Talk about getting the dad thing completely wrong: a loyal reader e-mailed this blog entry based on this story from a UK paper based on a study that said that kids don't want dad as playmate because he's too competitive. I wish I could find more complete data from the study to help poke holes in it; essentially, it claims that very few kids (1 in 16) would pick dad as their primary playmate, meaning dad lags behind siblings, friends and moms.

Now, this isn't that surprising. In my youth, my brother and my friends would have outranked my dad, who was a super guy noneetheless. No, the surprising part is the explanation: kids don't like to play with dad because he's too competitive. I have seen no evidence to support this, and the guy promoting the study doesn't convince me:

Tim Gill, director of the Children's Play Council, said: "Dads have difficulty not being too competitive. Several fathers said they found it hard to get down to their children's level."

This runs contrary to everything in the academic literature (see Yale's Kyle Pruett for more detail), which suggests dads are most likely to engage in active play with their kids. I'm willing to grant that most kids don't see dad as playmate because dad is the "giver of laws" (to use Pruett's phrase) or because dad is simply not around as much. But to suggest there is something innately bad (overcompetitiveness) about the way fathers play with their kids is doubly bad. It's wrong, and it's damaging to the idea that dads are intrisically good parents.

C'mon. If there's one thing that all the dads I've met are damn good at, it's playing.