Throughout the course of this year, I have become more and more aware of the immense amounts of time my peers spend on the road transporting their kids to sports leagues and games. The more I learn, the more appalled I am.

—One colleague transports her teenager to Blaine from south Minneapolis several days a week for lacrosse.
—Another participates in three concurrent basketball leagues for their pre-adolescent, with games and practices across the south metro.
—Another spends several evenings a week and most summer weekends at baseball practices and tourneys from Farmington to Forest Lake.

At one time, I envied these one-income families (virtually none of the parents that sign up for this rat race have two full-time careers) for all the additional time they had to be together on weekends. No spending half the weekend running errands and paying bills, etc. But I’m not so sure now.

Many of these folks routinely drive 200 miles or more a week transporting kids to sporting events. In an era of $4/gallon gas, the cost is astronomical. There are no “family Sundays” etc. Just a relentless schedule of practices and games.

Last spring, my son asked if he could play in a youth baseball league all spring and summer (He already played park district ball twice a week, but the season was only two months long.). He would have to attend practices and games two weeknights at 5 p.m. all over the metro area. Weekends would feature tournaments requiring two days of attendance at a ball field, often in the exurbs.

We said no. We could not leave work at 3:30 p.m. to have him in Lakeville by 5 p.m., and we simply would not spend so many hours of our evenings and weekends away. It would shortchange his sister and turn our remaining lives into a constant race of catching up with everything we were neglecting while we were sitting around watching him practice or play or sit. (The ironic upshot—the neighborhood kids he had plenty of time to play pickup ball with weren’t around all summer—they were in Farmington playing in weekend-long tournaments.)

As a guilt-induced token, our son is playing “fall ball,” five Sundays of baseball all over the metro, consuming up to eight hours of the weekend, more if there are Saturday evening practices. I’m still appalled.

I’m appalled by the waste of gas and carbon emissions, ostensibly by people who care about the environment. I’m shocked that these leagues and circuits have not been optimized to conserve fuel and minimize driving. I’m amazed that so many of my peers check their values at the door when it comes to pleasing their kids. And I’m saddened that so many of my peers seem to think their children are incapable of respecting the fact that there is more out there in the world than their obsessive schedule of sports. That their siblings and parents have the right to time of their own, interests of their own.

“I know it’s crazy,” said one parent to me about their time on the road each week. “But I can’t bear to say no to him because he loves it.”

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m shortchanging my children. But I wonder what kind of kids we are creating when we don’t expect them to relate to or recognize needs other than their own and through our actions subvert the very values we say we maintain merely to keep them smiling?

It is astounding to me, in this age where service industries dominate America, that the Twin Cities no longer has a diaper service, but the last one has bitten the dust. Cheek to Cheek Diaper cleaned my daughter’s diapers from 2004-06, and the now-defunct Crib Diaper did my son’s from 1998-2000. I’m glad we are done having babies.

Disposable diapers are noxious things, but they do a better job of hiding what’s in them, and that’s why they rule (you get a longer sleep from a dry baby than a wet one). I am sure diaper services are not a growth industry (In a story we published four years ago, Cheek had 300 customers; it is down to 125 today.), but it strikes me that the Twin Cities is a particularly inhospitable place for businesses that care for people in their domestic lives.

Don’t ask me why—probably part of the Lutheran DNA, self-sufficiency, etc.—I think people here are sheepish about having someone to clean the poop out of their kid’s diaper. Perhaps this is pointless nostalgia rooted in a sense that more and more of our progress is not really making our lives easier. (Love those ads showing folks checking their e-mail from a National Park or tropical beach.)

My son comes home from summer camp today, after two weeks away. Last week we sent his sister to Grandma Camp, and my wife and I spent a week together alone (on a very busy work-vacation—progress!) for the first time since 1998. It felt odd and sort of lonely. It was a sneak peek at empty nesting, and I realized what an adjustment that will be in 2022, should we be so lucky. (Try having a week of meals with your spouse, not mentioning your children, and having anything to talk about by day six.)

Cloth diapers create a tactile sensation that takes you to infancy or early parenthood faster than about anything else. There are a pile of cloth diapers on a shelf in my daughter’s room, relics of an era of her life that is now past. She will start school in a year and at some point will want them out of her sight.

For now, though, I enjoy looking at them when I go to kiss her good night. They are remnants of a chapter of her life that is now over, an era of child rearing that is gladly past, but nonetheless a reminder that progress is not all it’s cracked up to be.

As a community, we have to mourn when we lose the last remnant of a piece of our collective history.

If you heard the snippets of Barack Obama’s Father’s Day sermon at a Chicago church, you heard him call out African-American men (and women) for their interest in making babies but disinterest in parenting them. It is a singular cultural miasma confronting urban America, and it will be interesting to see if the Senator’s rising profile as a national leader can goad this community to more introspection and less scapegoating.

If you want an insight into the latter, peruse the African American Community Covenant, which the Minneapolis Urban League and African American Mobilization for Education have convinced the Minneapolis Public Schools to sign onto as the latest silver bullet in dealing with failing inner city schools.

It is a fascinating document because it places the bulk of the responsibility for poor African-American school performance, behavioral problems, and school failure on the public schools and society at large. It is merely a framework for a joint effort aimed at black achievement, requiring the district to swallow a lot of its pride—board member Tom Madden telling the Strib’s Terry Collins that its preamble was off-putting, but the goals are worthwhile.

Public schools certainly bear some of the blame for the state of black achievement. They have been slow to adapt to the challenges of educating in this cultural milieu and have been eclipsed by more nimble educational models (see below) unburdened by regressive unions and bureaucracy. But we only have to look at other urban districts and other racial and ethnic groups to realize this problem is neither unique to Minneapolis nor endemic among all urban populations.

If the Urban League and its brethren really think, as the covenant states, that the problem is a lack of a curriculum built around African American themes and a failure to recognize black kids learn differently than everyone else, they are kidding themselves. My daughter attends a majority African-American Montessori school on the North Side, and there is not a separate curriculum for black kids nor are there different expectations—each child is an individual, and the teaching is at once universal and customized.

But such schools are self-selecting cultures of parents that care enough to think about educational models and want their children in an environment rooted in proven success. The kids and families that the schools fail (or that fail the schools) are more deeply troubled—mired in multi-generational poverty, drugs, and criminality; in family and social units where education is derided and studiousness mocked.

The question is can or should we rejigger the schools enough to make up for lack of parenting, a values crisis of monumental proportion, and an external culture that refuses to acknowledge how bad things are for fear of being called racist?

There has to be more to this than endless cries of victimhood and demands for external solutions to internal problems—otherwise, we’d be making progress. It is not easy out there, and there are ways public institutions can be part of the solution. But Barack Obama laid out the diagnosis on Father’s Day. It’s a sickness no school or government program can overcome. First things first, I say.

The tragic prosecution of Anthony Klaseus, who killed his own eight-year-old son, mistaking him for a turkey while on a hunt, reminded me how much distaste I have for our state’s “great” hunting tradition, the hypocrisy of “sportsmen,” and the power their interests wield.

Anthony Klaseus deserves to be prosecuted. He took his child’s life under the rubric of male bonding and family traditions. He didn’t intend to. But he loved nature, and pot, and beer, and guns.

I spent a weekend a long time ago researching a story about a family of hunters at their deer shack in northwestern Wisconsin. They were stand-up guys, responsible, affable, and completely disdainful of the louts. But they could never explain the one thing to me that I most wanted to know—why this unequal battle between them and a deer was the linchpin that kept them bonded and steeped in family traditions.

Hunting for them was an excuse to be together, to be challenged, to play. And hunters romanticize it because it is what the men pass down from generation to generation, like baseball in my family. But if I bring a rifle with a telescopic sight to the Metrodome, I’m locked up on terrorism charges.

Explain to me how thousands of guys (mostly) armed with telescopic sights, fake animal urine, camouflaged tree stands, underwater radar, and other advanced weaponry and aids, convince themselves they are engaging in an battle of wits with an animal armed with nothing but its sense of self-preservation?

I’m all in favor of men hunting each other. That’d be a fair fight. I think Gov. Ventura proposed something like that a decade or so ago.

I am stereotyping here, but within every stereotype is an ugly truth. I am suspicious of most hunters’ regard for nature beyond its ability to provide them with prey. Trust me, nature is twice as nice when you’re not worried your buddy thinks you’re a deer.

I support people’s right to hunt; and when they consume what they kill, they’re better than I, who lives off the depravity of the commercial meat industry. But let’s stop kidding ourselves about why people hunt and do away with the romantic fairy stories about hunters and hunting.

So happy fishing opener. Watch out for carp that jump and whack you in the head. I mean, people get hurt.

I will not defend or minimize Sarah Jane Olson’s self-indulgent protest crimes, legitimize the ridiculous Symbionese Liberation Army, nor attempt to discern if Olson actually feels remorse for building bombs and robbing a bank where someone was murdered.

And I can’t argue with them hauling her back in last week after releasing her from prison; the sentence is the sentence.

But I question the imprisonment to begin with, especially a sentence well beyond what her co-conspirators received. I know, she conspired to build bombs and participated in a robbery in which an innocent person, a mom such as her, died.

But after you’ve evaded apprehension for nearly three decades, lived a subsequent life of magnanimous rectitude, and become a parent . . . I don’t know what was gained except to satisfy the victim’s family’s sense of vengeance, not what we should be concerned with when crafting justice.

Olson had teenage and pre-teen children in her home at the time of her arrest. It’s a given that the absence of these kids’ mom for a decade will have an irreparable effect on their adult lives. Maybe it will be garden-variety dysfunction; maybe they will become criminals themselves; maybe they will abuse or abandon their children, either physically or emotionally, as they were abandoned.

If a person is a danger to society, we must incarcerate them. If a person is not a danger to society but functions without any benefit to society except to commit crimes, I accept imprisonment as well.

But if they are not dangerous and living otherwise productive, relevant lives, what do we gain when we send parents to prison? A domino effect of troubled adults rearing troubled children that the broader society suffers and pays for.

Couldn’t we have sentenced Olson to a decade of community service? Forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, for ten years, plus the first five years in-house arrest outside the service? That sentence benefits society, at little actual cost to taxpayers, and does not wreak damage on the lives and psyches of Olson’s kids, the other innocent victims of her crimes.

Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe her kids, all of whom are now legally adults, have navigated the last decade unscathed and will go on to live lives unaffected by all this. But the fact remains that America has a larger share of its population in prison than any democracy, and the Olson case is another example of the insanity of how we mete out justice in the USA.

Sunday is my son’s tenth birthday. In discussing party and cake considerations in the car the other day, his three-year-old sister inquired as to plans for her birthday party in late May. She wanted a very specific cake.

“I want a Krusty the Clown cake,” she noted gravely.

“No you don’t,” her brother admonished. “He’s an alcoholic.”

“No he’s not!”

“Yes he is. And his father is a rabbi.”

“He’s not a rabbit.”

“No, you stupid idiot. He’s a rabbi, not a rabbit.”

At that point, I was reminded of one of the most easily forgotten reasons to have children—it is absolutely fascinating and hilarious to listen in on how children reason and try to be like adults.

I don’t know what was funnier—the fact that The Simpsons is so over my daughter’s head that she cannot distinguish Krusty (his Wikipedia page is longer than Winston Churchill’s) from any of the innocuous cartoon friends she enjoys, from Little Bear to Maggie to Franklin.

Or that my son, in fourth grade, caught somewhere in that nexus between little kid and puberty, was applying a kind of logic to the question that seemed adult to him but was actually more preposterous than his sister’s choice of birthday branding.

I encouraged the idea (a car with one adult and several children is an incubator of mania), indicating that goody bags would need to contain Zantac, Xanax, a wine cooler, a deck of cards, and American Spirit cigarettes. My son advised me that today’s high-strung, earnest south Minneapolis parents would not get the joke, referencing his idea to hold his tenth birthday party at Hooter’s, which, when told to a couple little league parents in jest, elicited blank stares and looks of confusion.

“Will they host a kid’s party?” asked one dad.

Probably not, and nor will a bakery make a Krusty cake (notwithstanding those with a small “k”) because most bakeries will not create cakes with trademarked characters on them. (They would need to pay for the rights.)

I’ve got ninety days, roughly, to find a Simpsons-obsessed baker. We’ll use cigarettes as candles. Maybe rum and Coke in the frosting. Who out there is up to the challenge?

As December dawned, we were pondering whether my nearly ten-year-old son still believed in Santa Claus. Having made the mistake of once explaining that Santa doesn’t stop at his Jewish friends’ homes because those kids don’t believe in him, we suspected he felt any acknowledgment of non belief would result in a vast reduction of net giftage.

What nine-year-old in 2007 America believes in the man in the red suit? I mean, my kid rides the bus with eighth graders and claims to want his tenth birthday party at Hooters. His advancing age and savvy has made it increasingly hard to stage Christmas morning. Gifts from his Dear Santa letter need to not show up in a wrapped box from Grandma. After all, how would she know he wanted a West Virginia football jersey?

In 1971, I remember watching my then-hippie aunt tell my sister (then five years old) the honest truth about Christmas as I silently shrieked “noooooo” in the background. If I remember, her rationale was, “It’s not right to lie to children.” But to me, then and today, so much of the magic of a child’s Christmas is wrapped up in Santa Claus that you should support the belief as long as they need or want it. Questioning Santa's existence seems scant evidence that children are ready to let him go.

Fast forward to December 2. Our family was seated in the festive confines of Red Stag Supper Club. I don’t know how the topic came up, but my son, seated next to me, asked, “Dad, is Santa real?” This was the cry for help, I told myself. He knew what was what and wanted to let us know. After all, he’s nearly double-digits.

“Do you want an honest answer?” I asked him. “Yes,” he replied. And I told him everything.

There was silence at first. “Really?” he finally said. Uh oh.

“Really,” I told him. Then followed a litany of questions about gifts he’d received from Santa over the previous five years. “What about the Wii?” There were never any at Target. “What about, what about, what about . . . ?”

Then silence again. “Didn’t other kids tell you?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said, “but I didn’t believe them. Mom showed me a book about it once, and I decided it was possible, and so I didn’t believe them.”

I had misread things. He was not looking to be released from his childhood bondage but to stay put. He loved Santa just like I had and was content to one day ask him for a Hooters gift card, no paradox implied.

And as the meal dragged and the food didn’t arrive, as my wife and daughter became preoccupied by the lack of bread, my son started to cry. And cry. Visibly, audibly, tragically. Good move, Dad. And three weeks before Christmas Eve.

Three weeks later, Christmas in the boy’s world is a tad more mercenary. There are discussions about gift availability at Target, about first and second choices, about how “An iPod Touch will last a long time. How much money are you guys spending?”

Christmas will never be the same, and I suspect he knew as much that night at Red Stag. Life is pretty sweet at nine, but as I remember, four looked pretty good from that vantage point. No cares, no responsibilities, no homework. Some nights, I would get into bed, my mom would come to tuck me in, and I would just cry. I wanted to go back. I saw what was coming and wasn’t sure it was for me.

But then, I wasn’t on a fast track to Hooters. I’ve been tempted to tell him the truth—that I’d been to Hooters, and the reality is no match for the fantasy, especially the PG-13 aspirational version in his head. Santa beats it hands down. But I suspect it’d break his heart. And one of those is enough this December.

Merry Christmas.

“Dad, do you have E.D.?” my nine-year-old asked, earnestly.
“Uh, what’s E.D.?” (scrambling . . . )
“You know, that thing where your thing doesn’t work.”
“Oh, that thing. No, my thing works.”

If this conversation had happened with me as a nine-year-old in 1972, my dad could have been confident I not only didn’t understand what E.D. was but had no idea of the things my thing could one day do. But in Tila Tequila’s America, who knows? The boy does ride the bus with eighth graders.

“Could I maybe have E.D.?”
“No, I’m pretty sure you don’t have it.”

Believe it or not, this blog is not about erectile dysfunction. It’s about why my son knows so much about it. Or doesn’t, as the case may be. It’s about why we are bombarded with TV ads for Cialis, et al., during every TV sporting event.

Believe it or not, this blog is not about my son knowing all he wants to know about E.D., although I’d prefer he wait a couple years.

It’s about whether pharmaceutical companies need to charge so much for medicines. As you know, Americans pay more for prescription drugs than any First World nation and have some of the strictest patent laws protecting drug companies from generics.

Big pharma insists federal intervention in drug costs will kill their profits, thus putting an end to innovation, thus turning the world sick and impotent.

“Dad, have you ever had a heart attack?”
“No pal, I haven’t.”
“Do you take Lipitor?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Maybe you should, so you don’t have a heart attack.”

Maybe it’s just the TV shows we watch, but I can’t escape Lipitor ads either. And I don’t watch anywhere near the average amount of TV. Which leads me to believe big pharma is spending a veritable fortune advertising meds we can’t buy without convincing a doctor we need them—advertising that has only recently been legal and is not in most westernized nations.

Clearly this advertising is effective. And doctors apparently don’t like to say “no,” or there’d be no Lipitor commercials and many fewer antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Much of this advertising is to convince consumers to ask for new, patented medicines that have to compete with off-patent, cheaper generics.

I’d be a lot more sympathetic to the industry’s claim that it needs to charge us so much if it wasn’t spending sums each year on ads that would probably sustain its research for decades.

I wonder how much of a drug’s cost goes to fund marketing budgets? And I wonder what value there is, if any, in allowing prescription drug advertising to consumers? It basically assumes doctors can’t make the right decisions about what patients need without TV ads to spark patient inquiry.

Let’s save the drug companies some money and return drug advertising to where it belongs—medical journals. If the drug companies can’t get behind that, maybe it’s time to regulate prices and/or shrink the length of pharmaceutical patents.

I know I’d enjoy seeing those old Alka-Seltzer ads instead.

My wife and I have some close and wise friends whose perspective on parenting is that you overprotect them at every possible turn and shield them from as much of the world as you can for as long as you can because what is out there is sick and crazy and malevolent.

Amy and I are not really built for that type of parenting, and our two kids’ personalities are ill-suited to that kind of insularity. They are fascinated by the outside world, crave experiences beyond their years, and exude no little amount of confidence. Usually, I am proud of those qualities. This week, they make me nervous.

I generally don’t follow crime news. My general take is crime is random, devoid of broader meaning, and following it delivers all pain with no gain. Still, the other night, unable to fall asleep, I violated my policy and read a crime story in the Metro section of the paper.

It detailed the conviction of a Blaine woman for abetting her boyfriend’s murder of his ten-year-old daughter. He fatally scalded her in a hot bathtub as punishment for putting a corn chip in her underwear, which she had started doing subsequent to sexual abuse by her mother’s boyfriend.

I was staggered by the level of casual depravity at work in the torture of this child. It’s the tried-and-true story—sick guy abuses his kid, weak-willed woman looks the other way.

Jordan Gonsioroski apparently had no one looking out for her. The women in her life sold her out for the worthless men they depended on. I’d like to throw her mother in jail for failing her so badly. I’d also like to stop her from ever reproducing again. We will put people to death in this society, we will lock them away forever, but we will not declare you unfit to parent and then make it impossible for you to do so. I know, the civil liberties implications are a nightmare. What’s your solution?

Most abusers were abused themselves and go on to repeat what they know. I spent weeks back in 1994 observing a juvenile-sexual-offenders program at the Hennepin County Home School for an article I was writing. The program was a valiant effort to turn around teenage boys who were showing tendencies, before they became monsters like Jason Gonsioroski. They were sympathetic kids from deeply troubled families at all strata of society. I wonder if the program still exists, and how many kids it's saved.

Jordan Gonsioroski’s death ended her suffering. But we need to find other, more hopeful ways to break the cycle of abuse. Until that day comes, if you suspect a child needs help, please have the courage to tell someone.

This weekend we will disassemble my daughter’s crib and put together her bed. It is a symbolic passage from baby to child, and a manifestation of independence. My little one is headstrong, willful, and completely drunk on assertiveness.

Perhaps the flipside of overprotection is that my daughter will be comfortable enough in the world and in her power that she would never be attracted to the type of person who would abuse a child. I hope for my daughter the confidence and courage to speak up, and then to walk.