Mar 7, 2008

Having boy trouble

By Malcolm Fleschner / Humor Columnist

It's no surprise that readers of the hundreds of parenting books published every year are mostly women. Oh sure, authors pretend to direct their advice at both genders, but it's clear just who the real intended audience is from section headings like "Why your fellow parent should change a diaper once in a while," "Getting your spouse to stop slipping beer into the baby's bottle" and "Sex after childbirth: Convincing him to keep it in his pants until the recovery room."

The lack of existing advice books for fathers is a real shame, primarily because writing one would be so easy. Like others in the genre, a guide for dads would include chapters dedicated to such topics as feeding, potty training, discipline and promoting good sleep habits, the main difference being that each chapter would consist of a single page imprinted with the same sentence: "Go ask your wife."

Of course, the real reason fathers have no use for such advice books is that we prefer to do our parenting on gut feeling. Call it a father's sixth sense if you will, but when a dad sees a child engaging in risky behavior like, say, his 3-year-old attempting to mount and ride the family golden retriever, that father knows, purely by instinct, to run and grab the camcorder.

My fatherly instinct kicked in recently when my daughter revealed that she had begun spending all of her free time at school with a boy in her class, adding that she "loves" him.

"Who is this boy?" I instantly demanded to know. "What are his intentions? Can he be trusted? Does he drive a Camaro? Maybe I should go and have a chat with this little Casanova, set him straight a bit." Putting on my coat and grabbing the baseball bat I keep by the door for just such emergencies, another thought occurred to me: "Wait, this boy, he's not unusually big, is he? Does he study karate, anything like that?"

As a father, I think I can be excused for worrying about my daughter starting to date before she's ready, which I roughly define as "any time prior to my death or the moment the Earth crashes into the sun, whichever comes first."

My wife, perhaps after consulting one of her parenting books, tried to reassure me about what was going on between our daughter and her boyfriend, whom she described as a very sweet and thoughtful boy. The budding romance is probably not worth worrying about, she explained, since our daughter is a sensible, levelheaded girl and she and this boy are always properly supervised, not to mention the fact that they are both only 5 years old.

OK, so maybe this dalliance is perfectly innocent, even though for a few weeks recently the two lovebirds staged a pretend wedding ceremony nearly every recess (say what you will about this boy, at least he's not afraid of commitment).

In truth, I probably wouldn't be so troubled by this situation if I had had any experience in such matters as a child but, sadly, my early school years were wholly free of romantic entanglements. My first real conversation with a female classmate didn't even occur until second grade when, as I was leaving class one day, I found myself face to face with Marnie Murphy. Until that point Marnie, a pretty redhead I'd long admired, had demonstrated about as much interest in contact with me as she had in Horace, the classroom's pet garter snake.

"Was this the moment?" I wondered to myself. "Did I dare hope that the girl I'd thought about and gazed at longingly across the schoolyard for so long, was finally coming around and prepared to declare her affections, and inquire whether those feelings were reciprocated?"

"Malcolm," she said, interrupting my animated visions of our lengthy courtship, followed, inevitably, by marriage, "I saw you at recess behind the swing set. You were picking your nose."

The truly sad part is that, for many years, this incident represented the high point in my dealings with the opposite sex.

My personal baggage aside, my wife eventually convinced me that our daughter and this boy are just good friends. "They don't even play wedding any more," she noted. "Now at every recess they play pirates. You're not worried she's going to take to the sea and start terrorizing the Barbary Coast, are you?"

"Well, not until now I wasn't," I grumbled.

But just because this particular friendship is harmless, and in fact, quite adorable, doesn't mean I can let my guard down. Following my fatherly instincts, I plan to sit my daughter down for a frank talk about boys, and why she needs to keep her guard up to avoid having her feelings hurt.

And then, just to be safe, I'll tell her I saw her boyfriend picking his nose.


Experienced fathers should e-mail Malcolm with their suggestions (legal or otherwise) for keeping boys away from daughters at Malcolm@CultureShlock.com.