The Art of Imperfect Parenting

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Take the issue of guns and violence. In our old neighborhood, where my daughter, Nora, and son, Martin, spent their first 10 and 8 years, respectively, disarmament was the rule. No toy guns were allowed on the premises. It became sort of a neighborhood joke that when you came over to our house you had to leave your squirt guns and plastic Uzis on the sidewalk. There was a very practical reason for this: The crack house at the end of the block invited periodic gunplay that was all too real. We made it clear to our kids and their friends that the local gangstas as well as the cops, faced with someone holding what looked like a gun, tended to shoot first and ask questions later—if at all.

Five years ago, when we had finally outgrown our tiny two-bedroom bungalow and moved to a larger house in a less exciting neighborhood, gun control was less of an issue. My wife, Sharon, and I discovered the pacifist stance we had inculcated in our son was a lot less durable than we thought, and Martin was soon lobbying for an expanded arsenal of weapons (he had been content until then with fashioning small revolvers and derringers from Legos). We backed away hesitantly from our nonproliferation treaty, with the agreement that guns shouldn’t be pointed at anyone, and soon all manner of weapons began infiltrating our home while spirited armed skirmishes began breaking out in the yard. The war, we soon realized, had been lost.

But I’m not sure it was such a bad thing that Martin was able to change our minds. It didn’t come about through strategically planned tantrums or through a long-term program of low-level whining. He’d basic-ally made the case that running around with play guns was no longer a big deal. He knew the difference between real and pretend violence. And, eventually, so did we.

Nora and I had a similar revelation earlier this year, when she announced her interest in seeing Eminem’s new movie, 8 Mile—“which you’re not seeing,” I quickly interjected. Reviews of this film had incited a firestorm of debate over its violence, sexual content, and liberal use of the F-word, and we had maintained a pretty rigid policy on what movies and TV shows were considered acceptable viewing.

And as Nora and I faced off in the kitchen that evening, I could sense the first twinges of teenage independence pulling at her -- and me. I told her about the reviews of the movie, and stubbornly argued that we shouldn’t be supporting artists and production companies who spread degrading images of women and rappers through the mass culture, and how this sort of thing debases even the viewers, and yadda, yadda, yadda . . . Even as I was making the argument, though, I knew it was lame. And so did Nora.

We let it drop for the evening, and the next day I happened to ask a colleague about the movie. The reviews were overblown, she told me; it really wasn’t that bad. So Nora and I negotiated further and came to a compromise. We agreed not to shell out $7.50 apiece to see something that might be stupid (at least to my way of thinking) and would wait until it came to our nearby second-run theater. Then we’d see it together and talk about the stuff all the reviewers were saying was so dangerous to the morals of America.

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