Role Model Dad

A Dilemma Begging For An Answer

Matt Baron — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 06:54:00 GMT

They limp along highway exit ramps, wander around business districts and spend large chunks of time splayed out in library easy chairs.

People assign them different names: homeless, down-and-outers, beggars, panhandlers and other words and phrases that are decidedly less sympathetic. As for me, I have another description: They embody one of the most confounding dilemmas I face.

There’s stuff that I thought I’d figured out before becoming a dad, only to learn that I didn’t have even a remote clue. And then there are those things that I knew I hadn’t come close to figuring out before the kids came, and now it’s even more perplexing.

High atop this list is the answer to the following question:

What is the appropriate response to strangers who ask me for money, particularly when Zachary and Maggie Rose are with me?

Over the years, my response has been all over the map. I’ve given small sums of money, typically $1 or less. I’ve given protein bars and fast-food restaurant gift certificates, purchased specifically for this purpose. I have taken a minute or two to try to connect with the person and find out their story, and encourage them in some way.

Rarely do I move on with a strong sense that I’ve handled things appropriately. When I give money, I have the nagging sense that I’ve helped perpetuate someone’s character weakness or substance abuse addiction. And when I don’t give money, I have an uneasy feeling that I have been callous and selfish.

The question of how to model appropriate behavior for my children triggers a host of other thorny questions:

Should my response be different when I’m with the kids, versus those times when I’m on my own? Am I hypocrite if I don’t behave the same way, regardless of who is watching? (Besides, on a spiritual level, isn’t there One who is always watching?)

Should I use the request as an opportunity to give, and thereby teach my children about compassion and generosity? Or maybe it’s a chance to say “no,” and teach them discernment and…and, what? Safety? How to seal yourself off from the difficulties of the world? What exactly would those other lessons be?

My pastor has consistently exhorted his flock to give money, and to give in the name of Jesus Christ, in those situations. And, sometimes, I do just that. But my practice, I suspect, is about as inconsistent as many Christians and people of other faiths do as they seek to sow some spirituality into the transaction.

Most of the time, when strangers—typically middle-aged men—ask me for money, I don’t see them in the same light as the widows, the orphans, the physically disabled or the leprous whose plight is recounted in the Bible. Far from being clearly in need, these folks more closely resemble slick salesman—they are able-bodied, have enough wits about them, and their sales pitch is a self-portrait of haplessness and hopelessness.

And most of the time, I simply don’t buy it.

Instead, I see the three servants in the parable of Matthew 25:14-30. One hid his master’s money in the ground, rather than work to make it grow. “You wicked, lazy servant…throw that worthless servant outside,” the master responds, instructing the money to go to one of the other, more faithfully productive servants.

I don’t say that, though. No, I avert my eyes and suddenly become deaf as strangers start issuing their request. I begin to dial (or—am I the only one who’s done this?—pretend to dial) my mobile phone. If I’m in my car with the kids, I develop this abrupt urge to engage in a quality conversation with them about last night’s dinner.

Recently, one guy on the highway exit ramp has taken to smoking a cigarette as he trolls past cars with drivers anxiously waiting for the light to turn green. Secretly, I’ve been thankful for his public-relations faux pas, because it has given me an easy excuse to roll up my window. That’s being a responsible dad, right? I would never think of exposing my kids to such offensive smoke.

But I know, like the pantomime cell phone chats and the averted eyes, that it’s just another smokescreen wafting over this haziness in my life.

For over a decade now, I’ve asked people I greatly respect to tell me what they do when confronted by strangers seeking money. Sometimes the plea comes with a story—they need train fare, or gas money, or even baby formula (that one can pull on your heartstrings, or enrage you, depending on your perception of the request’s integrity).

The cumulative effect has been even more fuzziness on what to do in any given interaction. But the advice that has made the most sense is to issue a quick, silent prayer for discernment in making the right decision.

Not that I’ve always heeded even that wisdom. Increasingly, I must confess, I’ve prayed instead for a quick escape path.

For the kids’ first year or two of life, as I pushed them around in the stroller, I got a free pass on this issue. There was something about the sight of my curled-up infants that gave a stiff-arm to would-be panhandlers: “Give this guy some space!”

But that phase is no longer. Nowadays, at least once a week I’m face to face with this dilemma. So far I’ve pretty much skirted around it, essentially using my preoccupation with the kids, real or contrived, as a buffer between a stranger’s request and my indecision.

My kids are watching, though. And soon they will begin looking to me for answers. What would you do if you were in my shoes? More to the point—how, and what, are you doing in your own shoes?

D-Day: A Dad’s Deliberations on Divorce

Matt Baron — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 02:15:00 GMT

I’m in a phase where I don’t attend weddings very often. Instead, I learn yet another couple whose wedding I attended is getting divorced.

Dim is the memory of two people vowing a lifetime of committed togetherness. In its place, I hear the anguished first-hand accounts or, as is more often the case, the second- and third-hand mentions that Jack and Jill are splitting up, have already split up, or—didn’t you know?—split up months or even years ago.

That’s how it works, of course. People don’t send beautifully adorned divorce announcements, complete with a few blank lines from which you can circle your reaction upon hearing the news:

A: Saw it coming even before you were married.

B: So sorry, though let’s be honest, we barely know you any more.

C: Very troubled, sad, and confused—say it ain’t so!

Even before I became a father, one of my first thoughts upon learning of a couple’s divorce was, “At least they didn’t have any children” or “That’s got to be especially tough because of the children.”

And now that I am a father, with each new revelation of a couple parting ways, I put myself in the shoes of the divorcing dad—how impossibly hard it must be to tell his children that he’s not going to be with Mommy anymore. Inevitably, I think back to shortly after my 11^th birthday, when my parents assembled us four kids in a sweltering living room to let us know they were separating.

My sister, just shy of 15 years old, let the tears flow. So did I, as I fidgeted with the adjustable strap on the back of my Little League baseball cap. Finally, firmly, calmly, my dad asked me to put the cap down. Meanwhile, my two brothers—a year and two years older than me—were so stoic, it was scary.

In the following months, embarrassed and ashamed, I didn’t know what to tell my friends. To my closest friend, I broke it this way: my dad had moved to a town next to Boston—about 20 miles closer than our home—because it meant a shorter commute to his job. My pal’s response was classic: “Can’t he take the bus?”

Fast-forward 15 years and I married Bridgett—whose parents also divorced when she was young. I knew she made a great partner; it was my own preparedness and wherewithal that I had questions about.

It was only through the grace of God that I began to learn what it takes to be a good husband. At least now I am much more likely to recognize when I’m falling short (which is often) and am therefore quicker to dig myself out of whatever hole I’ve created.

By the way, did you know there are books on marriage? I made that brilliant discovery a few years after we tied the knot in Bridgett’s mom’s and stepdad’s backyard. A short time later, we were so enlightened and enlivened by Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages that Bridgett and I bought 16 copies for siblings and cousins.

In a note to each, we humbly emphasized that we were not making any kind of commentary about the state of their marriage, but that we had gotten so much benefit from reading the book that we felt compelled to share it with them. We received barely a peep in response, and to this day we don’t know if anyone read much beyond the note. Some are no longer together.

The natural state of things is for stuff, when left unattended, to fall apart: our bodies, our cars, and, yes, our marriages. So it takes a conscious, intentional effort to counteract the erosion that can set in from so many things, large and (more often) small. Credit-card bills, buying new shoes for the kids, doing the dishes, doing the laundry, remembering to take out the garbage, and on and on it goes.

Bridgett and I do what we can to dispatch of those necessary, but cluttering, details in Post-It notes, e-mails and voicemails to one another. That way, when we do have those precious moments alone with one another, we can talk about bigger-picture stuff—and, hopefully, nip festering issues before they grow out of control. (Rough translation: I stop being so selfish and lazy.)

I don’t presume to know how our approach may differ from those in our lives who have opted to end their marriages. And I don’t pass judgment. But if you are married, or are thinking about it, I hope you are lucky enough to know that it isn’t about luck, or the alignment of stars, or whether that partner of yours is ever going to change all those annoying habits (which you were blind to, or used to think were so endearing, when you dated).

Joyfully, grudgingly, usually most imperfectly, we have placed our marriage as a priority over our sometimes-glamorous-seeming but ultimately marriage-endangering careers, over our children’s activities, and over our desires for bigger, newer, shinier stuff.

Being a success in marriage, as in any endeavor, takes work. So here’s the question we all need to continually ask: Is it worth all of the attention and all of the effort?

No Shying Away From This Truth: Words Wield Power

Matt Baron — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 04:49:00 GMT

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

Of all the schoolyard lies I heard while growing up, this one about hurled objects and hurled words may have been the biggest. That’s because, as I’ve learned since moving on from South River School in Marshfield, Mass., words have the potential to inflict immense damage.

How many real-life, actual bloody wars have begun with a war of words? How many family rifts can be traced to something spoken rashly, and wrongly? Granted, actions do speak louder than words. And actions obviously play a major role in history, both globally and in our own minuscule corners of the world.

But before becoming a father, I had learned enough about words to respect the power they wielded—for good or for ill—when they flowed from my lips to my children’s ears.

So does this make me a superstar in this category? Not by a long shot. More than anything else, this make me acutely aware of how often, and how badly, I fall short of the mark in this area. Just ask any neighbors who have heard me try to shepherd Zach and Maggie Rose up and down three flights of stairs.

We don’t have space for all the ways I screw up. Instead, let’s dwell on one word that I have succeeded in never speaking over Maggie Rose and Zachary: shy.

Though it’s only three letters long, I consider it a dishonorable member of the Four-Letter Word Club.

Now this may strike you as a tad strong. You may wonder what’s wrong with saying, “He’s a little shy today” or “What a cutie. She’s a shy girl around strangers”?

But when I hear other parents label their children in this way, I cringe. They mean well, and I suspect they believe they are simply speaking a harmless truth. But they’d never think of substituting “stupid” or “ugly” in the above phrases. Well, I put “shy” in the same harsh ballpark.

Words are seeds, and when repeated enough times—sometimes even once could do the trick—they have this way of taking root and setting up residence for life in an individual’s view of himself or herself. And think about it: in what area of life is it an advantage to be shy?

Fittingly, the Wikipedia definition of shyness includes this excerpt about children : “Shyness may fade with time (a child who is shy toward strangers, for instance, may eventually lose this trait when older and more socially adept)…”

(The full Wikipedia entry can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shyness.)

So next time you hear the “s” word, whether you’re the “stranger” or the parent or whatever your role may be, I urge you to respectfully disagree.

Any time someone has inadvertently hit this hot button of mine, my reply is along these lines, “Actually, s/he’s very outgoing. S/he’s just being reserved at the moment.” Then, with God’s grace, I leave out the expletive that’s just waiting to spring forth from my mouth.

I showed considerably less poise at least once, about six months ago, when Aunt Carol was visiting from Evanston. She referred to one of the kids as shy and I tersely snapped, “That’s a four-letter word in our household. Zach and Maggie Rose are not shy.”

Good thing I didn’t have any sticks or stones on me, or I may have hurt Carol.

A TV-Less Dad's Plug for Pulling the Plug

Matt Baron — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:07:00 GMT

Here at the Baron household, we have a book entitled “Sam’s First Word Book,” a colorful collection of some 140 pages featuring a bunny named Sam. On each page are individual items such as a key, a door, a diaper, a puzzle, a camera and on and on.

Around their 3^rd birthday, Zachary and Maggie Rose snuggled on either side of me on the couch to flip through the book for the zillionth time. Often, they correctly identified the picture. Sometimes, they were incorrect. On only one page, though, were they so stumped that they didn’t so much as venture a guess: the one depicting a TV and remote control.

That’s because you won’t find either of those items in our home.

Even above guiding our kids in spiritual matters, choosing to go without TV has been easily the single most formative decision we have made as parents. Fortunately, we made the break many years before they were born.

In April 1996, Bridgett and I agreed to pull the plug on our TV. That wasn’t a turn of phrase—we literally pulled the plug out of the wall socket because we saw it was interfering with our life. We were scheduling our lives based on “must see TV,” and that just didn’t sit right with us. We’d rather live life than watch someone else live it—and now that we have kids, that conviction has been an instrumental force in our parenting style.

We invest our family time in old-fashioned things like reading books, playing with blocks, putting together puzzles, playing hide-and-seek, running up and down the hallway, coloring, playing musical instruments, and “being rough with Dad.”

The irony is that most of my livelihood has been in the media and most of Bridgett’s has been working on movies and TV shows. But we rarely miss it. If I got an assignment for a major national story, and I had no clue about it, revelation was only a Google keystroke away. Bridgett rarely has seen major productions she’s worked on.

When people learn of our TV-less status, they typically have two reactions that could be boiled down as “Good for you! I could never do that.” and “How do you manage to function in everyday American life?” The latter question often has a self-justifying bent to it, as in: You’re freaky weird people who are sheltering your kids too much from “reality.”

Especially now that we’re parents, no TV means not having a potential “babysitter” that occupies the kids for long stretches while we go about our lives in some parallel universe. It means that we must engage our children more, speak with them more, play with them more. Physically and mentally demanding as that is, it’s well worth the effort.

Last year, when Bridgett did some part-time work on Fred Claus, she took the kids briefly to the office a handful of times. A few times she planted them in front of a TV as she tended to business. In as little as 30 minutes, they would turn into zombies, eyes glazed over and completely drained of energy. It redoubled our conviction that television—yes, even “good television” with wonderful, non-violent educational elements—is not good for them.

Neither, in comparison to all the other ways we can invest our time, is it much good for adults. So I challenge you to take part in National TV Turnoff Week, an annual event since 1995. But you need not wait until April...designate any upcoming week as your own version of this awareness effort.

For more information on our nation’s TV-viewing ways, visit www.tvturnoff.org. There you will find a wealth of information, such as this statistical dose of reality: the average American household has more TVs (2.73) than people (2.55).

Be assured that Bridgett and I lay no claim to full actualization. While we have successfully stiff-armed TV, a bigger hurdle is taming our desire to criss-cross the world of the Internet. Frankly, I don’t know how I’d go more than a day without it, let alone a week.