Interested but Certainly Not Ready

Chloe is now almost twelve years old and she is decidedly interested in boys. At any given time, Ryan, Wren, David or Brett is the object of Chloe’s interest. It makes me think back to when I was still a tween and my heart was set on a younger tween in my neighborhood named Shelli. Shelli was quite the little firecracker. She looked like a miniature version of then-starlet Suzanne Summers. She was extremely athletic and outgoing. She wore her shoulder-length blond hair down, in a pony tail or in pinky tails, always keeping it varied. At times, Chloe reminds me of Shelli.

It was the autumn of my seventh grade year. I was playing football for the first time and wasn’t particularly good at the game yet. A few of us like my friend Ken were good. Most of us like me were playing for the first time at the age of either twelve or thirteen. As a group we were particularly poor at maintaining hold of the ball. Nearly every time one of us got tackled, the player in question would lose control of the ball. For anyone not familiar with the game of football, that is called a fumble and it means the other team can get control of the ball and even run with it. Coach Carmichael was getting frustrated or at least he was acting that way.

“None of you knows how to hold a football! Here’s how you hold a football! You hold it like it’s a boob!”

I wasn’t sure I had heard Coach Carmichael’s last word correctly. Ken who had certainly heard the coach correctly but also knew most of us were unsure spoke up, “Say that just one more time, coach.”

“I said you need to hold a football like it’s a boob. Hold it like you would hold a girl’s tit.” He held the football with one point buried into the thin gap between his right arm and his chest and the other point in the index finger of his right hand so that his palm and most of his fingers were beneath the football and his thumb clasped down from the top. He explained what he was doing detail, always referring back to his original analogy.

All of us were mesmerized. The idea that there was a “correct” technique associated with handling a girl’s breast so that she would enjoy the experience and that one could likewise handle a girl’s breast in a way she wouldn’t like was news to me at least. From that day onward, nobody wanted to fumble the football when tackled because it meant that the boy who fumbled didn’t know how to handle a girl’s breast. As a result our team hardly ever fumbled. When somebody did fumble, a crowd of teammates would take it upon themselves to repeat Coach Carmichael’s imparted wisdom in every detail.

The fact that tween boys take a sudden and intense interest in girls’ breasts is no secret. The fact that tween boys and girls like Chloe take a sudden interest in one another is no secret either. The mystery is why. As a parent, I am baffled as to why God, nature or evolution arranged things so that in the process of growing up, very intense interest emerges long before one is even close to ready. Back at my school years and years ago, there was an entire middle school football team of boys including me each of whom was not only confident he could maintain hold of a football when tackled by a varsity player, he was also confident he was ready to satisfy a tween or even a teen girl with the correct fondling technique. Or at least we all acted that way around one another. But only a few weeks later the little firecracker, Shelli, put my confidence to the test.

We never went on a date. We didn’t get ice cream or go to a movie. After school, we rode bikes in the large parking lots of our condominium association. We played kickball, dodgeball and foursquare. On hot days we swam in the pool. There were three tween boys and three tween girls including me and the little firecracker living in our neighborhood. On the first Saturday in November, I found myself alone with Shelli. I don’t remember what we said but we agreed to kiss. It was a quick peck. She also wanted to check me out and agreed to let me check her out in exchange. A week later I found myself alone with her again. In the week since we had seen one another, she had a made a decision. “I want to go to second base together,” she said firmly. She had the exact location picked out in the woods far behind our buildings. I walked alongside her and repeated all of Coach Carmichael’s words to myself in my head. But when the little firecracker lifted up her shirt to get what she had asked for there was nothing that resembled the dimensions of a football. In all likelihood my chest had more mass. Shelli leaned against a fallen tree and wanted me to approach her from the front rather than behind as Coach Carmichael has instructed. I decided to approach from the side with my right hand.

The whole interaction was extremely awkward. I mumbled some words of affection and attraction. The little firecracker had gone silent. We had trouble making eye contact once we were finished. Nothing intimate ever happened between us after that day. Instead we had trouble speaking with one another. When the larger crowd of tweens would gather, I would try to hang close to her but she would act like she didn’t see me. At other times we reversed roles and I was the coy one while she hopelessly sought some kind of validation I was too afraid to give. A few months later Shelli moved to a different neighborhood. We would see one another from time to time in the years that followed but never gathered the courage to talk. It wasn’t until thirty years later when we connected on Facebook that we were able to discuss what happened, admit to our regrets but also admit that we were both long since over the matter and that our discussion was the final act of closure. The only thing I don’t regret was that Shelli was my first kiss.

Parents including me put a lot of energy into protecting their kids from the kind of interaction that happened between me and Shelli for the simple and explicit reason that tweens are not ready to be intimate. The majority of parents have rules. Some parents have particularly strict rules. For the strict parents, the solution is to keep the boys and girls away from one another for as long as possible. Technically, Amelia and I have rules too. But while most parents merely forbid, Amelia and I want to give Chloe appropriate and satisfying outlets for those feelings that somehow have come long before she is ready for a serious and intimate relationship. It is why we take her to dances and even reward her for mustering the courage to ask a handsome boy to dance.

If I could go back to either of those days with Shelli long ago, instead of doing what I did, I wish I could ask her if we could spend more time kissing and talking. I wish we could have agreed to talk on the telephone together and maybe even go for walks holding hands. Things certainly would have been different. But I did not have the social confidence to say or do those things. And perhaps that is the difference between my generation and Coach Carmichael’s generation. His generation championed the sexual revolution. In contrast, my generation is championing healthy relationship skills. We’ll see how we do.

The Toxic Allure of Tiger-Mothering (Part 3) Gender and Co-Parenting

It has now been two and half months since the Wall Street Journal published Amy Chua’s essay, Why Chinese Mothers are Superior. While there are many aspects of Chua’s parenting philosophy which deserve solid rebuttal, this post is solely focused on Chua’s gender bias. Her bias emerges immediately in the very title of her essay. It is not Chinese parents who are superior but Chinese mothers.

This is a charged subject for a number of reasons. To begin with, in nearly every two parent household, the division of parenting duties is never equal. And while I do not have any data in front of me, if one were to somehow measure parenting activity as divided between fathers and mothers, I have no doubt mothers (even working mothers) put in more hours of parenting activity than fathers. Second, not every child is raised by his or her father and mother. There are plenty of blended families, single-parent families, same-gender-parent families and other non-traditional families. Chloe has one friend from her basketball team for example who is being raised by her aunt and her grandfather. Advocates for womens’ rights, LGBT rights as well as those who advocate traditional family values would be quick contribute an opinion on this subject that could easily be inflammatory. So at risk of being inflammatory, myself, I am going to tackle this charged subject.

First, while gender differences are real, I believe those differences should never be artificially amplified. In contrast, I believe reasonable (but not ridiculous) efforts should be made to promote gender equality. As Amelia and I have been raising our eldest, Philip, and we have set rules and privileges for him, an important part in our decision-making process has been whether we would be willing to apply the same rules and privileges to Chloe when she reaches the same age. Whenever the answer was no, Amelia and I would normally continue deliberating until we came up with a plan in which the answer to that question was yes. In contrast, Chua’s rules state “Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school” rather than “Chinese kids cannot date until after high school.” The idea that the rules for girls should be stricter than the rules for boys (or vice versa) is both unfair and counter-productive even though for example high school girls may face greater threats on average than high school boys.

Second, I believe the healthiest family model in which a child can be raised is a single household that contains the child’s biological mother and father with any siblings from the same mother and father. That does not mean that I think the alternatives, even vastly different alternatives such as same-gender-parent households, are wrong. Instead I believe that parents who raise a child under a different model need to find ways to compensate. And my observation is most such parents not only compensate but do a good job compensating. Proactive single mothers and “two mom” families, for example, make extra effort to connect their sons and daughters with responsible, emotionally-healthy adult men. And the converse is true for single fathers and “two dad” families.

Finally, I believe values of both parents and the perspective of both genders should all play a material role in the parental decision-making process. For single parents and same-gender parents, getting at least one trusted adult advisor of the opposite gender is part of a responsible compensation plan, regardless of the child’s gender. While one parent (usually the mother) may put significantly more hours into parenting than the other, those same two parents need to collaborate more equally on the decision-making process of how to raise their child. In contrast, Chua feels completely comfortable and justified shutting out the man who is both her husband and her daughters’ father from both parenting activity and decision-making. Instead, Chua rolls her eyes and belittles her husband’s concerns when he voices them.

Chua accuses “western” parents of being lazy. But which takes more time, effort and thought: Making all the decisions oneself or genuinely involving another person? It is a rhetorical question, of course. The lazy parents are the ones who leave all the parental decision-making to just one parent. The lazy mother is the one who simply shuts her ears to her husband’s concerns rather than considering and even soliciting another perspective. The lazy mother (or father) does not want to take the time to work out a plan that brings out the best of all perspectives. If something is missing in a child’s life, responsible parents compensate while lazy parents merely follow their impulses. When dealing with the differences between teenage boys and teenage girls, lazy parents cannot be bothered with the effort it takes to promote gender equality. All this is to say good proactive parenting takes a lot of thought, reflection, work and most importantly interaction. Each child is unique enough that an inflexible set of rules like the ones Chua advocates can never be what is best; they can only be the easiest.

As I read Chua’s essay, I realize it is not merely the children of tiger-mothering who suffer and miss out. I feel very sorry for Chua’s husband and I also feel sorry for Amy Chua. While it has been a lot of work, the process of co-parenting with Amelia has been one of the most joyful parts of our relationship and it is something Chua and her husband will never know.

The Tame Teen Culture of Grinding and Social Networking

On March 4th the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report that showed (with two interesting exceptions) a significant drop in teen sex between two studies for which the data was only five years apart. I’ve copied the CDC’s figures for teenagers ages 15 – 17 into the tables below. In a way, the numbers communicate more than anything I or anyone else could write in comment.

Heterosexual Sex: Ages 15 – 17	Boys 2002	Boys 2006-8	Boys’ Drop	Girls 2002	Girls 2006-8	Girls’ Drop
Vaginal Sex	36.3%	31.8%	4.5%	38.7%	33.0%	5.7%
Any Oral Sex	44.0%	35.0%	9.0%	42.0%	30.2%	11.8%
Gave Oral Sex	30.4%	22.5%	7.9%	28.2%	25.1%	3.1%
Received Oral Sex	38.0%	33.4%	4.6%	40.3%	26.8%	13.5%
Anal Sex	8.1%	6.2%	1.9%	5.6%	7.0%	------
No Heterosexual Contact	46.8%	53.2%	7.4%	50.2%	60.3%	10.1%

Additional Sexual Data: Ages 15 - 17	Boys 2002	Boys 2006-8	Boys’ Drop	Girls 2002	Girls 2006-8	Girls’ Drop
Homosexual Sex	3.9%	1.7%	2.2%	8.4%	10.3%	------
No Sexual Contact	46.1%	52.6%	6.5%	48.6%	58.2%	9.6%