Brett Berk

The Gay Uncle is now writing two monthly features for the hip, intelligent, online parenting magazine Babble. The first is a “Dispatch” essay about a topic of his choosing–so far he’s written about things like mediated divorces, gender development, and lying to kids. But it’s the second we’ll be discussing here, a new column featuring his interviews with young (3-8 year old) kids, in which he asks them for their advice or ideas about different issues. Last month, it was The Economy, this month, it’s Careers. Since the shtick has a sort of “man-on-the-street” quality to it, Gunc has to go to places where there are crowds of kids (schools, playgrounds, libraries, Pinkberry) and because interviewing children requires parental consent, he has to walk up to total strangers and ask if he can talk to their kids. This might be easier if he were a) a woman, b) pushing a stroller, c) not insanely gay, d)wearing something besides a long, belted trench-coat. (This last bit is a joke; he never belts his jacket). As it stands, he often ends up having conversations with parents that go something like this:
G.U.: “Hi, my name is Brett. I’m a writer for Babble the parenting magazine, and I’m working on a monthly feature where we interview kids about a topic, and then publish their responses along with a photograph of them. I’m looking for kids between the ages of 3 and 8 to interview. Do you have any kids in that age range who might want to talk to me?
Mom: [Glancing around nervously] “Security!”
or
Mom: [Holding hand to chest] “You scared me.”
or
Mom: “This playground is for parents and children only. Are you a parent?”

The G.U. then has to explain that he’s an early childhood educator, that he ran a preschool, that yes, he indeed wrote the world famous instructive non-fiction book The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting. At which point, some moms soften, and others seem even more suspicious. He offers up his business card, he gives out his phone number and email address, he shows his driver’s license. He refuses to talk to the kids without the parent’s introducing him and remaining present. But some parents still keep up their guard. Dear readers, you know that Gunc wants only the best for all children (and to finish his damn assignment and get paid). Do you have any ideas about how to convince moms that he’s “safe”? Should he get one of those pre-screening cards they have in airports? Should he wear a wig and carry a fake baby? Should he get himself castrated? Let him know below in COMMENTS.

It’s official. The Gay Uncle loves his little niece, Cake. It isn’t only because the girl is very developmentally advanced, beginning to take her first steps well before her first birthday. Or because she’s been a point of care-giving communion for his three other similarly-aged and rivalrous Key West-based nieces Amber 9, Faye 10, and Lucia 8. Or because she’s made his sister Roxy and her boyfriend Nick so happy that they’ve bought a house down there, one with a guest room for him to stay in. No, he loves the baby girl because, when watching one of the videos he recently made for his Vanity Fair automobile column Stick Shift she reportedly cracked up. Of course you know by now that Gunc loves an audience, so that might have been enough. But after she laughed, she pointed at the screen and said the magic word…“Uncle!” Now, whenever anyone says the word “Uncle”, the baby guffaws. Once he heard this story, the G.U. immediately got online, cashed in some frequent flier miles, and booked a ticket down there. He’ll be reporting from the beach next week, and should have loads of good new anecdotes and observations from all your favorite Conch Republic characters.

The Thanksgiving holiday is over. The less intelligent of your loved ones spent most of it gorging, napping, in gastric distress, and trampling–or being trampled–at the nearest big-box store. But not you. You’re too smart for all that. You’ve decided to do all your holiday shopping online. And here’s a chance to get that special someone in your life something truly special. Just in time for the gift-giving season, The Gay Uncle is offering a special package deal on his amazing parenting book The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting. Sure you can buy it from any online bookstore, like our stellar partners to the right, or pick up one of the thousands of used copies that someone’s tossed aside after receiving it at their baby shower, but for a limited time only, you can also buy it RIGHT HERE. And if you do, the Gay Uncle himself will personally inscribe it with a witty note to your loved one, and sign it with his signature…signature. $15 includes everything: book, inscription, collectible bookmark, and even first class shipping. Just type up what you want inscribed in the Inscription field, and click the Buy button. Perfect for every mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, uncle, aunt, or generic gay relative on your list. Much better than another impersonal gift-card. Much more useful than an ugly sweater. And good for the environment. Click and buy below.

Inscription

It’s official. The Gay Uncle is going to Alaska. And it’s not just to check off the box on the only state he hasn’t visited, to eat wild salmon that hasn’t spent the last eighteen hours on a cargo plane, or to see some icy tundra before it all melts. He’s actually been invited to go North to the Future (state motto) to continue his speaking tour of preschools around the country. As it turns out, a friend of his from high school runs the Jewish Community Center early childhood center in Anchorage (www.FrozenChosen.org) and has asked him to come up and deliver a lively presentation to the parents of her students, and do a workshop with her teachers. This won’t happen until May, which gives Gunc plenty of time to find a super-fancy rustic lodge in which to spend the rest of the week he’ll be up there. He’s hoping that, with global warming, it will be “spring” by the time he arrives, and the roads to the super-fancy rustic lodges will be open. But before he heads out to the world of arctic lava hot-rocks and baby-seal-fat-body-wraps, he’s made a second urban plan. Based on a recommendation from one of his former preschool students–and the sincere needs dictated by the high-profile pregnancies in the area–he sent a signed copy of his stellar book The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting to the Wasilla Public Library, along with an offer to be a guest lecturer at their preschool story time. And in an act of kismet, on the day he received confirmation of his Alaskan JCC gig, a letter from the Library also arrived. “Thank you for your donation of the book entitled The Gay Uncle’s Guide to parenting. I’m also going to pass on your information to our Youth Services librarian with the offer of doing a guest story time reading.” The G.U. will keep you posted on how things go, but he is certainly looking forward to the trip, to the opportunity to help Bristol Palin with her new baby, and to have the chance to answer the question offered up by Raymond Carver in one of his famous short stories. “What’s in Alaska?”

The Gay Uncle wrote about sticking his big Gay nose into other people’s business this week in his Yahoo! Parenting column tackling the subject of disciplining friends’ and family members’ kids. Surprisingly–given his status as a know-it-all/butt-insky–he generally advocates keeping his ideas to himself, particularly in moments of conflict, as outsiders making suggestions often confuses kids, raises parents’ hackles, and ends up exacerbating situations. (Of course, he doesn’t always succeed in staying silent.) Instead, he recommends discussing the situation later, after the fact. And obviously, he’s not about standing idly by if a kid is doing something that might result in injury to themselves or others.

Well, just after he sent this column to his editor, he had a chance to put his advice to the test. He was at a party at a stranger’s house in L.A. and there were a few parent couples with toddlers present, including one pair with a particularly adorable young boy. Though this kid was probably around 14 months old and a fully functioning walker, because his mom was only about five feet tall, he appeared…shrunken, like he’d been washed in cold instead of dry-cleaned. He was, however, just the right size for investigating things close to the ground like people’s shoes, dropped tortilla chips, and the cat’s tail. He was also properly heighted for exploring the cabinets under the kitchen sink, where the G.U. noticed him handling various exciting objects like: a bottle of ammonia, a can of Easy Off, and a box of what may have either been Clorox wipes or toilet-cleaning wand refills. Gunc was fully tempted to go running into the room and gently explain to the boy that these items were dangerous, and redirect him toward some mildly less harmful playthings, like a steak-knife or ball-peen hammer. But then the Gay Uncle noticed that the kid’s parents were standing right nearby–calm as everyone in California pretends to be–and he supposed that if they weren’t concerned, then his own attempts at intervention would probably go over about as well as the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He hopes they at least rinsed the kid’s hands off after he finished playing.

The Gay Uncle was minding his own business, having a big gay brunch with his boyfriend at a dumb outdoor café in L.A. this weekend, when a nice-looking straight couple walked by, pushing their toddler in a stroller. Gunc is not exactly sure what happened next–he didn’t see a measles innoculation, an inorganic soymilk tetra-pack, a pile of Phthalates, or priest anywhere in the vicinity–but all of the sudden, the Bugaboo the pair was propelling sort of…went off, and started producing a deafening siren. And it wasn’t any ordinary noise–and it strangely wasn’t coming from their child, whose mouth was closed. It was a glowing, penetrating, electronic shriek, something like a cheap car alarm, but much, much louder, and more shrill. “Excuse me, but what the fuck is happening,” the G.U. asked, looking around, in case Los Angeles was or collapsing into a chasm, or falling victim to a Botox recall alert, and this stroller was the coal mine canary. But absolutely nothing was going on. Nothing at all. Just a bunch of people trying to eat mediocre omelettes, and roasted heirloom potatoes with homemade catsup. Eventually the nice mother and father found some way to make their child’s wheeled conveyance stop its piercing wail, and they strolled by as if nothing had happened–no apology, no explanation–moving toward Trader Joe’s (a.k.a. Parent Mecca) at a leisurely pace. The Gay Uncle looked at his boyfriend and shrugged, as if to say Isn’t this just like life: loud, mysterious, and ending abruptly. But then he glanced briefly over at the couple sitting next to them on the sidewalk: a 70 year-old woman, and what he assumed to be her husband. Catching his eye, the old lady shook her head. “Fucking Breeders,” she said with disgust to her compatriot, revealing themselves to be a cranky old lesbian and her gay-best-friend. “They think they own the sidewalks.” “You should see them at the Farmers’ Market, or the coffee place,” he spat. The woman squinted at Gunc and Tal. “What was that siren all about anyway?” Her brunch-mate shrugged and looked generally befuddled, as did G&T, and soon enough, everyone went back to eating. But as the G.U. found himself mulling over the question, he realized that the weirdest part wasn’t that he didn’t know the answer; the weirdest part was that the kid didn’t seem to flinch at this cacophony, as if the deafening alarm went off all the time. The Gay Uncle believes that–unless his parents are training him to sleep through nuclear attack, or to be a soldier in the endless Afghan occupation–this can’t be very good for his development.

The Gay Uncle spent the entire day at the L.A. Auto Show working the convention center for his Vanity Fair car column Stick Shift, a practice that involved absolutely no children (unless you count the hundreds of other overgrown boys–and the occasional girl–running around, getting in an out of every available vehicle.) But after the show, he had drinks with his friends Kate and Dylan and their two kids Max, 6 and Athena, 3, and while discussing the show (and being shown some of Max’s own favorite toy cars) Kate told him what it was like to bring a child to such an event. Apparently, she’d attended the New York Auto Show a few years before with Max. As with most Auto Shows there were a number of demonstration games (Volvo’s “Safety City” being the G.U.’s favorite this year in L.A., wherein one is instructed to crash into the rear of various computer generated vehicles) there to lure in kids of all ages. After waiting in line for what seemed like hours, she and Max finally made it to the front. The boy was enjoying playing around with the game, which involved trying to get a Volkswagen up to its top speed. But, being slightly competitive, Kate didn’t feel he was succeeding. “Go faster,” she kept instructing from the sidelines. “Faster. Faster. Go faster, Max.” Her son attempted but still didn’t meet his mother’s standards. So, standing over him, she tried to get him to push harder on the pedal. “The one. On this side.” She pointed at his feet, which dangled somewhat helplessly above the controls (he could either see the screen, or press the pedals, but not both.) “No. Harder, Max. Push this pedal harder. HARDER.” Finally, the boy’s car icon came to a screeching halt and crashed sideways into a banked wall. His turn was over. He was sad. Kate was disappointed. “It was only after we left the exhibit that I realized, I had been telling him to push the wrong pedal the entire time. He was trying to hit the gas, and I was screaming at him to press the brake.” She sighed. “I still have nightmares about that moment all the time.”

The Gay Uncle is once again back in California, this time on a dual mission to cover the L.A. Auto Show for his Vanity Fair car column Stick Shift and pitch around some TV ideas. You can follow the progress of both right here. But before any of this gets going, he’s been able to spend a few days hanging out with friends. In fact, as soon as he arrived, he went to see the new James Bond movie with his favorite straight parent couple, Kate and Dylan, and the magical gay pair Ben and Gregory. In order to find the best possible seats (yes, movie seats are reserved in L.A.) they chose a 5:30 showing. This pleased the G.U. to no end, as he wanted to very close to the screen, just in case there was another scene of Daniel Craig being tied naked to a chair and receiving some very belabored testicular torture like there was in Casino Royale. But when he told Ben and Gregory that they’d be attending the early screening, they balked a bit, but then consented. “Okay,” Greg said. “So…I guess in terms of getting some dinner after, we’ll just have to see how Kate and Dylan’s kids are feeling.” Gunc was stunned. Did these fellas really believe that Max and Athena–ages 6 and 3–were going to be attending an R-rated action film, replete with stabbing, punching, shooting, and (hopefully) scrotal smashing? “The kids aren’t coming!” G.U. replied, outlining the types of violence he was expecting (anticipating) as cause. “Right. Right,” his gay pals said. “Of course.”
But when they arrived at the movie, there were indeed a number of young children present in the audience, including a baby that shrieked for about fifteen minutes in the middle. (Justifiably, Gunc might add: this part was very boring.) The G.U. believes that kids take in just about everything they see, regardless of how young or old they are. But he knows that sitters are expensive, and that infants often sleep through shitty films. Still, bearing witness to this made the G.U. wonder, What’s the most inappropriate movie you’ve ever brought your kid to? And why? Let fly below in Comments.

The Gay Uncle and his youthful ward Tal were over at a friend’s house the other night, having dinner with her and her two kids, Lucian, 5 and Gregor, 9. The Guncles’ arrival seems to always bring out the boys…performative side. Last time they were over, the brothers enacted a musical routine with a toy drum, a piano, and a glockenspiel that was equal parts Noh, and No-Doubt. This time, it was puppets.

There were two shows. The first was pretty standard psycho-dramatic fare featuring a bullying narrative, in which an evil white paper-bag bully, after pounding relentlessly on a number of white paper-bag victims, gets his comeuppance. But it was the second show that really captured the G.U.’s attention. This one began in the 19th Century, and featured two white paper bag puppets who ruled over a crowd of brown paper bag puppets. The brown bags kept demanding their freedom, and were rebuked by the whites, until they were led into emancipation by a charismatic sack who was exactly half brown and half white. This play ended with three codas. The first fast-forwarded into the year 3016, and featured a future in which no one recognized skin (paper?) color as an issue. The second went back to January 20, 2009, and featured the half-and-half bag taking the oath of office to be the president (causing the assembled adult audience to tear up a little.) But it was the third that was the funniest. This one took place in the present day, in “Alaska, at the Governor’s office” and featured a white bag puppet with rectangular glasses and a down-home, female voice. “Servant,” the woman said to a brown bag, “can you bring around the car? I need to go shopping for some more fancy clothes? And while you’re at it, open my window shades. I need to see Russia.” The brown bag (and the audience) paid her no mind. Gunc’s friend turned to him. “Can’t wait to watch her on Dancing With The Stars. You think it’ll be next season, or the one after that?”

The Gay Uncle received a call from a Daddy friend the other day (we’ll call him Josh), asking how to retrofix a parenting situation he felt he’d just flubbed. Josh was watching as his nearly three year-old son was playing on some riding toys in the playroom of their apartment building. The boy was pretending to be a firefighter, an occupation which, apparently, involved pushing all the other kids’ vehicles out of the way and screaming “I’m a fireman!” (Maybe they were parked in front of a hydrant or a burning building?) Josh kept trying to corral his son, saying “No,” “Stop pushing,” and “That’s not nice,” but to little effect. Eventually, the rescue work escalated to a fiery frenzy, and he watched as his son got out of his truck, reached into one of the other vehicles, and firmly bitch-slapped the driver. Reeling in horror, Daddy firmly grabbed his son’s arm, dumped him in his stroller, and removed him from the scene. The boy howled the entire way back to the apartment, screaming in his own defense, I’m a fireman! I’m a fireman! “I felt like the other parents in the playroom were sort of on his side,” Daddy told the G.U. “What should I have done different?”

As usual, Gunc had a few pieces of advice.
1) Avoid blank commands like No and Stop when giving instructions: These kinds of decrees, when used alone and without further direction, strand kids in an abstract nether-zone, where the behavior they’re engaged in is being prohibited, but they’re not offered a viable replacement. Kids have a difficult time thinking outside of the proximal and the present tense. They need guidance. Use the G.U.’s patented E.A.R. method (Explain, Adjust, Redirect). For example, “Pushing other kids’ cars bothers them, and can hurt. Let them drive on their own. If you want to push something else around, use these traffic cones, or pillows.”
2) Not nice: Nice is a weak and ill-defined term. Kids often don’t understand the impact of their actions, and a word like “nice” doen’t really help. Guide their comprehension of cause and effect by being concrete and specific. Say, “Hitting hurts,” or “Pushing is dangerous.”
3) Set expectations and repercussions in advance: This is the big one. Part of why the little boy (and the other moms) responded like they did was because the dad hadn’t been clear about boundaries and responses. Provide warnings, and let your kid know what’s going to happen if they don’t adhere. Then, when you swoop in to follow through, your kid might still scream, but at least you won’t have to feel guilty. And you’ll know that you’re providing useful lessons for them (your will is law, you mean what you say, actions have effects) instead of just being reactive. Granted this is difficult in situations where your child gets violent (It hits! It’s evil!) But you need to get beyond this embarrassment, shame, and terror. Kids make mistakes. But they expect the grown ups around them to know better.