Free Advice

I love asking for free advice. Most of it is actually decent, when it comes to marital advice. Parenting advice for expecting parents, however, is a whole different ballgame. “Be prepared for your wife to be a post-nup wreck”, “You don’t have breasts (milk-producing, I assume)”, “Move to the suburbs”, “Forget about sleeping for the next few months”, “You HAVE to buy (fill in the blank)”, “Don’t expect to go out and see a movie for the next few years”, “Don’t read too many parenting books”, and my personal favorite, usually said with a hint of evil glee masked as concern - “Your whole life will NEVER BE THE SAME”. Yikes.

Well, I don’t give a rat’s ass. My wife’s been doing great up to her six months of pregnancy. The three stooges of small talk questions – “When are you due? ” “Boy or girl?” – and because we live in San Francisco “hospital or home-birth?” doesn’t faze her one bit. Neither does the total lack of people moving from the reserved front car on the “J” line.

What I do care about is being bombarded by a consumer frenzy that, much like the wedding industry, the “baby industry” does very well. Baby Einsten? Of course – your kid needs to be smart by toddlerhood. How about a stroller – why not spend a thousand bucks on one? Eco-friendly diapers? Sure – I want to feel like I’m saving the earth while wiping a baby’s bottom. Toss in an aluminum (non-PET of course) baby bottle while you’re at it.

I’m afraid that first-time parents, just like first time newlyweds, get caught up in the excitement and fear of the moment and just go overboard buying things they don’t really need or even want. My once divorced friends who had lavish weddings barely dragged themselves to the county courthouse for the second time around. Same with second time parenting – that poor kid gets all the hand-me-downs, but then doesn’t have to deal with the elaborate nervousness from the first time around.

So the one parenting piece of advice I’ve listened to is to stop focusing on the events of the birth – and its accouterments – and start paying attention how you want to raise the human being your are bringing into this world.

Hence the benevolent dictator. Fathers’ roles (and to a lesser extent, mothers’) have changed dramatically over the past 30 years. We’ve come a long way from the glares and nonchalant, smoking parents of “Mad Men”, yet it seems clear that kids really freak out when Mommy and Daddy want to be best friends, and not parents.

Can I find a happy middle path? Not to be like Stalinist Russia, with gulags, prison camps, and mass starvation, but neither like a Somalia, with lawlessness, poverty, and chaos that comes with weak or no institutions. Perhaps Bhutan is a good model to look at parenting – they’ve replaced Gross Domestic Product with a “Gross National Happiness” index. Absolute monarchy, yet tempered by a constitution. A benevolent dictatorship as a model for parenting. I’ll keep you updated on the results.

Besides, what’s the point of wheeling a thousand buck Bugaboo when the person sitting inside is a snot nosed brat?