“Happy New Year. I know this doesn’t mean much to you, but the combination of school starting, my birthday and Rosh Hashanah has always been the start of a new year for me. I wish I could capture and explain how special this time of year was when I was growing up.”

Yes, yes, I know. Things were so much better in New Jersey in the 1950s. As soon as I closed the email, I did an abashed Google search for “shofar.” A wise acquaintance of mine has said that a Jew need fulfill only one true requirement on Rosh Hashanah: He or she must hear the call of the ram’s horn. Not surprisingly, there were lots of videos of shofar playing on YouTube.

Elijah woke up at 8:15. There was no school today for “teacher training,” which is good, because the kids needed a break after nearly two weeks of rigorous study. He came down into my basement, where I was sampling shofar videos. I decided this was a perfect time for a little low-level Jewish education.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Good morning,” he said. “Can I watch a show?”

“Sure,” I said. “But first, come over here. I want to play something for you.”

“What?” he said, suspiciously. He sensed that I was about to delay his Spongebob fix for something ostensibly edifying.

“Well, you know how the Jewish calendar is different than the regular calendar?”

“No.”

“There are different months and it moves in different cycles.”

“OK.”

“Tonight starts the Jewish New Year, called Rosh Hashanah.”

“OK.”

“And to ring in the New Year, someone blows a ram’s horn at temple.”

“Why?”

“For many ancient reasons.”

“OK.”

“Anyway, I have a video of someone blowing a horn here. Do you want to see it?”

“OK.”

He came over and snuggled. I called up a video of a cantor at a congregation in Skokie, Illinois. I chose it because he was wearing what Elijah would probably consider a funny hat, and also because it was only two-and-a-half minutes long. The tikiyah call went out, and the first bleat escaped the horn. Elijah smiled at the funny sound. He liked the second blow, too.

Click here to read the rest….

The post Shofar, So Good: Theology for Kids via YouTube appeared first on Jewcy.

In my vast experience as an alternative-themed parenting guru, I’ve heard from a lot of parents concerned that our culture is feeding gender stereotypes to their children, almost from birth. They worry about the Disney Princess marketing juggernaut and worry more seriously about Bratz culture, with its makeover parties for six-year-olds and dolls who live only to shop, gossip, and show off their flat bellies. They seem less bothered by the culture surrounding their boys, who, as usual, are playing with trucks and beating one another with sticks, but there’s still concern. An ad for Tonka trucks says “Boys: They’re just built different.” This goes along beautifully with an ad for a hideous product called “Rose Petal Cottage,” which features a little girl doing the wash and making cookies accompanied by the lyrics “I love when my laundry gets so clean/ Taking care of my home is a dream, dream, dream!” It would be foolish to completely deny gender differences, but is it really smart to propagandize our children into Stanley and Stella Kowalski? Man as brute and woman as precious subservient flower is so last century.

We’ve all encountered the tomboy who can execute a perfect hook slide and the little guy who enjoys wearing mommy’s pantyhose. We also know the girl who wears princess dresses to school or the boy whose only mission in life appears to be pile-driving other children into the ground. But the rest of our kids, the ones whose tastes and behaviors don’t entirely seem bound by their chromosomal makeup, can occupy something I call the “nerd middle.” Therein lies the solution to gender stereotyping.

Beyond the Transformers and Hannah Montana is a rich menu of dorky gender-neutral characters that command fan fealty, like all corporate entertainment products must. But they also confound traditional notions of what boys and girls should be, and how they should behave. The major female character on Spongebob Squarepants is an ass-kicking karate squirrel from Texas, while the show’s titular hero breaks out into show tunes unbidden, can’t drive a lick, and cares for his pet snail like a little girl would her kitty.

The Star Wars movies have Princess Leia (if not much else) to balance out the portentous testosterone. The lead children in the Narnia saga and The Golden Compass are smart, capable, brave—and girls. Dora The Explorer doesn’t seem interested in makeup and boys, and her cousin Diego only has eyes for baby animals. The Backyardigans, a show that’s previously received a whuppin’ in this space, also passes the nerd middle test. Crappy music aside, The Backyardigans teaches girls that they can be pirates, spies, Vikings, or cowboys. Just as importantly, they teach boys that girls can be those things.

Even superheroes, the traditional rulers of the fortress of male dorkitude, can and should be presented to girls in the nerd middle. In the Justice League: Unlimited cartoon series, which many of my son’s friends watch, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Hawkgirl, Black Canary, The Huntress, and several other heroines are presented as the equals, and often the betters, of their male hero counterparts. Kim Possible vaults into action on the Disney Channel, and, while dropping this reference makes me feel old, let us never forget the lessons of The Powerpuff Girls, a show whose central joke revolved around the fact that little girls named Blossom and Buttercup kicked ass.

So the right messages are out there. Why, then, in a world where there’s always a Pink Ranger, has the concept of girl power been so marginalized? Why does it seem radical to suggest that it could be otherwise? For every parent who grumbles about the evils of the Rose Petal Cottage on Feministing, there are a hundred who wouldn’t think twice before taking their girls to the mall to buy Barbie’s Dream Beach House. Even Lisa Simpson, a gender-neutral girl hero if ever one existed, worships her Malibu Stacy dolls. It’s as though we’re willfully ignoring the gender-mixing messages of the media our children consume. Either that, or we never really absorbed the messages in the first place.

From age five on, boys play t-ball while girls take ballet. Coed sleepovers, which really should be acceptable up until age 10, rarely even get off the ground. My wife and I, like good self-righteous urban liberals, try to counteract this as much as possible. Our son plays flag football, but he also takes gymnastics. He likes to peg ants in the backyard with a squirt gun, but he goes to cooking class on Monday evenings. We wrestle in the backyard, and then sometimes on rainy days I take him to kiddie yoga. When he goes over to his girl cousin’s house, they have a gender-free good time: shooting hoops, playing “zoo,” watching Electric Company videos, and staging elaborate High School Musical dance parties. Well, the last activity is pretty girly, but it is her house. Sometimes you must make concessions.

American life, on the surface, has never been more gender-neutral than it is now. Women go to war, and men make dinner. Men win Dancing With The Stars, and there are female American Gladiators. Both genders, apparently, are capable of playing the role of Bob Dylan. The only real gender-exclusive things in the world are the siring of children and childbirth, though recent current events have even called that exclusivity into question. Yet the Bratz persist, and Joe Francis, the pig behind Girls Gone Wild, continues to make millions even as he stews in jail. It’s up to us parents to encourage the gender-neutral side of our culture, and to try and persuade our children that the battle of the sexes need not continue along the same path.

Elijah’s best friend (or second-best, depending on the week) is a cute, smart little girl named Ariel. They’re weird in the exact same way, and it’s obvious that they get each other. Friends like that are rare at any age. Their favorite activity is to play Star Wars, and Ariel always gets to be Luke Skywalker. The fact that a girl is playing a male lead barely even occurs to them.

The post Is The Nerd Middle the Cure for Kiddie Sexism? appeared first on Jewcy.

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. 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.
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.

The post How to Raise an Ideological Warrior appeared first on Jewcy.

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.

This 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.

Wendy 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.

The 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!

The post The Taming of the Jew appeared first on Jewcy.

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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.”

The post Rock Out With Your Latke Out appeared first on Jewcy.

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.

“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 35^th 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:

Dad: 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.”

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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 19^th-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.

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