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Article - Don't be a Cool Fool
The Weekend Australian - August 16-17, 2003
Copyright News Limited
Luke Slattery

Family confessions, as a general rule, should be restricted to the obituary pages. But this column is prompted by a book that recently reached my desk bearing the title: How 2 B a Cool Dad! Bristling with exhortations such as "Take Your Children to Work with You!" and "Gossip is Cool", and with a cover illustration of a smiley face with wraparound sunnies, it's really a pretty silly book. But it did get me thinking about the vexed issue of modern parenting, if only to rehearse passages from my own forthcoming title: In Defence of the Daggy Dad.

So please indulge me.

Rule No 1 for the Daggy Dad: Use exclamation marks judiciously and unlearn all that email shorthand. What possible advantage is "2" over "to" except as a fatuous marker of cool? Does "B", likewise, offer something more stylistically advanced than "be"? There's not even much of a brevity gain. Language usage might be shifting like a dune in an overnight storm but the Daggy Dad knows just where he's drawn the line before nightfall.

Rule No 2 for the Daggy Dad: Stop dressing like your children. No fashion trend devised by the middle-aged has ever trickled down to the young: all of fashion's energies vector upwards. Children invent (or reinvent) a look or style so that they can call it their own and say: "We're young. We're now. We're different." Parents in denial about their own decrepitude soon want a slice of the action, and before long dads wearing all the teen badges: baggy pants with briefs revealed, boardies, cargo pants, beanies. At this point the whole thing has been mainstreamed. The badges start to stink. So youngsters have to invent something else to call their own. The only way for parents to halt the wheel of fashion, and hence economise on the family clothing budget, is to start wearing old peoples' clothes.

As soon as Italian and Spanish men hit 40 they begin to dress like Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday and to promenade proudly in their pleated trousers and suit coats. It may be daggy. But at least it's not tragic. And the problem for the Cool Dad is that he is really an unwitting tragic.

But let's depart the realm of style for more serious matters. 'How 2 B a Cool Dad!,' which happens to have been written by a woman, counsels fathers to talk to their children about sex. To this piece of advice I have a reply from kidsville: "Gro-ose."

Only a cool fool imagines that his children want anything to do with sex talk in the family circle. It's a case of putting yourself in your father's brogues. You are 13. Dad knocks on the bedroom door, slides into the seat beside you and offers, unbidden, a little sex education: "Son, did you know that 70 per cent of woman can't achieve orgasm through penetrative sex alone? So let me reveal for you a few tricks of the trade..."

You begin to glow like The China Syndrome. Your stomach begins to feel like you've swallowed a sherbet bomb the size of a bread loaf. And you are left with a repressed memory, to be discovered years later when under psychoanalysis for impotence.

Pamela Karitinos, author of 'How 2 B a Cool Dad!, writes in defence of this no-brain notion: "It's a challenging topic to speak about with children, but sex is going to come about eventually. Sex was never a problem until society made it one by turning it into something that should either be suppressed or exploited. But ultimately we all know that sex is good." Uh-huh. Good sex is good, while no sex is better than bad sex. There's a lot, in fact, to be said for celibacy. And for that you don't have to join a religious order. People can go a long time without sex, as marriage just goes to prove.

There is too much sex in the culture today: one Britney Spears film clip is sex education enough for a lifetime of trouble. Family conversations, particularly at dinner time, should be kept as cones of sexual silence and Victorian propriety. Because if Dad starts talking about sex, the sexualisation of society will have reached saturation point – there's absolutely nowhere to hide. So rule No. 3 for the Daggy Dad: On no account talk to children about sex.

Many parents have their daughters enrolled in private schools; mine have their names down at the heavily castellated Carolingian Order of St Ursula at the top of Mt Blanc. Meanwhile the television at home is equipped with an X-chip so that it short-circuits as soon as flesh tones take up 30 per cent of the screen image. It also seems to cut out at every close-up of Bert Newton, which is an unintended but entirely desirable consequence.

Of course I am, it's true, being a teensy bit facetious. But it's only the sort of exaggeration that a novelist, or some other form of professional fibber, might deploy to amplify a deep-felt truth. And the point, in this instance, is that we really do spend too much time fretting about being cool with children and perhaps not enough time encouraging them to say: "Yes, Dad." Children need to know, as well, that it's cool to be uncool.

"Sharing a joke between Dad and child is the ultimate in having a great friendship," says the author of this little bookette. "If you can laugh with them, then you are cooler than you know. The funniest jokes I've heard are risque Dad jokes at the most inappropriate times and places." But her sample cool gag is really just an old poo joke.

My concluding axiom for the Daggy Dad: Cute is the new cool.

To this end let me offer my Dad's joke of the century.

A man walks into a doctor's surgery with a chip up his nose and a piece of fish in his ear. "Doctor," he says, "I've been feeling poorly of late. Something is definitely wrong. I'm tired, vague and irritable. But I just can't work out the problem."

"I can tell by just one look at you," replies the doctor. "You're not eating properly."

U2 can B a Daggy Dad with this one.

Copyright - News Limited

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