Parenthood perils eased (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Are dads born or made?

1:28pm Tuesday 2nd December 2008 in Leisure By David Barnett

Five-and-a-half years ago, when our first child was born, I wrote in my column for the T&A about this new, exciting and rather frightening time, musing that despite all the advice you get from various quarters, nothing can really prepare you for parenthood, and it was a shame that Haynes, publishers of guidebooks to cars since time immemorial, didn’t produce a manual for kids.

I promptly got an e-mail from the Haynes press office saying that, actually, they were just about to produce a manual for babies, aimed at new dads as a half-comedy Christmas stocking stuffer.

Since then, the famous Dangerous Book For Boys became a publishing phenomenon, with its “good old days” guide to reintroducing children to activities in danger of becoming lost through over-zealous health and safety coddling from parents, such as whittling sticks, swinging on ropes strung from trees, and skinning badgers.

The parenting book market is now a booming one, and the latest volume to land on the desk at Fast Forward Towers is More Dad Stuff by Steve Caplin and Simon Rose, whom you may know from other such successful books as, er, Dad Stuff.

You might buy More Dad Stuff (pictured right) out of fear – fear that you are not teaching your children all the right things that a dad should.

You might buy More Dad Stuff in the hope that your family life will become pretty much like the photograph that accompanies this article, a scene of familial bliss in which your children, grateful that they now know how to play marbles properly, will dress in wholesome white clothes and roll around on the lawn with you.

As any real-life father knows, what immediately happens after the scene on this photo is that you put your elbow in some cat poo, one of the children bangs heads with another and they start crying, your wife puts her hand on a spider and screams, and a big row breaks out over who thought it was such a good idea that everyone wear white and roll about in the muck.

More Dad Stuff will not turn you into a brilliant dad if you are not engineered that way, but it does give you some handy tips on how to buff up your repertoire of fun stuff beyond repeated tellings of “What’s brown and sticky? A stick.”

Whereas the first Dad Stuff was unadulterated fun, Caplin and Rose have tried to make the follow-up actually useful as well. They say in their introduction: “This time we’ve included a couple of slightly more serious chapters. One is the behaviour thing, which addresses the problem of managing children’s behaviour.

“We’ve all read the behaviour chapters in those endless childcare books that grandparents lavish on us the moment our children our born. The trouble is, most of these books assume that we have near-perfect children who are rational, obedient and eager to please. This chapter is a guide for the real world.

“We’ve also included a chapter called Teach Your Children How To Think. Children’s brains – unlike dads’ – are almost infinitely expandable: it only needs a nudge every now and then to set them in the right direction.”

All very worthy, but what we really want is the fun stuff. More Dad Stuff is the sort of book you should keep handy for rainy Sundays when everyone’s trapped in the house, or perhaps rainy fortnights when everyone’s trapped in a caravan in North Wales.

A lot of the items that Caplin and Rose have assembled will be familiar to anyone who grew up in the Seventies or Eighties, but they’ve tried to bring things up to date by including mobile phone games, such as using a phone camera to take pictures of toy soldiers positioned in unlikely places around the house; the kids have to take the phone and go off and try to find the soldiers.

Similarly, another game involves participants going off to a room and photographing a part of their own body which other players then have to identify, but that sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.

Full marks to the authors for finding or creating a lot of activities that involve dad sitting in his armchair reading the paper while the kids go haring off around the house.

But it’s not all about rainy day fun; many of Caplin and Rose’s activities do involve going out and getting a bit of fresh air, including instructions on how to row a boat properly, games with frisbees, and a guide to building the perfect sandcastle.

There are also plenty of games to play on long drives in a bid to stave off the “are we there yet?” barrage.

A warning from the authors: “The best games are those where dad has to start things off and the kids can keep it going between them. You can join in too, of course, but if you’re having trouble negotiating a busy roundabout in the pouring rain with a map balanced on your knees, while remembering that the French drive on the right, it can be tricky if that happens to be just the moment when everyone’s waiting for you to remember the name of a country beginning with O.”

As well as giving you lots of ideas of how to keep the kids entertained, More Dad Stuff will also raise a warm glow of nostalgia for the simple fun you used to have when you were young yourself, and it’s no bad thing to show children today that fun doesn’t have to come with a scart lead and a virtual bloodbath on an Xbox game.

Whether More Dad Stuff will, as the cover blurb promises, enable you to “be a hero to your kids” is another matter, but if the day ever comes when one of your progeny asks just how cranes are put up, and you’re able to answer thanks to this book, it might well earn you a couple of extra Dad brownie points.

More Dad Stuff, by Steve Caplin and Simon Rose, is published by Simon & Schuster in hardback, priced £8.99.