Dear Dave

  Some things are hard to grow out of

Dear Dave,

There are at least two sides to every story. I'm sure you'll become steadily more aware of this as your children get older. Conversations in your household will frequently run along the following lines:

Daisy: Sam pulled my hair!

Sam: She bit me.

Daisy: He hit me first.

Sam: She grabbed the car from me.

Daisy: It's my car!

Sam: I was playing with it first.

Daisy: I said I was going to play with it first.

Sam: I was playing with it before lunch.

Daisy: So it is my turn!

Sam: I hadn't finished my turn.

Daisy: It was your turn yesterday.

Sam: I didn't want to play with it yesterday.

Daisy: So? It was still your turn.

Sam: But you were playing with it.

Daisy: So?

Sam: So it was your turn yesterday.

Daisy: No, it wasn't it.

Sam: Yes, it was.

Daisy: No, it...

And so it will go on. Luckily, in this situation, the solution is a pretty easy call. Both children have started out by shopping each other for a couple of rule violations and then continued by shouting angrily at everyone - they both get sent to their rooms while you get a few minutes peace to sit and read the paper. Who gets to play with the car once the time-out is over is less clear but it's really up to personal parenting preference. You could toss a coin, work out a sharing timetable, give the thing to the most penitent-seeming child or just make it mysteriously vanish for a couple of days. Another option is to try distracting the kids from the whole issue with a fun and exciting activity. It's probably not worth the effort, though. As soon as the activity is done, they'll start arguing about the car again. You might as well address the issue straight off.

Yep, in the above scenario, it's almost impossible to get to the bottom of things. There is no root cause to the conflict except, maybe, Daisy's conception. These are just the kind of spats you have to deal with if you have more than one child.

There are some cases, however, where one side of a story is vastly more illuminating than the other:

Sam (rushing into the room): Dad! Dad! Daisy sat on my head!

You: Really? Where was your head when she sat on it?

Sam: Hiding under her favourite cushion.

You: Uh-huh...

Actually, let's face it, most stories are pretty open and shut, but your children will try hard to convince you otherwise. More often than not, however, one of them will have 'forgotten' some salient fact, such as a threat to eat the other's nose, the lobbing of a cuddly toy into a ceiling fan or the incriminating sock they're holding that is not their own. It's usually not too hard getting an approximation of the truth fairly quickly. Sometimes, though, particularly if only one child was present at the incident, it can take a fair amount of probing to find out what happened. For instance, things didn't entirely add up when Fraser fell down the stairs recently:

There was a huge thud and a small scream and I ran to investigate. Thankfully, since our stairs are carpeted and divided into flights of only six steps, he was more scared than hurt. I untangled him and checked him for injuries. He had a couple of bruises. I gave him a cuddle and some sympathy but I was a little suspicious. It was at least the fourth time that Fraser has fallen down the stairs. Given that Marie and Lewis have only managed it once between them, there's the possibility that he's not always being entirely careful. On this particular occasion, taking into account that my Nintendo DS was lying open beside him when I arrived on the scene, there was the distinct possibility that he'd been being positively careless.

Playing videogames while using stairs is never liable to go well for long.

"Were you holding onto the rail?" I asked.

"Yes," said Fraser mournfully.

"Why did you have the DS open? You know you're not supposed to go up and down stairs with it open."

Fraser went on the defensive. "I hadn't started going down. I was just about to close it."

"You hadn't started going down but you were holding onto the rail?" I said, raising an eyebrow.

"I was on the top step and I slipped."

My suspicions were confirmed but I decided not to press things further. He had just fallen down the stairs, after all. I couldn't help myself from a little bit of telling off, though, to make up for the scare he'd given me. "OK, well maybe if you'd closed it before you got to the stairs, you might have been able to concentrate on not falling."

Fraser's concerns were elsewhere, however. "Is the DS broken?" he said anxiously.

"I think it's still working."

"What about the pen?" Fraser asked. "Did you find the pen?"

I was confused. "Isn't the pen in the holder?"

"I had it in my hand."

"So you had the DS in one hand, the pen in your other hand AND you were holding onto the rail?"

"Er..." said Fraser, obviously attempting to concoct a viable explanation for a temporary third hand. He stalled with, "But I wasn't going down the stairs."

Fortunately for him, I was just glad he was OK. "Uh-huh," I said and went to get us both some chocolate.

Doubtless, if I'd continued questioning him, he would have argued at length how he really had been being careful. He'd probably even have convinced himself. As it was, we both knew he'd broken a rule or two, and he had some aches and pains to remind him to be a little more sensible in future. It had taken a while to get there but the conclusions weren't really in doubt. As I said, open and shut.

Of course, I'm not saying it's a good idea to leap to conclusions. (You don't want to end up starring in your own personal sitcom). Always check the facts and consider different possibilities. It's just that children can spin a very complicated defence from an indefensible position. At best, this confuses the issue. ('I wasn't talking loudly while you were on the phone... I was singing!') At worst, it will incriminate them in several other cases of rule-breaking. ('I didn't throw the remote at Marie. I was juggling it with some knives but Fraser moved his leg that I was standing on and made me drop them all. It's his fault!).

Sometimes it's fairer to give them a short hearing than a long one.

This can feel wrong, though. We're used to balanced arguments. Debates, talk shows, news items and magazine articles are often set up so that both sides get equal time. In reality, both sides may not deserve equal time.

I got to thinking about this after receiving an invitation to an online discussion over the pros and cons of child vaccinations. A wealth of information was promised, along with input from experts on both sides of the debate. I just sighed. There is no debate. Vaccinations save countless lives and take a great deal of worry out of parenting. Horrible diseases have been eradicated; others have been held at bay. Vaccinating everyone who's old enough doesn't just protect those who have been vaccinated, it prevents the disease in question from spreading and infecting those who are too young or too sick to be vaccinated themselves. Vaccinations are fantastic.

You wouldn't know that from watching the news, however. Some shows have to pad out their time with endless discussion and controversy. Others feel the need to be impartial and give the same air-time to different points of view. Admittedly, we don't want the media to tell us how to think but a fair presentation of the facts doesn't necessarily lead to a balanced debate. Sometimes, giving equal time and weight to both sides of an argument isn't impartiality, it's bias towards nonsense.

I actually danced around the room when a recent Teletext article dismissed any link between the MMR jab and autism as discredited in a very off-hand way. Sanity at last.

The world is full of people constructing convoluted arguments and emotional appeals to further their point of view. Before long, your house will be full of little people doing the same. On occasion, you may want to treat the children like adults and hear them out. Most of the time, however, you'd be better taking it all as training to view adults like children - children who've got bigger and who are still determined to prove that it wasn't their fault they fell down the stairs while playing videogames.

Many things makes a lot more sense that way.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: children, statistics

  10:00 AM - Permanent Link - 6 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  We've got to let the mums win at something

Dear Dave,

Yeah, I know how you feel - Christmas suddenly seems to be upon us. Sounds like you're mostly on top of things, though.

We're getting there. We've converted the lounge to 'Christmas Land' (as Marie calls it) with the help of plenty of shiny baubles, an explosion of tinsel and a very irritating musical santa. Hopefully we'll get the cards done soon. We've given the kids a gift or two each already to spread things out. We're having a mulled wine party in a few days. (Scary Karen has promised to bring her accordion!) The shopping's mostly done. I've been to a couple of carol services. Everyone keeps asking Marie what santa's bringing her. Fraser keeps impatiently explaining to them that santa isn't real. The school nativity play was yesterday. There's Christmas music everywhere. Christmas adverts. Christmas food. Christmas lights. Christmas. Christmas. Christmas. Christmas. Christmas. Christmas.

Too much Christmas.

And there's still over a week to go. Goodness. I'm going to be burnt out before the day arrives.

Must think of something else...

Actually, there is something I've been meaning to write about for a while and it's kind of related to Chr... er, that other thing... in a round about sort of way:

A recent study has indicated that boys who have been cared for by their fathers for a significant amount of the time as toddlers perform less well at academic assessments upon starting school than boys who have been looked after by their mothers.

There are plenty of obvious questions thrown up by this. Why boys and not girls? Exactly how much less? Were the dads who were surveyed looking after their children out of choice or circumstance? How does this compare with children who are looked after by their grans? What sort of assessments? And what's all this got to do with Chr... er, the time of year?

Maybe the actual study answers some of these questions. (Well, perhaps not the last one). Typically, however, the press coverage didn't even ask most of them. It was all 'housedads could be damaging their childrens' future chances'! Men don't give children as much mental stimulation as women, apparently... or, at least, possibly. The study didn't have any definitive reasons for the discrepancy.

Of course, the instant reaction is for us to jump up and down in annoyance. How dare journalists accuse us of not stimulating our kids? They do fine at school. What are the researchers talking about? Unfortunately, this is twisting things to support our own agenda as much the newspapers have done. Men and women are not the same. There are plenty of situations and problems that, on average, men and women will deal with differently. Whether this is due to upbringing or genetics doesn't really matter - it simply is the case. This is bound to apply to childcare too, and thus it's bound to affect the kids in some way. Maybe what this study has discovered is true.

Don't hurriedly rush out to find a job and order Liz back home to stimulate Sam and protect his future, though.

There are a million things you could measure about a kid to evaluate good parenting. These include nutrition, behaviour, happiness, fitness, curiosity, dental health, vocabulary, politeness, bravery, cleanliness, stubbornness, resilience, knowledge, empathy, hand-eye coordination, kindness, imagination, road safety awareness and biscuit decorating ability. Chances are, dads are better than mums for encouraging at least some of these things. Working out whether it's men or women who come out on top for a majority of the list would take rather a long time, however, and, even then, it wouldn't necessarily help very much in determining who should look after the children. Is a slightly higher chance of the kid being resilient more important than a slightly higher chance of them being polite, for instance? That could be quite a debate and, in the end, the childcare duties in any given relationship will still come down to finances and temperament. Which is how it should be. Having parents who are solvent and enjoying their roles is going to do more to encourage a child's long term development than anything else.

Bearing that in mind, I'm quite happy to accept the results of the study. There was always going to be something that dads aren't so good at. I'm actually pleased that it turns out to be this. You see, I'm not certain that children doing less well in academic assessments upon starting school is necessarily a bad thing. Surely the whole point of schools is to teach children how to do well in academic assessments. I wouldn't want to interfere with the teachers' jobs and, besides, being a little behind the curve gives plenty of room for some quick confidence-building improvement. Even The Daily Mail pointed out that the research didn't investigate whether 'the damage to the boys' prospects' is permanent. There's every possibility the boys in question caught up in a very brave and resilient manner after a couple of months. Maybe the other ones, the ones who'd been taught to read by their mums, got bored, burnt out by the end of the second week and dedicated their lives to politely decorating biscuits.

Who knows?

And you're still wondering what this has to do with Chr... the current up-turn in sales of turkeys and Brussels sprouts...

Well, I guess my first point - that housedads aren't an abomination against nature - doesn't actually have anything to do with Chr... Frosty the Snowman... but, given the context of this letter, it's not really much of a point either. You probably saw it coming. My second point, however, is about stimulation:

I grew up somewhere so dull that I used to sit watching the test card for entertainment. Maybe if my mum had sat with me and taught me to spell then I'd be a genius now, but I doubt it. I'd probably just have been a know-it-all who made life difficult for my teachers in primary school. I might also have lost a very useful trait. As it stands, I have a very high tolerance for tedium. This makes my job a whole lot easier. I can play Snakes and Ladders for hours at a time without going mad and watch the same episode of Tweenies endlessly without gibbering. I should really thank my mum for leaving me to my own devices so much as a child. (I'm not going to, though, just in case it comes out wrong...)

So remember, next time you sneak off to check your email, you're not ignoring the children, you're building resourcefulness and self-reliance. After all, there is such a thing as over-stimulation.

If you're in any doubt, think of Christmas.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS I've got a peculiar ringing in my ears now. I think it's jingle bells...

Labels: christmas, housedad, statistics

  11:00 AM - Permanent Link - 5 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Protective perspective

Dear Dave,

You're right. Kids make you worry. Two kids is twice the worry and you only have half as much available time to fit all the worrying in. You need to concentrate your worry on major risks.

If only I knew what those were...

I seem to spend a great deal of my time shouting warnings about imminent catastrophe:

"Don't do that!"

"Look where you're going!"

"Watch what you're doing!"

"Don't stand there!"

"Don't touch that!"

Unfortunately, my voice usually carries the same sense of urgency whether 'that' is a sweet on the ground, my PSP, a python or an electrical substation. If the kids are doing something liable to cause injury, I will often throw in "It's dangerous!" If they're doing something hugely stupid, I might even go so far as to say "It's very dangerous!"

Still doesn't really give them a particularly clear picture of risk, though.

"Stop waving your fork around. It's dangerous!" isn't much of a step up from, "Watch out! Careful with your milk!" In fact, the latter is actually likely to create more of an impression thanks to the words escaping my throat in a frantic scream as I lunge across the table to catch a teetering cup. My kids probably live more in fear of giving me extra cleaning than they do of impaling their siblings with kitchen utensils.

I guess this will make them normal, though. It's hard to realistically determine probabilities and weigh likely rewards against possible disasters. It's not really surprising the kids don't have a clue. I don't even know what the most likely calamities might be and how badly they could go. Running with scissors probably is pretty dangerous (if they have a pointed end) and so is hopping with knives but how dangerous is dancing with a spoon? What level of warning should I use? Does it depend on the size of the spoon? The style of dance? The proximity of crockery?

Or should I just let the poor kid enjoy herself for a change without me prophesying doom?

The media doesn't help. I saw an item on the main ITV evening news the other week that was all shock and horror about the dangers of hazardous drinking. A large glass of wine every night is a hazardous level of consumption! Well-to-do rich people are drinking too much! Shock! Horror! Not once was it mentioned in what way this level of drinking was hazardous, nor to how great an extent. They did, however, imply a causal relationship between having an expensive house and drinking too much. This means that it's not really the drinking that's the root cause of danger - it's buying a mansion.

As I said, the media isn't much help.

Then again, neither is personal experience much good at assessing most risks. I know from experience that if we go to the swing park there's a good chance that someone will scrape a knee but what's the chance of one of the kids getting snatched? Considering I'm not in the middle of a custody battle, vanishingly small, probably, but all I've got to go on is hearsay and media reports. And I've already established that the media isn't much help.

Nope, it's very hard to tell what's really worth worrying about. Still, in terms of the amount of thought and effort I put into preventing disaster, these are the dangers I feel most threaten my children:

10. Food. Between obesity and food poisoning, additives and E numbers, E. Coli and bird flu, there are any number of food related scares around. I'm considering moving the kids over to a diet of lime juice and crackers, just to be on the safe side.

9. Going to hospital. Hospitals are full of germs and sick people. Must avoid.

8. Dirty hands. Dirty hands are covered in germs and cause sick people. Must wash.

7. My old Xbox. The instruction manual contains only one warning about photosensitive seizures but FOUR about not dropping the thing on a small child. Do the maths.

6. Dog poo. We have some inconsiderate dog owners round our way. I spend a great deal of time telling the kids to look where they're about to put their feet. Strangely, this usually makes them look behind them. They've got used to wandering around peering over their shoulder to see if they've just stepped in doo-doo. This is not hugely safe or convenient. I see dog poo on the pavement and shout at the kids, they look behind them, step in it and then walk into a lamppost.

5. Coffee. It's hot and spillable which is a dangerous combination. Luckily, it's usually gone cold by the time I get a chance to drink it.

4. Traffic. The boys have got the hang of the 'Stop' part of 'Stop, Look & Listen' but haven't yet realised that the other two are quite tricky if they're talking at me. A couple of days ago, while we were already halfway across a road, I told them to stop wittering about Mario and look for cars. Unfortunately, this just led to even worse distraction. Fraser promptly shouted, "Look! There's a car," and pointed at a car that was not only in the wrong direction but also on a different road. Handy.

3. Each other. When the boys were younger, I turned round from the washing up to find Fraser stabbing Lewis in the head with a fork as they sat quietly eating their tea.

2. Themselves. On closer examination, the number of triple puncture wounds suggested that Lewis had been letting him do this for a while.

1. Zombies. I watched 28 Weeks Later recently. Since then, most of my spare brainpower at any given moment has been devoted to locating emergency exits and suitable materials for barricades in case of the unexpected arrival of a horde of the living dead. It may not be a very likely threat but its consequences would be catastrophic. Best to be prepared.

That's the list. Essentially, if I gave each of the kids an eating utensil and a turkey sandwich while I was drinking coffee and we all followed a dog along beside a busy road on the way to the hospital, that's the most dangerous situation imaginable. Unless it started raining Xboxes... or zombies.

I suppose I could always take comfort in the fact that we all had clean hands.

Right, I'm off to purchase emergency plastic bags, a chainsaw, some bear-traps and a shotgun in preparation for the inevitable undead apocalypse. Got to keep the kids safe, after all. And it beats worrying about which secondary school would be best...

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: children, statistics

  9:30 AM - Permanent Link - 5 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Statistics

Dear Dave,

Ninety-three percent of statistics are mis-reported.

Think about it. Your average journalist is an arts graduate who hasn't studied any maths whatsoever in twenty-three and a half years. Even the four-fifths-forgotten statistics lessons they have had will have been to a very low level. The typical journalist, for instance, will only know two and a third types of average and will use the mean in eighty-nine percent of cases. Ask them to calculate the probability of three cases of a ten-thousand-to-one non-contagious illness in a village of a hundred people and they will either answer, 'Small enough to make a big headline,' or run away screaming. Neither of these is the correct answer.

The correct answer runs closer to, 'Is this the chance it will occur in a particular village chosen at random or that it will occur in some village somewhere in the United Kingdom? And besides, surely it should be the probability of three or more cases? And what are the assumptions, again? You haven't even mentioned timescales, for crying out loud!'

An article I read the other week kept going on about the effects of interest rate rises on a typical mortgage. What on earth is a 'typical' mortgage?! Was it the mean value of all mortgages they were talking about or of new mortgages? Something else reckoned that a 'typical' baby sleeps sixteen hours a day. Since I felt lucky if any of mine slept twelve hours out of twenty-four when they were small, I can only assume that some children barely open their eyes before the age of two. What?

Then there are phone-in polls. Don't get me started on those. (No, really - it won't be pretty...)

To be fair, I don't think getting mathematicians to write the newspapers would, in general, be a good idea. (Can you imagine?) But it was with some scepticism I viewed reports of recent surveys of dads. One, for instance, claimed 43% of dads surveyed had 'put their careers on hold' to spend more time with their families, passing up work worth an average of £2,800 a year. What does that really mean, though? 10% of all the dads claimed to have gone to working part-time. Surely this must account for the vast majority of the wage reduction? It's possible to conclude that over half of the dads had made no changes to their work patterns (maybe they were laid-back to start with!), one third had cut back on overtime a bit and one tenth had gone part-time (but who knows what their partners are up to?).

Does this actually tell us much?

Not really. I probably achieve equally scientific surveys by hanging around outside school at collecting time. On this basis, I'd say there are plenty of couples where both partners are heavily involved in childcare. One or both of them may be working part-time but it's just as likely they're both working strange shifts and granny is filling in the gaps in the schedule. There are housedads about but you could probably cram us all into a phone box.

Looking at parent and toddler attendance gives a different picture. Dads are rare. I am 'the man', quite often. Either the percentage of dads staying home and looking after very small children is extremely low or they're all scared. Maybe we're as endangered as pandas or female executives or crumple-horned snorkacks. Who knows? Not me.

I think all the various surveys show is that the number of housedads is on the rise but, you know, that wouldn't be hard. I don't think there will be vast numbers of us any time soon. Probably more important is that, 'on average', dads are far more involved with their kids than they were a generation ago. Scarily, this makes you and me role models for a revolution where men engage more fully with their offspring. We demonstrate that it's perfectly possible for men to look after children whatever the occasion, not just on Saturday afternoons. We can educate and encourage. We can teach other men that, 'Kids are fun once you know which way up to hold them!' (We might want to think of a better slogan that that, though...)

That may sound like a tall order but the simplest way to start is to walk along the road smiling with a stack of children in tow. If we can do it without everyone treating us like pandas, so much the better. ('Look! Look! There's one. It's a housedad! Aw, isn't he cute with all the little ones. Do you think if I poke this stick at him, he'll eat the leaves off the end?')

Probably best to the ignore the statistics and get on with it. Of course, you may be thinking that if ninety-three percent of statistics are mis-reported, what about the rest? Should we pay attention in order to learn from the other seven percent of stats we hear and read about?

I wouldn't bother, to be honest - those ones are entirely made up.

I'm off to prepare for the paintballing tomorrow. Apparently, Scary Karen has been watching Rambo III all week as training. This could get brutal...

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS I read a great book about statistics last year. It's called Freakonomics and it's by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner. Did you know that there's a correlation between having a house full of books and having children who do well at school but that there isn't a correlation between reading to children every day and them doing well?

Conclusion: Books are magic! Buy books!

Kidding. It's not what you do that makes you a good parent, it's who you are. Isn't that both reassuring and frightening...

Labels: favourite, housedad, statistics

  2:30 PM - Permanent Link - 3 comments - Post comment - Links to this post