Trying not to Raise a Kardashian

                                                            Nothing but sweetness, right?

How do you ensure your kid grows up to be a “nice” person?

It is not a rhetorical question – I hope you will give me your best advice.

My children are very different. Sydney is loud, outgoing, brash. Tyson is reserved, quiet, maybe even a little timid.

We met the Easter Bunny last weekend. Sydney ran to him and hugged him like he was her best friend. Tyson clung to my legs.

A neighbor whom we don’t know walked her dog by our house the other day. Sydney ran to the end of the driveway and started a conversation with her like they were old friends.

Tyson clung to my legs.

Their personalities, so far, are completely different. They are very stereotypical: Sydney is verbal and very smart with vocabulary. Tyson is quiet but is much better than his sister at math, puzzles and similar activities.

Their differences are evident in other ways, too, and that is where I am concerned. Take Christmas for example. Sydney tore through her presents like the Tasmanian Devil. As soon as she had the wrapping off one, she was reaching for another.

Tyson still had unopened toys weeks later. If he opened something he liked, he would play with it for the rest of the day, not worried about what he could have, but content with what he had.

You see where I am going here?

I have said it many times before: If someone were to offer Tyson a balloon, he would ask for one for his sister. He is THAT nice and thoughtful.

On the other hand, if Sydney saw someone offer Tyson a balloon, she would run up and steal it for herself.

She is THAT kind of kid.

This isn’t a learned behavior. Some of it might be from being the first born and having all the attention for nearly two years, but I think she was born like this.

Ask Tyson to help clean the room, he is on it. Ask Sydney to help and you get three hours of bargaining and procrastinating and outright defiance.

All I have to do to get Tyson to go to bed is set my phone timer to go off, no matter what time it is. He knows that when the timer goes off, he has to go to bed and he starts heading that way.

The timer is like the bell at a boxing match for Sydney. Time to start the verbal sparring in order to squeeze in another hour or so of play time. She comes out jabbing like Muhammad Ali.

Before you say, “You can’t let her get away with these things,” understand that I know that and I don’t. But my point is, I want her to act the right way without the threat, or distribution, of punishment.

Also, I have known kids who grew up in very strict environments, where they were afraid to step out of line or challenge their parents on anything. Sometimes that doesn’t work out so well, either. I’m not trying to turn my child into a submissive robot or someone who rebels with drugs or other felonious behavior to deal with overbearing parents.

She’ll get her fair share of groundings, or worse. But I don’t believe I can punish someone into being a good person. She has to come into that on her own.

  

More than once, my wife and I have looked at each other and asked, “How do we make her understand how important this is?”

I had friends visiting this summer and they have two older children who are respectful and very well behaved. I asked my buddy how he and his wife did it, and his answer was vague. Really, they simply tried to steer their children between right and wrong and hoped for the best. So far, it has worked. Or they just got lucky. Or both.

I asked another friend the same thing a few weekends ago. He and his wife have raised three daughters who are all on their own and doing very well as adults. His answer was much the same.

But how much of it is luck? I know siblings who grew up in the same environment. One is an empathetic soul who leads a successful life, while the other is a pathological liar who scams everyone in their path.

Some of it has to be the luck of the draw, right?

  

I spend a great deal of time trying to keep my kids safe. Sydney is so oblivious, she wouldn’t see a car coming until the Ford emblem was implanted on her head. Tyson would play football on our flight of stairs if I let him. They’d both put coins or balls or other choke-able items in their mouth if we weren’t watching them 24/7.

Safety is always the number one concern. It won’t change as they get older. I’ll worry about them experimenting with drugs or driving drunk or hanging out with some knucklehead who thinks Interstate 71 is the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

A lot of energy is spent on keeping them safe. Then, you worry about their intellect and how smart they might become. You spend hours reading books to them, playing online learning games and ensuring they are watching educational TV.

At some point, I am sapped of parental energy. Yet, there is still a mountain to climb: turning your kid into a “nice” person. Someone who respects others, cares about others and is not as self-absorbed as Kim Kardashian.

But then again, Kim’s doing ok. Maybe the selfie-centric way of life is the way of the future?

Screech!!!! Hold the phone. Pardon my interruption!

While I was writing this, my daughter just came up to me and gave me a nickle she had found on the floor somewhere in the house. Instead of keeping it, she gave it to me in “case you need to buy something for yourself.”

Not buy something for HER. Buy something for ME. What a quantum leap forward! Perhaps not all is lost.

Maybe 4 years old is a little too early to consign the fate of "incorrigible" to a child. Maybe I am worrying for no reason.

But just in case, feel free to send advice my way. I’ll be the clueless dad in the corner.   

The Secret to Enjoying Your Cheese Coneys with Kids in Tow

After doing this for three years and two kids now, I think there is one area where I have parenting down pat:

The dreaded dinner out.

No, I don’t have the perfect make up for the either sorrowful or angry stares you receive when your 3-year-old daughter melts down because just the tiniest sliver of ketchup touched her cottage cheese or when your 18-month-old son throws a fit because he wants to hold his own cup and doesn’t like your parental attempts to save the restaurant from flooding.

But I am a fast eater. I mean really fast. And if there is anything I have learned as a parent of toddlers, it is that you have a very short window when eating out. You basically need to plan your get-away while being seated and ask for the check as soon as your food reaches the table. Otherwise, you are playing with fire. And I mean fire of the worst kind: a complete melt-down-by-a-3-year-old fire.

I used to be one of those single guys who ate out by himself, quietly reading the paper in between trips to the buffet bar. I hated when my Frisch’s fish sandwich was interrupted by the temper tantrum of a 2-year-old. I looked on in disdain at the parents who couldn’t keep their kids under control in a public place.

No more.

I now know that there is no controlling the emotions of a toddler. The littlest things set them off and getting them back on course is more difficult than moving Disneyland to Ohio.

Threaten to take them to the car? Three things are going to happen. First, they are going to escalate and get louder at the thought of losing the privilege of eating out. So your situation actually worsens. Two, all eyes will be on you when you carry a kicking and screaming toddler from the restaurant. Embarrassing. Three, you are going to miss your dinner.

Those who know me know I don't like missing dinner.

Threaten punishment at home? As “soon as we get out of here, I’m going to…” Good luck. They will have long forgotten the incident and punishment will be a moot point. You can’t learn if you don’t remember why you are being punished. Children have the attention span of a gnat.

The best thing you can do is prevention. Get out of there before a melt-down happens.

I am one of the fastest eaters you will ever meet. When I was a kid, we were poor. Hot dogs were a regular meal. Hot dogs come in packs of eight. There were five members of our family. I can guarantee my dad was getting a second dog. The other two were up for grabs to the fastest eaters.

I learned young.

So when it comes to restaurants, my wife and I have a game plan. We sit down and immediately ask for the kids’ food. That gets delivered first and we hope it holds their attention. When our food comes, we immediately ask for the check. We sometimes have to explain our “short window” to the server, but most of the time they get it. They either have their own kids, or they are thankful we are willing to get out of there before the floor under our table is covered with Splenda packets.

Then I do my thing. I eat like Hannibal Lector at the county morgue. My fork flies fast and furious. Just about the time the kids are starting to get antsy, I am cleaning the last bit of Skyline chili off my plate.

Then, it is wait-and-see time.

If we all get to stay at the table until the wife is finished, that is a bonus. We just enjoyed a nice family dinner. But if one of the kids is on the verge of a Tasmanian Devil impersonation, I am free to swoop them up and run for the car as fast as possible, leaving my lovely bride – and our fellow diners -- the luxury of a peaceful meal.

Voilà! There you have the Gregg secret to eating out.

Parents-to-be, take heed. Start practicing now. Study the menu for the shortest cooking times. Learn what goes down smoothly and what will take time to eat. (This is no time for crab legs, for Heaven’s sake!) Know what restaurants have the best items of distraction, or bring them with you. (We have even been known to bring the iPad.)

You heard it here first. Bon Appétit!  

My 15 Minutes of Fame

The call came in shortly past noon, while I was eating lunch at my desk. I didn’t answer for two reasons:

1) I am in charge of customer service for my organization and if a complaint is not handled properly and works itself all the way up the ranks, it lands on my desk. This means I am often hit with phone calls from very angry people who want to drone on and on about their issue for a half hour. I don’t mind helping (if it is called for – many of these complaints are not valid), but I find it better to do it when on my time instead of theirs. So I rarely answer the phone blindly, preferring to call them back when I have a clean schedule and mind.

2) If you know me, you know I take eating very seriously, even if it is only a 220-calorie microwavable Chef Boyardee, bowl of salad, apple and yogurt. If I am eating, don’t mess with me.

But the 202 area code intrigued me, and I picked up the voicemail quickly. It was from an NBC Nightly News producer in Washington DC and he said he wanted to talk about my blog.

My first thought was he was calling about the blog we have at work, with work-related things. But I knew there wasn’t much newsworthy on there of late, certainly nothing that would generate a call from NBC Nightly News, so I wondered if he was referring to my personal blog.

That would be crazy, I thought.

But, yes, he said when I returned his call, this was about my blog on being an older father. He found it funny and interesting and thought I would be a good representative to speak on a story they were doing that night. It was about a study that showed children of older dads had an increased risk of falling victim to certain diseases and social ills.

I immediately started relating the story of our pre-birth scare when Sydney tested with a higher than normal chance of being born with the fatal disease Trisomy 18 and about our experiences with Tyson’s very serious heart defects.

He cut me off.

“I’d really just like you to talk about your experiences as an older dad. Talk about some of the things you worry about, the every-day things.”

“Oh, I have plenty of funny stories,” I responded.

“Great!”

Thus was born, what I believe to be, a misinterpretation by me. I’ll touch on that later.

First, he told me he was going to be at my house at 2:30. It was 12:30, I had a 1 p.m. meeting I could not get out of, and I had to pick up my kids at child care (he wanted shots of them). It was going to be tight time frame, but hey, how could I pass up on the chance to be on national TV?

I called my wife at work and asked her work colleague to have her call me back immediately. Word to my fellow fathers: if you are going to ever relay a similar message to your wife, make sure you stress to the person on the other end of the line that there is NOTHING WRONG. Otherwise, your wife will call you with panic in her voice, wondering if one of the children is maimed or dead. And when you innocently try to calm her fears by telling her that you needed to talk to her about a good thing, not a bad thing, she will yell at you. For a LONG time.

But once we got over that, I asked my wife if she was ok with the kids going on camera. Her response was a quick yes…”but the house is a mess!”

This is her main concern. Really?

“Oh, don’t worry, he can shoot around that.”

“No, you cannot have someone in our house right now! I am going to see if I can get off now and go home and clean before he gets there.”

OK. If it involves you cleaning and not me, I am ok with that.

That’s exactly what she did and our house looked better than it has since Sydney was born when I walked through the door two hours later. Amazing how motivating a potential public shaming can be.

My next call was to my child care provider. Amber was excited about the situation and said she would have the kids looking good enough to go on camera when I picked them up. True to her word, she accomplished that feat, which is no easy task with two toddlers.

So we were good to go when I rolled up about 2:30.

The camera guy, Ray, was already setting up. My wife had already done her Tasmanian Devil-like cleaning job. The dogs were locked upstairs.

Everything was perfect.

Then the light went on. This was a gazillion-watt light that lit up our house like a prison yard in the middle of an inmate escape. I am pretty sure you could see dust mites in the corner of the dining room 15 feet away. I knew at once this was not going to be good for my “look.” I’m old and craggly looking at this point in life, so anything above a 75-watt soft bulb is not BG-friendly.

But what to do? I didn’t want to appear vain and run upstairs to ask my wife for makeup. The camera guy said he had some powder, but “you look like you are ok.”

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

For the interview, we decided my wife would take the kids upstairs to avoid noise and then bring them back down when he shot B roll of us as a family. Surprisingly, the kids were ok with this and it worked.

Ray started giving me the logistics of the interview and I cut him off, telling him I do about 40 of these a year for my day job. I then asked if he wanted me to white balance his camera. If you ever want to look like you know what you are doing with a video guy, hold up a piece of paper and say, “hey, let me help you get a white balance.”

Totally impressed, he called the DC office and told them we were ready to roll. Soon, the guy from DC was firing out questions from a cell phone sitting next to me, which I answered, looking straight into the camera.

I told a funny story about how my wife, 15 years younger, gave me an ultimatum: kids are part of our future or we have no future. I caved.

I got sentimental and told him having kids was “the best decision I ever made.”

I told jokes about my main concerns as an older dad: being mistaken for grandpa; being in diapers at the same time as my children; being on social security when they graduate.

I was funny. I thought the interview went well. I thought that was what they wanted from me.

The guy on the other end of the phone line even said, “You nailed it.”

Then, my wife brought the kids down and he shot video of us together. I told Ray, “You have a very short window on this. These kids won’t sit still long and sooner or later one of them will cry about something or throw a tantrum. Get what you need as fast as you can.”

He must have been a parent because he understood. He moved quickly.

He got some great shots of me reading to the Sydney and coloring with Sydney. Tyson was either in my arms or in the nearby jumperoo. I looked like father of the year. When the camera went off, I turned them right over to my wife, the REAL parent in our family.

This is about the time I noticed Sydney’s scraped face from a run in with the corner of a wicker basket. She felt it would be fun to spin around and around in the living room as many times as possible, and on about the 13^th time around, she spun herself into a head-first fall.

This might not be a good look for national television, I thought. And, I am the spokesman for the local agency responsible for protecting children from abuse and neglect.

Was it too late to stop the interview?

Good husband that I am, I kept trying to get my wife in some of the shots, but the guy kept positioning us so she was not in camera range. He did not come out and say it, but I think NBC hates women. Or mothers.

He had the shoot wrapped up by 3:30. Then it was wait on pins and needles until 6:30 to see if we made the cut.

I celebrated with an early dinner of ribeye steak. Hey, I was home at 3:30 with a lot of time on my hands. And, I told you, I take my eating very seriously.

So 6:30 rolls around and we excitedly tune in. Right in the opening preview, they show a shot of me reading to Sydney! We made it!

In fact, we were the second story. I think they led with coverage of some war or whatever. Then they got to the important stuff.

I had DVRs rolling both upstairs and downstairs as they began our segment.

The first thing I noticed was that hi-def was absolutely killing me. I not only have a face for standard definition, I have a face for radio.

I could have used that powder.

Every blemish was highlighted and redder than a fire truck. My crow’s feet looked like ostrich feet. My goatee needed a serious trim.

Uggh.

The second thing I noticed is that all my good stories and jokes were cut from the interview. It quickly became apparent I had misinterpreted their intent. I thought they wanted me because I was an older dad who could provide witty commentary. Turns out they just wanted an older dad. I fit the bill based solely on birth date.

Any thought I had of promoting my blog and getting that book or sitcom deal went out the window when they 1) didn’t let me say anything funny and 2) didn’t promote my blog.

Sigh.

The third thing I noticed was that I needed to lose a lot of weight. This was no revelation, and I jokingly said I had ten cameras on me at 10 pounds each, but being on national TV at anything more than your Freshman 15 weight is a little embarrassing.

The fourth thing I noticed was that the story they were doing was not really a good one and went beyond the increased risk of ADHD and other some genetic diseases that I had discussed with the producer. They said my children had a greater risk of becoming drug addicts or committing suicide. When this sunk in during the DVR playback, I literally muttered “Jesus Christ” under my breath. I didn’t realize how seriously depressing this was going to be where my kids were concerned. 

 

But the positives outweighed the negative. Being on national television is fun. I have received calls or messages from folks around the country, some I have not talked to in some time. In fact, my phone was going off WHILE the segment was playing. Some people couldn’t even wait to call and tell me how shocked they were that I was showing up on their TV screen next to Brian Williams.

Getting to show off my kids was even better. I’ve received so many “adorable kids” messages over the past two days, I’m floating on air. Two people have mentioned they think Sydney could do model work, even with the wicker-basket face.

It will be a cool thing to someday show the kids. They went national when they were still in diapers.

I asked Sydney if she liked being on TV and her reply was an excited “Yes! Let’s do it again.”

Sure. We’ll make it an every-day occurrence.


PS: Here's a link to the story:

http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/study-some-disorders-more-likely-among-children-older-dads-n39341