brainsnorts inc >.<

Time magazine, February 21, 2011

 “In a British study of children and nutrition, kids who ate a healthy diet (lots of fruits, veggies, rice and pasta) at age 3 had higher IQ’s at age 8 ½ than kids who ate meals made up of a lot of fats, sugars, and processed foods.  The average difference was slight – less than two IQ points – but that can add up.  Disturbingly, improving the kids’ diets after age 3 could boost their overall health, but it didn’t change their intelligence scores.”

 and this is a mystery?  when are we going to learn the single most important item, most important factor, most important word that affects who, what, where, how, and why our children will be – PARENTS.

kids of a high IQ ate good food and became smart kids.  and we’re going to think it was the food that made them smart?  noooo.  it was the parents.  and it was the parents who decided to give the kids the good food.  why?  because they’re good parents.  good parents give kids good food.  good parents also give kids a good upbringing and a better chance at being smart and successful.

bad parents aren’t as smart.  bad parents don’t know the right foods to give their kids.  bad parents eat crappy foods, and they give their kids crappy foods.  why?  because they don’t know better. 

when the kids with low IQ’s started out eating bad foods, but later they changed to good foods, their health improved but not their IQ.  really?  that’s a mystery?  if you bought a crappy present but wrapped it really nicely, does that make it a better present?  no f-ing way.

i’ve notice a handful of books in recent years from celebrities and television personalities, non-fiction books that are like a tribute to the father from the son.  i would imagine that any father who has a son so motivated to write about about him must be a great dad.  however, some dads are so tough with their sons that those sons spend a lifetime fighting for approval.  probably the most famous example would be howard stern, who has admitted thousands of times that his entire show is basically a way of proving to his father that he’s not an idiot.

although i’ll never be famous enough to write a book about my father, i can still recognize and admit that i learned a lot from him.  most of it was good, but some of what i learned was what can be called “what not to do.”

Be tough with your kids, but also be there when they need you.

Make sure they understand the difference between “earning” something and “being given” something.

Be ready for hardship, but be ready to have fun.

No matter what you do, I’ll be there to pat you on the back, and I’ll be there to grab you by the neck.

Sweating is good for you.

Put on some pants because I’m turning down the heat to save a few bucks.

If you join a team, you stick with it until the end of the season.  You don’t quit after a few losses.

Homework, then TV.

What Mom doesn’t know, Dad might.  What Dad doesn’t know, Mom will.

If you can’t say “sorry” when you did something, then don’t try using “please” when you want something.

Not every dinner tastes great, but every dinner will be healthy.

Just because I can give you what you want, doesn’t mean that I will.

Never accept the answer, “Because I said so.”

Sports are important, but they’re not worth fighting about.

 If your teacher says you did it, then you’re guilty until proven innocent.

 If your brother or sister says you did it, you’re innocent until proven guilty.

 If your report card says you did it, well, you did it.

 I won’t always have all the answers, but I’ll always do everything possible to find the ones I don’t have.

See this man?  I don’t know him, but I don’t like him either.

For several hours, for several days, I watched him do two things:  read newspapers and ignore his kid.  For several days I watched his son, a sprightly, energetic boy of about 9, dig in the sand and run left and right, to and fro (whatever they are) with a football on the beach as his father either read a newspaper or napped in a beach chair.  The boy tossed a football in the real air while imaginary football players, presumably on the other team, tried to tackle him.  All while his father sat his ass in a chair doing nothing other than read and sleep.

It took great restraint for me to not go to the boy and say, “Hey, throw.  Let’s play catch.”  All while his dad caught nothing but Z’s.  I was afraid that someone would find it weird for a 40-something guy to approach a 9-something boy to play.  It may have seemed like the right thing to do, but it wasn’t worth the risk. 

I know a dad is entitled to his vacation too, and if he wants to read, he’s allowed to read.  But it’s not difficult to find reading time on vacation.  Play with the kid, tire him out, and read while he falls asleep in front of the television or goes to bed early.  Parents are entitled to many things, but kids are entitled to more.  They didn’t ask to be born, and if you didn’t want or plan to have a kid, then give him up to one of thousands who would die for the chance to be a parent.

My father didn’t do everything right.  He wasn’t capable, didn’t know everything, and did what he knew.  I can’t fault him for that, even though I know way more without knowing why I know way more.  He never hugged me said he loved me, but he was there at 12:30 in the morning in 33-degree rain when I got out of work and my car wouldn’t start.  He was under the hood while I feebly aimed the flashlight like an AV geek and he replaced spark plugs or cleaned a carburetor.  He was in the street playing football with me and my friends while other dads were raking over the books and receipts.  He knelt in the street with a piece of chalk and showed me how to run a button hook, a down-and-out, or a fly, flag, or post pattern.  My friends thought he was the greatest dad ever, but I was convinced they were way off, falling for the “show” dad.  Sometimes they were right, sometimes wrong.  I didn’t know it at the time, but compared to the dads I see today, my friends were way more right than wrong.

As I drive to work each morning from 6:30 to 8, I pass various residential settings. Along Atlantic County Road 575 there is a pair of trailer parks with half a dozen kids standing curbside, if there is a curb, as the school bus approaches. A similar group of children, a range of ages, stands in the driveway of an inexpensive motel on state highway 322, likely a location at which the state sets up as low-income housing during the non-summer season. Before I get to those places, I pass two suburban developments and a stretch of farmland.

First come the McMansions of the developments with once-clever outdoorsy names like “Deer Run,” “Dillon’s Creek,”and “Waterstone.” Announced by gold-lettered signs, the entrances of those subdivisions are clogged with SUV’s and crossovers, engines idling and spitting a stream of carbon monoxide into the precious atmosphere. Inside sit silent parents listening to an AM news station as the children are plugged into their Ipods and listen to collections of sounds that they believe are actually songs. September to June, regardless of downpour or wondrous and warm sunrise, these children are sheltered both physically and emotionally by their loyal parents until the bus comes rolling along.

A mile down the road is a gravel path that leads to a farmhouse partially hidden by the early growth of next year’s “live and cut Christmas trees.” Each morning, six or seven high-school kids stand where the rocks meet the road and watch for the same school bus that had been waiting for the other kids to crawl out of Mom or Dad’s SUV. The farm kids are different. They’re not plugged into ipods, and their parents aren’t driving back up to the house with the kids’ empty coffee cups. The farm kids talk. They interact. They play “catch” with hacky sacks. When it rains, they get wet. When it’s cold, they bundle up. When there’s something beautiful on the horizon, they see it.

They also see life. They see work, and they deal with problems, maybe feeling the residual, “trickle-down effects” of a poor economy while the kids up the road will still get Mom’s credit card and BMW to drive to the mall at will. The farm kids might get to college, and if they do, they’ll hustle out of class to get to their part-time jobs, the same jobs they have now in high school. They’ll learn life skills like how to please the boss, be on time, and get along with co-workers whom they don’t like. The kids up the road will only go into a workplace if it’s the one their parents own. They’ll deal with college as more of a social opportunity and annoyance than an education. They’ll step into jobs, careers really, but they won’t have the drive that will have developed in the farm kids who actually worked hard but were never actually certain that they would get there.

I don’t know with whom I have an issue to take up. It’s hard to blame the McMansion kids because they don’t set the conditions, not at first anyway. They’re a product of their environment, and they’re what they have been taught and raised to be. One of the very few times my brother, a staunch Republican, has ever agreed with me was when I said, “I don’t want to hear parents complain that ‘kids are different these days.’ Kids are what we have allowed them to become. They are born no different than we were, but they’re raised much differently than we were.” Should I take issue with the parents who spend too much coddling time instead of quality time? On Friday night they leave a handful of $20’s on the kitchen table with a note that says “See you Monday,” then after work they head for the shore house or Atlantic City condo while the kids are home with the house to themselves all weekend. The parents are the ones who give the teenagers the new Lexus for Christmas their senior year and send them to the Caribbean after graduation, ruining a lifetime of expectation and entitlement.

Or maybe my issue is with myself.