Family

Thursday

Mary Eberstadt

Critical father theory

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, my stepfather worked as an auto mechanic in Upstate New York, at a ‘youth camp’ nestled in a pine forest. The bucolic sobriquet was a euphemism; this ‘camp’ was a medium-security pre-prison of sorts for boys 14-17, mostly from New York City, sent up following precocious encounters with the law. These youthful offenders were not the worst of the worst. Boys implicated in rape, murder or similarly terrifying offenses were assigned elsewhere, to compounds with barbed wire and armed guards. As it happened, campers liked to hang around the garage, and over the years, some who showed diligence and aptitude with tools were taken under my stepfather’s wing.

father dad
children
Mary Kate Skehan

My role in our demographic disaster

When you come from a family of a certain size — in my case, one with eight children — you often get asked: ‘How many kids do you want?’ Innocent on its face, this question is carefully phrased in terms of my personal preferences, and I’m happy to answer: I’ll take what I can get! It’s an easier question every year, because biology has largely made the decision for me. My mother had four kids by the time she was my age, and as of this writing I don’t even have a boyfriend. Childlessness at 30 has its inadvertent blessings, of course: I get lots of rest and exercise; I spend my disposable income on haircare and loungewear and coffee, and the most stress I regularly endure is over WiFi connectivity.

Wednesday

Mary Kate Skehan

How to fight with your family

Like many families, mine is home to a diverse array of political orientations, ranging on an ideological spectrum from Calvin Coolidge to somewhere around Attila the Hun. In 2021, this means arguments can get quite heated. Should the government subsidize young families? Should tech companies be regulated? Should America reconsider its support for Israel? Should you, personally, get the vaccine? The first half-year of the Biden administration has already given even broadly right-of-center communities plenty to in-fight about. My left-leaning friends who have also spent more time with their families during the pandemic report a similar phenomenon: their good boomer liberal parents are skeptical about critical race theory, for instance, or are suddenly nervous about the national debt.

family

Wednesday

James Panero

Son of a gun

In his late-middle age, my father cultivated more of the interests of the old neighborhood. His kitchen overflowed with pasta makers and deli slicers. His prep table was taken over by a home wine-making operation; we ate our meals beside a glass carboy as it bubbled up fermented gas. And scattered about the living room, tucked in the bookcases and stashed behind the coffee table, he positioned an array of locked cases and bags containing a growing collection of rifles, pistols and shotguns. The acquisitions that came to fill our Upper West Side apartment mainly came from the shops around Little Italy. Home winemaking was once common among Italian Americans. So too was a well-developed sense for gun culture.

gun

Monday

Matt Purple

Becoming a father

They say immersion journalism is dead, but I just might have proven them wrong. The night before I wrote this column, I took on a most unfamiliar role, one my wife has been playing for the past two months: waking up in the night to take care of our baby son. We recently started bottle-feeding him, which allowed me to overcome my, er, biological inabilities in this department. This won’t be so bad, I thought around 5 a.m., as I sat in the dark while he cooed and sucked down formula. Cut to an hour later as I lay in bed, my mind churning through the latest NFL trades. While my wife can fall asleep at the drop of a hat, I have a giant spinning turbine of an overactive imagination.

fatherhood parenting father

Sunday

Julie Bindel

The worrying rise of ‘rent-a-womb’

In April 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, New York governor Andrew Cuomo approved a much needed state budget. Buried in this 400-page document was a provision to legalize commercial surrogacy. Passed without the opportunity for legislative hearings or public debates, the law came into effect in February 2021. Critics claim that Cuomo is unleashing an exploitative multi-billion-dollar industry that preys on the vulnerabilities of women. While surrogates are usually from poorer backgrounds and, in many states, are more likely to be of color and in particular black, the implanted eggs are selected from mainly white women up to the age of 25, usually highly educated and screened for any hereditary illness.

surrogacy

Thursday

Raj Tawney

The diversity dinner

Growing up in a mixed American household of Indian, Italian and Puerto Rican descent, I never questioned the varying menu each night for dinner. Until I was a teenager, I hadn’t realized my family’s weekly meals were different from those of my friends — until they began begging me to eat at my house on weekends after I told them what was being cooked. For me, dietary normalcy meant chicken curry on Mondays, arroz con habichuelas on Wednesdays and lasagna on Fridays. My Puerto Rican and Italian American mother Loretta had married my father Roop, an Indian immigrant, in 1981. I always admired my mother for her fearlessness in crossing cultural lines during an era when interracial marriage was less common than it is today.

family diversity dinner

Friday

Madeleine Kearns

Babies on demand: the nasty side of surrogacy

For the cover of its June ‘Pride’ issue, People magazine chose the image of a newborn baby being cuddled by his father. Apparently, Wyatt Morgan Cooper’s birth marks the latest celebratory milestone for LGBTQ+ liberation: the right to biological children. His father, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, told People how grateful he was for ‘all the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people who struggled for generations and have died never thinking this was a possibility’. As for raising Wyatt, Cooper is not taking paternity leave and is hiring a nanny recommended by his friend Andy Cohen, another gay dad. His ex- partner will also be on hand to help since, Cooper explained, ‘it’s good to have two parents, if you can’.

surrogacy

Friday

Claire Kohda Hazelton

It’s different for girls

‘Buy pink baby clothes,’ Kim Jiyoung, the protagonist of this best-selling South Korean novel is told at the obstetrician’s office. Jiyoung’s mother responds: ‘It’s OK, the next one will be a boy.’ There are numerous births in this book. Births of girls are met with disappointment. The births of sons are celebrated. When Jiyoung is born in 1982, ‘abortion for medical problems had been legal for 10 years...aborting females was common practice as if “daughter” was a medical problem’. Her younger sister is ‘erased’.

jiyoung

Wednesday

Cosmo Landesman

Daddy issues: the fatherhood revolution has failed

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. When I was growing up in the late 1960s, boys like me craved the admiration and approval of our dads; we wanted nothing more than to impress them. And now that we are dads, we crave the admiration and approval of our children; we want nothing more than to impress them. But the curious thing is, they don’t care about impressing us. In fact, our teenage children are just like our dads were — distant figures who are busy getting on with their own lives. Today we demonize dads of the recent past for being cold and uncaring. For failing to change diapers, read stories at bedtime, provide the unconditional love and praise children need to grow into happy, well- adjusted adults.

fatherhood

Saturday

Karol Markowicz

Please don’t take your kids to Vegas

Every year, my husband and I take a trip alone, without our three children, often heading to that paradise in the desert: Las Vegas. Vegas fits our needs for many reasons. The weather is always perfect, so we spend our day having drinks and lounging by the pool. We spa. We enjoy dining out and Vegas has terrific restaurants. We’re both poker players and Vegas has an abundance of poker rooms. I dress way up, in outfits I might not wear back home (I have some high, white leather boots that only get worn in Vegas) but that don’t cause a stir in Vegas at all. Most importantly, the atmosphere of the city is very grown up. For parents on a break from their kids, it’s exactly what we need. But in the last few years, we’ve noticed a troubling trend.

las vegas

Wednesday

Daniel Akst

Thanksgiving advice for new boyfriends

Congratulations! You’ve been invited to Thanksgiving with Dad. Since you’re new to the role of my boyfriend, please take a moment to review some of the special considerations that can make your time with this important American writer more rewarding for everyone. As soon as you receive this memo, begin following Dad on Twitter. Then complete and return the attached six-page release. It’s just a formality, giving him unlimited rights to use any and all of your stories, mannerisms, disabilities and family secrets in all media anywhere in the known universe. You also pledge to indemnify and hold him harmless in the event of a lawsuit, however frivolous, by anyone in connection with this material, including you.

thanksgiving advice