Only Foreword
New Perspectives on Fatherhood
The Girl is approaching the ripe old age of one, and I’m finding that my perspectives on this whole skeptical parenting thing are become less abstract by the day. Call it what you will — early confusion, naive over-extension — but my views on what it means to be a father, particularly a father attempting to raise a critically thinking kid, have evolved and refined since a little more than a year ago (on the very verge of fatherhood) when I set out to build this blog.
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Edmonton Skeptics
I’ve very excited that over the course of the summer our little effort to convene a collective of local skeptics has resulted in lots of new interest, a couple meetings, and some upcoming community education projects. It looks like things are taking off. If you are finding this page because of a search for Edmonton Skeptical groups, or groups in and around Alberta, look us up on either Facebook or (for the time) Meetup.com and come out to a meeting.
As a dad to a little girl who is really starting to build up those cognitive functions, I’m looking forward to having some great community support in the coming years around critical thinking and skepticism.
Check out our new webpage at www.edmontonskeptics.org
I don’t wanna die!
Dale, over at The Meming of Life Blog wrote a stellar piece recalling a conversation with his daughters about death, particularly a conversation with a secular view of such fate. You should check it out here: http://parentingbeyondbelief.com/blog/?p=311
I haven’t been sticking my nose in here much due to other obligations, but I think when the summer is over I’ll try and make a better effort. Cheers!
Lipids, Drugs, and OMG THINK OF TEH CHILDREN!
If one ever needs a reminder of the sad state of medical and science reporting in the modern media, one can often just turn on the television and witness a lemming-like approach to sensational news stories. This morning, for example, after the wife and I watched last night’s The National (CBC) report on a new report on childhood obesity from the American Academy of Pediatrics I Google’d a total of six-hundred and ninety-five redundant articles on that same subject proclaiming the same exaggerated and out-of-context headlines: “Cholesterol drugs urged for children as young as 8” or even “A sad milestone: Kids and cholesterol drugs.”
I wonder how many of those six hundred and ninety-five publications and their editors bothered to scope out the real deal behind the story?
I spent five minutes and tracked down the actual article — available online, in full, for free (by the way) — and skimmed through it in enough detail to realize that the “drugs for eight-year-olds” is LAST on a list of thorough recommendations that works through a progressive, stepwise analysis from diet and exercise to counseling and advanced screening to (yes, at the last-ditch, holy-crap your kid is so fat his knees are going to buckle) drugs.
Yet, the television reports and the print articles simply wave the flag and shout: “these guys are saying eight year olds should be on drugs.”
Unfortunately for a group like the American Academy of Pediatrics who publishes papers such as this from respected researchers there is a need to be discrete and professional — and so the language of the report is subtle and nuanced and doesn’t bother to speak to the public in plain language.
The seven recommendations, as I have reinterpreted them are:
1) Guess what. Your kid is a little person and needs good food. Feed your kids good and proper food, you stupid parents. Not crap. For example, a strawberry milkshake from McD’s is not the same as a wholesome glass of two-percent.
2) If you don’t know what good food is, talk to someone who does. There are people who know these things. Really. It’s their job.
3) If you are fat as an adult we know you like to blame your genes. But guess what! We can screen your kids to see if there is some genetic link — or if you’re just fat and lazy and setting a bad example.
4) By the way, this means soon. Probably when your kids are between two and ten years old would be a good time to start thinking about healthy lifestyle choices.
5) If you are a doctor and you’re reading this report there are ways to test kids that are different than testing adults. You probably know that, but we have to tell you to cover our butts here.
6) If your kid is already fat, start feeding him properly and pry the Wiimote from his hands before it’s too late. There are some great new inventions to help with this: balls, bikes, running shoes. Really, get off your couch and do something physical with your kids — maybe take them to the farmer’s market and buys some fruit.
7) If your kid’s blood is already measured as a double-digit percentage of chocolate and french fry grease, guess what: you’re a bad parent. Really. No, you suck. We can’t do much to fix this anymore with diet and exercise — and if we try we’ll probably do even more damage — so honestly, sorry to say, there isn’t any other way than pumping them up with some powerful drugs in the hopes that they don’t keel over the video game controller and have a heart attack at twenty-five. We don’t like it any more than you, but if you haven’t figured this out in the first eight years of your kid’s life we don’t know what to say.
The media’s reply: OMG! They want to drug our kids! Story at 10!
Monday Meta: Topic Redux
Mondays? Making up excuses for missed connections.
I’d like to write here every day, but it’s just not going to happen. In the meantime, little two-week breaks from my rants provide opportunity to let new ideas and experiences marinate. We have a medium-sized circle of friends, and when I’m not playing with the girl, pounding away on a keyboard, or puttering about the garden, we’re usually socializing. And, even if those friends don’t have kids of their own — which most of them now do — they always have opinions on child-rearing. What’s a skepdad to do? Commentate on those ideas, of course.
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Wednesday Wild Card: 2D Characters
Wednesdays? Whatever. Whatever!
One of the other hats I wear is that of a semi-professional writer. Some of the stream-of-consciousness blather that gets posted here might cause readers to doubt that assertion, but nevertheless I do get part of my paycheque from mashing words into paragraphs. Of course one rarely falls into that kind of role if one does not have “the itch” — that nagging, yearning, urge that any artist will quickly tell anyone within earshot is the driving force behind his work — for which neither salve nor ointment can sooth the need to share one’s gift (whatever that may be) with an audience that is often silent and unseen. I write what I need to write — and I get paid. I write what I want to write — and blogs are brimming with opinion, notebooks are overflowing with fanciful descriptions, and ideas are etched out in countless word processor files — yet not a dime ever arrives. In sharing this I’m not trying to offer some round-about guilt-trip for reading these words. Rather, I’m attempting to introduce my motivation (as a passionate writer) in elaborating on a recent podcast discussion (from The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe) about stereotyped characters in children’s media, particularly with regard to so-called “nerds” and “geeks.”
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Tuesday Media Watch: Second Language
Tuesdays? Pondering pointless programming.
I’ve often quietly scolded myself for being fairly inept at languages. I mean, I have a reasonably high proficiency in English due to thirty-odd years of reading, writing, and speaking it. But over the years I’ve stumbled through a number of focused efforts to learn a second language, namely French and German, but sit here today without the ability to do much more than count to ten, introduce myself, and order a beer in either. Both efforts to lean a second language have involved numerous formal (textbooks, school, and evening courses) and informal (travel, websites, multimedia, and broadcasts) attempts to build vocabulary and grammar. But at the end of the day my proficiency will never match that of a native tongue.
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Friday Consumer Culture: Priddy Books
Fridays? Products, from one to five skeps.
We’d likely be kidding ourselves as parents if we thought all the stories we were reading to our very young kids were offering any more benefit than the sound of our voice and perhaps some loose vocabulary development. The girl is seven months old and I’m under no delusion that she is following the plot of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” or “Charlotte’s Web” as we read aloud from them on a nightly basis. But there is a ritual there and I’d like to think that my voice has something of a calming effect on her little mind. This raises the question as to the value of books in the life of a “Really Young Thinker” when books can really be no more than colourful toys to be grabbed and manipulated by equally young fingers. To help answer this, we were lucky to be given an interesting cloth book as a gift early on, and its only recently that the girl has taken to it with devoted fascination and often giggling delight — so much so that we bought another in the series.
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The skep/dad blog is a place for rational, science-minded fathers to express their thoughts, opinions, and ideas about bringing up kids to be critical thinking adults in a world filled with superstition, mysticism, and pseudoscience.
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Brad adds: As of October 2007, I'm soliciting interest for skeptics in the Edmonton, Alberta, Canada area who are interested in forming a skeptical society to contact me. Please do so through this blog or via Facebook (through the Edmonton Skeptical Society Group).
Or visit our new website: www.edmontonskeptics.org - The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.- Thomas H. Huxley
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- NeuroLogica Blog
- Junior Skeptic
- Skeptic’s Annotated Bible
- The Meming of Life
- The Museum of Hoaxes
- Memoirs of a Skepchick
- Pediatrics
- Snopes (Urban Legends Reference)
- Podblack Blog
- James Randi Educational Foundation
- Skeptical Mom
- Skeptical Kids
- Bad Language
- SkepBitch
- The Philosopher Dad
- Bug Girl’s Blog
- Skeptic Magazine
- Nye Labs
- ScienceBlogs
- Skeptical Family Forum
- The Skeptic Dad
- DIYFather.com
- Science Creative Quarterly
- Skeptical Surfer
- Science Based Medicine
- Claire’s Booklist
- The Skeptics Guide to the Universe
- The Blogfathers
- Skeptoid: Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena
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