Bunchland

My twice-a-month parenting column for Eye Weekly posted today…

I was talking to an old friend about the unwrapped Dentyne gum pieces my kids got last Halloween, when the offer came: “Why don’t you trick-or-treat with the kids up in our neighbourhood?”

Which bugged me. I’d been in the midst of complaining that too few homes in my area gave out candy. Last year, I took the kids out — my son dressed as a jogger, my daughter as Max from Where the Wild Things Are — and conducted a six-block loop. Barely a third of the homes we passed yielded candy — not a great batting average. Turns out my neighbourhood sucks for Halloween. More…

Christopher Shulgan is Bunchland’s guest editor for the month of October and the author of Superdad: A Memoir of Rebellion, Drugs and Fatherhood.

Photo by Carlos Osorio.

The New York Times magazine ran a really thought-provoking essay in a special issue on empowering women yesterday. By Lisa Belkin, author of the paper’s Motherlode parenting blog, the piece (linked here) argues that women’s careers won’t achieve equality with men until men assume equal responsibility in the family, for parenting roles.

“That women are not yet equal in the workplace is largely a result of the fact that they are not equal at home,” writes Belkin in a related blog post. “And that last gap will not close until our policies and expectations change for men.”

So you know the conflict, right? My parents introduced my kid to Nintendo Wii. He’s become obsessed with Mario Kart. I talked to experts about introducing kids to virtual entertainments; one that suggested yes, go for it, and then one that was just plain scary. Before I came to any decision, I was still mulling things over. I tend to do that, I mull things over for ages, I’m in a perpetual state of mull.

Facebook helped me procrastinate from making a decision. I posted on my wall one of the earlier Bunch Family posts under the headline, Should I buy my 4-year-old a Wii? Old friends weighed in, and the result was an experiment in communal parenting; the social network as advice maven. Only one friend voted against. The rest, most of whom had kids who were older than mine, suggested I go for it. “We’ve had a lot of family fun with ours,” said Amy Logan Holmes, the impresario of Open Book Toronto. “Especially the dorky bowling game.”

After the interview with videogame critic Josh Ostroff, I still wasn’t certain whether I should buy my 4-year-old son a Nintendo Wii. So I called up Robin Benger, an old friend of mine. Robin is a Toronto documentary filmmaker and father to three children, including his oldest, 25-year-old Griffin Benger, who first started playing videogames as an 11-year-old boy and quickly found his way to the military-based first-person shooter, Counter-Strike.

Dad Robin tried to limit the gameplay to an hour per day, once Griffin was done his homework. But as the years passed, the game started coming between parent and child. Griffin played the game for hours at a time, then, seemingly, days at a time. If he was banned from the computer, he waited until his parents were asleep, then crept downstairs to play all night. When Robin disconnected and hid the computer, Griffin would sneak out in the middle of the night and go to web cafes to play. Sometimes he’d be out for days at a time.

Joshua Ostroff is the music editor for AOL’s Spinner.ca and the videogame critic for Exclaim magazine. He’s also an old friend and the father of 13-month-old Emile. As the owner of all three major consoles and a big advocate for interactive culture,  Joshua was certain to challenge my wariness about games and kids, as I tried to decide whether it was time to get my family a Wii.

SHULGAN: Joshua, have you thought about whether you’re going to let Emile play videogames, when he’s a little older?

OSTROFF: He’s already playing videogames. Or at least he plays with the iPad.

Any in particular?

Sure, he likes anything that lets him affect the look of the screen or creates a musical response. There’s a virtual piano app that fascinates him to no end, and he likes making fireworks explode with his fingers and scattering the fish in a virtual koi pond.  Read more...

Dear Bunchlanders,

Writer Chris Shulgan is a dad in the Bunch community. At our True North dance party back in January, he approached us about doing something for the release of his book, Superdad: A Memoir of Rebellion, Drugs and Fatherhood. Chris told us his book was about partying and being a dad, and we nodded and laughed. We thought it was so cool that a busy dad could still find time to party.

Little did we know until an advanced copy of Superdad arrived at Bunch HQ that the book is actually about Chris’ struggle with crack cocaine through the first 18 months of his son’s life. In his attempts to try to come to terms with his admittedly stinker behaviour, Chris did a really hard think about what it means to be a dad and a man. And the result is a story that is dark, engaging, gritty and funny. Since he’s a pretty darn fine writer, we agreed to turn Bunchland over to him for four weeks to examine the dad life and invite his crew of literary dads to contribute.  Read more...