting, however. The dads profiled pointed out something I had been thinking about every time I went to the playground. Men and women raise kids differently.

Yeah, I know, stop the presses - but here's the gist...

If a child falls down out there in the playpit and their resulting cry grabs every adults' attention, the reactions are very different depending on the gender of the parent. The mothers, whether or not it's their child tend to move toward the child, prepared to comfort them and check for wounds. Dads on the other hand, tend to watch from a distance making certain it isn't serious and then letting the kid get up, dust themselves off and go on. If crying persists, fathers will offer up encouragement, "you're alright", or "go on, get up." It's not as if they don't care. They just seem to expect the kid to deal with it. Surprisingly, the kids do. They just get over it and get back to business.

The flipside to that is a situation of conflict. Two tots get into a beef and it's the moms who now watch, waiting for the kids to work it out. If it escalates into something really ugly, mom will step in, but the preferred method is to let the tykes settle it themselves. Dads, however, at the first hint of disagreement will invariably step into the fray, especially if their kid appears to be getting the worst of it. Pop inserts himself into the mix and dictates a resolution - "Timeout - both of you, " or "Give her back the toy before I potato-sack you back to the car." Daddy makes the call.

In the article the dads all wondered as I have, what that all means. With more fathers becoming the primary caregiver are there upsides and downsides? It seems, at least anecdotally, that stay-at-home-dads may be responsible for more self-confident, better problem-solving kids. All that "dust yourself off" business could be teaching the offspring to fend for themselves, giving them the skills to solve problems. An entire generation of kids that fearlessly attack all manner of hardship and effortlessly cope with any circumstance. Yeah, dad's got it goin' on!

Not so fast, daddy-o. You see, papas could also be on the hook for boys and girls who have no conflict-resolution skills. Those playground interventions and dictated peace accords mean baby never works it out. We (daddies) impose our will and neither party learns the virtue of compromise and agreement reached through negotiation; they just look to somebody else to settle it. We're creating a bunch of monsters with no personal skills. Daddy ain't all that, after all.

Of course, all this is just the musings of a few dads with too much time on their hands, but it's worth a study or two. I mean if we can fund research about whether or not kids think clowns are scary (surprise, they do), we can certainly take a gander at what dads' and moms' influence is on kids.

I'm sure I'll go to the park one day and, somewhere behind the swings will be a camouflaged blind, within which lab-coated grad students will scribble away on clipboards. They'll observe me and my burgeoning ilk as we struggle to raise kids just as moms have done over the years (and quite well, thank you very much). In the end, who knows, maybe they'll find something and someone will write a book and we can all learn a new way or be frightened about what we've done. I only know that if I see one of those grad students I'm going to ask them if they wouldn't mind putting down the clipboard and watching my kid for a bit. I really want to catch up on some reading.