When you share your life with teenagers, you’re bound to deal with some daunting existential subjects that come up every so often, and, I don’t mean issues like, “Where’s my iPad,” or “Mom! Dad! Call the doctor! I’m out of acne cream!” I mean the dilemmas that have to do with the Meaning of Life (MOL).

You can’t blame them. After all, there is something quite odd about how most of us live our lives and raise our children: be good, go to school, get high grades, go to college, get a job, start your own family, repeat. At a few points during their young adult life both my boys expressed quizzical doubts about this routine. “I don’t see the point, dad. All this time and work and effort, and for what?” From this point on, the conversation inevitably veers toward the age-old conundrum, The MOL.

If you ever read this blog before, you know that our family is not religious. On a good day we are humanistic atheists, which is a great way to be, but it does not provide easy answers to the MOL question. Personally I don’t think that our human lives have more meaning than the life of any other sentient being on this planet. I may be wrong about this but I don’t think that my dog ever asks her stinky old self what the meaning of her life is. Neither does any pig, monkey, snail, or fish that I’ve ever met. Yet they’re all full of natural zest and passion for life ( except my dog who’s kind of depressed since the vet put her on a weight loss diet).

The meaning of life is life itself, which is quite a meaningless statement, except it’s true.

As humans we are blessed (arguably) with a more developed brain, and we tend to ask many questions and, even worse, come up with all kinds of answers. While many of us find answers to life’s deep questions in religion, more and more people in our society are searching for existential questions that extend beyond god and faith.

So when my boys want to know what’s the point of all the fuss and work, I try to tell them that there is no MOL that is external, independent and subjective. As opposed to what many people would like them to believe, there is no set of agreed-upon goals that we should do our best to reach in our lifetime in order for it to be “meaningful.” As long as you stay somewhere within The Golden Rule, I tell them, go ahead and set your own meaning to your own life. It may be about your job at NASA searching for alternative planets for the human race after we’re done destroying this one, or maybe it’s your depressed dog, or your exotic bug collection, or a combination of different things that you feel passionate about. But the meaning comes from what you mean, you know?

But what if you don’t know? What if you don’t feel exceptionally passionate about anything in particular? Where do you begin your search? Well… many different paths can lead to multiple and variable answers, but higher education is a good place to start.

Education is not just about getting a job, a family, a retirement plan, and a six feet under plot with a view. Good education expands your mind, which in turn expands your world and opens you up to possibilities you didn’t even know existed. It can expose you to big and meaningful subjects and ideas, so that you’re a better-informed human citizen of planet Earth, and maybe on the way you also find your passion, and let it grab you and take you with it for as long as it’s meaningful  for you.

Some people are lucky to realize their passion from the start. They know from age zero that they want to be a musician, a doctor, a plumber, a chain saw juggler. But most of us don’t know. We need time and some ripening before we find what turns us on. And higher education is one good way to explore, and try to discover what may possibly lead to one’s own private MOL, or at least part of it.

Secretly, I have an agenda. All I want is for the boys to get a great job that, unlike mine, pays a lot of money, so they can throw me a couple-three millions when it’s my time to retire. Blogging and collecting exotic bugs don’t pay too well. But as they work and fuss through high school and college, and finally achieve that goal, I also hope that the path they choose is one of joy and passion, and meaning.

Dadding Dudes

If you’re a parent of a teenager, then know this: your son or daughter may be exposed to some brain-damaging chemical compounds that are presented as cool and fun recreational drugs, some even glorified by pop culture rappers.

Now get this straight: I’m not talking cheap gin or the occasional toke. I’m talking stuff that can destroy chunks of gray matter, bring on paranoia, depression, and that’s only if they DON’T overdose. When they do OD… well, read for yourself .

 We live in a small city, not a large metropolitan with high crime rate and bustling drug trade. But it doesn’t make our town a safe haven. When high school kids get together, many of them carry either prescription drugs (Xanax, Aderol, and Ritalin are a hot commodity; Oxycodone sells well too), or mystery substances that they buy anonymously online, paying with bitcoin using the .onion browser. The internet has brought Anywhere, USA, into the heart of the drug trade. The other day, while extremely careful to not reveal any details that may identify anybody, my son told me how, during a party where parents were not home and the left-behind teen threw a little get-together, he walked in on some young people sniffing lines in a bedroom. “They used rolled up bills and credit cards,” he said. “Just like in the movies.”

 I go with his rule, and do not try to find who are the people involved, but I know that these teenagers are not hardened criminals. They are mostly kids who will, in a few months, go to college and do their best to succeed in life. That is to say, those who will survive the molly, the mandy, the uppers and downers and powders and lines.

 It’s dangerous out there; one wrong move can cascade into a series of bad mistakes, and badly damage a potentially good life.

 So what’s a parent to do? Part of me wants to scream, “Put them under curfew! No parties, no going out after dark!Stay home with mom and dad and play Scrabble into the wee hours of the night, then be in bed by 10:00!”

 But wait… as tempting as this may be, there’s a problem with this logic.

 My dudes are 16 and 17. Come September my older son is off to college 4 hours away, where he’s going to be exposed to the same chemicals, I’m sure. The answers are not confinement, detention, or quarantine.

 If you want your son or daughter to learn how to confront and manage life, then a cage would not do it. It’s out in the wild where we learn the most valuable lessons. Even if I knew that one of my sons is attracted to those intoxicating drugs (which luckily they are not, at least as far as I know), I’d still let them go out and be with their peers. Why? Because I’d rather them get into trouble while I’m still around and can help, as opposed to when they are far from home, on their own, without a parent to offer a hand.

 Guiding your teenage children through life’s traps and perils requires trust and communication. I am grateful that my son tells me some of what’s going on at those parties. He knows I trust him to not be stupid, and he trusts that even when he confesses to some alcohol consumption (his biggest sin so far), I’m not going to embark on a self-righteous rant, or put him on a house arrest. I was a teenager once too, if my memory serves me right.

 But if your teenage daughter or son is out a lot, and does not tell you anything about who and what and how much, then pay close attention to behavioral changes; try to learn which drugs are out there these days, and their main damaging effects; pay close attention to performance in school; moods; social changes.

Parents, stay on your toes. Don’t miss a chance to teach your child, and help him or her survive.

Dadding Dudes

I’ve been a parent for almost 18 years now. Does it make me an expert? Yes it does, but only on the subject of my own family, not yours. During those years I have read parenting books, looked up stuff on the web, and listened to many experts. Since in our modern, nuclear-family life-style we have lost the wisdom and support of an extended family, and a village, the commercial resources for parenting can be very valuable. Yet, they sometimes offer axiomatic “truths” that just irk me.

Here’s my list of the five most bogus parenting guidance items that push my buttons:

1. Family dinner is a holy institution. Attend daily or perish.

   This one is big. You hear it all the time from experts. I think it’s based on some statistics. Someone did a research and found out that families that eat dinner together are stronger, healthier, somehow better, though I’m not sure exactly how. But is it really the dinner part that does the magic trick? Does everybody in the family absolutely have to stop everything they do every single evening so they can chew food in unison? And must one of the parents always stay home, shop, cook, set the table, and clean up, or else? What is it about this activity that makes families so good and happy?

   It’s not the actual meal. It’s spending time together, talking, sharing a common experience. If you are in the habit of regularly speaking with your children (and, as importantly, with your spouse if you have one), doing things together, noticing each other, communicating, I can promise you as the parental non-expert that I am, that your family can be awesome and great even if it never works out for you to ever eat dinner together.

   On the other hand, you may twist your family’s collective arm to a forced dinner seven days a week and twice on Sunday, and have such a miserable time together that everybody would be better off with a quick snack alone at the corner fast-food joint.

   My advice: have family dinners, or lunches, or breakfasts, when it nicely works out. Sure why not? It can be a wonderful ritual if it works for everybody without stress. But regardless, always be open and ready to talk to your children, tell them stories, make them laugh, be interested as well as interesting. It does not matter if you do it around the dinner table, or in your car driving them to school, or while grabbing pizza after swim practice.

2. Parenting is the most important job you’ll ever have

   Now don’t get me wrong on this one. Parenting IS an extremely important job, but it’s not the whole story. Life is about creating balance between many complex roles and issues. Many of us are parents, but at the same time we are also children to our own parents; have a demanding and significant professional lives; have friends, areas of interest, hobbies, passions. If parenting becomes the one and only important job in your life, then you may miss on some balance and complexity that life has to offer. You’re also up for getting laid-off at some point from that most important job, and then what?

   Let’s be honest about the nature of parenting: it’s a temporary deployment. You’re on high demand for the first 12-15 years, and then your importance gradually diminishes until your kids leave the house and become independent. And even if they don’t go to college, and can’t find a job and never leave your house, they don’t really need YOU. They need what you have and provide, but emotionally they are on their own. Your job at this point is mostly ceremonial in nature. The kids show up for holidays, birthdays, or on the occasion when they need a loan.

   My advice: take parenting very seriously, give it all you’ve got, do the best you can. But at the same time don’t quit your other day jobs. Do not neglect the rest of who you are professionally, socially, and personally. By the time your parenting role downsizes, you’ll have other areas in your life that give you meaning and joy, regardless of how many times the children call or come to visit.

3. Parenting is the most difficult job you’ll ever have

   This one smells like number 2 (I mean advice #2), but it’s different. If I was in the habit of reading those scary predictions about how nearly impossible parenting is, I doubt if I ever would have the guts to become a father. There are experts out there who make it sound as if parenting has never been done before, and your mission, if you chose to accept it, will most likely end up in a large heap of misery, with children who are depressed, or hate your guts, or both.

   The news is that parenting HAS been tried before once or twice, and there are even some success stories out there, some of which miraculously from the times before doctors and shrinks and priests and gurus told us how to do it right.

   I strongly believe that we, as a species, are genetically wired to be parents. Some people are better at it than others, of course, some were so damaged as children by their own care-givers, that they should never become parents themselves. But in general we possess an inherent wisdom, intuition, and knowledge of how to care for our offspring. Now, there’s always room for improvement, for advice, for catching up on all kinds of information, and issues that we’re clueless about, but yet, parenting does not have to be “the most difficult.” It is full of fun and joy, and challenges and misery, just the same as many other closely intense relationships that a person has over the course of her or his life.

   My advice: parenting is an integral part of life. Go ahead, try to learn how to be a better mom or dad, it’s helpful to sometimes take other people’s advice, but in the end trust your own gut; be authentic and real with your children. You owe it to them, and to yourself.

4. Never get angry with your children

   I swear I read and heard this sage advice. More than once. And not just regarding anger, but many other emotions that are somehow “inappropriate” to express around children. According to this, as soon as our children come into our lives, we should develop an ability to hide and suppress feelings that children may be damaged by.

   If you’re the kind of person who’s always in rage, or you suffer from anxiety, or you’re badly depressed, then you need to care for yourself. Go to therapy, use medications, whatever you need. This is not only a parental issue but a personal one. Otherwise, if you’re a human being who sometimes experiences those “negative” emotions, then you can allow yourself, at least on occasion, to be that way around the children. My children learned some of their most valuable behavioral lessons because sometimes they pissed me off so bad that I yelled and screamed and behaved in a very unholy manner. They’ve seen me sad, and happy, angry, and confused. They learned that grownups have feelings, too, and that their actions can bring some unpleasant consequences, like daddy going bananas. It’s always a good example and a healthy practice to apologize, explain, and clear out difficult interactions when the storm is over, but storms are natural to any environment. It’s okay.

   My advice: take care of yourself, become the best person you want to, and can be, and then be yourself with your children, as well as others in your life. Behave responsibly, but keep it real.

5. You must read parental advice from people who know what they’re talking about

   No you don’t.

   My advice: If you’re a parent who is raising, or has raised a wonderful family doing the exact opposite of all that I expertly preach here, then you’re doing fine. If you disagree with every single item in this post, and you think that I’m a pretentious and clueless prick, then good on you. You know best what works for your own family.

    *      *      *

   Parenting is not some isolated job that you hold in your lifetime. There’s a wide overlap between how you are as a child, a spouse, a parent, a worker, or a friend. Many skills that you may or may not have as a human being are the same skills that you need as a parent. If you’re mean to your underlings at work, dishonest with your spouse, and negligent with your own parents, no how-to manual or sage advice would turn you into a wonderful parent.

   On the other hand, if you’re the kind of person who cares about others, and values kindness and responsibility, non-judgmental attitude, communication, and fun, then you have a chance of being a decent parent. Even if you never ever have dinner with your children.

Dadding Dudes

Three weeks ago I had a car accident. While driving to work I stopped behind a school bus that was loading children in the road ahead. In my rear view mirror I caught a glimpse of a sedan flying toward me from behind.

This is the last things I remember.

The 22-year-old woman who drove that car rammed into my trunk, and pushed my car into the opposite traffic lane, where I was hit again by a twenty-foot Ryder moving truck. She then continued forward to hit the car that stood in front of me, and pushed it to the side of the road. We still don’t know why she did all this. We may never find out. It doesn’t really matter now what it was that distracted her so bad that she did not notice the blinking lights of a school bus ahead of her. I just hope she learned her lesson and never does this again.

They air-lifted me to the trauma center injured, bleeding, and unconscious.

At the hospital, after a full-body CAT scan, the doctors found the extent of my injuries: a shattered patella in my right knee, a broken nose, facial lacerations, a lost cuspid tooth, some injured ribs, a concussion, and multiple bruises and scratches all over my body.

It could have been worse. Much worse.

Three days later, after a long surgery to put my knee-cap back in a semi-functional form, and with enough narcotics to keep me happy for a long time, they let me go home. I’m on crutches now, not allowed to bear weight on my right leg, not even bend the right knee.

I used to be the dude’s daddy, I’m now a house furniture. Nice to meet you.

For almost three weeks now I’m at the mercy of my family, and it’s six to eight weeks before I can maybe go back to somewhat normal activity, so says the surgeon.

Now, I always knew that my wife has a big great heart that brims over with goodness. That is part of why I fell in love with her almost twenty years ago. But the way that she responded to my traumatic injury fully revealed to me her heart’s fathomless depth and devotion. She’s been with me at the hospital from the moment I came to, held my hand through my ordeals, washed off the blood from my face, told me that it’s all going to be alright, and did all she could to sooth my horror and shock, as well as hide her own.

My wife has been my home when I was lost in pain and confusion.

But not only her. Dude 1, my older son, who’s now 17, heard about what happened while he was in school. His younger brother stayed home with a cold that day, and texted him the bad news. He left school as soon as he could, took his grandmother’s car, and drove an hour to the unfamiliar hospital where I was, guided by Google Map directions that he printed out ahead of the trip. “I just knew I had to see you, Dad,” he said later. “No way I wasn’t going to come to the hospital where you were.”

My wife, at the hospital, knew he was coming. She did the best she could to clean off the dry blood caked into my hair and face and hands. She made me look less shocking for him. When he arrived and saw his daddy, he shed a quick tear, but remained mature, and strong, and comforting. My heart swells with love when I think of him acting like a mentch during those difficult times. And pride, too.

Then I came home.

My younger son, Dude 2, age almost 16, was over his cold by then. He’s been my right hand with many of my needs ever since. He also cleans the kitchen, throws out the garbage, loads and unloads the dishwasher, even empties out the big stinky compost bucket. He’s here for me, and he does it so simply and naturally. “Sure, Dad. No problem.”

Not that there haven’t been any problems.

On occasion I have to remind the boys that they need to help around the house more than they’re used to since I can do nothing and mom can’t do everything. They tell me that they know, and that there’s no need to make the same speech time and again. Sometimes I feel useless, I tend to get impatient, I’m worried that I’ll never be able to ride my bike again. I’m not always an easy patient.

But in general I can positively say that the leaps and bounds of healing that I have done so far would not have happened without my family’s support and love. First my wife, then the boys, all rising to the occasion, doing above and beyond to help me sit on the couch and do nothing.

It’s not easy being a furniture, but I would have been a much more uncomfortable one without my family, as well as the fantastic help of our friends who cooked and brought over dinners for us almost every night for the first two weeks, and all the wonderful people who came to visit me, called, emailed, and cared about my health and well-being.

Thank you, guys.

Dadding Dudes

A couple of nights ago our school district held a board meeting, and my son felt compelled to participate. He left swim practice earlier (coach was not happy), wrote a short speech, and then stood in front of the school board and expressed his opinion. His younger brother is busy these days writing an article for the high school newspaper about the very same subject.

The issue they’re disturbed by is the proposed employment of an armed police officer (euphemistically dubbed SRO –School Resource Officer), who would be in charge of school safety and security.

Our school district, I’m sure, is one of many around the country these days dealing with the issue of providing protection to students and staff. The atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut, so I hope, has rattled us enough to face the fact that our schools, colleges, movie theaters, and other places where we congregate in large numbers, are not safe.

My son’s opinion on the issue, which he bravely expressed to the school board, is that if school children are indeed our nation’s resource, and as valuable and dear to us as we claim they are, then they need all the protection that we can afford them. He thinks that an armed officer on the school premises would provide a fast intervention in case violence erupted, as well as a significant deterrence to potential criminals or terrorists.

His younger brother, in the family tradition, disagrees. While recognizing the need, he’s concerned about the prison atmosphere created by a gun-carrying, uniformed police officer patrolling the hallways.

And me? I’m pissed that we even have to deal with this.

But when I dig deeper, I’m actually scared.

As a loyal follower of my blog, you already know that I was born and raised in Israel, where armed guards who search through bags and wave their metal-detector wands are common in theaters, malls, schools, universities, even restaurants. You get used to it; it’s no big deal. People understand that it’s for their own safety. But the difference is that in Israel these extensive security measurements are for protection against terrorist acts, perpetrated by enemies with whom the country is in a perpetual military and political conflict. The violence is external, the attacks, like a flu virus, come from the outside.

In the U.S these days we are dealing with a different breed of violence. These attacks are generated from among us, our own citizens, members of our society. It is like cancer.

Flu and cancer are very different diseases, and that scares me.

While I support  illegalization of assault rifles, and I believe that the oh-so-powerful NRA is not as mighty as most of us believe, and should face the horrific consequences of the policies it’s pushing in the name of the 2nd amendment, I also know that the problem is way more complex than access to fire arms.

Guns don’t shoot people; people don’t shoot people; people with guns shoot people.

And these people with guns are not healthy people. They are mentally ill, depressed, desperate, lonely, isolated.

Most evil acts are committed by miserable people.

The ubiquity of mass shootings is not the problem, it’s the symptom of a deep disease within our society. Dr. Gabor Maté, in an interview with Tracy Frisch in The Sun Magazine  says it better than I ever could:

“The parent-child bond is our most important relationship; through it we experience the world. The child doesn’t experience poverty in the abstract; the child experiences whether the parents can provide for him or her. When a parent comes home stressed, the child experiences the parent’s emotions and, through them, the world that stresses the parent. The attachment relationship gives us our concept of the world: Is this place hostile? Is it friendly? Is it nurturing? Is it indifferent?

It’s also through the attachment relationship that we learn about relationships in general. Can people be trusted? Can we be vulnerable and express who we are, or are we going to be attacked for it? Do we need to protect ourselves and hide and shut down?

In the attachment relationship we also learn who we are: Are we good? Are we bad? Are we acceptable? Are we worthwhile? All of this depends not on what the parent thinks of us but on how the parent unconsciously acts toward us. If my parents enjoy me, then I’ll have good self-esteem. If my parents are so stressed and worried and depressed that they can’t enjoy me, even if they love me, then I will have low self-esteem, because children invariably make everything about themselves.”

It all starts at home, with love, attention, enjoyment of our children. There are too many young people in our society, who for a variety of reasons grow up without the necessary attention to their emotional needs from their parents and care takers. Many of these children will develop all kinds of physical conditions as a result. Some of them will also have mental illness, and some will be pushed so far that they will become prone to committing mass killings.

We are facing a societal cancer here. The way many of us live and raise our children is dangerous. Armed guards and gun control may alleviate some of the symptoms, but we need a closer, deeper examination of this crisis, and solutions that address the root-causes.

Dadding Dudes

It’s the holiday season, and here at the 72nd floor of the Dadding Dudes HQ, the staff of writers, directors, and regional managers, decided that we too should publish a gift guide.

Since on most days I’d rather have a root canal without Lidocaine than go shopping, my first idea was an ultimate gift-that-ends-all-gifts: hire a Rabbi, convert to Judaism, and immediately get off the Christmas hook. Some candles, a few oil-dripping potato latkes, and you’re done. No shopping malls, black Fridays, or Amazon one-click-ordering.

But who am I kidding?

Long ago we threw in the towel, and started the habit of giving the boys “a little something” for the holidays. It was just too hard to resist the massive current of retail, and we eventually found ourselves drifting away with the mainstream, only a flimsy little credit card saving us from going under.

We used to buy the boys cool little toys, just to ease up their Christmas envy, make them feel a little more like their goyim friends. But now that they’re older things are different.

So this is Dadding Dudes’ 1^st annual gift guide for teenagers of all creeds and genders:

•  Open them a bank account if they don’t have one yet. It’s time they learned how to handle their finances
• If they have a driver’s license, register them to a defensive driving class. It may save their, or someone else’s life
• Are they planning to go to college? Start a tax-free saving account in their name. Other family members can join in as well
• Do they have a special interest? Give them a magazine subscription. A little gift that continues to arrive in the mail each month for a whole year

The idea is to give them gifts that are more than stuff; gifts that won’t end up in the landfill come July. But if you feel that a holiday season is incomplete without wrapped boxes under the tree, then:

• Give them something that they actually need: a good winter jacket, a better backpack to carry all those 20 lbs textbooks, or anything that you know they will actually use
• And my personal favorite: Set a budget and let them pick what they want. In most cases they know better than you about the difference between Assassin’s Creed 3 and 2.

Toys, and games and gadgets are fine, but as kids turn into teenagers, the holiday season provides an opportunity to give them something that would help them with transition into adulthood, arguably the most challenging time in a person’s life. So think joy, and fun, but also meaning and usefulness.

From the Dadding Dudes HQ, happy holidays and a peaceful new year!

Dadding Dudes

Oceans of words are forming now about the horrific shooting in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Such events are shocking and incomprehensible. Sadly they are becoming increasingly common in our country and around the world. As opposed to Mike Huckabee, I have no answers why; like the POTUS, I shed a tear.

But as someone who’s served 3 years as a paratrooper in the Israeli military, I want to scream at the top of my lungs:

BAN ASSAULT RIFLES!!!

Automatic and semi-automatic alike, these ultimate killing machines have no place in the hands of any civilian, anywhere, anytime. Such weapons are designed for accuracy and speed, with lethal effectiveness. They are death machines that do not belong anywhere, but since they already exist, their only place is in the battle field, at the hands of highly trained professionals.

If you have any respect for the constitution of the United States, then you know that the people who wrote the 2nd amendment never envisioned what we see in the news today, and what we will continue to see unless things change. The right to bear arms is about self-defense, and hunting.

The right to bear arms is not about attacking civilians with the chilling effectiveness of a Navy SEAL.

Assault rifles are meant for, guess what?  ASSAULT.

Sadly, I can assure you that right now as you read these lines, some mentally disturbed copy-cats are lurking in their dark holes of pain and loneliness, fantasizing about committing their own murderous attacks on innocent,  unsuspecting citizens. I don’t understand the kind of hell their brain creates; I don’t know why they do it.

But let’s make it harder for them to be such efficient killers. Let’s take the M-4′s, M-16′s, AK-47′s, and all other sub-machine guns out of the hands of civilians before the next insanity shocks us.

Dadding Dudes

“Morning, dad. Wad up?”

“Shhhhh!” I shush.

It’s a little after 8 a.m., the dudes come down for breakfast before they’re out the door for school, and as usual these days NPR features some story about Israel, Gaza, or the West Bank. It’s hardly ever good news, and it’s almost always a topic familiar to me, yet I cling to the small kitchen radio like any good Israeli learns to do from a very young age.

“Shhhh! The news is on!” And it may be the end of us. You never know.

The boys used to not care, but now they ask questions. They want to know what’s happening in the place where half their family lives. Who’s right? Who’s bad? They see a lot of anti-Israeli rhetoric on Reddit and other sites. They’re not sure what to think.

About a year back I took them for a visit in Israel. We toured the old city of Jerusalem and spent a day with a great guide who did a thorough job explaining the narratives of the sides involved in this long war for survival. I now see how the boys try to form some opinions about the conflict between the Jewish state and its Arab population and neighbors. But when they come to me for my opinion, all I do is complicate things further more. I have no one-liners, no simple solutions.

I’m doing the best I can.

In November of 2012 there has been another bout of violence in the Gaza Strip, where Israel operated its mighty military machine (in which I once was a small cog) in response to many months of Palestinian rocket-attacks against Jewish population in the southern parts of the country.

And this is how it goes in my house:

“Dad, why is Israel attacking the Palestinians in Gaza?”

“Because the Hamas has been attacking Israel for a long time now. You just don’t hear about it here. They shoot rockets almost daily. Israel is doing what every country would and should: defend its citizens.”

“But why the rockets?”

“The Hamas believes that this is their best way to achieve freedom.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t think so. Violence in not the solution. They’re only hurting their own people.”

“But Israel uses violence too.”

“Yeah. It’s just as wrong and futile.”

“So both sides are wrong?”

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s the same pattern over and over. They both believe that the other side understands only force. They both talk about crashing and destroying the other. It’s crazy…But both are right, too. Historically both peoples are victims,though at the same time they’re perpetrators. It’s complicated…”

At this point the boys turn back to Reddit for more straight-forward opinions about the issue.

I’m vague, conflicted, contradicting and confused. But what else can I be?

My parents barely survived the big war as Jews in Europe; their life experience dictates that military might, national pride, and a lot of chutzpah is the only way for Jews to survive in this world of hostility and persecution. They were victims for many years, but no longer. Can you blame them?

I think the Jews have a right to their own homeland.

But I also harbor a strong sense of frustration and despair facing Israel’s decades of injustice, oppression, dehumanization, and cruelty toward the Palestinian people. I’m deeply disappointed and angered at the Israeli governments in the last 60 years or so, for their shortsightedness, lack of understanding of reality, inability and unwillingness to do the right thing. Their actions and inaction have sank the country and both its peoples deep into religious extremism, violence, and unending war, where civilians are held hostage.

Not that the Palestinians are free of blame. They have committed multiple atrocities against innocent civilians, used terrorism and unconscionable violence, which eventually only worked against them.

Nevertheless, I think the Palestinians have a right to their own homeland, too.

 ”So what’s the solution, Dad?”

“Peace.”

“Yeah, but how?”

I don’t know. I have no magic wand.

When the dudes were toddlers, playing on the carpet, stealing each other’s Legos, occasionally whacking one another with a plastic toy, it was all about learning how to share, how to not hit. “Use your words,” we used to say a million times a day. “No hitting. Use your words.”

Maybe what the Middle East needs is a crew of kindergarten teachers. But seriously? I don’t know. It’s a tiny sliver of land on which both sides are fighting for survival. It’s crowded, hot, and volatile.

The question is, what do I teach my sons when I have no answers?

Complex politics can be a vivid display of reality’s fifty shades of gray (without the sex scenes in most cases). While following every rocket that flies in the Middle Eastern skies does not turn me into an expert, at least I can expose more details of the large picture, and bring to light more aspects of the puzzle. Most importantly, I tell my sons to doubt anybody who paints the situation in black-and-white terms.

In complex political conflicts, just like in the big existential questions of life, nothing is absolute. It is sometimes better to struggle with unanswered questions than dwell in the fake safety of half-baked answers.

But wait!…Hold on… There’s something on the news about voting for a Palestinian state at the U.N. It’s a great development, though it can also be a problem, or it may mean nothing… Anyway… I gotta go…

“Shhhh!”

Dadding Dudes

When the dudes were young and sweet and they took everything I said as the word of god almighty, I kept reminding myself to enjoy these precious times, because at some point they were, without a doubt, going to rebel.

I wasn’t sure what exactly they were going to rise up against: Our liberal politics? The humanistic values? Organic health food? In my mind I was ready for the boys, at some point during their teenage years, to turn into Evangelical Republicans who harass little old ladies while chewing a Big Mac, and muttering, “I hate you, dad.”

My sons of anarchy are 17 and 15 now, and there’s not much insurgency coming from their end.

Not that all is rosy around here all the time. They go to bed too late and we argue about this almost daily; they blow up at each other on occasion, sling four-letter words, and stop short of a full-blown fist fight; my older son gets sick of living here and is ready to move out (at least until the next time he gets hungry).

Then there’s their single most rebelled-against issue: our ongoing campaign against screen time. It’s not quite a revolution, more of a passive-aggressive resistance fueled by addiction to Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and the likes. While there are some occasional skirmishes over the issue, the parental unit knows that it lost the fight years ago, and truth be told, it partially joined the cause.

“You’ve been on the computer for three hours,” I say. “Get off the couch already. Go do something else.”

“Alright, dad,” he replies. “I will. In a minute. Just need to finish something up.”

And we both get back to our laptops for three more hours. Not much of a revolution, is it?

So where is teenage rebellion, angst, doubt and dissatisfaction? What happened to aspirations of freedom from the oppressive, rotten system? Anarchy? Loathing of bourgeois values?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not disappointed. I’ve seen rage against the machine. The machine keeps going just fine, but the rage often turns self-destructive. I’m not complaining here.

My boys are mostly polite and well-behaved; they work hard in school; they’re determined (at least so far) to go to college and do the whole good-education-that-leads-to-a-good-job thing; they try to eat healthy; they mostly stay out of trouble, they even love and respect their 87-year old bubbe, and lean down to kiss her cheek when they meet (they stoop a little lower each time, as they grow taller, and she shrinks).

What went wrong? Why are they so complacent? Did we raise them too protected and comfortable?

Of course I like to think that our parenting skills are so awesomely fantastic that our kids turned fully satisfied and adjusted. After all, we give them food and shelter, not to mention unconditional love, undivided attention, and full dedication to their wishes and needs twenty-four-seven and beyond. To top it off we also provide high-speed internet. What’s not to like, right?. But I doubt that they’re so well-adjusted only because we are such wonderful parents.

I think that there are different things going on here.

First, the answer to the question I posed above is, yes. They did grow up too protected and comfortable, possibly to a degree that turned them into young little bourgeoisie, and dampened their spirit of dissatisfaction with the way things are in the world. Though I’m not sure what I’d have done differently, this is an issue that I, or they, may regret later on in life. I’ll keep you posted.

But I don’t think that’s the only reason that they don’t rebel. There’s more.

We are a progressive little family, living in a progressive little college town. Our values are pluralistic; our main dogma is avoiding dogmas. We instilled the boys with humanistic values, but tried to not tell them what they should or should not believe in, what they should become, or who they should be.

Religious or secular, straight or gay, white collar or blue, these are things that you have to figure out for yourself. As long as you’re a mentch, and your choices don’t hurt you or others, give it a shot, see if it works.

I know, of course, that I’m an opinionated SOB, and my dear wife also tends to express some strong views from time to time. I realize that, even when it wasn’t our intention, the boys absorbed a lot from us, especially during that time when we were still gods. But the point is that we did not indoctrinate them, or try to mold their personalities.

While I do have expectations from my sons, I’m careful to put no suffocating demands on them. For instance, I’ve always expected them to work hard in school, but never bribed them to get high grades. The expectation is that they understand the value of succeeding in school, and act as self motivated people, as opposed to working hard for an A because I promised them a new X-box.

And there are other forces at play here. In addition to the egalitarian, liberal (excuse my French) environment that my boys grow up in, the very same internet access that I complain about prepares them to life in a manner very different than previous generations. I’m not claiming here that dwelling on Reddit is equivalent to a real-life community, but the shear exposure that they have to millions of people from around the world, people with varying opinions, lifestyles, and cultures, turns my boys into jaded citizens of this global village where it’s not about rebellion, but about information and choices.

Rebellion springs from too few possibilities, limitation, oppression. The two young men under my roof have, if anything, too many options to pick from. The world they live in may get overwhelming at times, but you don’t have much to rebel against when you’re free to make your choices.

So whatever they choose to do with their lives will not be because I told them to, nor because I told them not to, even if they turn into junk-food fundamentalist wingnuts, it’ll be their choice, and it’ll be okay. As long as they take the time to kiss bubbe.

Dadding Dudes

New research reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans: Adolescent brains are vulnerable, dynamic and highly responsive to positive feedback.

Finally some good news about the teenage brain!

For years now I’ve been puzzled about the bad rap that the adolescence gray-matter is getting from neuroscientists and child psychiatrists. They make it sound as if teenagers, equipped with their half-baked neural structure, just can’t help it but recklessly drive fast cars while smoking, drinking, and having unprotected sex at 90 MPH. Teenagers, according to most experts, are temporarily broken at best, but commonly described as just a short step above crazed apes.

Keep in mind that I’m not an anthropologist (I just play one on my blog), but those claims about the adolescence brain never made sense to me.

I can’t help but ask myself, as I lock my car keys in a safe, What is the evolutionary advantage of this developmental stupid-phase? What purpose did a seemingly broken brain serve us during the eons that it took us to become the species that we are today?

Is this some kind of a weeding-out process in the “Darwin Award” tradition? You’re going to be really dumb for a few years, take unnecessary risks, and practice cheap thrills, but if you survive those years of adrenaline and bad choices, then you’ll get to procreate, and spread your little offspring across the planet.

I don’t think so.

Evolution is wiser and more practical than this, and it seems to provide us with exactly what we need to survive and thrive at any stage of our lives. This is, after all, how we became the most successful species on this planet. Arguably.

In this new study, teens, as well as fossilized-brain grownups, played a game where they got points for answering questions about the motions of dots on a screen. This sounds so boring, I already give credit to those teens who completed the study without running out to the bathroom to smoke a joint. But anyway. While the dot game was going on, the researchers measured activity in brain regions involved in decision-making and rewards.

Now this is where it gets interesting: when a lot of points were at stake, those stupid teens actually spent more time studying the dots than the wise adults with their fully developed brains. MRI Scans of the younger people showed more activity in brain regions involved in making decisions than the older participants. They refrained from acting too fast, or exhibiting risky behavior. The teenagers even displayed patience! Who knew?

So what do we learn from this?

One thing is that teens are better than adults in playing silly games on a screen, but we already knew that. The other thing is that the infamous teen brain is capable of making the right decision without haste or irrationality.

They just need to understand the rules of the game, and what’s at stake.

Of course this kind of understanding of rules, risks, and rewards may be simple with dots bouncing on a screen, but it’s more complex in the game we call modern life. Perhaps too complex.

The kind of brain that our young hunter-gatherer lad is equipped with serves him well. He is fierce, fast, calculating the odds, and navigating well among the relatively few options that he has in his immediate environment. He’s good at that game.

Get food, get shelter, get girl.

Now shift forward a few thousand decades. One could argue that the basics are still the same: hunt, gather, procreate, but the details are undoubtedly more complex. Not to take anything away from the difficulty of bringing down a woolly mammoth, hunting in the job market is a different ballgame. Same goes for gathering enough money in one’s financial portfolio, or choosing the right mate from the hundreds, if not thousands of people a young person encounters during his or her days. The rules are not always clear, the odds are nebulous, the consequences frequently unpredictable.

The teenage brain that had provided us with an advantage for many generations now turns restless and confused like a wild animal in a confining cage. It craves speed, and power; it seeks challenges that promise immediate rewards.

So what is a daddy of dudes to do about all this?

First is to realize that there is nothing wrong with the teenage brain. It is exactly what it’s supposed to be. As a parent it is my job to help my boys make good use of that powerful tool stored in their skull, an instrument faster than an iPad, smarter than a Droid. It’s up to me to explain the odds the best I can; show them the stakes; lay out the map of possibilities, options, and opportunities; discuss the consequences of the choices they may make.

Our modern lives are never as simple as a game of dots moving on a screen, but the main principles are the same. Sometimes you move fast, sometimes you wait; there are moments to take a risk, and times to play it safe.

The teenage brain is wonderfully flexible, it is not rigid or stuck in the experiences of the past like grownups’ brains can be. Teenagers are about the future, ready to adapt and change their minds when circumstances vary. They are not about being irrational, but about surviving and thriving in an ever-changing world.

As a parent of two teens, I constantly bring up the high stakes involved in the game of life: happiness, well-being, health. I try to connect rational behavior and hard work to the rewards that life has to offer, and make it all look like a challenge more worthy than speed and danger. But more than this, I respect the boys for who they are right now, and I don’t see them as temporarily broken.

Dadding Dudes

Earlier in September my younger son had a surgery to correct a deformity in his rib cage, an ordeal involving a week of recovery in the hospital, followed by weeks of pain and discomfort. The preferred medical procedure for the syndrome that he had is quite uncommon, and requires a surgeon who has a high degree of experience and training in its specifics.

But this post is not about medical issues, not about the gut-churning experience of helplessly watching my child in the worst agony of his young life, not about willingly and happily doping my fifteen-year old with drugs that turned him into a mumbling zombie. This post is not even about the joys of hospital food, or the sleepless nights in the children’s ward, or trusting my son’s life with a bunch of people I don’t even know.

This post is about the Socialist, anti-American, unconstitutional experience that my family and I had: a major medical event fully covered by a state-funded health insurance plan. I mean, It’s all paid for now, and we still own our home!

But wait! Before you call your local Tea Party representative, let me explain.

The state of New York, where we live, provides a reasonably priced health coverage for children age nineteen and under, whose parents don’t have a health plan from an employer. It’s called Child Health Plus (CHP). I’m not sure what the plus stands for, maybe common sense? Compassion? Responsibility? Either way, I’ll take it.

For a very affordable monthly premium, my kids get decent health coverage, including meds, dental, and vision. It’s so exceptional that I am finding myself hesitant to write about it publicly. What if some liberty crazed Republican stumbles on this blog by accident? Next thing you know Sheldon Adelson funds a billion-dollar war against CHP and those victims-who-believe-they-are-entitled-to-government-aid, who depend on it.

Just as a comparison, my wife and I (both self-employed), proudly follow the path of liberty and free enterprise. We pay debilitating monthly premiums for a high-deductible health insurance plan with no drug coverage, co-payments galore, co-insurance, and other creative euphemisms, which all mean that nothing is fully covered, and  if we ever have a medical problem, it’d better not affect the hand that writes checks. We shell out thousands of dollars every year to get something that is only slightly better than nothing. Our health insurance plan is a flimsy safety net with holes large enough to fall through and hit the ground six-feet under.

Now don’t get me wrong: New York’s Child Health Plus is not perfect. It’s good and bad. As a HMO it forces us to only use providers who are in the network. When we wanted the operation done in the world-famous Cleveland Clinic by a nationally renowned surgeon, CHP, being bad, denied our request, BUT, being good, gave us the option to go to a relatively modest children’s hospital in a city an hour away from us. Begrudgingly, we went along with it, hoping that the surgeon we consulted with would be inexperienced with the correction procedure that our son needed, and willingly refer us out of network. To our surprise he didn’t. He assured us that he has successfully performed the surgery a number of times before, and was confident to operate on our son. He answered all our questions very knowledgeably, and we opted to go with our gut feeling, betraying our constitutional right for freedom of choice: we decided to let a doctor we never heard of before, who has less experience than we had hoped for, to go inside the chest cavity of our child. It was not our first choice, but it was a sensible one.

In retrospect, I’m extremely happy to report, we made the right choice.  Furthermore, the choice that CHP left for us proved better than the one we had in mind. Instead of traveling to a far away city, we stayed close to home; instead of a doctor whose statistics looked good, we found one that was perfect in person, and natural fit for us. The hospital was not only a high-class medical facility, but also an accommodating place for the initial recovery. The children’s ward was set up so that two parents can stay 24/7 with their sick child in a room with a bathroom, shower, and a flat-screen TV; the nurses were fantastic; the staff was great, from the room cleaner to the lunch lady and the security guards.

As a direct result of the excellent care that he received (and still receives), my son is doing real well now. While he still needs some pain management, he is back to school full-time, and we expect full recovery shortly.

So this blog post is about the American people, who could, if they weren’t such a collective of stubborn mules, vote for the same kind of health care coverage that CHP provides to the children of New York State. Not a perfect health coverage, not without forced limitations and provisions, but good coverage nevertheless, and undoubtedly better than losing your home.

If the cash-strapped state of NY can provide such coverage for its children, then each state, with some help from the federal government, can do the same for every citizen in this country, young and old alike.

This is not about takers, victims, entitlements, or some anti-liberty communist plot. It’s not about big government, but a government for the people; not a political issue, but a moral one. It’s about a healthy nation made of citizens pursuing happiness, just like it says in the Declaration of Independence.

My experience with CHP taught me a lesson. I am a humble beneficiary of privileges afforded by a collective to which I contribute my fair share (Man! That sounds Marxist). This does not make me feel like an entitled victim. Instead, it gives me some hope that maybe common sense will one day prevail in this country. Maybe that’s what the Plus in Child Health Plus stands for.

Dadding Dudes

Last weekend our region hosted a music summer festival, a huge, annual, four-day event that involves thousands of people, rivers of beer, clouds of sweet smoke, and dancing till sunrise and beyond. We’ve been going to it for years, since the boys were very young, and enjoyed the kids activities, the music, and meeting with friends. At 17, my older son still loves the event. This year he spent two nights camping in a tent at the festival’s grounds, wandering around with his friends, exposed to a highly concentrated dose of carnival life. His younger brother, on the other hand, stayed at home, happily engaged in internet-based adventures in the virtual cloud. He couldn’t care less about the rowdy festivities.

 On some days my two dudes represent two opposites. One is a social creature, out with friends, exposed to the fun and dangers of teenage life; the other is home, on the couch with a laptop, visiting all sorts of websites, exposed to different fun, and dangers of teenage life. Personally I am more concerned about virtual-life boy than about real-life boy.

 But why? You may ask. Why worry about virtual boy’s safe dwelling on the couch, while real life boy has friends with motorcycles, some of whom had already had the honors of visiting the local ER with alcohol poisoning? Virtual boy, you may claim, is only exposed to the dangers of internet predators, a problem easily avoidable with some common sense and basic caution, while his brother is out there facing the unpredictable risks and physical dangers of life away from home, and the kind of predators one can not switch off with a click of a mouse.

 All good arguments. And the truth is that at any given moment in time, internet life IS way safer than real life; a couch more dependable than a scooter, a website, any website, friendlier than downtown past midnight. But my worry is not about the present, it’s about the long run. What kind of a person am I helping to raise? How well prepared would he be for, well… real life?

 I slept with my cellphone by my side during those two summer nights when he was away doing who-knows-what at the festival; I had all kinds of scenarios haunting my dreams, but I also knew that he’s having a blast, that it’s risky but good for him to be away from home, on his own, saying yes to some temptations, and, hopefully turning away from others. I remember how formative those experiences had been for me at that age, and I was not going to let my parental anxieties deprive him of those best of times.

 He survived, as well as his parents. I know that the experience has taught him some valuable lessons. He’s up another rung on the growing-up ladder. But meanwhile, back on the couch, did anything of value happened in the virtual world of internet?

I don’t know. I’m not saying this sarcastically. I truly do not know.

Two-hundred years ago people my age were the elders of the tribe. They had experience-based knowledge that younger humans did not possess. (They were also prone to kick the bucket any day, but that’s a different story). But today our years of experience give us very few tools to understand the ins and outs of internet life, web-based social connections, role-playing games and virtual identities. It is very possible that my couch-warrior son is getting a very adequate preparation for his future life. It is conceivable that my dinosaur brain is incapable of understanding this new world. I don’t know. But I’m still worried.

We know the damage of sweet clouds of smoke, but do we fully understand the effects of the virtual cloud on our brains?

 Statistics tell us that more and more people spend more and more time on the internet. This is where they work, play, meet new people, and interact. There is something about it that disturbs me. The sole fact that this is so foreign to our eons of evolutionary years as a species is enough to sometimes make me want to smash our home modem and Frisbee our laptops through the window. The fact that I am almost as guilty of the same sin against our primordial nature worries me even more: some days I spend more time with my computer than I am ready to publicly confess.

 What effect does computer dwelling has on our brains, our psyches, our souls? What are the dangers of the internet, and the physical isolation that comes with it? Good questions. I think I’m going to Google them up now, get some answers. I’ll keep you posted.

Dadding Dudes