http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/dads_grapple_with_new_role_tech_support
This week’s column wonders why being a dad today so often means being an IT guy.
The time has come, dads, for a performance review.
As you well know, the job requirements for modern fatherhood are highly demanding and subject to change without notice. Only by carefully reviewing your performance in key categories can you expect to keep up in today’s competitive child-rearing market.
Conflict resolution skills? Check. Unconditional support, emotional and financial? Check. Ability to safely maneuver minivan while being bombarded by sibling squabbling? Check. Management of college savings and petty cash accounts? Check. Competence in toy assembly, emergency first aid and janitorial arts? Check, check and check.
Still with us? Good for you. But now we come to what is perhaps the most important portion of the review, the make-or-break category that separates the merely competent father of yesterday with the truly good dad of today.
How fast is your home wireless network? How quickly can you resolve an e-mail connectivity issue? Blu-Ray or HD DVD? Where do you stand on the issue of childhood cell phone usage? How quickly can you free a new gadget from its bondage of twist ties?
In other words, how good an IT guy are you?
From programming the parental controls on the cable box to monitoring the use of game consoles, fathers are now the go-to guys for domestic technology. Certainly there are tech-savvy moms, but in the vast majority of households, matters of electronics fall to the father.
It’s a role many of us dads feel intensely conflicted about.
On the one hand, many of us were gear heads long before we were ever parents. We relish the chance to spend a Sunday afternoon comparing the picture quality of plasma screens and have that count as family time. We love the look of horror on our wives’ faces when we toss aside the manual and assemble a gizmo armed only with a Phillips Head and a MacGyver-like ingenuity.
After all, keeping busy with gadgetry allows us to avoid other aspects of family life. Like, say, laundry. We’re simply happier changing batteries than diapers. We’d much rather talk downloads than discipline. We’re better at electronics than emotion.
Unlike most problems in family life, technical issues have an answer. They can be resolved.
At the same time, there’s no getting around that domestic tech support is largely thankless and time consuming. To do our jobs correctly, we must spend our off-hours tangled in cords and immersed in the fine points of new technology. We can easily find ourselves relating more to the help desk operator in New Delhi than the teenager playing X-Box upstairs.
Not that you can’t learn a lot about your family by attending to their technological needs. Recently my son came home from school and asked for help setting up a website to promote a business venture he and a school chum had devised. I was instructed to set up an e-commerce system that could accommodate the sale of science fiction DVDs, warm weather clothing and “swords and other weapons.”
My son is eight years old.
Needless to say, his request raised a red flag and led to the adoption of a new family rule: No Online Arms Trading. Still, I had to hand it to him. When I was eight years old, the height of my technological expertise was putting a cold washcloth on the TV so my parents couldn’t tell how many hours of “Twilight Zone” I’d watched while they were at work.
Meanwhile my son shoots and edits short films of light saber duels and creates funk-fusion CDs from sampled instrumental loops.
Somehow, though, his multimedia dabblings have not yet translated into a willingness to help out with other technical issues.
Still, I know my reign as head geek of the house will end soon enough. There will come a day when I will not be the only person in the house who knows how to change the batteries in the TV remote. There will come a day when the kids will know more about car navigation system than I do.
When that day comes, I will not grieve. I’ll be too busy figuring out another way to avoid doing the laundry.