#1 Dad of the Year

Thanks, Bean Dad, for making me feel like a damn champion when it comes to parenting today.

So my original plan had been to write a new edition of just words, writing—complete with the usual recommended reading, music, and miscellaneous links—to go live on Thursday or Friday. Despite doing my best to write regularly, I didn’t want to inundate people with content.

Then this whole Bean Dad thing blew up and my son and I got into several yelling matches about topics including, but not limited to: nap time, bath time, potty time (x3), reading books, singing songs before bed, and other subjects I have long since forgotten.

So I wrote some stuff about parenting, being distracted, yelling, and generally feeling like a not great dad on a day when some real jerk dads decided to pull down their pants and expose their whole butts, present company included.

You know, there are days—a lot of days—where other dudes deciding to fuck up at fatherhood so much makes me feel a lot better about my own parenting skills.

Take today’s Main Character of Twitter, Bean Dad—also known as John Roderick—a dude I’ve never heard of before this morning and am only tangentially aware of. I didn’t even read the entire “Bean Dad” thread because I was up at 7:10 this morning with a toddler who just wanted to sit in the basement and watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and/or Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and play with blocks and Play-Doh at the same time.

But apparently he’s a real shitheel of a dude even when he’s not making his kids’ life unnecessarily difficult.

You can also take a nice long stroll through the specimens of parenting excellence that sometimes get collected in my personal favorite section of Reddit, Am I the Asshole?, where women will often talk about the thoroughly insane and often abusive shit their husbands inflict upon them and their children and then ask if, somehow, they are in the wrong. Occasionally these missives will be written from the perspective of the children themselves, either adults or teens. You’ve probably already seen the “best of” compilations available on Twitter and on other websites. Needless to say, on any given day where I feel that I’ve missed the mark when it comes to being a loving, compassionate father, I just head over there for some edification.

But the reason I’m writing today is not, in fact, to say that I’m the best dad on the planet.

I’ve spent a lot of time today raising my voice (read: yelling) at my toddler, who you may affectionally know as Benji/Banjo/my idiot son. Sometimes I tweet about things he does, or I post photos of him on Instagram because I think he is the singularly most adorable human being on the face of the planet.

He’s also two-and-a-half years old, which means he’s a raging sociopath.

I’m not gonna talk about the actual reasons for the yelling, because—as we have discovered—mining your kids’ actions for content with any specificity is a real dick move. Just know that it was consistently naughty behavior that created cumulative frustration. Posting a fire hose of photographs and videos to a public Instagram is bad enough, but going into details about his behavior could come back to be harmful or embarrassing later. That’s why I try to stick to generalities, such as complaining about the favorite song of the day, reasons he’s crying, etc.

The problem right now, however, is that parenting a toddler is hard. Parenting a toddler in the midst of a global pandemic is parenting on EXTREME HARD MODE+! Everyone knows this. Even people without kids.

I don’t like yelling for a lot of reasons, chief among them that it doesn’t seem to do a damn bit of good and—if anything—is pretty traumatizing for my kid. It doesn’t even make me feel that good. But today I found myself in a feedback loop where I just. could. not. stop. Maybe it’s the four days in a row of constant toddler-wrangling, but the back half of my vacation has not, in fact, felt like a vacation. I often joke that I refuse to take days off unless they’re days that my son is in daycare, because having him around is actually more stressful right now than work.

That’s…weird, right?

Speaking of daycare: We delayed daycare for three months and felt helpless as we watched our son struggle with speech development, and when we decided to finally roll the dice and put him in daycare in June, he almost immediately started thriving.

Now he never shuts the hell up, and it is alternately adorable and infuriating.

That is not to say that we have it bad, because there are plenty of parents who can’t even put their kids in daycare for safety or monetary reasons. Daycare’s hellaciously expensive, even for three days a week, and our decision to do so wasn’t taken lightly. Still, replacing three days of copious screen time with consistent attention and direction from childcare professionals has done wonders.

But I am not a professional educator, and I’m not a patient person. This is why Saturday and Sunday mornings are typically a nonstop cavalcade of cartoons while Daddy reads books on his phone. I’d try to read physical books, but he always wants to join in or rip them out of my hands. We honestly do pretty good at this point, because he’s generally pretty self-sufficient and I get to drink coffee and wake up slowly, and then all at once.

The thing is, I don’t know about the longterm damage of exposure to screen time, and I can’t tell you if watching a lot of (educational) television is really all that harmful. I watched a lot of TV as a kid, and I think I’m okay, but I might not exactly the best sample to examine. Nearly two decades of steady internet use have essentially ruined my attention span. I’ve tabbed out of writing this essay at least five times since starting it.

What I can tell you, however, is this: It’s hard to create activities for someone who gets distracted two minutes after they start doing something. I get mental whiplash as we pinball from wanting to build a “real tall tower” with Lego to cooking plastic food at our IKEA kitchen.

As another example, I built a fort with this awesome kit yesterday morning and by the time I was done and had the sheet thrown over it, we didn’t want to play inside it anymore.

It’s a pretty amazing thing to watch your kid begin to engage with the world, to show intellectual curiosity and begin to make connections about circumstances; to make requests and asset their independence. It’s also really confusing to try to figure out why a desire to play with a new train set received for Christmas will evaporate in an instant, to be replaced by an arbitrary affection for peeling stickers off and slapping them on a blank piece of printer paper.

I don’t know if I have the elasticity to go back and forth between these activities like a rubber band, which is hilarious given my penchant for switching between apps on my phone on a minute-by-minute basis.

But let’s go back to the part about me feeling like a bad father for yelling and nearly losing my shit several times this afternoon, often over minimal stuff that snowballs.

What’s the remedy here?

How do you get someone who has difficulty registering consequences and connections between events and behavior to, well, register consequences for behavior? Bribery only gets so far, and there’s not enough shelf space in this house to put thrown toys in time out in perpetuity.

No one has all the answers, but I think we’d appreciate it if we could find an answer that seemed to work for longer than a few minutes.

Of course, no answer works for longer than a few minutes because—as Erin has rightly pointed out—short attention spans are normal and the remedy is to just deal with it. It’s totally typical for kids to move from one item to the next and not settle down and just fully exhibit the behavior of sub-atomic particles that just never, ever stop vibrating for one second.

There is no easy solution to this. It’s just—much like the way Banjo approaches the world—one minute at a time.

One. Long. Infinite. Minute. At. A. Time.

Next time on just words, writing, the subject of the day is an introduction to the Retail Therapy series, where I’ll start putting down all the ridiculous anecdotes I have from a decade of retail work. I’ll also hopefully, by that point, have read something worth sharing.

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