Blog Posts by Pater Familias

Illustration by Peter Arkle

On the surface, this is terrific at-home daddying. Active involvement, support, encouraging a healthy athletic pursuit for life that also prevents drowning. And, don't let me forget, our seven-year-old only daughter dearly loves swimming and the cool competition-optional team I got her into.

Before practices, 5:30 pm Tuesdays and Thursdays, I see to it that she does homework and eats a power snack. Then I check her swim bag and speak words (per Mama) on the need to rinse and condition post-swim so her hair isn't a complete chlorine write-off and she has to get a boy cut. She likes me to sit poolside and watch practices.

What could be wrong here? This ravening, demented, deep green monster that stalks my inner being, that's what. Instead of enjoying my child's enjoyment - the coach has a genius for keeping it all mellow and fun - I silently scream for her to focus, pick up the pace, swim like a winner.

Am I crazy, b-a-d, what? Only a

Illustration by Peter Arkle

Recently I witnessed something that showed it might be a really bad idea to get school kids more involved with video games than they already are. It happened when my wife, our seven-year-old only daughter, and I were on vacation in Los Angeles . We rented a convertible and did a lot of cruising with the top down. Livin' the LaLa dream, oh yeah.

One lovely evening we drove around with a 9-year-old boy, son of a friend who's more like demi-family. Getting together has always been a big deal for the kids. This time, though, they didn't pay so much attention to each other, focusing instead on game apps on iPhones. Our daughter used mine so we could make her quit playing when we felt like it. The boy had his own iPhone and was pretty much lost to the world.

This got to be annoying on the road to Griffith Park Observatory, up through steep, unbuilt parkland with fantastic views of LA. While we grownups took it all in and our daughter kept an eye out

Illustration by Peter Arkle

No, it isn't the money.

Except maybe it is. My wife and I, parents of a seven-year-old only daughter, pay every which way to live in this leafy green bright-child paradise. The deal includes famously high taxes to support fine public schools. (We need to believe they're fine, anyway, because that's the only reason anybody in his/her right mind would live here.)

And now comes a hit that irks me way out of proportion to the actual dollars. On the first day of school, our girl has to show up with a load of stuff - pencils, crayons, markers, glue sticks, so on - on the Second Grade Supply List. The instructions say N-O-T, bold caps, to label anything so presumably it's to be held in common and used as needed.

The supplies came to about $50 -- pocket change after major kid costs and no worse than other incidentals like, say, the $55 to rent a costume for last year's ballet school pageant. And, of course, the supply list items are not optional.

By Pater Familias, Illustration by Pater Arkle

Two school years ago, when our seven-year-old only daughter was in kindergarten, I regularly introduced her teacher to family and friends as "the World's Best Kindergarten Teacher."

Hokey, yeah, but amazing how much the teacher loved it, like a cat being petted. And I liked doing it, because…

A) I meant it. The lady was a pedagogic superstar and work-ethic phenom.

B) I knew I had managed, in a small, jokey way, to score points with Teacher, a major part of the at-home parental mission.

The B) item is major to me, anyway.

Volunteering matters, of course, but I do it strategically, passing on tasks that other moms and dads do. Like, say, coming in to class to do reading and math circles - good stuff, but to my mind also showing off. "I, Brainy Superparent," you know? I try to do things nobody else wants to. Thus I have swept out classrooms, stacked chairs, made pies beyond counting for snack time, schlepped heavy

By Pater Familias, Illustration by Peter Arkle

Shortly after the birth of our only daughter, now seven years old, a veteran mama (one girl, two boys) said this to me about having kids:

"Best mistake I ever made."

She said it with a smile. From time to time I repeat her words, her way -- loving the mad Möbius mood loop of being my kid's at-home daddy, married to her mommy.

I wouldn't have it any other way. This I know because for a long time my wife and I lived looking at a terrible, irrevocable, heartbreaker mistake - waiting too long to have our baby - which thank God we didn't quite make. Right when we were giving up, TahDah! our own little girl. On the worst daddy days, I never forget how lucky we are, that the kid driving me nuts is a miracle, and that life without her would be so much less. Less hectic and maddening, sure. But also less full. Less rewarding. Less happy.

This puts me out of sync with the tone and content of All Joy And No Fun, cover story of

Illustration by Peter Arkle.

Before you get all Nyaah Nyaah about witless stunts done by dads who ignore clear warning labels on kids' toys, let the record state that the mother of our seven-year-old only daughter showed similar lack of judgement.

Not once, but several times, she belly-slid down our kid's brand new Banzai® Aqua Blast Dual Racing Slide™. (Using the full name on the box because Slip N Slide®, which we all call these things, belongs to Wham-O®, which originated these slides in 1961).

To her credit, my wife slid rather sensibly and knew when to quit. No way would she have kept sliding, as I did, after feeling ominous crunching and radiating pain in her back.

Next day I work up stiff, sore and wondering if slippery slides really aren't for people over 12 - as it states, rather emphatically, on the box.

My God, the things have crippled people! So, at any rate, said the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in a bulletin put out way back in 1993. To

After all the furor about the dangers of extreme kid-to-kid hostility - bullying, ostracism, abuse via internet social media and texting - comes research suggesting that having enemies and feelings of hostility may, indeed, be good for a child's social development. Within limits, of course.

The New York Times' Benedict Carey lays out new scientific evidence of childhood antagonism's positive side in Can an Enemy be a Child's Friend? Both the writer and the scientists he reports on say that trauma and lasting emotional damage can be suffered by some young people, but most of us get through our scrapes with other kids just fine.

As an at-home dad who is sometimes concerned by our seven-year-old only daughter's social conflicts and fixations on various worst enemies -- as important to her as best friends -- there's comfort in Carey's fascinating piece.

Really gotta love results of UCLA research involving 2,003 middle school children that showed girls with reciprocal

What's not to understand about No? A whole lot if the person saying No is our seven-year-old only daughter feeling iffy about a new experience. Like, say, two weekends ago when she said she didn't want to go to a birthday party at the ice rink, because she didn't know how to skate and was sure the other girls would laugh. But she also made it obvious that she didn't want to miss the party.

As the at-home parent I do more decoding of No, deciding whether to honor a refusal or try to talk the girl around or just give her a shove (figuratively, of course) into some new realm of experience for her happiness and/or her own d*mn good. This time my wife was home and solved the dilemma like so: "Lily is one of your best friends. You'll have fun. You're going!" And our girl went to the party and had hilarious fun.

Okay, that one was a no-brainer. Clearly Mama did the right thing by nudging, which she was asked to do, really. But now we're facing a bigger, more serious and emotionally