LZ Granderson hates your kids . . . well, maybe not YOUR kids but he certainly makes it clear he hates some folks’ kids and judging from this interview with CNN, it isn’t just for the reasons he states.

Here he discusses the need for parents to discipline their children so that they are well behaved in public. Fair enough, and certainly worthwhile.

However, watch for the subtext.

I absolutely agree that parents should teach their children to behave early and that allowing children to run rampant is a terrible way to parent a child. However, it is important that “The Look” not be based upon fear but on mutual trust and respect. As regular readers here know, I am an advocate of positive disciplining and am very much against corporal punishment. The point Granderson makes about teachers feeling powerless because they cannot spank the kids in their charge speaks only in part to poor parenting, it also speaks to teachers not having diverse enough tricks in their toolbox. Certainly, school age children should not require spanking or fear techniques in order to gain appropriate behavior.

While I am absolutely for children behaving appropriately in public places, especially places that are normally reserved for silence and formal decorum, I would be very wary of parents who have children that are always silent . . . sometimes an overly quiet child is a beaten child.

Granderson has a right to prefer to travel or eat or live in areas that are kid free . . . and he has a right to expect appropriate – but not robotic – behavior of children in public places when their paths meet . . . as do we all.

I would be wary of initiatives that attempt to eliminate children from the mix completely . . . certainly the airlines that are making first class kid-free are being a bit on the creepy side . . . essentially their plan is to move mothers and their charges into business and even economy . . . regaling them to second-class status.

While for Granderson, children are not the center of the universe, they are for some of us . . . and even for those who are not, they certainly aren’t somehow inferior beings merely because they are still learning how to behave.

I know the main point Granderson is trying to make is not anti-child . . . for some reason a bit of the humor at the expense of others and tone of the piece rubbed me the wrong way . . . not out of a feeling of being a target either as my child has never behaved in an inappropriate way in public, she’s never had the temper tantrum or run around crazy approach to growing up . . . nor did we have to beat her to teach her appropriate behavior.

I do believe there are some folks who really probably should never have been parents and that others need a bit more solid education on being parents before jumping into it (the old joke that it’s harder to get a license to drive a car than it is to become a legal parent is true, and a bit sad all things being equal) but . . . I think that there is one very great flaw in Granderson’s thesis that parents should not allow their children’s needs or desires to become top priority . . . he’s making assumptions that to do so is to allow a child to run wild or roughshod when even the best parents really should be doing that very thing . . . it’s the parents who suck who are not making their children the priority.

One of my absolutely favorite statements by Joseph Cambell is “when the child is born, the parents become as if dead for the rest of their lives are spent nurturing that new life” and for me it’s very very true. Oh, not in a parents-no-longer-have-a-real-life way or that the fun is sucked out of their lives way . . . folks who assume that need to promise themselves and the world that they won’t have kids. Rather in a very positive way. Don’t get me wrong, my wife and I don’t feel “dead” – we’re not zombie parents who exist solely for the benefit of our child who mindlessly do whatever she wishes and we certainly do have our own interests and have things we enjoy without her involvement (although we do make a very real effort to include her and to create experiences for her benefit). After our daughter was born, every major decision we have made has been with our daughter’s interests and needs in mind . . . where we live, what sort of car we buy, even whether or not I keep my job or move on . . . however, we do not do this with resentment, we do it with care and love and we do it automatically . . . and yet . . . despite Granderson’s assumptions, we have a very very well-behaved child, one who does not make an inappropriate fuss in public (and didn’t do so even when she was a toddler and reasonable people – yes, I said REASONABLE, not the secret child haters who revel in the idea of barring children from restaurants or resorts or airplanes – might give it a pass, to a degree).

One can focus on their children . . . appropriately . . . without giving up parental rights and without creating what may seem like daemonspawn. Of course, Granderson is also very very correct that some folks haven’t seemed to have caught on to just how to accomplish that.

– Brian