Author: Jack Rice

As every parent knows, a bored child is a menace to herself and others. Lacking positive ways of focusing her attention, my toddler, for example, will use her own body in experiments designed to discover if there are any loopholes in the laws of gravity. Keeping children entertained during the winter months presents special challenges, especially when the weather obliges us to stay indoors. Granted, winters in Central Virginia are generally relatively mild, but relative warmth doesn’t necessarily make going outdoors more appealing: While 30 degrees and snow is a perfect opportunity to get outside with the kids, 40 degrees and rain is a miserable thing to try to manage with children (no matter what people from the greater Seattle area may say).

Last winter, I resolved to come up with a list of inside things to do out of the home. I expected slim pickings, but quickly discovered that Charlottesville has so many great, publicly available, free or low-cost things to do that even the most restless child could never get to them all in the course of a single childhood.

Starting with the free things, the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library (comprising eight library locations from downtown Charlottesville to Albemarle, Greene, Louisa, and Nelson counties), offers a truly impressive variety of free ongoing and one-time classes, events, and activities for kids ranging in age from infants to teens. Some of JMRL’s offerings are open to drop-in attendance, but most require prior registration (and many of those fill up quickly) so check for details about JMRL’s offerings on its website (jmrl.org/pr-kids.htm) or by picking up a program guide from any of the locations.

Of particular note are the storytime programs for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, and book clubs for tweens and teens. My daughter was especially fond of “Mother Goose Time” at Gordon Avenue Library. Glynis Welte did a wonderful job making well-known children’s stories interactive by combining stories, songs, movement, and play time to keep the infants and toddlers fully engaged.

Other highlights from JMRL’s schedule include the monthly Family Movie Matinee, Lego Mania, a “Nutcracker Suite” meet and greet with the Charlottesville Ballet, occasional dance parties for 2- to 5-year-olds, various craft programs, and special programs when school is out (including snow day matinees!).

The Virginia Discovery Museum (vadm.org) sponsors “Kid-vention” (February 22), a free annual event designed to “celebrate science” through a variety of interactive displays. Admission to the VDM itself is $6 per person. The museum, catering to kids from ages 1 to 10, has a lot of exhibits, many of which my daughter found mesmerizing. The VDM is fun for parents, too. The only drawback is that it’s not open on Sundays.

The Charlottesville Department of Parks & Recreation also offers an incredible number and variety of activities for kids from ages 0 to 17—everything from aerobics to zumba. Most classes and activities require prior registration and charge a small fee (albeit higher for non-city residents). Check the Parks & Rec website for details (charlottesville.org/parksandrec).

For sheer physical activity for toddlers and preschoolers, there is the “Parent and Me Playgroup,” which is for kids up to age 5 and meets three times a week. My daughter loved the tumbling class we enrolled her in last winter (so much so that we took the same class twice), so I was pleased to discover that Parks & Rec offers tumbling classes for specific age groups through age 8. Parks & Rec has sessions in specific age groups (starting at age 2 or 3 and running through age 17) in basketball, soccer, swimming, tennis, skating, self-defense, and dance (including separate classes in ballet and zumba). Roller skating at Carver Recreation Center is free (!) on Fridays and Sundays.

For kids who prefer to get their ya yas out in less physical ways, the options include art classes available to kids as young as 1, photography classes (starting at age 7), crafts (starting at age 3), separate guitar and drumming classes (open to kids from age 10), yoga (starting at age 3), Spanish language classes (starting at age 6), and cooking classes (starting at age 9).

Conducting an informal poll of local parents, I came up with even more suggestions for free or low-cost activities not covered by the library, Parks & Rec, or the Discovery Museum. A lot of parents recommend taking younger kids to the indoor play areas at Fashion Square Mall, C’ville Coffee, and Barnes & Noble. Older kids might be interested in “Public Night” at UVA’s McCormick Observatory. It’s free and happens on the first and third Friday nights of each month. Check the website for details (astro.virginia.edu/public_outreach/schedule.php). Finally, Bounce-N-Play (bouncenplayofcville.com) offers an incredible play area for everything from crawling to laser tag and a lounge area for parents. Cost of admission is $10 for each child over 2 years old, but free for adults.

With all the resources Charlottesville has, the problem isn’t finding something to do when the weather is bad—it’s choosing among all the great options.

One of the things that made me wary about having children earlier was intimidation over the sheer work involved in raising kids. I thought I’d do fine with the nurturing, tender, Hallmark moments of fatherhood, but I was much less confident in my ability to manage the mundane day-to-day labor and constant vigilance that parenting has come to require in the last 25 years or so. Parenting norms have changed so radically since I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s that I couldn’t fall back on my own experience as a consumer of parental services. What I knew firsthand was not only obsolete, much of it (e.g. being left alone in a car or at home at a tender young age) would be punishable and subject to harsh penalties under the law.

My wife, who describes herself as “much” younger than me, nonetheless grew up just before the 24/7 full-court press style of parenting had become the norm. Having not a single niece or nephew between us, we hadn’t had the opportunity even for second-hand information on how parents have been handling the workload of raising children in recent years. So we were both obliged, in the months before our daughter was born, to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how we would manage the chores involved in raising her.

The clear and obvious ways of managing the labor didn’t work for us: We didn’t have family living conveniently nearby, and neither of us was prepared to quit working and become the primary caregiver, even though that option had some appeal in purely rational economic terms. Just to make things more difficult, I was opposed to sending our daughter to daycare. Daycare didn’t even exist when I was a child and I could only imagine it as an over-lit soulless warehouse where our daughter’s first words would be “If my parents loved me they wouldn’t leave me here all day.”

We were undoubtedly not the only new parents to bring home their first baby without having a clear idea of how we were going to manage it, but we were certainly old enough to have known better. At some point in the heady, euphoric, and sleep-deprived early days of parenting we decided we would manage the work by taking equal shifts throughout the day and night. My wife and I have enough flexibility in our work schedules that we could divide the day into smaller, more manageable childcare shifts. I imagined us working together tirelessly in perfect peace and harmony like actors in an early Soviet propaganda film. Early on, my wife took five hours in the morning, I took five hours in the afternoon, and we broke the shorter evening period into one- or two-hour shifts. My wife covered late night until 11pm or midnight and I covered whenever she went to sleep until 4 or 5am (which, to my dismay, was an active shift early on).

The Utopian plan worked tolerably well during the first month or two, but the obvious flaw in the plan—that equal division of time does not mean equal work—became increasingly apparent. My daughter developed the appalling habit of sleeping peacefully during her mother’s morning shift while crying inconsolably during my afternoon shift. I’m not particularly proud to admit I complained bitterly whenever I actually had to attend to my child during my shift while my wife was able to work quietly on her laptop during the bulk of hers. We both wound up keeping score about how much actual work we did during the periods we had agreed to work, and this led to the sort of useless bickering that sleep-deprived parents and disabused idealists do so well.

Even when equal time shifts worked out to at least roughly equal amounts of work, the plan started to feel more like a rigid custody arrangement than a cooperative division of labor. We handed our daughter back and forth to each other throughout the day like sheriff’s deputies handling a prisoner. Our daughter was, in effect, being raised by a single parent with interchangeable parts and wardrobe.

As my daughter approached her third month, the flexibility in our work schedules was starting to stiffen, and her mother and I were stressed out, exhausted, and frustrated because we weren’t able to put in the time that our respective jobs require. So we made a couple of important changes to try to get a grip on things. I stopped keeping score about how much time my wife and I were putting in, a decision made easier when I learned that studies show that men generally still do much less of the childcare chores, but complain much more loudly. We also divided up the childcare duties by task rather than by time. I started bathing our daughter and putting her to sleep most nights, and my wife would get her up most mornings and prepare her meals.

These changes would not, however, have made much difference on their own. The most important change was that I bowed to reality and began to shed my admittedly neurotic aversion to daycare. We started slowly, sharing a nanny with another couple for a few days a week for about nine months. A little after her first birthday, our daughter began full-time daycare.

On more than one occasion during those first few months, I felt cruel and heartless for dropping her off in the morning. But it wasn’t long before the pickups became harder than the drop-offs; just as she’d initially clung to me and protested being left at daycare, now she frequently clung to daycare and protested my attempts to take her back home. There’s still an enormous amount of work involved in raising a child, but the lucky-to-be-able-to afford-daycare plan works pretty well. Raising our daughter still requires a lot of sacrifice and flexibility, but it’s manageable—at least until she stops taking afternoon naps on weekends.

My 2-year-old daughter is growing faster and stronger every day. Whenever I’m obliged to chase after her, I, like all older parents in similar moments, find myself wishing I had had children a long time ago. After all, I’m competing on the playground and in the daycare parking lot with other first-time fathers who are more than 15 years younger on average. Like all older fathers who’ve lost a step, I console myself with the notion that graying hair and stiff joints are merely the physical manifestations of greater wisdom and insight.

Unfortunately, I don’t have anything profound to offer yet. But while I wait for wisdom and insight to flow to me like the special deals on Viagra in my spam folder, I can offer a reminiscence about an insight lost to all who become parents: Our kids can be very annoying to other people. And the otherwise sensible parents of annoying children are often completely and sincerely oblivious of this fact. It’s like perfectly normal people have children and then drink some sort of Kool-Aid, which makes it impossible for them to understand why allowing their kids to, say, go into your kitchen and start running their filthy hands through your food could be annoying.

In my mid-20s I was thoroughly traumatized by a toddler on a transatlantic flight, an experience so awful that I resolved, long before the prospect of fatherhood even appealed to me, I would never become that type of parent. On the flight in question, I was literally jolted awake by a toddler enthusiastically kicking the back of my seat. I tried to wait it out, but 30 minutes or so later the toddler escalated by punching the top of my headrest and, as collateral damage, my head. Being thoroughly annoyed, I turned around in my seat to cast a baleful glance at my tormenter. I was greeted by a smiley German boy who seemed absolutely delighted to have gotten my attention and who proceeded to kick and punch my seat with renewed enthusiasm as soon as I turned back around.

Incredulous, I tried again, this time redirecting my scowl to the boy’s parents who deflected my glower with smiles so sweet and blissful that it honestly occurred to me they might not be getting enough oxygen. No, the doting parents were merely happy—happy for me—that I would get to share in the enjoyment of the beauty and perfection that was their child. After a lengthy interval with no let-up in the barrage against my seat back, I turned around a third time and tried to talk to the parents but they were either too high on parenthood or didn’t speak a word of English. After a while, I gave up.

I didn’t get it. The parents seemed like nice, well-meaning people. A scowl should be able to transcend language barriers as the universal sign for annoyance. Experiencing similar—but not nearly as acute—frustrations in the years since, I gradually realized there is an enormous gulf that separates doting parents of small children from everyone else in the world. When our turn came, my wife and I swore we would never be that kind of parent.

We took the promise seriously. We don’t attempt to take our daughter to plays or movies or lectures. We’re pretty good about restaurants, avoiding closed spaces that amplify crying, taking her outside if she’s crying or being too rambunctious, and tipping extra to try to offset the inevitable mess we leave behind.

The first big breakdown occurred just shy of my daughter’s first birthday when she screamed and cried inconsolably for half of an hour-long flight. The guy in front of us turned around to give a world-weary look of disgust while I muttered inadequate apologies all around. The crying was followed by the meet-and-greet portion of the flight in which my daughter insisted on getting the individual attention of everyone sitting nearby. As we made our way through the airport I was thinking how lucky we were to have not yet been accosted by angry fellow passengers when I overheard my wife say into her cellphone, “The flight went very well! She was great! People turned around to see her because she looked really cute in the way she was connecting with people on the plane. Everyone loved her!” I knew then that my wife had drunk the Kool-Aid, and I was on my own.

I maintained my stubborn attempt at being a sensitive parent for almost another year. But just a couple of weeks ago while sipping my first cup of Kool-Aid—er, coffee—at Charlottesville City Market I noticed a father pulling his three children in a train-like stroller through a large crowd of clearly displeased shoppers and I had an epiphany: I’d been worrying too much—just because other parents and children could be very annoying, that didn’t mean anything about me and my daughter. My wife was right: Everyone loves her!

While our own stroller is larger than many European cars and might appear at first glance to be a bit too large to be pushed through a large number of people confined to very narrow corridors, I realized that the grim-faced early morning shoppers who impatiently maneuvered around us just hadn’t yet benefited from the sight of my daughter in her adorable flowery (reversible!) hat (from France!) or new bunny-themed socks. Seeing her, obviously, would cheer them right up. As a public service, I pulled back the top of the stroller so everyone could get a better look. I noticed then that my daughter was wearing a shirt full of kale that she had managed to pull from the adjacent vendor stall. I chuckled at her delightful antics and took a big swig of my coffee-flavored Kool-Aid. I couldn’t quite hear what the vendor was yelling to me from the back of her stall, but she was probably upset because she was too far away to get a good view of my perfect daughter in this perfectly delightful moment. Unfortunately, we had to press on—the next vendor had a large display of baked goods that needed a baby’s saliva-soaked touch.

Like most parents, I spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about how the various things I do might impact my daughter’s emotional and intellectual development because, thanks to social science research, I know that everything I think is good is actually bad. I’m told, for example, I can’t tell my very smart daughter she’s smart because this will make her afraid to try difficult things; if she doesn’t do something right, she’ll supposedly think that means she’s actually not smart.

Similarly, I have to ration admiring comments about her appearance because if I tell my beautiful daughter that she is in fact beautiful this will make her think her self-worth comes from her physical appearance which will lead her to become a stripper or something. So I find myself constantly over-thinking what I say and wind up awkwardly shifting my word choice in mid-air so when my daughter does something particularly smart I wind up saying things like “you’re so smar—er, um…here?” No word yet on what social science says the effect on children is of having mush-mouthed and obviously dissembling parents.

While fretting about how anything I say or do could be damaging my 20-month-old daughter’s psyche, I stumbled upon several recent studies that show that the damage can go the other way, too: In effect, children (and especially daughters) screw up their parents (and especially their fathers) in ways I never would have imagined. The Pew Research Center, for example, recently published a study showing that having a daughter can turn even very politically liberal people into conservative parents who vote Republican.

Thoroughly dismayed, I initially dismissed the study’s findings. But I’ve reluctantly come to concede there is at least some small measure of truth to this—e.g., even well before my daughter’s second birthday, my long-standing support of comprehensive and serious gun control measures has started to loosen because I now realize the original intent of the Second Amendment was to allow me to have a shotgun on hand to greet any and all of my daughter’s suitors in the years to come. Other than that, though, I remain skeptical that I’m being politically reshaped in any significant way.

A couple of studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, point to even more dramatic changes that may be in store for me. A 2011 study showed that while men with higher testosterone levels are more successful at attracting a mate and having children, testosterone levels drop dramatically once a man becomes a father. But here’s the kicker: testosterone levels fall further still for fathers who take an active role in raising their children. Fathers who reported three or more hours of daily childcare duties had further reductions in their testosterone levels compared to fathers who were not involved in the raising of their children. A similar study published in 2013 goes a little further: a man’s “testicular volume” varies inversely with child nurturing behavior. The more time fathers spend with their children, the lower their testosterone level and the smaller their testicles. This is supposedly a salutary evolutionary adaptation. While high testosterone is important to attracting a mate and having children, it makes for bad husbands and fathers if sustained. Lower testosterone makes men better husbands and more nurturing fathers. In other words, the invisible hand of nature has fathers by the balls, but it’s supposedly for our own good. Or is it?

As far as I know, there are no studies showing just how far the inverse relationship between being an attentive father and masculinity goes. Does the decline in testosterone levels and testicle size stop at some critical minimum point or does it just keep going with every playdate, story-time, and tumbling class? I think it’s safe to say no one actually knows where this is going and what the long-term effects will be because the really involved father thing is, at least as a general sociological phenomena, something entirely new under the sun. Other studies suggest that men who have fully embraced the role of nurturer are regarded as unattractive and even embarrassing by their female partners, although it’s not clear if the basis for this is primarily physiological or sociological (i.e. even women who have eschewed traditional gender roles for themselves are not comfortable with men who have done the same).

I’m not a stay at home dad, but I do spend a huge amount of time with my daughter, which apparently puts me in the at-risk male population. How would I know if I’m spending too much time with my daughter and getting close to some tipping point? Will I start talking about my feelings and watching Bravo or will I merely start using more emoticons? Can I have it all by taking a more masculine approach to nurturing and doing things like father-daughter bow hunting or ultimate fighting? Should I use a timer when I interact with my daughter and limit my nurturing behavior to less than three hours since that seems to be the cutoff? Or should I just stop wearing the matching outfits my wife buys for me and my daughter? What if both the political and gender transformation studies turn out to be true? Will I one day look in the mirror and see Mamie Eisenhower—or will I become even more conservative and even more feminine and become Marcus Bachmann?

While I wait for science to tell me what to do, I’ve started talking to other at-risk fathers to come up with strategies to slow down or moderate this transformation. Right now, we meet for tea once a month and talk about how we feel about what’s going on with our bodies. The goal of these gatherings is to embrace our lives and where we are within them and push back at the stigma on the mature, nurturing man within our society. Above all, we strive to provide a safe and supportive environment for men who have lost testicular volume. We’re easy to find—to show that we’re not embarrassed about who we are and where we are in our lives we wear red hats in public. And we’re looking for new members. Bravo should do a show about us!