A Dad’s Eye View by Rick Epstein
Misconceptions: Theirs, Mine, Yours
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hen I was little, I believed that if you peed behind a tree in the park, the squirrels would follow you and pollute YOUR home for revenge. My mom told me that. I also believed there were three sure ways to die. Listed with information sources, they are: touch a light switch with wet hands (my dad), sustain any kind of blow to your temple (other first-graders), or eat an entire tube of toothpaste (Mom again). Everyone grows up with his or her own changing set of misconceptions. Back when I only had two daughters, one 4 years old and the other 9 months old, I made a list of theirs. The 4-year-old believed: • That the healing rays of the television set will cure most illnesses. • That there really are 12 days of Christmas, and although we celebrate only one, families with jollier parents observe all of them. • That if you put a broken rubberband under your pillow, the Rubberband Fairy will give you a nickel for it. (My wife’s contribution to the world of the supernatural.) • That the whole business of time and clocks is a lot of mumbo jumbo that grownups invoke whenever they want to make a child go to bed or get dressed and they don’t have a real reason.
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The 9-month-old couldn’t talk, so I was guessing on some of these. She seemed to believe: • That anything you can’t put in your mouth cannot be fully experienced or enjoyed. • That mother’s milk and baby food must be supplemented by foraging on the floor. These foodstuffs range in palatability from dust bunnies on the low end to crumbs of Play-doh, a special delicacy. (She can be under unblinking surveillance on a freshly scrubbed floor, and suddenly she’s working her mouth like she’s about to lean out the window of a pickup truck and let fly. A probing adult finger will find anything from a short crayon to a piece of tree bark.) • That standing up in her highchair aids her digestion. • That to get full nutritional value from baby food, it must be smeared directly onto the skin. (The pleasing cosmetic effect is a bonus.) • That any attempt to wipe her mouth or nose is an insult and must not be tolerated. • That toilet training is necessary only for people who plan to go into certain high-profile lines of work, such as retail sales or public relations. New parents have misconceptions, too. Here are a few of mine that have been set straight during 23 years of parenthood: • That boys and girls are born the same, and it’s their upbringing that makes them different. Sorry, but no matter what color you dress them in, by fifth grade most boys have graduated from toy trucks to video games, while most girls have moved from baby dolls to social voodoo (as victim or priestess). • That a father can effectively pass along all the progress he’s made since his own wasted youth, so his child can start there and improve upon it. If that were true, the human race could have been perfected in just a couple of generations. But maturity is non-transferable. Every child pretty much starts from scratch, and Dad’s good advice and example are like an instruction manual that only gets opened only after the possibilities of instinct and intuition have been exhausted. • That my kids ought to turn out like me. Why should they? I mean, hasn’t that experiment already been tried? • That if you raise three children the same way, they’ll turn out the same. But it’s more like: You follow a recipe expecting to get three apple pies, and one turns out to be an apple pie, another is a pumpkin pie, and another doesn’t even seem to be a pie at all. There’s a lot more, but I don’t want spoil any of the surprises that lie ahead of you. And you wouldn’t believe me anyway. My job is just to expose you to a few ideas. Now it’s up to your kids to continue your education. Rick Epstein can be reached at rickepstein@yahoo.com. But take it easy; he’s feeling a bit frail just now.