I’m still new to the whole parenting thing. I don’t suppose that sentence is going to change much: I’ll be saying it thirty  years from now, undoubtedly. So, I’ve got a lot to learn. Some of it, recently, has come from books, which I have tried to avoid in the past (at least, when it comes to parenting).
Books are not written with my kids in mind, which has been my reason for avoiding them whenever possible. Not, mind you, that my kids are more special than anyone else’s (though they are probably more special than your neighbor’s). It’s just that they’re my kids, and like all things, pretty unique. Publishing, on the other hand, works within the constraints of a mass-production culture where the advice must be general enough to fit all people, and specific enough to matter. Usually, those criteria don’t work very well together: either the advice in the book is so general as to be worthless (‘respect your child’), or else so specific as to be largely inapplicable, if you’re actually thinking of your child as an individual rather than Baby Unit Model #x4003.

Instead, I’ve always tried to hold onto the vision of my relationship with my kids as one in which they teach me things, not the other way around. That’s been tremendously useful to me most of the time, and I like to think I’ve learned some really valuable lessons from them. I remember that when we weren’t allowed to give Arun the name we wanted to give him when he was born in Thailand thanks to stupid laws (we were told he wouldn’t have even been allowed to be named with a hyphenated last name, or even just his mothers’ name!), both Leah and I got angry and depressed. Arun didn’t care. I would normally have spent days thinking about how angry the situation made me, or how unfair it was, or plotting some sort of puerile revenge against the state (at least in my imagination). But like I said, Arun didn’t give a damn. He was Arun Boda, no matter what anyone else said. Even if his passport, issued by the United States government (not an institution I typically bother respecting too much) said Freeman Arun Davis, he was always going to be him.

So I relaxed.

Which isn’t to say I’ve always been able to take the lessons my chilluns are teaching me, or even understand them. I’m convinced that there are plenty of lessons I have yet to understand were being taught: perhaps the most important has something to do with being able to survive extreme sleep-deprivation. And I have resorted to books on occasion – especially with sleep problems, almost universally with horrible and potentially damaging results.

So if one can’t get all the advice and support one needs from one’s kids and from books, where else is one to go? Well, one’s own parents are generally a good start. Especially now that I’m living in my parents’ lovely basement (a ‘Basement Unit,’ as my father refers to the phenomenon of adult children moving back home, in my case, into a house I never lived in as a child), I’m very fortunate to have constant access to their experience and support. And while I don’t always agree with their perspectives on things, and have to pick and choose from their useful experiences in order to apply them usefully to my own children, their advice is normally more useful than that found in books.

But I’m a strange bird, and have hard-headed opinions about not imposing hard-headed things on my children. Specifically, I have a deep-seated desire to raise my children in a profoundly anti-authoritarian manner, with other anti-authoritarians. My parents don’t always share that perspective, and their advice has its limits of applicability in that way.

So what’s such a parent to do? While there are resources for radical mamas (RAMBL comes to mind!), many of them specifically exclude dads. This is often for a good reason – the mamas need their own spaces, and guys have difficulty shutting up in groups. But I wish there were more radical dads interested in talking to each other. I think there are plenty of radical dads out there – we just aren’t very vocal about our needs. Maybe this comes from a certain amount of embarrassment for being so involved in our kids’ lives – not a really manly pursuit, is it? Or maybe those of us who are stay at home (not me, to clarify – I stay at home, but that’s where I work; I don’t bear that cross or share those joys at the moment) are a little ashamed that we’re not out there winning the bread (that is me, on the other hand, since my work is pretty much completely unpaid at this point).

So I’ve found that the internet can also be useful. I’ve added a new list of blogs to my blog roll, over there on the right, called ‘radical parenting,’ and from the ravings of ‘dark daughta’ to the black and green ‘ye mateys’ of ‘pirate papa,’ I’ve found some useful things. That blogroll is going to be the fastest growing part of this blog in the next few days, as I start to change the focus of this blog ever so slightly.

The point of this whole post, however, was to flog one non-blog-related book I read that I did like. Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting. Really, go read it. I learned about it from ‘mother anarchy,’ who makes her home with her two daughters in the vicinity of our old stomping grounds in the Pacific Northwest region to the West of Cascadia.

Although I’d suggest that Kohn put some more reassuring stuff up toward the front (I spent the first few chapters harrassing myself about the horrible mistakes I’d been making, like most parents reading parenting books, I imagine), the book as a whole is lovely, and unlike most such books, well-documented. I’m already trying to put some things into practice, like – counterintuitively for me – not praising the kids every five seconds or telling them how ‘good’ they are, but shutting up (there that is again) and asking questions. I’ll let you know how it pans out, and would appreciate your feedback.