On a normal weekday, after homework is done, he is permitted about an hour to an hour and a half of gaming. It’s usually around the time I’m making dinner, so I’ve become accustomed to hearing ghastly sounds bursting out of the computer speakers while I chop garlic or debone a chicken thigh. My son gets bored quickly, so a typical gaming stint will include demonic cackles from his Level 65 “World of Warcraft” Death Knight alternating with the drawn out howls of pain from battling soldiers in “Team Fortress II” — along with the assorted explosions, machine gun fusillades, shrieks and screams that make up the rest of the soundtrack of modern gaming violence.

My son is not unusual. Boys under 17 years old account for 18 percent of the overall market for videogames (more than double the market share of girls the same age), according to industry group Entertainment Software Association. 12-13 year-olds are the peak of that demographic — hours spent gaming decline for older teens, presumably because the opposite sex has become more interesting. Boys are especially drawn to violent games — far more so than girls. Ratings systems designed to shield minors from “adult” games are a joke. Most big game retailers have a policy against selling games rated "M" (for Mature) to children under 17, but at least one parent of your child’s friend will blithely ignore recommendations. It’s much easier to play a violent video game than get into an R-rated movie. One study published in The Journal of Adolescent Health found that in a sample of over 1000 children, 68 percent of the boys reported that they played at least one mature-rated game regularly.

Among my son’s peer group, there is no more popular way to pass the time than to gather in front of a console and start piling up the blood and gore.

The Case for Critical Thinking

Why does Eli love first-person shooter games where it’s kill or be killed, where your outlook on the world is framed by whatever weapon you happen to be wielding? Because, he says, it’s “fun!” Because it’s “exciting!” Because … and he imitates a paranoid, hopped-up combat fighter’s body language — muscles tensed, eyes flitting from side-to-side, anticipating danger from every angle — and leaves the rest unsaid: The virtual world gets the adrenaline going.

Dating back to their earliest toddler days, when my children — I have a 15-year-old daughter — first started reaching for the remote control and the mouse, I’ve been concerned about how good parenting and modern entertainment intersect. I’ve generally taken a pretty liberal approach — likely due to a combination of factors. My parents never banned anything — my father was a television critic and I have always been a voracious consumer of media of all kinds. Censoring my children’s media consumption felt hypocritical from day one. With the one major exception of sexually explicit material, and within the constraints of regularly enforced screen time limits (TV, games, Facebook all fitting under that one category), I’ve mostly let my children watch and play what they want, although I do make sure to keep an eye on whatever it is they are checking out. Even if I believed it was possible to successfully cordon off the forbidden (which I don’t), my basic position has been that I’d rather raise my kids to critically engage the world than attempt to shelter them from it.

In general, I’m not unhappy with the results. My daughter may have ended up watching more episodes of America’s Next Top Model than I am comfortable with, but she is also a third generation feminist and is able to balance that contradiction. And my son may leave a trail of virtual corpses (human, alien, and magical) behind him everywhere he games, he may devote an inordinate amount of brain power to the question of what type of battle-axe his latest barbarian giant should be packing, and he can talk your ears off discussing the varying merits of the newest handheld gaming devices (“I know my lore,” he once told me, when I expressed surprise at how far back his encyclopedic knowledge of the gaming industry went), but he is in general a sociable, friendly, enthusiastic kid, fully engaged with school. He likes to roughhouse with his friends but he’s never been in a fight. He’s just your typical sweetheart who has slaughtered millions.

When Videogames Become Too Realistic

So I think I’m doing something right. My sample of one declares that obsessive gaming, properly regulated, doesn’t lead immediately to social dysfunction — at least not yet. But even so, I feel a sense of disquiet at just how much his entire generation is drawn to the killing fields. Too much of their interaction with the world is mediated, too much of it is high-intensity adrenaline-revving virtual combat, too much of the real world seems boring and uneventful, compared to the gaming life. What happens when my boy leaves the nest? Will he disappear into a videogame vortex? I wonder where this is all headed, for the simple reason that games are just getting too compelling.

Computer gaming has been a part of growing up for at least 35 years now, dating back to Pong and PacMan. But we have never seen anything like the complexity, aesthetic power, narrative depth, realism, immersiveness and addictive potential of today’s games. In the game “Spore,” you can evolve your own life form from scratch into a space-faring civilisation (and choose whether to be warlike or peaceful.) One of 2009’s hits, “Assassin’s Creed 2,” places you on the canals of Renaissance era Venice — in a world as lush as any painted by Titian or Tintoretto. “World of Warcraft” draws you into a fantasy landscape so rich and deep and interactive that reading J. R. R. Tolkien feels like a pale simulacrum, a bowl of bran that can’t compete with a 12-course banquet.

And then there’s the blockbuster smash of 2009, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” which grossed $US550 million in revenue just five days after its November release, putting it on a par with the biggest Hollywood productions. “Modern Warfare 2” delivers a hyper-realistic commando-fighting experience merging amazing movie production values with a narrative of terrorism, global warfare and constant peril ripped directly from the latest headlines in Afghanistan, Moscow and Washington. Watching kids play it is not unlike imagining yourself inhabiting the TV series 24; That much realism gives me pause.

The real world has a harder and harder time competing with these marvels of simulation. If I didn’t impose screen-time limits, my son would play these games until he keeled over.

Handling the Skeptics

My ex-sister-in-law, a mother of three young boys, views violent games as an evil distillation of 10,000 years of male war-mongering and brutality; she is convinced, like many pundits and psychologists, that such games desensitise kids to violence. Almost every parent I know worries about this to some extent, even if they don’t go quite so far as to denounce all of human civilisation. At the other end of the spectrum stand eloquent gaming advocates like Steven Johnson, who provocatively argues that hours spent in virtual distraction can positively prepare kids to excel in an ADHD, relentlessly multitasking world. I can’t subscribe to either view. The data, to say the least, are inconclusive. Untangling cause and effect from socioeconomic status, family dynamics and genetic predisposition is no easy task.

But it seems undeniable that there are consequences to so many hours spent in immersive, interactive environments. So in the absence of knowing anything for sure, what are we supposed to do?

Teaching Real World Lessons Through Gaming

When my kids first started watching television, rather than try to avoid commercials, I asked them to ask themselves one question whenever an ad came on: What do they want me to buy? It became a game even kindergarteners could play: Deconstruct the media! And I tried, when possible, to experience the world with them, rather than from afar. A critical stance, I hoped, would arm them against media propaganda better than placing them in an isolation ward. But what this requires is active engagement on the part of the parent, too. You can’t just let the TV be a babysitter. So I didn’t stop my preteen daughter from watching America’s Next Top Model, but you can be sure there were plenty of conversations about how pop culture treats women’s bodies.

I’ve tried to continue the same policy of engagement with gaming. When my son spends an hour talking about an escapade in “World of Warcraft” or "Team Fortress II," I try to draw connections between virtual war and real war, without being heavy-handed. I check in on him while he’s playing — his computer is in the dining room between our kitchen and family room, so he is always part of the house dynamic, rather than squirreled away behind closed doors. If he is playing a game I’ve never seen before — because you can find almost anything on the Web — I want to know what he likes about it. And I’m not shy to tell him when I find something objectionable. Once I was alarmed to discover him playing a Web-accessible game that featured street-fighting hobos beating up on each other in a darkened alley. He thought it was funny; I thought it was disgusting. But rather than ban it, I wanted to make sure he understood why I thought it was mean. We launched into a mini discussion of why poverty and homelessness weren’t all giggles.

How much of it stuck? I have no idea. I never saw him play the game again. But I’m betting that this strategy will have a more effective long-term impact than a command-and-control approach.

One recent attempt to exert some level of editorial responsibility over gaming turned out to be an almost comic failure. I decided not to buy him “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” for his birthday last November because I was suspicious of its rah-rah nationalistic politics and disturbed by just how closely it looked like footage from Iraq or Chechnya. I didn’t want to be personally responsible for bringing it into the house. A few months later, half of his best friends had the game and his opportunities to play it seem unlimited.

Having the Videogame Conversation

Eli doesn’t particularly like it when I express my distaste for some aspect of his gaming life. I’m sure he isn’t looking forward to having his Modern Warfare gaming accompanied by my kibitzing on the ineffectiveness of torture or how Government policy in the Mideast helps to breed terrorism. But he does appreciate it when I take his world seriously. He enjoys the give and take. And he’s getting a big dose of my values, without my bashing them into his brain with a sledgehammer.

A few months ago, my ears perked up when I heard the voices of young men spewing out a wide range of homophobic, racist and misogynistic comments from the computer speakers. Eli was playing a game called "Team Fortress 2," another first-person shooter, but one in which you could hear the live comments of other human players currently logged in and playing on the same server.

My first impulse was to tell him he shouldn’t be playing a game frequented by such cretins. But I knew a teenager who lives at his mother’s house played the game regularly, and I could not control his exposure over there. One way or another, he was going to hear this crap. So I kept to my usual path. I asked him if he understood why I found their comments so objectionable. I made fun of the intelligence of his fellow gamers, suggesting, uncharitably, that they hadn’t been brought up very well. He got a sour look on his face, but eventually he admitted he didn’t particularly like hearing a lot of the commentary either. He couldn’t tell me exactly why, but I’d like to believe it was because he recognised at some level that this kind of crudity just wasn’t cool. We ultimately found out there was a way to mute individual players if you wanted to.

He still plays the game, but I’m pretty sure that when he’s out of my sight, when he’s older or when there is no one around to enforce any rules, he won’t go over to that dark side—or at least not too far. All the engagement, all the conversation, has, I think, helped him tell the difference between the gaming reality and how to behave in the offline world, how to treat people with respect.

I believe all this, even if one can never be totally sure what is going on in the inner recesses of your child’s heart and mind. And I know I’m taking a gamble, but all our bets on how to raise our children are gambles. There are no hard-and-fast rules guaranteeing success, especially in a world that changes as quickly as ours does. The best we can do is make it up as we go along, keep asking questions, keep watching and keep listening. If we stay in the game, we have a better chance of influencing how it all plays out.

Which is to say, she shook a rubbish bag in the general direction of our mountain of toys as she sat down to patiently help us clean up—again.

I am not my mother. I never threaten to throw my children’s toys away, but sometimes, when the kids are sleeping at night, I really do throw their toys away. Right in a big black rubbish bag.

I should feel guilty about this, but I don’t. I secretly enjoy it. I find it soothing to put a fistful of puzzle pieces in the garbage and know that I’ll never again look for the missing one.

It’s liberating to throw a toy in the bin. Poof! I am no longer responsible for that object. I won’t spend another second of my life stooping to pick it up. I never again have to play referee over who plays with it. I don’t have to wait for a Freecycler to take it or have it sit in a donation box on my bedroom floor for six months until I get it together to drive to Goodwill. It’s just gone and I’m free of it.

I look for excuses to throw toys out. This train track has a jagged edge. Toss it! The box of beads spilled? Well, picking them out of the dust bunnies is just too much work. Bye-bye, beads! This Bob the Builder storybook was peed on. Can we trash this? Yes, we can!

Mostly, I keep my toy-trashing to small stuff: art supplies I could salvage but don’t want to, broken dolls, puzzles with missing pieces, books with torn pages. Sometimes, I indulge myself in getting rid of stuff that just really annoy me. Every Christmas, I commit quiet genocide on the battery-operated gizmos from grandparents and all the excess sweets.

My worst sin: when I throw away things, I tell the girls I’m putting them in a “special place” to “fix” later, like all those Polly Pocket Princess dolls whose heads have snapped off and won’t go back on for love, money or superglue.

Mercifully, I’ve never been busted. My kids are young and their passions are fleeting. They rarely ask after a toy I’ve thrown out. On the rare occasion that they do bring it up, it’s usually weeks after the fact and there’s no emotional weight behind the inquiry. I tell them the toy “went away,” or sometimes very candidly that I threw it out and they quickly move on to other distractions. My guess is that as they get older, this will work less well. My prayer is that their playthings will come with fewer little pieces that get strewn around the house.

Another good reason not to feel guilty: my kids just have too many things. Some of it has to go.

Between the carefully preserved treasures of childhoods past and the Christmas loot of childhoods present, we have a lot of toys. We have three dollhouses, two large sets of Tinkertoys and a 120-litre bucket full of stuffed animals. The wooden trains in this house could probably take you to Uluru if you laid out all the track.

I know how I’m supposed to deal with this. Good Mothers pack the toys up in little storage bins with labels and carefully rotate them so that only a few are out at a time. That way the kids always have something novel to play with and Mum never has an uncontrollable mess on her hands.

Let’s just say I am not a “neatly labelled storage bin” kind of person.

Apparently, the right way to go about the process is to explain to your children why their toys need to be binned. Jen Hunter, who runs Boston-based Find Your Floor, cautions against throwing children’s things away in secret. She says it can make kids insecure and lead to hoarding behaviours in later life. Instead, you should sit down with your child and tell them why it’s time to let go of some things. Getting you child engaged in the process of thinning out toy clutter will not only give you a happier kid, it’ll help them learn the skills to be a clutter-free adult.

She also points out that we can’t always tell what our kids are attached to. As parents, we may be tempted to weed out the trashiest items in the toy chest and keep the pretty stuff, but remember the Velveteen Rabbit? That filthy toy with a missing a limb that got that way because your kid played with it. There are some kids that Hunter calls “jr. hoarders” who are irrationally attached to toys they don’t even play with. But a toy might still be dear to them, even though it’s broken or covered with dog drool.

So, yes, I get it that sneaking toys into the rubbish while the kids sleep is bad. But I just can’t give up the feeling of freedom I get when I toss a toy that I’ve tripped over one too many times.

Procedure Day

The day after Ben was born, I accompanied him to the nursery where, in less than five minutes, my OB-GYN performed the procedure, using a metal ring tool to cut and remove about 5mm of foreskin that covered the head (glans) of the penis. During the first nappy-change following the procedure, I noticed Ben’s glans was bright red, but my OB-GYN explained the appearance was “normal.” We got discharged. A week later the redness subsided, but as I went to clean Ben with a baby wipe I found myself squinting down at his penis. It seemed the entire glans was sucked into a ring of fatty skin. Where is his penis? I panicked. I gently pulled the skin back and his penis popped out like a tiny turtle’s head. Phew.

Something is wrong

Still, whenever I released my fingers after cleaning Ben’s penis, the head retracted back in. Wasn’t circumcision supposed to have removed the skin I was tugging back? Confused and upset, I found myself Googling phrases like: “My son’s circumcision looks weird.” The search revealed message boards like this one, stacked with topics like “incomplete circumcision” and “re-circumcision procedure.” You don’t read about that in the fluffy parenting books — nor do the studies that boast circumcision’s health benefits.

Three days later the pediatrician told me that some baby boys have a large amount of fat in the pubic area, so the appearance wasn’t all that abnormal. I put my anxiety to rest and listened to the pediatrician say the same thing at two months, at four and at six: “He’ll grow into it. RELAX.”

When Ben was eight and a half months later and I was still retracting the skin with every nappy change, I found myself confiding in a girlfriend at a birthday party while we changed our boys side by side. I opened Ben’s nappy and my friend peered in. “Oh no,” she said. “That’s…wrong. You’re not supposed to have to pull the skin back on a circumcised baby boy. There isn’t supposed to be any skin there.”

“The pediatrician said he’d grow into it!” I barked. At Ben’s next well check-up, the pediatrician examined his penis and his forehead wrinkled up. “Well, now he seems to have an adhesion, which sometimes occurs when tissues of the body are cut and the edges of the skin stick to the surrounding tissues,” he said and signaled for me to take a look. “I think you should see a paediatric urologist. He might need to have this redone.” Redone?

When I finally got an appointment a month later, I told the pediatric urologist our history. He snorted a laugh. “The child is either circumcised or he’s not. Ben has an incomplete circumcision, and that’s why you have to retract the skin.” He explained that he could cut Ben right there on the table “1-2-3,” that he’d scream, but that it would be beneficial because he could clean out the smegma (sloughed skin and oils that form in an attempt to break up the adhesion) that was trapped under the sealed skin.

But that wouldn’t be all. Ben didn’t just need another circumcision, he needed a penoplasty — plastic surgery on his penis. He would have to be put under anesthesia for a forty-minute procedure. We’d have to do it before Ben started potty-training, because though the recovery was quick, it would involve some pain and sensitivity (mostly stinging) when urinating, and we didn’t want to associate “pee-pee in the potty” with pain. Thankfully, however, since Ben was just fifteen months old, he wouldn’t remember having the surgery, but if we waited till Ben was five, it would be hard to explain to him why he had to have surgery on his private parts. The other option was to leave it be and hope he didn’t get an infection, another adhesion, or feel awkward about his sort-of-circumcised-looking penis down the road. I booked the surgery.

Surgery Day and Beyond

Because Ben was an infant, I was able to accompany him into the operating room, though I wished I hadn’t. The anesthesiologist placed a mask the size of a toy teacup over Ben’s screaming mouth. I watched his eyes close and his body go suddenly limp. I started to cry, and a nurse escorted me out of the room. In the waiting room I talked with two other sets of parents of babies who were having the same procedure, the result of a “botched circumcision,” as one of the fathers said in a huff.

Forty-minutes later the procedure was done, and the doctor updated me on Ben’s status: “He did beautifully. It’s all fixed now.” In the recovery room, Ben was disorientated and agitated—common side-affects for an infant coming back from anesthesia. But within two hours we were home on the couch, and Ben slept the afternoon away on my chest.

His post-op care was simple. Whenever I changed his nappy, I gently cleaned him with a sensitive skin baby wipe, dabbed his penis with antibacterial gel and covered it with a square of gauze. Three weeks later, it was like he never had the surgery, and I probably won’t even tell him about it.

But now when people ask me if I still believe in circumcision, knowing what I know, I’m not sure. Even if the supposed health benefits are real, they definitely don’t outweigh the ordeal my son went through.

Babs, my wife of fifteen years, and I were first smitten by the mountains during our honeymoon in Switzerland. Sixteen days of hiking through some of the most compelling terrain in the world ignited our passion for high, remote places and physical challenges. Since then we’ve spent virtually every weekend either climbing or training and every holiday has had climbing as its sole intent. We’ve travelled from the granite aiguilles of Chamonix France and the Dolomites of northern Italy to the sandstone towers of Red Rocks near Las Vegas and the 900 hundred metre limestone walls of El Potrero Chico in northern Mexico. We’ve endured sprained ankles 300 metres off the deck, broken legs, wet bivouacs and innumerable near-death experiences. Our best trips are most people’s worst nightmare.

Climbing is one of the few sports that both sexes can perform equally well. Grace, balance and flexibility are the coin of the vertical realm; brute strength can actually be a liability as there’s more mass to haul up the mountain. My wife has a T-shirt with a drawing of a woman crooking her arms in a body-builder’s pose with the caption: Climb Like a Girl. As a competitive father with a daughter, you can understand the appeal.

Kelly was born in the spring of 2003. While she was lightweight, portable and non-ambulatory, I took her to some small crags close to home, always carefully positioning her so she could watch Mummy and Daddy and hopefully imbibe some climbing juju. As she grew, I tried to short-circuit any childhood acrophobia by tossing her high in the air, terrifying bystanders to the point where her daycare director sent me a stern letter indicating that such behaviour was not socially acceptable.

Her first words are lost to memory, but her first sentence was “Higher, Dada! Higher!”

Once she began to walk, I encouraged her to scramble up scaffolding and climb on buildings while I chanted our mantra: “Bones heal, pain is temporary, boys dig scars and glory is forever.” Now she requires no encouragement. Her fearless stunts on the playground have caused at least one overly protective mum to drag her little snowflake from play time with Kelly. My wife tolerates these antics but does not necessarily approve.

“You need to make friends with other parents, not scare them away!” shouted Babs when I told her the story.

“Honey, Kelly’s a climber,” I replied. “She’s different than the other kids; we’re different than other parents. And why do we want more non-climbing friends anyway?”

“No,” she retorted, “You’re different, she’s a little girl. Climbing and sex, that’s all you ever want to do,” she sneered, turning and walking away.

By the time Kelly was four, it was time to get her on a wall. My first attempt was a disaster. I anchored myself at the top of an easy, low-angled, twenty-foot slab. Babs stayed at the bottom. Kelly tried to climb, crawl and scramble over the smooth rock, but she kept slipping, bashing her knees, elbows and forehead. She started to cry.

“It’s ok, honey. You can come down,” Babs cooed.

“NO!” she sobbed, “I want to go to Daddy.”

I should have felt sympathy for my wailing progeny; instead I felt pride. Despite her torment, she wanted nothing more than to please me. I knew I was on perilous ground. Pride is foremost of the Seven Deadlies and I knew if I kept encouraging her, years of therapy or a deadbeat climber boyfriend could easily lie ahead. Selfishly, I flicked the good angel off my shoulder.

“Again, Dada,” she chirped through her tears after she reached me at the anchor. “Let’s do it again.” She had the mettle of a true alpinist.

Kelly, now six, is skinny as a feral cat and has the heart of a Viking. She’s been gym climbing during the last two winters and spent much of the summer climbing outdoors. She can regularly make it to the top of a seventy-foot pitch. When I return from a day at the crag, she asks questions about the routes I did and their difficulty. Some weekends she’d rather swim, ride her bike or play with her friends, but from time to time, I take her with me even if she doesn’t want to go. Once there, if her competitive nature doesn’t compel her to try a route and she sits sulking with her Barbies at the base, I cajole and manipulate her much as parents do when trying to get their kids to eat broccoli or lima beans, and up she goes again.

Am I doing this for me or my family? I know I’m more extreme than most dads since few are guiding their offspring toward activities that are so inherently high-risk.

At my primary crag, virtually every weekend a climber is hauled down the talus to a waiting ambulance. Obituaries are common in climbing magazines.

When I talk to other parents about the dramas of year one or trips to Movie World or the beach, the one topic that never manifests itself is how God-awfully boring parenting can be. I’m desperate to recapture my pre-child life and go back to taking off-the-grid vacations. The only way that will happen is if Kelly can join us. I don’t even want to have another child, in part because it would delay my return to the mountains.

Yes, I know I’m obsessed and I see that I’m pushing my obsession—dangerous as it is—onto my daughter. And I’ve seen all those sports and pageant parents who obsessively drive their kids so they can live though their accomplishments. But I teach Kelly to climb not only to live through her, but with her. I’m thrilled at seeing the glee on her face as she finishes a climb, but I’m also relieved that I’m not stuck on a play date at the zoo.

As she becomes a more skilled and independent alpinist she’s going to want to try harder, longer and more dangerous routes. Once she’s hooked, the jones to risk life and limb will prove irresistible. This is still a few years away, but as I watch her at the cliffs, I realise if something happens to her, it will be because of my struggle to ease the banality of parenting and to connect with my daughter on the thing I love the most. Does this make me a bad dad? Maybe so.

For now, when we climb, I lead and she follows, but at some point, she’ll want to be on the “sharp end” and pick her own way up the mountain face. If she lets me, I’ll hold her rope and be there to catch her if she falls. But one day, she’s sure to say to me, “Sorry Dad, not this weekend. I want to go climbing with my friends.”

It will probably be the proudest and most frightening day of my life.

“He’s so cute,” she says, touching my son’s curls. “Still not walking?” His chubby fingers clutch mine as he inches towards the swings, wobbly as a newborn foal.

“Oh, you know. He’s getting there,” I say, as if everyone walks around with a 13-kilo-toddler death-gripping their thumbs. As if on cue, Owen drops to his hands and knees and speeds off, slap-slap-slapping across the filthy playground flooring.

“He’s a big boy,” Playground Mommy says. “How old?”

“Thirteen months.”

“Thirteen months?!” she says, eyes wide. “He’s huge!”

That’s true… except for the “thirteen months” part. My son is actually seventeen months old, but you’ll never hear it from me, at least not at the playground.

Yes, I know it’s nuts. As a reasonably intelligent, Birkenstock wearing, “Every child develops differently” type of gal, I always assumed I’d be Captain Awesome when it came to raising my own kid. I pictured myself surrounded by a crew of happy, tow-headed tots, each secure in the knowledge that they were special Just The Way They Are. But all that flew out the window when faced with a gaggle of playground parents whose ten-month-olds were running laps around my older son.

At first I didn’t think too much of it. The babe had always been a little slow with the physical stuff, but I figured it was genetic. His dad and I veer toward the “readerly” side of the athletic spectrum, so it made sense that he’d rather thumb through Goodnight Moon than run a 5K. But then it started. The looks. The tsks. The well-meaning advice from people whose charges were walking — running! — at twelve or nine or even seven months.

Within weeks I’d heard it all: Buy him sturdier shoes. Buy him comfortable shoes. Make him walk everywhere. (He’s only crawling because you’re not putting your foot down.) Don’t let him watch television. Tempt him with treats. One ancient grandmother-type recommended that I tie a scarf under his armpits and march him around the playground like a puppet.

I’ve found myself considering it.

Still, my gut tells me he’s fine. I’ve done the reading; I know that boys tend to be slower with language and that taller children take longer to walk. At seventeen months — and thirty-six-inches tall — he’s as big as most three-year-olds, so it makes sense that his toddler brain would have trouble co-ordinating his preschool-sized parts. But just to be safe we went ahead and had him evaluated to make sure we weren’t missing any red flags. The physical therapist, a small woman with a reassuring smile, said that Owen was a little behind the curve, but physically and cognitively he was fine. Better than fine, even. Smart! Social! Wonderful in all the ways that warm a neurotic parent’s heart! The best thing I could do for Owen, she said, would be to put down the parenting magazines and let him develop on his own schedule. After all, nobody goes to college not knowing how to walk. I know she’s right, yet all it takes is one raised eyebrow on the playground to send me spiralling.

It started small, as most lies do. I’d round down his age down to the nearest month, shaving off a few precious developmental weeks. “Oh,” the parents would sigh, relief flooding their faces. “That makes more sense.” Gone were the furrowed brows and awkward talk of early intervention. Suddenly we could chat about normal things like nap schedules and vegetable aversion. I was happy. They were happy. And my son didn’t understand what I was saying so, hey, happy.

Of course I still have qualms. It doesn’t take an episode of Toddlers and Tiaras to know that it’s a slippery slope between fudging a few facts and turning into a full-fledged Freakmother. But some days saving face feels like the only way to keep my sanity. I know I’ll have to stop when he’s able to understand me, and that’s fine. Until then, telling a white lie every now and then to avoid an hour-long lecture on footwear seems small in the scheme of things. The less time I have to take to defend his (okay, our) honour, the more time we have for important things like playing chase. Even if it’s on all fours.

I honestly don’t think I’m a bad or unloving mother. From the time my baby turned 3 months, I was so eager to do a good job that I had us on a rigorous schedule of music classes, museums, library story hours and play-dates. “He’s just luggage until he’s 6 months,” my friends would say. “Just go on with your day the way you normally might. Get your nails done. Go to the movies.” Why, so I would get a break? No, thanks. I would do anything that might provide the stimulation and give him an edge in this hardscrabble world.

But I couldn’t do the park. The park may have incredible climbing ropes, twisty slides, and lush hills through which a child may frolic, but it also has sand teeming with parasites from dog excrement, piles of juice boxes, crackers and broken shovel pieces. I’ve seen countless broken bottles, condoms (shudder), adult men’s briefs (double shudder), and, on one occasion, a plastic shopping bag from Target with razors inside (granted, they were unopened in their clamshell packaging). With all this garbage, how can I just let my son roam free there?

My husband argues that our son needs to be around other kids, not to mention the physical exercise the playground provides.

“But I found razor blades in the sand!”

“They were packaged,” he replies. “You can’t accidentally break open clamshell packaging.”

“Razorblades!” I answer.

“You’re talking about the ones you took home and used, right? Those razorblades?”

“Razorblades!”

My grandstanding about safety and cleanliness, I admit, isn’t the real reason I hate the park. I hate it because it’s boring. My son loves it, but when I’m there, I am deafened by the voice in my ear that asks me how I could leave an orderly life and thriving career to muddle around in dirty sand, chasing a boy with no game-plan and no understanding that he should be grateful that I’ve taken him there instead of just pissy when it’s time to leave.

Furthermore, being at the park depresses me, especially when I’m faced with the other mothers and see how worn-down we all look. We all wear the same yoga pants and thongs. We talk the same: “Sweetie, I hear that you want to use the slide, but it’s time to take turns.” And, finally, we act the same: we go into a trance. At the park, we’re Trance Parents. We zone out in an effort to endure the long hours spent watching, not able to do what we want or what would keep us active. Very few of us can stay fascinated by our children during all their waking moments. Our kids are way more boring to us than they are to the working mothers and fathers who only get a few hours a day with their little ones. Kids are endlessly needy, they can’t hold a conversation and they don’t know anything you don’t know. All these things make for day-long stretches of tedium. And though they’re cute as hell, and though we’re genetically wired to be crazy about them (and we are!), I still often find myself decidedly unstimulated — especially when I’ve been pushing the swing for sixty-six straight minutes.

As I push my son in a baby swing, I don’t coo at him and play depth-perception games. I endlessly press the refresh button of my iPhone, desperate for some communication from the outside, desperate for proof that I still exist. I look at my watch, unable to believe we’ve only been there for five minutes. I stand in a row of mothers, all of us who want to be applauded for doing the hardest job and I, too, am on the phone, ignoring the fact that my child has asked to get off the swing for the last five minutes now.

When I am somewhere else with my son, or just at home, I am giddily in love with him. I am interested in trying to piece together words that he might be using to make a sentence. I sit with him as we watch Playschool, counting together, trying to name colours and characters. We stack blocks, knock them down, say hello and goodbye to his toys. It’s only at the park that things turn.

I am not self-righteous about my hatred for the park. I salute the other Trance-Parents there for their ability to withstand an endless, life-sucking outing to the playground.

And I envy all the non-Trance-Parents. Though I suspect (hope?) that they are putting on a show, or that they are working parents just taking a day off from their other grind, they actively engage with their children, and don’t just check their iPhones. They play in the sand, get dirty and have what appears to be fun.

Trance parents make me upset by reflecting my own complacency, but non-Trance-Parents add further insult by, well, doing what I should be doing, what I thought I’d be doing.

In an ideal world, I’d love the park. I’d run through the grass, holding my son’s hand. I’d watch his look of wonder as he whooshed down the slide, smitten by his laugh. But this is not an ideal world, and I am not an ideal parent. When I’m not at the park, it is easier to forget that.

When I was pregnant with my third child, I accidentally wandered into a conversation in which two mothers I’d recently met were extolling the virtues of homebirths and water births, midwives and doulas. When the well-meaning mums asked about my birth plan, I told them I was having a scheduled C-section. Their faces conveyed self-righteous disapproval and my mind was immediately awhirl in disclaimers: I was having the scheduled C not because I wanted the convenience, not because I was afraid of labour, not because I didn’t want to miss my manicure appointment.

“My oldest son would have died if I didn’t have a C-section!” I said instead.

It was unfair to pull the “my kid almost died” trump card, and if I hadn’t skulked off in annoyance and then embarrassment at having reacted so defensively, I could have told them about my first pregnancy and the months of bleeding, followed by the morning at thirty-two weeks in which there was no kicking; then the hours on the monitors where the heart rate was at first fine, then shockingly not fine, which provoked the careening stretcher; the epidural which didn’t have time to take effect, so instead the general anesthesia and the intubation. It was birth as highly medicalised and impersonal as critics of the C-section claim, one in which I had no voice and no control.

I also could have admitted that I’ve occasionally felt a twinge of loss that I’ll never give birth more naturally. Having never experienced labour, I sometimes feel like a little girl eavesdropping on the grown-ups’ tales of childbirth. I pore over pictures my husband took during one of my C-sections, to convince myself that this was my body, my baby. When I watched a friend’s video of her home birth — in water, no less — I felt as I do when watching Olympic figure skaters: as much as I would love to do that, it’s never going to happen.

But that loss is nowhere near what I would have felt had all those highly-interventionist, medical-establishment doctors not been exactly where I needed them. After a month in the NICU, when we were finally ready to take our son home, the resident who’d been on call the night of my C-section told us how blue our baby was. He held his fingers imperceptibly apart and told us we’d come “this close.”

Those words followed me for the four years in which I worked up the courage to get pregnant again. I went back to the same OB, who warned me I would be closely monitored. But this pregnancy was so uneventful that by my third trimester, my doctor raised the possibility of a VBAC. I was aware of the spate of newspaper articles decrying the increased rate of C-sections and moved by a relative’s joy at having a VBAC. Mostly I was tempted by the opportunity to prove to myself that I could do it. My mother used to tell me about her paternalistic male OB who, in the days of twilight medication and fathers in the waiting room, had instructed her to “lie back, sweetheart, you don’t have to do a thing,” to which I’d always rolled my eyes, confident of my physical capabilities and glad for all that had changed in the world.

If I’d tried, and all went well, perhaps this would be an essay in praise of VBAC. But that of course would only be evident in hindsight, when the result of the birth was cradled in my arms. Not yet having crossed over to that safe other side, what my prior experience taught me most starkly was that birth was not a process that I could control. The incision scar fades after a year or two, but the scars of near-tragedy are etched more permanently, making it hard to care about the experience, rather than the result, of birth.

My scars also make it hard not to hear a tone of triumphalism on the part of some who are lucky (because that, after all, is what it is) enough to have the birth of their dreams. Or to hear narcissism at the wishful fantasy that it is simply a matter of “trusting my body,” or to hear folly at the idea that what matters most in a birth is your own experience of it. Surely the current obsession with the process of birth comes in response to the many years in which women were told to lie back and do nothing, yet it reminds me of the bride fixated on the wedding, not the marriage, the bride bedecked with a breathtaking array of flowers, as if the abundant beauty can serve as a talisman against the harsher realities that lie ahead.

For me, the question of VBAC was easily decided when at thirty-seven weeks, my doctor saw a heart rate deceleration. While this wasn’t necessarily cause for alarm, she wanted to do a C-section that evening. Was this the much-maligned elective C, which I was choosing because I was distrustful of my body? Was this the voice of the medical establishment, belittling my capabilities, trampling my rights? Was this an example of a doctor rushing to surgery, for fear of malpractice? What I heard was the voice of my doctor, wise, capable and kind, who had saved the life of my first child. My desire for a certain experience, my image of who I thought I was or wanted to be, mattered least of all.

During my third pregnancy, with a different OB in a different city, there wasn’t a conversation about VBAC. November 26, 8 a.m., was penciled in on our calendars, though given a variety of complications, it seemed unlikely I’d go to term. But the weeks passed and the baby grew, until the date loomed before me, and I remembered more viscerally the physical pain of my previous C-sections. When I told my doctor how afraid I was, his nurse happened to repeat the same sentiment my mother once heard. “Lie back, he’ll take care of everything.”

Beautiful words, those were. Because a C-section is a scary thing in which I was glad to take no active role. Even when it’s planned, it doesn’t necessarily go according to plan. This time, I knew the date so far in advance that I made sure to complete a major project beforehand; the night before, I packed a few days’ worth of school lunches and laid out my kids’ clothes. Most of all, I concentrated on not letting my mind wander to the netherworld of all that could go wrong. Yet no matter how much I’d prepared myself, I still felt terror at being wheeled into that operating room. Despite the fact that I’d had every test and an inordinate number of sonograms, the moment my baby was lifted out was unexpectedly fraught with worry as the neontalogist present was concerned about a possible malformation. While my baby was examined across the room, I had to wait helpless and terrified until I was told she was going to be fine.

Was it the birth of my dreams? Hardly. Do I wish it could have been different? Sure. But compared with the result — my daughter, Liana, little sister to my sons Eitan and Daniel — I really don’t care. If I’ve learned anything in ten years of motherhood, it’s that the way our children are brought into the world means very little for how they live in the world. Nor do the intense hours in which we become mothers shape the months, years and decades of our actually being mothers. And if the experience of childbirth is in fact a crucial process, then let it be the process of teaching us that our children will emerge in ways varied and complicated, not necessarily in times or manners of our choosing, neither made in our image nor as proof of our prowess. Let birth remind us that, with children, so little goes according to even the most well-drawn plan.

Photo: Kelly Sue DeConnick via Creative Commons

"You had better clean up your toys before your father gets home," I told my four-year-old, turning fast on my heel to avoid the impending face fall, the pleas for more time. This wasn’t going to end well- my patience had worn well past thin.

It was dirty. But sometimes in a battle of wits with a pre-schooler, you realise you’re the unarmed opponent. You’ve got to pass the buck. Preferably to the parent who isn’t there to defend himself.

Dirty or not, it worked. The mystery of what might happen when Daddy got home lingering over her head, puzzle pieces began piling up fast in the giant plastic bin.

When in doubt, I’ve learned, be vague and let them fill in the blanks. Daddy won’t do anything horrible when he gets home. Ours is a non-spanking household, and he is a calm, genteel knd of guy.

For the stay-at-home parent in a two-parent household, playing the heavy is your job day in and day out. Works-Outside-of-the-House-Parent comes home laden with treats picked up on lunch break like a bath time egg that will melt to reveal a duckie inside. Work-at-home or Stay-at-home Parent drops them in the bath after they’ve coated the walls and themselves in pudding.

It is the nature of my husband’s job, rather than a failure to step up to the parenting plate on his part, that has carved out our roles. I am home when the cat’s pulled across the room by his leg, the sink overflows, the wall is revamped with black magic marker. It’s my responsibility to protect the four-legged, the floors and the market value of our house.

He is at work through the dog being locked in the bathroom, the yoghurt drink being snuck out of the fridge, the cheese crackers being smashed onto the couch cushions. Hence he’s cast as bestower of fantastical surprises from the store (even those requested by Mummy in a mid-day phone call), the parent who will indulge in an extra story before dinner because he’s eager to make up for lost time with his girl.

It’s tough being loved for wiping a kid’s butt and doling out vegimite sambos when he’s got the rock star status closer aligned with her love for the postie and his magical van full of toys.

So you’ll excuse the guilt-ridden glee in letting loose the words "Wait until your father gets home." I’m momentarily passing the torch as the overseer of discipline, but with that power I also pass a bit of the heavy load off the weary at the end of a long day at home. I became a parent but I didn’t sign up for evil hag married to prince on shining steed.

Behavioural experts tell us we should be worried that warning our kids about dad’s impending return will create anxiety as the day goes on. It’s true that painting him as a bad guy is no fairer to her than it is to him. She shouldn’t fear her father or look to 5:30 like it’s high noon at the whipping corral.

For friends growing up, those were the words that foreshadowed pain of butt-sized proportions. Mum may have been charged with settling sibling squabbles, but misdeeds were tallied up at day’s end and handed off to Dad for the official dressing down. Walking in to a laundry list of complaints did little to engender a positive relationship between father and child. So he did what Mum was often unwilling to do — took the little brats over his knee and gave them what for.

It’s a reminder to her that Daddy’s return will not signal her excuse to abandon clean up or regain privileges lost.

It was not, as those same experts advise, a united front on discipline, and it did give me pause the first time I set his homecoming as a deadline for a behaviour change.

So why say it? Because my husband will never march in the door ready to take out the anger of the day on his kid. Instead, it’s a reminder to her that Daddy’s return will not signal her excuse to abandon clean up or regain privileges lost.

A united front on discipline means letting your kids know that both parents agree on a course of action. Just because he’s not here to send her to her room for acting out or pull out the wet paper rag for scrubbing down a markered wall doesn’t mean he wouldn’t.

Coming home to a living room that resembles a bomb blast at Toys R Us, he’ll shrug off his coat and back me up.

"You had better clean up your toys before your mother and I are done making tea."

So, who’s the bad guy now?

“What are you doing?” Jack asked.

“I’m cleaning the bathroom,” my husband replied.

Jack twisted his face into a look of concern, “What happened?”

Like any child confronted by an unusual event in a familiar environment, Jack didn’t know what to make of what he saw. The truth is that both of my kids witness housecleaning so infrequently that they consider the very activity evidence that some unfortunate event has occurred.

I rarely clean my house. Walk through my front door on any given day and you’re almost certain to find dust collected on the coffee table and book shelves. You’ll spot books and magazines semi-stacked on floors and you might trip over those tiny, goody-bag toys kids gather like treasure. The windowsills between the inside glass panes and outer screens bear dirt deposited by seasonal storms and breezes, the wood floors do not gleam and there are blemishes pockmarking the bathroom mirrors — not to mention traces of toothpaste on the walls of the sink from kids who still haven’t learned to aim their spit at the centre of the basin. In short, you will find dirt.

And I don’t care.

When I sat down to write this essay, the first thing I did was open my internet browser. I thought that I could perform a couple of Google searches, find a list — or several — of reasons why people thought it was so important to maintain a clean house when you have kids, and then refute those reasons one-by-one.

I was, however, surprised by the results of my searches. Site after site offered tips for how to keep a clean house when you have young children, how to get the kids to help you clean, even how to find cleaning inspiration when you have trouble mustering it on your own. But on no site — that I could find — did anyone bother to address the reasons why keeping my house clean should be one of my top maternal priorities in the first place. That’s probably because most people think the point is obvious. But it’s not at all obvious to me.

It’s no secret to any parent that time is limited. Once I’ve devoted six or seven hours of each day to sleeping, I’ve got about 30 hours of goals to squeeze into what’s left of any given day. I need to get the kids to school with all of their accoutrements, shepherd them to their activities, cook their meals, wash, dry, fold and redistribute their clothes, help with their homework, schedule doctors’ appointments and play dates, and so on. As soon as I get the kids out the door, I need to write and do all of the other things this business requires as well as fulfill my volunteer commitments at school, temple and around town. I need to shower and eat. I need to find the cat so I can take her to the vet. The last thing I want to do with any moments I have left over when all of these requirements are complete is clean.

I’d much rather spend time enjoying the company of my husband and my kids than battling with the detritus spawned by my house. I read Harry Potter to my seven-year-old son at bedtime. I listen while my four-year-old daughter takes me on long, sometimes incomprehensible journeys through the complex universe that lives in her mind. I accompany my children on long walks in the local apple orchards in autumn and together we marvel at the glowing reds and ambers of the trees, the birds we watch as they dive for lunch, the apples we’ve just picked that taste so much sweeter than those we buy at Woolies. We celebrate my kids’ and my own Jewish heritage every Friday night as we feast on challah I’ve made from scratch for them, we learn to cook and eat bulgogi together to experience a piece of my daughter’s Korean birthright and we share corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day in honour of my husband and my son. We watch movies together. We learn about the world, we play games, we have fun.

And no one in my family ever says to me, “Gee, I wish the house were cleaner.”

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, let me assure you: I do have some standards. If I notice that a bathtub or the kitchen sink is truly vile, I clean it — or at least I ask my husband to do it. If the dust balls drifting out from under the couch become large enough to invite possible investigation by the Board of Health, I sweep them up. When the cat pukes— as she does almost daily —I clean it up. I am not a total pig. My kids eat off clean dishes and they wear clean clothes. That’s good enough for me.

I should also clarify that I have no objection to cleanliness itself. If I could, I would hire a cleaning service to come in every week and have them tidy and sanitise and polish the inside of my house until it could pass even my late grandmother’s literal white-glove test. It’s the process of achieving cleanliness that I despise. Cleaning is tedious and repetitive, and it’s disheartening when you notice the dust regrouping on the piano before you’ve even finished wiping down the other side of the room. I know some people love to clean, including some of my own closest friends and family. (And then there was that Monica-character on Friends. I never understood her.) They find it to be a stress-relief. I find it to be on a par with teeth-cleanings and colonoscopies.

I don’t even do much cleaning for family and friends. I might walk through my house before guests arrive and deal with anything that doesn’t pass my “Is this disgusting?” test. Beyond that, though, I reason that no one wants to be friends with me because of my housekeeping skills or lack thereof. If you’re going to condemn me for the state of my house, then my guess is you’re probably not going to enjoy my company very much in the first place.

As far as I’m concerned, there are countless better ways to spend my time with or without my kids than cleaning. My mudroom may contain actual mud and my countertops may be sticky, but my kids, my husband and I laugh a lot.

And I’ll take that over a clean house any day.

I have changed my children’s names in order to protect their privacy.

Pregnancy: Be freelance and have the kind of “catastrophic” insurance that covers something if you are hospitalised, but not sonograms, medicine or doctor visits. Have no end of small problems for which you have to see the doctor, including thinking you are leaking amniotic fluid in seventh month. (Turns out it’s urine, which is at first a relief and then disturbing in its own way). Spend a week believing you have gestational diabetes, but later it’s discovered that it was the glass of Sprite you drank just before the blood test.Bonding: Ask timidly if you are “allowed to breastfeed.”

Birth class: Attend with ex, who openly resents any homework and bolts before class is over each week to get a drink at neighborhood bar. Wonder if it would be more or less embarrassing to go alone.

Labour: Wake up feeling crampy and dig out yellow Wonderbra you’ve never worn before; don it. Go to hospital five hours later and immediately beg for an epidural. Get an epidural that pools so that your left hip is numb but everything else is in full bloom of pain. Make mental note that you don’t have pain relief, nor will you get credit for having a natural birth. Say to anyone near you, at first abashedly but with increasing volume and abandon, that you “really feel like” you have to “poo”. Although all other clothing has been removed, keep yellow Wonderbra on for entire labour and delivery.

Birth partner: Ex is there but leaves during transition to make phone calls. When he comes back, he takes one look at your vagina and blanches. Ex attempts to comfort you through contractions by trying to pash you; stands on IV.

Delivery: Scream bloodcurdling scream until son finally comes out. Baby is immediately whisked to neonatal intensive care unit. Head to hospital room and become the only person on the floor without a baby. Feel foolish.

Bonding, phase 1: Visit child in NICU but feel like interloper. Ask timidly if you are “allowed to breastfeed.” When son finally comes home (day four), experience feeding child as akin to placing a snapping turtle on your swollen, chapped nipples. Notice son has little pimples and have flashback to terrible high school years when you had ackers.

Bonding, phase 2: Son is now covered in white and red pustules and looks not unlike the Singing Detective. When people come to see him, blurt out, “Can you believe how bad he’s got baby acne?!” so that they know you know it’s there. Feel bad that this is the first thing you say about your child. Try to pump bottles so Baby Daddy can do four a.m. feedings, but “allow” the occasional bottle of formula (okay, use formula every night).

Co-parenting: Swing between smugness that you and baby’s father literally share the work and expense of childrearing, unlike most “real” couples you know, and blind rage that you have to parent with irrational man you broke up with two years ago. Wag finger in ex’s face and whisper sotto voce threats that you won’t follow through with.

Bedtime: As child grows older, have him on late schedule so he’ll sleep in the morning. By the time he is twelve months, his bedtime is ten p.m.; by eighteen months, it’s midnight. Keep this a secret from friends, relatives, and your own parents.

School: Take son to pre-school the day after he turns two. Sneak out of school, sniffling, when he isn’t looking because that’s your strategy when you leave him with babysitters. Walk home talking on mobile to sister about how son is in school and next thing you know you’ll be leaving him at Uni when other line beeps in. Learn that son is hysterically crying, “desperate,” as the teacher terms it, and that you are to pick him up immediately. At the pick-up, start to cry when teacher asks if you even said goodbye to son before leaving.

Psyche: Notice son winds his tresses in his fingers as he is falling asleep, plucking out many strands during each nap, creating small bald spot.

Food: Son appears to consume about a gallon of milk every day, eggs, and very little else. He asks for Tic Tacs and cough drops as a treat, demanding in a loud, rude voice, “Need Tic Tac! Need Tic Tac!” Try to resist giving child Tic Tacs or cough drops, as it seems weird and he’s crunching them and probably going to break one of his tiny teeth. Despite anorexic’s diet, son is extremely tall. Sometimes he will emerge from his bedroom chewing on something and when you inquire what, he’ll say, “hair.”

Psyche, part 2: Notice son gets up from a nap covered in strands of hair. Call pediatrician for advice. Pediatrician says to ignore that son is pulling out hair ritualistically, that son is soothing himself, like thumb-sucking. Ignore hair-pulling for one day and then take to whispering intensely to son not to pull his hair; you’ll give him cough drops if he’ll stop pulling hair. Please stop pulling hair.

Love: At son’s school, three weeks into the term, as you are fluffing his hair to obscure thinning areas, receive wet, mentholated kiss from balding two-year-old. Wince as heart nearly breaks from how lucky you are.

Photo courtesy Nathan Kendall