Apparently there is an event held at many schools nationwide called, “Donuts with Dads”. Kids bring their fathers to school for donuts and a sort of open house. Bring your child to work day in reverse.
Along comes a lady named Elizabeth Oates with an article calling for the end of this tradition. She lists five reasons to stop this practice immediately. However, when you read the five reasons, they sort of boil down to 5 reworkings of the same reason…that reason is: I don’t have a dad, so you shouldn’t get to bring yours.
This is a mindset that has been around for a long, long time, but is recently gaining in popularity. You see it everywhere, often veiled behind some other fallacious argument but at the core it is, “I can’t (won’t or don’t), so you shouldn’t be able to either”. We all know someone like this….
Now, upon reading a bit about Miss Oates, she seems like a wonderful woman who truly wants to help people. I have nothing negative to say about her other than my opinion on this article. On this one she is wrong…very wrong…and I can tell you why.
First, some background. My dad died when I was still in elementary school, so I speak from first hand experience. Father’s day sucked….but so did many, many other days. On top of that, my brother and I (along with the custodian’s child) were the token scholarship kids at a fancy school for the children of the wealthy and famous. So I spent most of my days surrounded by kids who already had many other things that I didn’t, fathers being just one.
Let’s start with Father’s day…we all spent class time making macaroni pictures or soap sculptures for the dads. Super sad day…absolutely…and as I see it, I had a few options. I could do something and be sad or, as Miss Oates suggests, ask to remove the activity from everyone.
So…19 other children shouldn’t get to do something, because one kid is saddened? See how that looks? Not very good…plus, think about kids when they are told they can’t have something because of someone else…I was already the asthmatic scholarship kid, I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to pile on another reason for the kids to look sideways at me.
Which do you think would be worse for a kid? One day of a little extra sadness or many days of being hated as the kid who ruined Donuts with Dad?
I am going to go down a path that may seem a little ridiculous, but please bear with me. All the children in my class wore Chemin De Fer or Jordache (or whatever the pricey jeans of the day were) and I wore Toughskins with patches on the knees. Should we have had a school policy stating that because I didn’t have designer jeans, no kid should get to wear them? I know…some schools have uniforms to fix this…but there are certainly plenty of other items to denote have/have not…lunch boxes, notebooks, locker decorations, jackets…they will find a way.
Now, you may say that jeans aren’t as important as a father…and I certainly agree…but from the hours of 7-6 (I spent a lot of time at school), M-F, on the schoolyard that was the constant reminder of have/have not…the one day of Father’s day gift making….that was merely a blip.
Or…let’s look at child pick up after school. A constant stream of high end cars rolling through, some with chauffeurs, all coming through to pick up the kids…and then here comes a 1971 (give or take) Dodge Colt to pick us up. Should we have a school rule about car value…because it isn’t fair to those kids whose parents don’t drive a Rolls Royce?
I have asthma…I am 46 and still have to take something every day to keep it under control. But let’s flash back to my childhood. Kids run and play…asthmatic children back then (in the B.C.P.I. era – before cell phone & internet) were often taught not to do that…so there is another dilemma. Do you tell all the other kids that they can’t run around because Asthma Trousers (yes, that is what some of the kids called me…see the Toughskins paragraph above) can’t? Or, do you encourage me to get out there and do what I could? I think you know how that went as I became a tuba-player and half-marathoner (not at the same time…yet).
I get that Miss Oates sat in a classroom and watched wistfully as all the other kids had fun with their dads. It just seems selfish to me that instead of appreciating that other people are happy, or finding ways to include more people in the fun, she would rather everyone be forced to join in on her sadness.
Why are we always presenting all or nothing solutions? Instead of bringing everyone down to lowest common denominator, why not attempt to bring people up instead?
This doesn’t have to be binary. There are more than two options, much like the presidential election…(see how I snuck that in there?). What if we stopped anything that upset someone or they couldn’t participate? Halloween, gone because diabetes or peanut allergy. Christmas, gone because other religions…you pick your favorite holiday/event and it will be cancelled because somewhere there is someone who is saddened by, or can’t participate in, that event, and we need to prevent sadness and unfairness.
What then should we do? Perhaps expand the invitation to other people who mean something to the children…instead of take away from everyone in an attempt to “make it fair” (the world isn’t fair and never will be, time for people to start to recognize that). Perhaps invite the fathers who are there to add a fatherless child to their group and look at their macaroni pictures as well. As a father, I can tell you I would have been absolutely thrilled to include other children in my donut day.
I will tell her (and you) this. I missed my dad…he certainly wasn’t perfect (Oh the stories I could tell), but he was mine and I missed him every day. But taking Donuts with Dads away from all the other kids doesn’t bring him back or lessen that pain. I don’t subscribe to the, “If I am going to be miserable, so is everyone else” method…and I would hope that Miss Oates re-thinks her stance and sees how selfish it actually is.
Above the Nonsense 