As my daughter gets closer to nine years old, I can feel the finiteness of our closeness. Soon, she’ll no longer be my little pal, in either size or intimacy. This is one of the biggest pains of being a parent. You really are only entrusted with them for a very short time before they need to break away and create their own lives. The family unit, while such an icon, is a very short-lived event.

That’s why I like this post from The Thread

I Love My Dad…

this story resonated with me. As Frank Perdue used to say, “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.” In the case of stay-at-home whatevers, it takes someone with endurance to handle the drudgery of baby routine punctuated by the magic moments. The following is from a stay-at-home dad’s experience as the “primary caregiver,” which he feels often leaves him the odd man out.

Does this sound like a rough day? Not necessarily, but that’s the point. Staying at home is a marathon, not a sprint. Stay-at-home moms need to string together months and years of such days. Their strength lies in their ability to store vast reserves of the energy, patience, resilience, and affection required to raise a child. Marathoners need a healthy heart, and so do stay-at-home moms.

[From Among the stay-at-home moms, a dad in disguise | csmonitor.com]

Here in San Francisco, when a man stays at home, or just shows up at all the school functions, everyone assumes he made a bundle in the internet boom and doesn’t have to work. Staying at home is looked on as a glorified form of sloth, reward for what may or may not have been a lot of hard work. For the rest of us, who have to make hard choices with our spouses on who is best positioned to work at a “real job,” it may end up feeling like a lucky reward, but it usually doesn’t start out that way on the first day.

“The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance by Polly Young-Eisendrath is out and it will be a good read for parents frustrated by the “every child is a winner” mentality that has taken over our schools and playgrounds.

I happen to believe in the philosophy behind constant praise for children. In my belief, they need to build a reservoir of love and good feeling to be ready to battle the big bad world. However, I am also wary of shielding them growth experiences that will prepare them for the challenges after they leave the nest. We have covered many good books on the site related to self-esteem, especially by Michael Gurian and Robert Brooks which are strong resources to better understanding this dilemma.

In this book, Ms. Young-Eisendrath spells out sources of the problem. If you recognize yourself as one of these types of parents, you may be setting your child up for self-esteem issues later on:

* Laissez-faire parents - “indirect, non-confrontational, vague, and friendly in their attempts to be authorities”

* Helicopter parents - “hover around their children” trying to be close friends with them.

* Role-reversal parents - believe that you can encourage children’s inner genius by allowing them lots of affection and attention with few boundaries

As in the books of Gurian and Brooks, Ms. Young-Eisendrath examines the importance of adversity and virtue in developing kids with good self-esteem. Adversity is important, so they can overcome or make peace with it. Teaching virtue and conscience, especially as it relates to others, especially by helping them, helps to get kids outside themselves.

Some readers may be put off by her chapter on “Religion and Reverence,” where she has a section entitled, “Why we need religion,” and patronizingly insists that “spirituality” is not a substitute for organized religion.

Polly Young-Eisendrath is a Jungian analyst and psychologist,, and a a Clinical Associate Professor o Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Vermont.

Science has found new clues to why you may find yourself smiling at babies. Maybe after you’ve had one, this effect is even more pronounced, but scientists have long thought that we are programmed for survival to react to a baby’s face. Whether or not we say we like children. most people react positively to a baby’s face.

Now science appears to have real proof, as reported in an article in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Our brain can’t help itself. Our neurons reflexively respond to an infant’s big eyes, broad forehead, button nose and tiny chin, University of Oxford researchers recently reported in the online journal PLoS One.

Using a technique called magneto-encephalography that measures brain signals, the Oxford researchers found that a baby’s face can seize our attention in milliseconds, activating an unusual mental organ called the fusiform gyrus that responds to human faces. Moreover, these distinctive infant features, unlike the mature features of an adult, trigger a sense of reward and good feeling in a seventh of a second. Picture Bambi’s saucer-size eyes or those of Mickey Mouse.

So, if friends, or even your wife, are teasing you that you’ve gone soft around babies, maybe it’s not that you’re evolving, maybe just that we have as a species, to protect the little ones in our midst.

As a dad you may have gotten on Facebook. It’s not a surprise - they are adding thousands of new users a day (or is it a minute?). However, you should be aware of privacy issues that relate to your use of Facebook even if you don’t think you’re giving out data to more than your friends.

In a report in the Wall Street Journal, and then picked up on Public Radio and elsewhere, some of these dangers have been highlighted. The biggest problem relates to other plugins you or your “friends” may have downloaded. The user agreements on most (or all?) of these plugins for games, photo sharing and the like, state that you agree to share your data, AND the data of your friends, by using their software. So as a user, you may have posted your age, favorite books, maybe even sexual preferences, thinking you are sharing with a very small group of friends. However, if even one of these friends has downloaded another application, your data is now public. It’s a word to the wise. Not all of us are privacy crazy since so much about you is public anyway (jobs, schools, address, political donation). But would you want your health data or worse to get out because you shared it in some group on Facebook?

Me, I’m limiting mine to the schools I attended and taking down my age tonight. Another thing you can do is tweak your privacy settings by clicking on Privacy in upper right hand corner of screen. This functionality is pretty complicated. Be prepared to spend ten minutes figuring out what to do.

And my daughter doesn’t get on until she pierces her ears and learns to drive at eighteen.

In case you missed it, the New York Times did a story on the phenomenon known as “double-dipping, “made famous by The Seinfeld Show This is when you dip a chip into a dip, and then dip into the dip again with the same end of the chip, thereby polluting the entire bowl of dip with your used chip. Of course, it was George who was guilty of this infraction and was set upon by another party-goer who denounced him to the crowd.

But how unhealthy is the practice? Is it just another over-reaction to the interaction with others? Not so, says Professor Paul Dawson , a microbiologist at Clemson University. In a study inspired by the Seinfeld episodes, tests showed that double-dipping did result in significant quantities of microbial activity, especially when more than one dip was done.

They found that three to six double dips transferred about 10,000 bacteria from an eater’s mouth to the remaining dip sample.

”I was very surprised by the results,” Dawson said in a telephone interview Thursday. ”I thought there would be very minimal transfer. I didn’t think we would be able to detect it.”

The professor said the students’ research didn’t get into the risk behind such a bacteria transfer, but they got the idea.

”I like to say it’s like kissing everybody at the party — if you’re double dipping, you’re putting some of your bacteria in that dip,” Dawson said.

Dawson is the scientist who last year disproved the famous “five second rule,” that says that food that drops on the floor stays clean for five seconds and can be eaten. The results here showed that quick retrieval resulted in 150-8000 bacteria. Left an entire minute, however, food collected ten times that amount. A quick pickup therefore is better than eating off the floor, but no guarantee of food safety.

My seven year old turns eight in March. Many of her 2nd grade classmates, especially the boys, have already read most if not all the Harry Potters, and have even seen all the movies. Over the holiday break, I suggested to my daughter that we finally break into

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Book 1) and see what all the fuss was about. Lost as she usually is in books about princesses or American Girl dolls, she wasn’t too interested. By the second chapter though, she was hooked. At every occasion, she begs for me to read Harry Potter to her, and many of our conversations are reviews of the plot and mystery. She even reads to me as well, and some times will advance a chapter or two without me when the suspense gets too great.

As a dad, I’d say the books are marginally good. They are not “great” fiction, but are well-written and creative enough to hold an older person’s interest. The big draw, I now realize, though, is the wonder of watching your child have their first real immersive literary experience. My daughter can imagine this world, all through our reading it together.

We’ve now watched the movie together as well, and I’ve been happy that most of my character name pronunciations were correct. I also did a pretty good impersonation of Hagrid, a giant, who has the most distinctive accent so far.

I’ve been told that the tales get “darker” as they go along, with plenty of betrayal and violence. We’re proceeding cautiously at this point, which will increasingly become a challenge, as my daughter asks every afternoon when she gets home from school, “Can we read just a little bit?.” As dads of daughters can attest. it’s always hard to say, “no.”

This month’s Men’s Health is on 2008 resolutions and one section featured screenwriter Justin Zachham’s ‘bucket list,’ his “top 10 things to do before I die.” There, at number 7, was the item you see over and over, but that you’d never want to see written by your own kids, “Be the father mine never was.”