The experts are, I believe, trying to get it right, trying to give us life-saving advice. Use car seats, for example. Don’t smoke two packs a day while pregnant. But when the attitude veers from helpful to paternalistic and big-brother-ish, and when following it means erasing your own instincts, I get prickly. And so does Debbie, who has written a hilarious and spot-on piece about how she — a food expert! — has, unbeknownst to her, been bucking received wisdom the whole of her son Harry’s life by feeding him the dreaded choking hazards.

Here’s her piece. Let me know what you think:

Debbie Koenig's son, Harry, aka "Mr. Hot Dog"

Apparently, I’m trying to kill my son.

Or so it would seem, now that the American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a policy statement pointing out the choking hazards lurking in my kitchen—even going so far as to suggest that manufacturers redesign the hot dog (a notion which strikes me as being just short of insanity). When the statement appeared, it included a helpful list of the 10 biggest choking hazards for children under five. This list zoomed all over the momosphere; thanks to parenting blogs, message boards, and social media, I heard about it from at least a dozen sources. Like all my friends with preschoolers, I read the list, felt a chill run down my spine, and promptly began to beat myself up for the countless times we narrowly escaped tragedy.

Let’s see, which of the foods on that list have I given my four-year-old recently?

• Hot dogs: Frankfurters are, without a doubt, Harry’s favorite food. It’s no surprise—my husband and I are raising him to appreciate the finer points of a well-made dog. We actually take road trips just to sample renowned weenies. The AAP recommends cutting them lengthwise until age five, but we stopped doing that months ago.
• Nuts: He doesn’t eat them often, and so far it’s only been as part of a trail mix that features chocolate. (In fact, we’ll only let him have this mix if he eats the nuts—no picking out the chocolate, junior. Further proof I’m trying to kill him.)
• Seeds: That trail mix I mentioned? Sunflower seeds.
• Whole grapes: For the first two years of Harry’s grape-eating career, I meticulously cut them up. Heck, at first I skinned them entirely. But once he became a kid more than a toddler (to my mind, at least), quartered grapes seemed like overkill.
• Raw carrots: Seriously? Baby carrots are among the few vegetables Harry eats willingly. Thanks to his disdain for squishy food, I gave up steaming them when he turned three.
• Popcorn: Harry had his first taste about six months ago. To be honest, I knew this was a choking risk and was pretty terrified—but so many of my friends had been giving it to their tots, I had begun to feel like a wuss. So I sat with him on the sofa and insisted he eat one piece at a time, chewing thoroughly before swallowing. No surprise, that level of vigilance has eased. I don’t leave the room when he’s eating popcorn, but I don’t watch him like a hawk, either.
• Apples: Again, seriously? Harry must wait another year to experience the perfect pleasure of biting into an apple while we cruise the farmer’s market?
• Marshmallows: Yeah. These, we actually used as potty-training incentive. For pee, he’d get one mini-marshmallow. For poop, two. I shudder to think how I risked my son’s life, just so I could say goodbye to changing diapers.
• Hard candy: Only a single transgression here, a few months ago. There was a sucking candy in the goody bag from a schoolmate’s birthday party, and Harry got to it before I did. I blame that kid’s mom.
• Gobs of peanut butter: Harry only gets thin shmears. Phew! At least there’s one item on the list I haven’t used for attempted filicide.

You probably assume I changed my dangerous ways once I read that list. Eh, not so much. According to an analysis performed by Stats.org, a nonprofit research center that interprets statistical mumbo-jumbo, the AAP’s policy statement may be a wee bit inflammatory: “To put the risk into perspective, approximately five children died each year in the U.S. from choking on a hot dog—along with, approximately, 3.3 from candy, 3 from peanuts or other nuts, 2.7 from grapes, 2.3 from other meat, 2 from carrots, 1.7 from popcorn, 1.5 from apples…” And all of these deaths were children younger than three. As creepy as it is to discuss in such terms—and believe me, I know every single one of those children left behind a devastated family—more children Harry’s age die each year in car crashes (or by gunshot) than from choking on the top 10 hazards combined.

Which is not to say I haven’t made adjustments. Reflexively, I check that Harry’s peanuts are halved before he eats them. He’s fully potty-trained, thank heavens, so we’d already cut out the marshmallows. Popcorn remains an occasional treat. And lately we’ve been serving him what we call “dogburgers”: a hot dog cut in half lengthwise, then again across the middle, served on a hamburger bun—a practice instituted when we were out of hot dog buns, not in response to the AAP’s statement. Harry seems to prefer it that way, and if it makes me feel less like a would-be murderer, so much the better.

This has been circulating in old- and new-media circles this muggy month in part thanks to an article in New York magazine, by Jennifer Senior, that has, as they say, gone viral. It’s been Tweeted and Facebooked, blogged about, and discussed on the radio (one good interview with Senior took place on my local NPR station, WNYC, on Brian Lehrer’s show the other day. You can listen to it here, if you’re so inclined).

Um, what do I have to say on the topic? What makes you think I have something to add to the discussion? Hahaha, as the social-media types like to type. Of course I have something to say.

And it’s this: Really? Really? We’re still talking about this? Have we still not come to terms with the fact that becoming a parent doesn’t magically bestow happiness on your head, any more than getting married does? Apparently not. Apparently we’re still, as the article suggests, “surprised” (and of course bemused and not a little bit annoyed, if I may editorialize) that bringing our children into the world didn’t up our happiness factor.

Senior takes as her premise the statement that “most parents” expect having children will make them happy.

They do? I didn’t.

Oh, I get that many people use that word, “happy,” as shorthand for other things, like fulfillment and an increased sense of purpose, but it all boils down to the same idea. We’re all always looking for the magic, make-me-happy bullet, and guess what folks? You are the only person who can engineer your own fulfillment, nurture your own sense of purpose, and create your own contentment, all of which are hard to find, and all of which are unfair to ask a baby or child to give you. Unfair, and impossible.

Yeah, I know–I’m taking what’s essentially a pop-culture article to the extreme; after all, it is a well-written, thought provoking piece, that’s mostly for, you know, passing interest and diversion. Plus, it’s getting people talking, especially about thorny issues like why American parents may be, according to research on such things, unhappier than those in, say, Sweden or France, where support for working families mitigates some of the modern-life issues that make parenting such a tough row to hoe for many of us. Things I pine for, like paid maternity leave, subsidized quality daycare, healthcare coverage, and free or very low cost higher education. Just think — as Senior’s piece points out — how may of the woes of modern American parenthood those things erase!

She writes, as well, of the difference between our generation, armed with our educations and our choices (and the attendant, for some of us, sense of entitlement), and that of our parents, who (speaking broadly here) went from their own parents’ homes to their married homes and leaped right into parenthood. The idea being, no choices to ponder, plus no time to think, equals no crazy-making false assumption that becoming a parent will Make You Happy. (This, incidentally, has always been my mother’s take on our blah blah blah navel-gazing generation: “You people have too much time on your hands. Less talking, more doing, okay?”)

And yeah, there is a big gulf there, leaving to one side all the jawing about choices or lack thereof and what that has to do with how happy (or not) we are. But where does that leave me? I’m smack-dab-bang-on in the cohort that should be wrestling most mightily (and, if you agree with some of the online commenters to Senior’s article, whining the most with the belief that if I’m feeling something, everyone must be) with this problem of unhappiness in parenthood.

Just check it out: I’m well-educated. I had a solid, successful career before I even got married, much less decided to have a child. I was 36 when I had my son, for heaven’s sake. Not to mention I am (or was, at the time) urban. East Coast urban, no less.

And I had that baby. And while I expected that I would feel pride in his being, joy in the sight of his face and a renewed sense of being needed and wanted, purely physically at first, but physically, too, as I raised this human being; while I anticipated that I would fall madly in love with my son and any other children who followed him out of my body, it honestly never, ever occurred to me that he would make me happy. Or that parenthood would be all joyful, or even, I don’t know, as much as 25% joyful. I knew it would be a lot of shit (literally, at first), a lot of snot, a lot of laundry, a lot of money, not a lot of sleep, not enough sex (in the early months and years), and other scary and amorphous non-happy-making things later. Can I just say “teenager” and leave it at that?

Later in Senior’s piece, she makes the not unfamiliar point that in the “olden” days, children were essentially economic commodities. Adults had children in part because they had little to no effective way of controlling whether they had them or not, but also because their offspring provided vital help on the farm or whatever, as well as childcare help with the subsequent new siblings. Those who survived, that is. Fast forward to now, and after a bunch of generations during which we got increasingly better at choosing the timing of parenthood and the number of kids, and we’ve reached a point where kids are not home and farm helpers (or, as they were in the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, potential money earners in factories and mines). We’ve reached the point where they’ve turned instead into projects. Says Senior: “kids went from being our staffs, to being our bosses.”

Oh. Ick.

I’m not my son’s serf. I met his needs as a newborn, an infant, a toddler, and continue to do the things for him and his brother that they can’t do themselves. I feed, I clothe, I see to their education, I organize their things and their social lives and read to them and get their hair cut and wash their bodies and wipe their butts (still, with the five year old. Sigh. He promises that by his sixth birthday he’ll take the toilet paper into his own hands). When they get older, I’ll still do a lot of those things, and more (hey, I still expect a meal prepared for me when I go to my mom’s house, which is as it should be), but I’ll also expect that they will pick up quite a lot of the slack.

All this is not to say that I want my sons to, when they are able-bodied enough, become my staff (first of all, I don’t have a farm, so there’s that). What I am aiming for? We’ll all serve each other, the needs of the family and of the home. Funny, just yesterday I was talking to Daniel about the things he can do (put the waffles in the toaster, stack his dish in the dishwasher) and the things he can’t yet (grill the hot dogs on the barbecue), and said that as he got older, he could — and would — do lots around the house. I started ticking them off: Change your sheets. Do your laundry. Help mommy cook. Dust and vacuum. Rake the leaves. Mow the lawn. Shovel the snow. Wash the car.

“And if your friends say, ‘hey, Daniel, why did you have to do all that stuff?’ you can say, ‘because we all do things for each other in our house.’ ”

Because, I want him to understand, while we all have the human responsibility (and ability) to effect our own happiness (he can’t “make” me happy any more than I can “make” him happy), we have the familial responsibility to lighten each other’s loads, and each other’s lives.

No whining necessary.

Right after this, he *almost* let me kiss him. Almost.

My second son, James, is bewildering and bedeviling in shifting measures, like all offspring, but I have been feeling for a while lately that, while he’s as capable as his big brother of winning or crushing my heart, I understand him better. To put it in actorly terms, I have flashes of brilliance and insight, dealing with him, where I can totally see his motivation.

Why? Because I am he, and he is me. Replace his penis and dormant male hormones with girl parts, let his hair grow (not a a lot, but a little; at his age my mom kept my hair cut in an early-70s pixie, the better to suit my superfine strands), stick him in Dr. Brown’s Delorean set for 2010, and he’d be me. First, in looks. Here’s a pic of me and my sister, when I was around 4:

That's me on the left, with the mini dress (cute, right?) and the Mr. Spock hairdo.

And then here’s James at more or less the same age as I am in the photo above. Also, you’ll note, he’s with his brother. I have more photos of him alone than my parents did, thanks in large part to easier photo technology, but still it’s harder to find photos of him than of his big brother, or without his big brother:

That's James on the left. It occurs to me that he hams it up in photos, with Daniel as straight man. Just like me and my sister.

Here’s how he’s like me in other than looks:

1. He’s gregarious, entertaining, smart and funny (what, you don’t think I am, too?!). That is, when he feels safe. Otherwise, he appears either painfully shy or snootily standoffish.
2. He’s got a dramatic streak 14 miles wide. Direct quotes: “Oh, now we’ll never get there!” (said on a normal-length trip to Grandma’s house marred solely by a short spate of traffic buildup); or “You never make macaroni and cheese” (which I do make pretty darned often, thankyouverymuch); or “I bumped my head and it really, really, really hurts,” when it quite obviously was the lightest possible bump in the history of kids’ bumped heads.
3. He’s a loyal friend, and even at the tender age of 5 1/2, he sees straight through cliquey-ness and cattiness and he instinctively avoids it. It’s cute to watch, because he has no idea that he’s steering clear of the knot of “in” boys because their interactions appear shallow or showy. He’ll say it’s because they’re too loud.
4. He’s not interested, at all, in pleasing grownups who attempt in good-hearted but exaggerated ways to be friends with him. So, teasing and tickling are out, out, out. This of course leads to some bewilderment and temporarily hurt feelings among relatives who don’t see him much, but he’s not giving it away for free, and he sees through a ruse from a mile away, so just don’t try.

I’m musing on this topic for two reasons today. One  is that, on this second week of summer camp after school ended, James is only just now easing into that transition. He finished kindergarten, which was a very big deal to him. The other day, when we were in the car and no one else was talking, I heard him say, softly to himself, “why couldn’t I just stay in kindergarten forever?” So my baby is at a turning point, and he’s not sure who he’s supposed to be, the big first grader, or the baby clinging to kindergarten. So while Daniel leaped eagerly from second grade to a return to the summer camp he loves, James has been more needy, so of course he’s on my mind (and keeping me up at night worrying) more than usual.

Which brings me to the second reason I’m mulling my little one’s resemblance to myself, physically and psychically: I’m trying to figure out the most effective way to deal with a child who is, you know, like me. My grandmother, rest her glorious, tart, sweet soul, used to say that you have to parent each kid the way he or she needs to be parented. Which sounds simple and makes sense, until you get to the part where you have to figure out what those needs are.

With James, I have to pull back from saying breezy, distracting things like, “Oh, but you want to go to first grade!” when he misses his happy, collegial kindergarten. Because of course he does want to go to first grade; of course he does know he’s a big boy; he knows that kind of response is a sop to his ego, which he’s not interested in.

He’s not looking to be distracted; he needs to be heard. You can’t play subterfuge with this kid. You just have to say, “yep, of course you miss kindergarten. Of course you do” and leave it at that.

I have to gloss over the dramatics and praise his good-friend status.

And I have to kiss him while he sleeps, because otherwise I’m not allowed. Come to think of it, was I like that, too? Paging my mom…

How do you shift your parenting styles to suit your kids’ needs?

The big payoff? When kids get it about money.

Tell me something: When you hear your child say things like, “Gosh, that’s so expensive,” or “Mom, when we run out of the other cookies, and you have a coupon, can we get the [fill in the blank]?”, would you pat yourself on the back for getting an important money lesson across to him–or would you feel you’ve perhaps burdened him with too much knowledge of your own and the world’s financial realities?

Is a seven-year-old too young to know that you can’t afford to go to Hershey Park (where we’ve never been, but which has been stuck in the kiddo’s head ever since he heard of a magical place that combines rides and chocolate consumption) this year, but maybe next?

Is a five-year-old too young to understand that if Grandma gave him $5, he can get the Mater car, but not the Mater car and another Chick Hicks car to replace the one that went missing somewhere in the house (which itself replaced the one that went missing on show-and-tell day last year in pre-K)?

I don’t think so. In fact, I think that overall it’s gotten so easy to get what we want, when we want it (even when we can’t totally afford it), and so seductive and so easy to shroud our kids from economic pain we may be feeling, that most kids have no cotton-pickin’ idea what things cost, or that things have a cost (or that cotton is something that needs pickin’). Now, I don’t sit my boys down to tutor them on mortgage rates, and my husband and I save our angst-y discussions about money and the future for after they’re in bed. But I’m starting now, right now, to teach them that things have value, that there’s value in waiting for them, and that no, my sweet child, you can’t have the [fill in the blank] cookies today.

I was thinking of this in a serious way lately because of a tip I added to a story I wrote for the excellent website Daily Worth. You can see it here. The piece was about how I stretch my grocery dollars, but it got me pondering how open I am with my boys about the reality of prices, or of our finances.

I don’t think too hard about what I’ll tell them and what I won’t; I figure that when it comes to talking to kids about money — as with talking to them about sex — they’ll take in what they’re currently capable of understanding, and the rest becomes background noise. But if I keep talking–telling them that the reason we shut lights is because the electric company sends us a bill every month for our use of them; or that that we borrowed a very, very big amount of money from a bank to buy our house, and have to pay them back a little bit at a time; or that “on sale” are two of mommy’s favorite words–eventually a lot of it will be absorbed.

The best lesson my father ever imparted was taught slowly and unconsciously over time. He taught me how to handle money, that work brings it in, that things have value, that having things you can’t really afford is ultimately unsatisfying, not to mention dangerous. Not once did he sit me down to explain these things. I just kind of absorbed it, watching him sit at the blue desk (which he still has and which I still covet) and pay the bills, slowly and patiently and carefully, or watching my mother organize coupons and write her shopping list, slowly and carefully.

Tell me what you think. I have a feeling this isn’t going to be my last post about money!

Oh, dear God.

Read this piece, by Washington Times writer Marybeth Hicks. Hicks describes how the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) has pushed and pressed for several years now for Disney and Baby Einstein to just up and admit that the videos are pure entertainment, not the first stop on the road to Harvard. (Even better, Hicks quotes one of my favorite writers and bloggers, Jen Singer, owner of Mommasaid.net and author of the new Stop Second Guessing Yourself series of books, who is the go-to gal if you need a reality check on parenting).

So yeah, big surprise.

I first heard about this on the radio yesterday, in a brief segment on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show. He took a couple calls, and seemed surprised that parents aren’t beating Disney’s doors down asking for their cash back. Again, no surprise here.

Because, uh, did anyone buy this stuff, seriously, in hopes that plopping your 6-month old in front of them would boost his IQ? I imagine some did, but not seriously. Just sort of in that, “well, this could give him a teeny edge, and couldn’t hurt, right?” kind of way.

Baby Einstein, and our old friend Julie Clark (who always included an annoying promo for herself and her products on the tapes, which my husband and I parody to this day… hi, I’m Julie Clark, founder of the Baby Einstein company, and I’m getting fabulously rich on the backs of your parental insecurities and competitive natures! Isn’t that great?!), dovetailed nicely with a general climate, in the parenting world, of edge-getting. Anything we could possibly do — or anything someone like Julie Clark soothingly coerced us into thinking we could do — we simply had to do.

It all seems so benign. And the videos themselves are, for sure. But the impulse behind them is anything but.

Listen, we had the whole collection of BI videos. Some bought, some gifts. The big boy loved it when we first showed him Baby Beethoven at about 8 months (that is, aside from a brief scene when  a lion puppet plays a saxophone. He’d cry hysterically if we didn’t grab the remote and fast-forward. No idea why). But before long, those videos became a routine part of many days. First, all of the videos are about 30 minutes long. That’s a shower, with extra time to moisturize, deodorize, and get dressed in peace. Second, my son was mesmerized by most of them, and soon they became a clear signal that it was calming-down time. Video, then nap. Easy-peasy.

But I never expected him to hum Beethoven, then toddle to his play piano and start composing his own music. And while we both loved Baby Van Gogh, I don’t expect him to wander into a museum when he’s older and feel a pull toward the artist’s work thanks to his early exposure. They were just nice. Mild. Not jarring. No purple dinosaurs, no commercials.

I don’t want my money back, thanks.

But I am getting a good laugh, and that’s priceless.

Robert, my husband, with three-day-old Daniel.

Here he is, the day we took our first son, Daniel, home from the hospital. (Note the beard growth and dazed expression; that’s what you get after sleeping on one of those hospital recliner chairs for three nights. Not that I looked much better — after two days of labor and a C-section, I wasn’t anyone’s version of a beauty queen. But what I love about this shot is the tenderness in his hands, contrasted with the terror in his eyes.

He rose to the occasion — because he’s not what I call a Helpless Dad.

Those who know me best (my family, who has been treated to me yelling at TV commercials for years now) know that I cannot stand that category of commercials I call “The Helpless Dad.” Can. Not. Stand. Them. They feel so anachronistic to me, and lazy to boot. Surely, the smart, creative types at the ad agencies can come up with a less tired concept to push, say, cold medicine than the idea that the poor mom has to stuff herself with decongestant and get up out of bed, because if her husband has to get the kids off to school, well, there’s no telling what mayhem might ensue.

Yes, I know there are plenty of dads who are truly helpless — leave them alone with their kids and they fall apart, with no idea where the Cheerios are or what bowl you put them in, much less the pediatrician’s name or how to dress the children on a snowy day. But I suspect there are fewer of these than you’d be led to believe. Why? Territoriality. It’s hard for moms (who, let’s face it, get judged from all sides about how good they are at motherhood) to let go the reins. Behind many a mom’s sigh of exasperation about the partner who is clueless about cleaning the spit up from the baby’s neck folds (you know how mysteriously stinky that can get!) is a sense of smug satisfaction: She knows.

Dads do things differently. Take my husband: When Daniel was an infant, I made a habit of hitting the gym on Saturday afternoons. I’d get back, and more often than not, they’d be gone. But our apartment?! It looked like the secret police had knocked at the door, and he had to grab the kid and whatever supplies he could get his hands on and climb out via the fire escape. I mean, did he really have to turn the whole dresser inside out to get the boy into his bunting? I could have chastised him for not Doing It Right, but who cared? (OK, I cared a tiny bit, because I had to clean up, but I got over it). The baby might be in a strange outfit, but he was happy, and clean, and safe, hanging out in his front carrier, against his big, strong dad’s comfy chest. And I promise, he was really careful with that steaming cup of black coffee from Starbuck’s!

Here’s what my husband says, apropos of the helpless husband phenomenon: If I was going to become a father, I was going to do it all the way. Otherwise, why bother? That’s not a direct quote, but it does sum up his sentiment. He’d never seen the business end of a diaper before Daniel was born, and his dad who (bless his 50s-guy heart) still prides himself on never having changed a baby, his own or his grandchildren) didn’t exactly offer practical lessons in modern fatherhood. But he plunged right in.

Here he is, sleeping with an infant Daniel — probably after swinging him for hours in his carseat (that boy craved motion), or feeding me forkfuls of dinner while I nursed the baby (a task that, in the beginning, seemed to take two hands).

Daniel loved sleeping like this.

I’ll tell you right here, right now, without an ounce of know-it-all-mom pride, that I could not parent my kids the way I want to without this guy. You know when I do my smug gloating? Silently, when I’m surrounded by moms complaining about husbands who mysteriously can’t hear a baby cry in the middle of the night; or can’t figure out the anatomy of a sippy cup; or measure out baby Tylenol. On the outside, I might be politely nodding, but inside? I’m saying: Mine does! Mine does! Mine does! Lucky, lucky, lucky me.

Can’t do it without him. Happy Father’s Day, my dear.