Delegating Fatherhood.

I can see Chip percolating on Aunt Bosky’s diagnosis.

I miss how it used to be. He’d climb into my lap, we’d talk, and all his troubles got sorted out right there, with my arms around him.

Of course, most of his worries were the sortable kind. His little Rubik’s Cube was never more than a few turns out of sync.

Now? I’m not sure how it happened, but most of my fatherly tasks have been delegated. So when Chip heard about Aunt Bosky’s cancer, he took his questions to Google. Meanwhile, I stand in the wings, waiting like an understudy to be called on stage.

Let’s face it, dads. Fatherhood is being outsourced:

• Questions and Answers: Outsourced to Google and AI.
• Hands-on Mentoring: Outsourced to YouTube and Etsy.
  
• Talking and Sharing: Outsourced to Twitter and Facebook.
  
• Fun and Games: Outsourced to Sony and Nintendo.
  

Wake up, dads of America! The Father Fire-Sale is on! The marketers and sellers and branders have hijacked your role! Task by task, you are being replaced!

Stand up before it’s too late! Unplug those computers, turn off those Wi-Fis, box up those game stations!

Take a page from Howard Beale’s notebook: get up, stick your head out the window and shout, “I’m a mad dad and I’m not going to delegate any more!”

Whoa... Got a little carried away there.

Take a breath, Bob.

Wait a minute! Why am I apologizing? Maybe I need to get carried away.

​Shouting is appropriate in a burning house.

Comments

Media Jean: I sometimes forget that your dad doesn’t just dislike technology. He kinda hates it.

Chip: Yeah. Once I tried explaining how the newspapers and books he loves are also technology. I mean, newspapers were new at some point. People used to gather in the town square. News was a real community event. If you asked a Town Crier, he might say newspapers ruined everything.

Media Jean: I never thought about it that way!

Chip: That’s nothing compared to books. Books were a bigger change than the Internet ever was.

Media Jean: I guess that’s true. Books changed how people got and shared information. The internet is just an upgrade.

Chip: Right! If you look at today’s technology as just the next step, then it’s not so scary because there was a step before this step, a step you were comfortable with. From that point of view, changing technologies are as natural as changing seasons.

Media Jean: I love that kind of thinking! What’d your dad say to all that?

Chip: He said, “That may be technically true, but it’s not emotionally true.”

Media Jean: Uh… What does that mean?

Chip: Beats me. He tried to explain it, but lost me after the fifth Thoreau quote.

Media Jean: Your dad has read us the Thoreau Riot Act so many times, I practically got that book memorized.

Chip: The Thoreau Riot Act. That’s funny.

Media Jean: Thoreau! What a sour puss! I bet he wasn’t invited to a lot of parties.

Chip: Ha ha! Thoreau the party pooper!

Media Jean: Ha ha! Instead of, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” maybe his first draft of Walden really read, “I went into the woods because nobody liked me.”

Chip: Ha ha!

Media Jean: Let’s go to Project Gutenberg, download Walden, and publish an “unauthorized first draft.” We can rewrite the whole thing from a whiner’s point of view.

Chip: I don’t know. It’s pretty preachy already.

Media Jean: That’s true. Man, you can’t even make fun of Thoreau for long. What a sour puss!

​Comic strip from the series "Bob's No Tech Igloo"
(Kid, Inc. Volume 2: The Batcave of Childhood)

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