The road to tech success is not paved with pink Legos

I’ve started writing about Daddyland again, this time around at a new business publication called Quartz.

It’s a mobile and international-focused startup from Atlantic Media, which publishes The Atlantic, among other publications.

So I’ll be taking more of a big picture economic and societal view on all the work/life issues that come up when you start talking about mass paternity leave, like we have here in Sweden (though not enough of it!).

My first Daddyland-centered post for them was about … Legos:

At our house, we’ve got a box of hand-me-down plain brick Legos tucked in a corner of the kids’ room. My six-year-old daughter tends to build  ”cities,” and they are tall and sprawling, though mainly vehicles for role-playing with friends. But, honestly, she plays with the Legos less often than she does with random objects—a steel tube, a broken reflector—found on the sidewalk and turned into homemade dolls.

I don’t push the Legos either, and I’m starting to wonder about this. Am I depriving my daughter of a future as a filthy rich mobile game app developer in Silicon Valley? Am I squashing her inner geek as I applaud her dancing and pictures of flowers?

And is the answer Lego Friends?

Lego Friends is the new line of girl-focused Legos that caused a firestorm when it was announced late in 2011. The new “slimline” Lego girls and their convertibles and beauty salons outraged bloggers, inspired a protest petition signed by more than 50,000 people, and earned a pro-Lego cover story at Businessweek.

Finish reading the story here.

New essay on existential jet lag (and small kids)

I’ve been absent from the blog for a while now, as I needed some time to think about how to proceed with my personal writing.  But I’ve also been busy editing a couple essays for The Morning News.  And here is the first one, on jet lag:

It is hard going east. It is harder going east with small children. It is hardest going east with small children into the gloom of a Swedish winter.

The planes are fast but the adjustment is slow, and I get caught in the gap between. This seems true of so much of modern connected life, but especially with kids, who ground me in their urgent and eternal needs, and in Sweden, with its fundamental tyranny of light and dark.

I’ve always taken jet lag as something to either cure or endure. But this proves impossible with my children, who cannot, or will not, fight the time shift. Instead, we linger in our altered state, and it is not fun, and it evokes death and madness but also transcendence, all at 2 a.m. as the little ones jump off the couch on a dangerous quest for buried pirate treasure.

You can finish reading here.

Photography: my daughter takes portraits of tigers

More work from my five-year-old daughter, this time … portraiture.

Of Tigger.  Notice the thoughtful composition and contrast with a princess purse and a Swiss book about flowers.

And then a different kind of animal shot:  dragon with little brother.

photography: the fine edge between spring and winter in sweden

I have not had the time I would like to take pictures lately but here is a taste of the drawn out end of winter here …

The coolest part of this?  I ride past this water on my way to work.  And getting on the bike again was a dream.

This is misleading because it was the only day so far where the kids did not wear snowsuits out.  Maybe tomorrow again, as it was over 10 degrees Celsius today.  But last year it took until mid-April.

I love taking pictures of sand and bikes.  I have no idea why.  But early spring sand cakes give me hope for summer.

In praise of the dude teaching at my son’s preschool

I turned to close the preschool gate the other day and looked back to see what my three-year-old son was up to.

And this is what I saw: his teacher in a laughing jog, leading a pack of toddlers in a full sprint. A few weeks ago I saw this teacher sliding on the ice (safely) with the kids. And somewhere in there, I came to pick up my son to find the same teacher lost in a mountain of pillows, laughing kids all around piling on.

Good teacher, huh? Oh, yeah, one other thing. The teacher’s name is Sven (not really, but he is a guy).

There have been three male teachers at the preschool in the past 18 months, and all three were great, even if not so energetic as Sven.

The last thing I want to do is say that my son needs Sven because he is a man, because only men would skate on the ice or race through the yard or wrestle in a mountain of pillows. That’s ridiculous. It’s probably a function of youth as much as anything else.

However, most of the other teachers – even the young ones – do not slide on the ice or race through the yard or wrestle in a mountain of pillows. Sven does.

We live in Sweden, and before you think this is some paean to socialism and progressive Scandinavian values, it’s not. Sweden is pretty bad at recruiting male preschool teachers, at least compared to neighbors Norway and Denmark.

And this isn’t about male role models either. Well, it is, though not so much. See, I was home with my son paternity leave for more than half of his life before he started preschool. He knows lots of dads. His grandpa baby sits him when we are home in California. He doesn’t need guys.

But it’s nice.

And it’s good for society. I push paternity leave pretty hard because I think it’s important for mom, dad and baby. But challenging gender roles should not stop at the preschool door, and it should not just be about getting my daughter to see princesses in a different way or letting my son wear pink mittens.

This is from a Gloria Steinham interview in 1995:

 The way we get divided into our false notions of masculine and feminine is what we see as children. And, if, as children, whether we’re boys or girls, we’re raised mainly by women, then we deeply believe that only women can be loving, nurturing, flexible, patient, compassionate, all those things one needs to be to raise little children, and that men cannot do that, which is a libel on men. Of course men can do that. On the other end of it, they mainly see men in the world outside the home, or being assertive, aggressive, so they come to believe that women can’t be assertive, achieving, aggressive, intellectual. And that’s how we get our humanity? We’re deprived of our full humanity

This won’t change easily, I know, but it should change (and here is an excellent report for deep reading on how to make it change.  The report includes the best ever description I’ve read of why boys and girls and not driven by their sex, but by their gender roles:

Gender and sex are closely linked, in so far as one’s biological sex will determine which gender role (male or female) society will expect one to play (Dejonckheere, 2001).

Oh, and about the whole sexual predator thing, that overarching fear seems to be missing here in Sweden when it comes to guy teachers. I couldn’t tell you if the crime rates are lower here, or whether Swedes have more or less missed the crazy, anxious panic that American parents have been whipped into the past couple decades.

Nope, here men don’t become preschool teachers just because men don’t become preschool teachers.  But I’m sure glad the dude running my son’s class chose differently.

Talking about fandom, fathers and the violence of football

My daughter is a die-hard fan of AIK soccer here in Stockholm.  She is five.  I have never mentioned AIK, except in relation to their stadium, which is in our town.  But she picked up AIK fever at preschool, even though she has no idea about the reality of AIK soccer.  She just loves the black and gold and knows that they “win a lot” (this is debatable).  You can probably read in between the lines my ambivalence.  I am not an AIK fan.  I am a fan of other, American, teams.  I appreciate much of AIK’s history and the devotion of the fans and their association with our town.  I do not like the hooligans, who piss outside our window and drink in our park and once rioted (really) right outside my sleeping childrens’ window.

I also think soccer is boring.  I also do not like that her sports world is not revolving around me.  This is what I get for swearing off watching sports on TV.

Still, this makes me think what I do want her to like.  Baseball?  Definitely.  Basketball?  Absolutely, and this is the local sport I push the most.  American football?  Oooh, I get tortured.  I still can’t shake football or my love of the Buffalo Bills, and I definitely do not want my son to play.  But can I replace the Bills with AIK?

Should I Quit Watching Football For My Kids?:  OK, I wrote this story back in 2010.  And it led to a radio profile on The Story from American Public Media.  Everything still holds here, however, on my ambivalence about the nature of football’s violence, its culture, and the concussions.  How can I even watch the NFL now that we know about the concussions?  I don’t know.  Now I feel bad.

The Saints, Head-hunting, and (another) disaster for the NFL:  I feel less bad after I read this by Charles Pierce.  At least I am trending the right direction.  I too feel the slow slide of football away from the realm of baseball and basketball and more towards boxing.  It may take decades, but I’m not sure the hyper-controlling NFL can put the concussion genie back in the bottle.  And I really don’t think they’ll build helmets that solve the problem, at least fast enough.

For years, sensitive people in and out of my business drew a bright moral line between boxing and football. Boxing, they said, gently stroking their personal ethical code as if they were petting a cat, is a sport where the athletes are deliberately trying to injure each other. On the other hand, football is a violent sport wherein crippling injuries are merely an inevitable byproduct of the game. I always admired their ability to make so measured — and so cosmetic — a moral judgment. This was how those sensitive people justified condemning boxing while celebrating football, and, I suspect, how many of them managed to sleep at night after doing so.

How We Become Sports Fans:  The Tyranny of Fathers:  This is the article that makes me feel worst about my kid’s AIK fascination.  As a sports-loving dad, I am supposed to be dominant here.  And my daughter does say she likes the Bills “too.”  And while I picked up my father’s love of football, I did not pick up his team (Detroit).  I went for Buffalo, where we lived.  In fact, I did this about when I was five.  But I don’t even like soccer!  Ahhhhh.

But, wait, maybe it’s a good thing she likes AIK.  Maybe it means she doesn’t need to bond with me over sports.  Because we bond over doing goofy dances together instead …

Dads are more emotionally remote than moms, except when they’re watching sports, and that’s the crack in the ice that kids naturally choose to exploit. If Dad laughs, cries and high fives about the Red Sox, his kids are going to use the Red Sox to laugh, cry and high-five with him.

Do Sports Build Character?:  The big money question.  Does all our sports obsession mean anything?  Are we kidding ourselves that we are somehow tapped into the Greek ethos, the YMCS ethos, of building character through sport?  This is a long, rambling article but at least it is asking the question, one that we don’t usually even dare to bring up in American pop culture.

And, heck, he features Plato and Lawrence Taylor extensively.  Got to appreciate that, even with a wishy-washy conclusion that Plato and LT would knock off the field.

In Plato’s spirit, one must give the thymotic drives of the soul full recognition and reasonable play, but at the same time keep them in check. This is an ideal—Hector’s ideal, we might call it—and it is not impossible to attain. But there is something in the drive for glory that despises all reflection. A certain sort of glory-seeking must in fact overcome reflection, as Achilles shows, and go headlong. So sports will always be a world of danger, as well as one rich with humane possibility.

More photography from the eyes of my five year old

More photos from my daughter, who goes on these picture-taking sprees with her beat up Fisher Price camera with the worst lens ever.

I gotta get her a real camera.  These are not necessarily the best, just the clearest.  But they still have a certain preschool je ne sais quois …

There has been a self-portrait phase.  Notice the dress from when she was two years old, plus the one glove, a la Michael Jackson.  Very funky.

In the laundry room.

We still like hearts, though less than before.

She also likes to photograph details from books and her own drawings.  These are usually beyond her high-powered Fisher Price, but this flower detail came out beautifully.