A strange little piece about involved fathers showed up yesterday in the New York Times, and it's hard to know exactly what to make of it. The bitwas about the growing number of dads going to the pediatrician with their kids. But it was a weird trend story in that the author, Anemona Hartocollis, seemed uninterested in really figuring out if this was actually a trend.
She focuses first on an Upper West Side pediatrician who claims that dads outnumber moms some days. That's an impressive (if dubious) claim, and there's no real good rationale given for why. (Hartocollis suggests that it's a post 9/11 family bonding thing, which strikes me as a stretch.) Then, the pediatrician lets loose with this: ".. '10 years from now it'll make it to the East Side, and in another 10 years it will make it to the rest of the country.'" The author then dutifully finds that on the Upper East Side, very few fathers come in with their kids. Brooklyn Heights, according to the story, represents the middle ground: a quarter of the kids come with their dad (and a quarter with their nanny).
Here are the problems: 1) parenting trends do not emerge from the Upper West Side, cross over the park and then seep from the Upper East Side into society. And we should thank goodness for that. 2) These neighborhoods are hardly representative of NYC, let alone the rest of the country. Look, I live in the protective, fantasy-land bubble of a professional-class DC neighborhood, yet even here, there ain't a line of nannies at the pediatricians. For Brooklyn Heights to symbolize the "middle ground" is delightfully insular and absurd.
But my overarching complaint is that the dads-at-the-pediatrician story is an important one. This is not a new issue, and it's on many radar screens. Heck, there is an official push for more father involvement being driven by an American Academy of Pediatrics campaign. But none of that was mentioned, acknowledged or explored. Instead, a thousand words of some of the most valuable real estate in journalism (Sunday NYTs reach 1.6 million folks) was wasted.
(Thanks to Elizabeth at Half-Changed World for the link. Her thoughts are, as usual, worth reading.)
She focuses first on an Upper West Side pediatrician who claims that dads outnumber moms some days. That's an impressive (if dubious) claim, and there's no real good rationale given for why. (Hartocollis suggests that it's a post 9/11 family bonding thing, which strikes me as a stretch.) Then, the pediatrician lets loose with this: ".. '10 years from now it'll make it to the East Side, and in another 10 years it will make it to the rest of the country.'" The author then dutifully finds that on the Upper East Side, very few fathers come in with their kids. Brooklyn Heights, according to the story, represents the middle ground: a quarter of the kids come with their dad (and a quarter with their nanny).
Here are the problems: 1) parenting trends do not emerge from the Upper West Side, cross over the park and then seep from the Upper East Side into society. And we should thank goodness for that. 2) These neighborhoods are hardly representative of NYC, let alone the rest of the country. Look, I live in the protective, fantasy-land bubble of a professional-class DC neighborhood, yet even here, there ain't a line of nannies at the pediatricians. For Brooklyn Heights to symbolize the "middle ground" is delightfully insular and absurd.
But my overarching complaint is that the dads-at-the-pediatrician story is an important one. This is not a new issue, and it's on many radar screens. Heck, there is an official push for more father involvement being driven by an American Academy of Pediatrics campaign. But none of that was mentioned, acknowledged or explored. Instead, a thousand words of some of the most valuable real estate in journalism (Sunday NYTs reach 1.6 million folks) was wasted.
(Thanks to Elizabeth at Half-Changed World for the link. Her thoughts are, as usual, worth reading.)
posted by Rebel Dad at
1:04 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home