Birth of the cool

Neal Pollack, author of Alternadad, with his son, Elijah. (Aubrey Edwards/Random House Canada)

Neal Pollack has written four books, all of which star “Neal Pollack.” The first three were phoney memoirs about fictional versions of the author, meant to parody our culture’s obsession with confessional books: there was a fake memoir about growing up (Never Mind the Pollacks) and two fake memoirs about his journalistic exploits before and after 9/11 (The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature and Beneath the Axis of Evil, respectively). In 2002, Pollack’s real-life wife, Regina Allen, gave birth to their son, Elijah. Once again, Pollack reached for his computer keyboard. But he wasn’t going to write another one of those faux jobbies — not this time. This time, it was going to be genuine memoir.

Pollack’s new book, Alternadad, chronicles the first four years of Elijah’s life, which began in Austin, Tex., before the family moved to its current home in Los Angeles. Pollack writes about the boy’s nail-biting delivery, which ended with the doctor admonishing Pollack, “It was the most harrowing birth I’ve ever presided over. Make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Other highlights: a verbal scrap Pollack had with his parents over circumcision; Elijah’s first gymnastics class; and the day the little biter was turfed from day care. But Alternadad is less a compendium of vignettes than a manifesto for a specific type of parenting.

On several occasions, Pollack rhapsodizes about his rock band (the Neal Pollack Invasion) and his reluctance to give up pot. “We would not succumb to the cult of child-rearing,” Pollack emphasizes. “Our kid was not going to be our excuse to retreat from the wider world.” Feel Pollack’s righteous anger, the way he scoffs at old-guard parents and their squareness, their addiction to Raffi, their misguided altruism.

Pollack feels the greatest gift he could bestow on Elijah is an appreciation of cool— more accurately, to teach his son to value the same music (Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse) as his alternadad. Pollack scoffs at a neighbour’s son for liking Devo while delighting in Elijah’s fondness for The Hives; this is where the man’s priorities lie. There’s also an indulgent yarn about a Pollack family outing to the Austin City Limits Music Festival. Pollack believes he’s doing something different — unprecedented, even. Alas, in resisting the “cult” of sacrificial parenting, he unwittingly embraces another: the cult of hipster parenting.

(Random House Canada)

Hipster parenting advice has become a formidable niche in publishing. While people still reach for stuffy-yet-useful tomes like What to Expect When You’re Expecting and Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, with-it parents are finding succour in titles like Knocked Up: Confessions of a Mother-to-Be and Mack Daddy: Mastering Fatherhood Without Losing Your Style, Your Cool, or Your Mind. December saw the launch of Babble.com, a “magazine and community for the new urban parent.” Observers have made much of the fact that Babble is run by the same company behind the sex culture site Nerve.com, although, as one reporter pointed out, anyone titillated by Nerve staples like the “Position of the Day” was bound to produce “results” eventually.

Babble.com and many of the trendy new parenting tomes are characterized by sarcasm and a nauseating self-regard. These folks come across as wisecracking test subjects in mankind’s first experiment with procreation.

People used to raise kids with a sort of quiet stoicism; the fact that humans have been reproducing for millions of years was enough to humble any new breeder. But in this era of unfettered narcissism, child rearing has become a spectacle. The tabloids stalk famous females in search of a “bump” to monopolize the news cycle; Tom Cruise buys his pregnant wife a $200,000 US ultrasound machine for home use; and Oprah exalts celebrity mothers as though having a child is as novel and courageous as space travel. And non-celebs? They bloviate in blogs.

It’s the age of full disclosure, but also the age of prolonged childhood. Due to societal changes — particularly greater permissiveness in the workplace — people are no longer obliged to grow up. They show up at the office in the sort of garb they wore in middle school: sneakers and a hoodie. An astute cover story in New York magazine termed this generation “grups.” (The word was cadged from a classic Star Trek episode in which the Enterprise crew discover a planet run by children.) Procreative grups don’t let parenthood thwart their cool; in fact, they feel compelled to fashion their offspring into equally cool individuals. While Babble claims to rebuke the “acquisitive baby-as-accessory bent of so much of today’s parenting fare,” it fetishizes baby clothes; the site features links to chic fashion lines for parents who like to use their kids to advertise their own pop cultural tastes and/or sick humour.

I understand the impulse behind books like Alternadad, Elisha Cooper’s Crawling: A Father’s First Year or the mommy blog of Canadian newspaper columnist Rebecca Eckler. As a parent myself, I know child rearing can be confusing and destabilizing; it can feel like a screwball comedy or a foreign drama without subtitles. Writing about it can make sense of the madness and win reader empathy. The trouble with Babble’s articles is that many seem disrespectful — in some cases disdainful — of children.

One of the most insufferable features is a blog by Steve Almond, a fiction writer who refuses to let parenthood neutralize his “edginess.” The name of the blog, Baby Daddy, is a sardonic reference to a reluctant father. (The most famous baby daddy: Kevin Federline.) In a post about child names, Almond writes that his daughter is “nearly three months old and we still don’t have any kind of consistent name for the little f---er.” Classy, Steve. One blog on the site asks readers to post links of kids crying. I wonder: is it healthy to revel in a child’s misery? Babble has such a craving for snarky commentary that it even invites don’t-wannabe-parents to weigh in on child rearing. In “Notes from a Drunk Aunt,” Lisa Gabriele writes about the freedom of not having to be someone’s role model. What moral are we, as parents, supposed to glean from that?

Many Babble writers simply gripe about not getting the kind of kid they wanted. Madeline Holler wishes her second child was as clever as her first; AM Homes wishes her girl was a boy. Elisha Cooper recounts the miseries of bottle-feeding his daughter, while Erin Cressida Wilson recounts the miseries of breastfeeding her son. Many of these writers dream up elaborate cruelties for their little sprogs, before acknowledging — reluctantly — that they’re too naive and defenceless to justify such loathing.

Pollack and his ilk have undertaken a dubious task: to make parenting seem cool. Alas, there’s nothing cool about arriving at a party in a shirt flecked with milky drool. Parenting advice is a lot more useful when it shrugs off the hipster yoke and embraces child rearing as the messy, demanding yet enriching job that it is.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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Letters

This article hits the nail on the head when it comes to 'what's wrong with kids these days': it's their parents. I am a Gen X parent of two kids and, yes, I still catch myself on occasion having a grown-up tantrum instead of acting like a grown-up. But the fact that I have kids has me going to great lengths to change this about myself. The simple fact is: smug, self-absorbed parents will raise smug, self-absorbed children who, in turn, will become smug, self-absorbed adults.

I think it's well known by now that the single greatest threat to survival of civilization as we know it, greater than global warming, or terrorism, or another nuclear age, is the fact that we as a society have become completely apathetic. And how we're raising a whole generation of kids and young adults who are the same. Too interested in their own lives to care about, well, anybody or anything else. Except for shopping maybe (and I'm trying to curb that, too. The formula's the same: Material parent=Material kid). Bottom line: we just don't care. And, if we don't start to, neither will our kids.

Well, you know what? I've decided that I care. A lot. And I now know that the single most important job I have as a parent, after loving and providing for my kids, is teaching my kids to care, too.

Hey man, now THAT'S cool.

Tracy
Toronto, Ontario

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I always believed it was only old men who got so set in their ways they thought anyone who disagreed with them was just wrong. Now new parents are refusing to grow and learn with the new experiences child rearing will bring them. They are so stubborn as to believe no one before them ever got it right - even their own parents, I guess.

Well done Andre, for exposing these people for the angry, petty, selfish narcissists that they are. Neal Pollack should know that most parents act out of love and simply doing what they think is best for their KIDS, not themselves or how their choices for their children may be perceived.

I can't wait to hear from Mr. Pollack when his son becomes a gawky, geeky teenager and rebels against all the "coolness" his dad is raising him with.

Wayne Watson
Toronto, Ontario

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Andre Mayer's article on hipster parents is simply dripping with angry disdain - disdain which I believe is mostly misplaced.

As a parent myself, I wholeheartedly agree that parents obsessed with making sure their newborn drools on only the latest line of baby Gap clothes are taking it too far.

Mr. Mayer seems to have something against the "hipsters" as a whole, stating that the last generation has refused to "grow up" because they wear hoodies and jeans to work - is this his only criteria for growing up?

Mayer seems to think the "hipster parenting" trend is all a result of selfish, lazy whining parents that refuse to grow up or wear proper clothes. I disagree. I would argue that the hipster parenting trend is simply a refutation of the theory of sacrificial parenting that has dominated child-rearing for so long.

The truth of the matter, as Mayer admits, is that being an involved parent is often a tough job, and can frequently be emotionally unrewarding as well. Sometimes you might be frustrated with your child. Sometimes you might feel all the milk drool is not worth the sublime satisfaction the mommy myth and the school of sacrificial parenting promised you.

What Mayer identifies as "hipster" parenting is, for the most part, parents rejecting the notion that one has to destroy or supress everything you were before you had a child, and the notion that sacrificing everything to your kid is healthy - for you or them.

Mayer tries to blame "hipster" parenting for problems and phenomena caused by obsessive parenting and sacrificial parenting. Nothing is wrong with acknowledging you don't always like parenting. Nothing is wrong with wanting to show your children the things you love, as long as you can accept your children will ultimately only love the things they choose to love.

Matthew McRae
Winnipeg, Manitoba