The number one factor in a child’s success in school is parental involvement. Experts in every field — not just parenting and education, but also fishing, knitting and stamp collecting — will tell you this. Parents need to be involved.

And schools are taking that expert knowledge to heart by doing everything they can to get parents involved.

Which is why I couldn’t help my daughter with her homework this weekend. I didn’t have time. I was too busy “being involved.”

First of all, those of you who read Captain Dad regularly and have been blessed with good reading retention skills will recall that my older daughter is only in first grade. What’s a first grader doing with homework anyway, you may ask? The answer is: learning to hate it, just the way third- or fourth-graders of my generation did. Hating homework early is yet another way that kids these days are precocious by design.

Fortunately, the distaste for homework is not something they’ll burn out on. You can retain it well into adulthood.

Take Parental Involvement projects like fundraiser auctions, for example! Every family in our school is required to sign up for a committee for the annual auction. I tried to sign us up for the Simply Writing A Check Committee. But it wasn’t on the list.

Since my introverted personality would cause me to implode if I had to go out and solicit auction items, I volunteered to hide in my studio and draw cutesy pictures for the catalog (like the ones here, for trips to the children’s museum, theater, or water park). The hardest part was scheduling the meeting for when all the parents on the committee could make it. What with modern parents’ dearth of time and abundance of scheduling conflicts, finding a mutually acceptable date ate up most of our time before the deadline.

After that, for me it was merely a matter of me finding five or six hours of not helping with homework to knock out some drawings. Except it had to be this weekend, when my daughter had the once-a-year event of homework on a weekend.

Miraculously, it all got more or less done. So I shouldn’t complain. Despite the fact that I had to make an extra, emergency run to school this morning to bring part of the homework that my daughter — and her time-crazed parents — forgot as she was rushing out the door five minutes before the bell and was all but hysterical without it.

But the point of my rambling is not to rail against the system. It is merely to apologize to all the new readers who heard me on the radio yesterday and have come here expecting a post packed with parental wit and insight. It’s not here today. I’m sorry.

I only have this dog of a post. You see, my homework ate it.

To all of you fine folks living near the Chicago airwaves, please tune in your radios to WBEZ, 91.5 FM, tomorrow morning (Monday) between 9 and 10 to hear their popular 848 morning program with acclaimed host Tony Sarabia. Captain Dad will be one of his guest panelists to discuss the economic worth of a stay-at-home parent.

If you live far away, you can stream it from your computer by clicking the “Listen Live” button near the upper left corner of the WBEZ web site.

Talk to you all in the morning.

***UPDATE***

The producers of the show also welcome any Captain Dad readers to call in with questions and such. Their number is 312-923-9239. And they are @wbez on Twitter, for any of you who do that.

So I will indeed talk to you in the morning. I just hope they know what they’re getting into.

It’s a bugbear for parents, at least. There is a genuine — and contagious — fear of not getting into the “good” schools. Even preschools!

We all like to believe that we are willing to make sacrifices for our children. But it is also normal to doubt if you will be able when the time comes.

Don’t worry. You will be able to do it. In fact, you may be amazed at how much you are willing to sacrifice.

Indeed, there will be a time when you see your 18-month-old tearing the pages out of that New Yorker article you actually intended to read for six weeks but have yet to find the time. When she starts shredding the pages into identity-theft-prevention-sized bits, will you shriek at her to stop? Or will you make that sacrifice for ten minutes of relative calm?

Sacrifice.

Or you may see your just-turned-toddler crawl into the shower. You will instantly envision the eighteen different ways she could slip and scramble her brains all over the tub and you will want to rush to save her. Yet you will make that sacrifice — for five minutes of knowing that she is in a confined space and you do not have to chase her all over the house.

Sacrifice. Sacrifice.

Or when you’re trying to load the kids in the car, they may be crying out for a brownie. You will want to tell them, “No. You’re on your way to Grammy’s house. There are always treats at Grammy’s house.” And you know that it wouldn’t be fair to deliver the kids all amped up on sugar, but it’s a long drive to Grammy’s house and they are still crying for those blasted brownies. So what do you do?

Sacrifice. It’s what makes a good parent great.

Once the balm to any parental worry, “normal” — or, worse, “average” — has become an insult. A feared epithet. “Gifted” is the only acceptable status for a child.

But, if I may be permitted to get nit-picky here, the word itself tells us something. Giftedness is a gift. Not a virtue. It is something to be happy about, just so long as you remember that you didn’t earn it. In the end, you’re judged not on the cards you were dealt but on how you played them.

So it’s okay to be less than gifted. Which is good, because it is the vast majority of the planet.

Take a certain daughter I know, who shall be nameless, who is… well, un-gifted in athletic pursuits. Her parents wince in sympathy every time she tells of playing tag and can never catch anybody. But! Yesterday at recess, she scored two goals in soccer — even though she wasn’t entirely aware of one of them except for the fact that other students were cheering for her. Two goals! Out of a total of four in the game, because they didn’t count the other four goals “where somebody was hurt” (I didn’t have the heart to inquire what that meant).

It made me happy, not because she scored half the goals (because I know that is only likely to happen again in a 0–0 tie), but because she got a turn to wear the mantle of glory that all her fellow student’s have worn before her. She got to feel more accepted. Normal. Average.

And for a young person trying to find a place in this world, that is truly a gift.

When my older daughter was not yet two, she got the boxed set of all the original Thomas the Tank Engine books. It was her favorite. We read and reread all 26 of them, including the one with wrinkled pages from falling into the toilet. She even made me make up more Thomas stories before every nap and bed time. I legitimately feared the Rev. W. Awdry estate coming after me for royalties.

A few months later, I also learned that there was a school bus manufacturer named Thomas. “That bus says ‘Thomas!’” my excited barely two-year-old shouted one day as we sat at a stop light.

This fall, she started first grade, where she is actually expected to read. Full sentences, not just the names of beloved characters. One is tempted to say, “Ohh, how grown up she’s become.” Except she’s not grown up. She is seven years old. The books she loves are about fairies. Or dolphins. Or magical talking dolphins that can fly. If there were such a book. Indeed, if there were, we’d own three copies.

What seems so grown up, compared to her toddler self, is that she reads (and, yes, she is taller). But that’s as grown up as I want her to be right now (although cleaning her room on her own would be nice too). I want her to remain the sweet little innocent that she is.

Which is why I hate taking her grocery shopping.

If you’ve taken young readers shopping, you know where I’m headed with this. The checkout line. Specifically the magazines at the checkout line. It may seem hard to single any of them out, what with the pictures of celebrity bikini bodies gone bad, the horrific bad-lighting paparazzi photos, and headlines about spurious addictions and infidelities. But if I had to single one out, it wouldn’t be one of those pulp rags. It would be one with a slick glossy cover featuring celebrities who were actually paid to be on it.

Cosmo.

Seriously, can there be that many sex tips? I mean, golfers can only focus on maybe one or two tips at a time without messing up their swing — and that’s golf, a complicated sport that takes years to master. Not an activity that comes instinctively for humans as well as weevils. So why does this magazine even need to exist for more than one issue? Ever.

Look, I’m not a total prude here; I have two children as living proof, after all. But do I really have to subject them to Cosmo covers? Do they need to be über-sexualized at so tender an age?

I honestly have to start yelling, “No, you can’t have any candy. Don’t look at the candy! Don’t look at the candy!” just to make sure that they do look at the candy — instead of the Cosmo cover three inches away. The candy at least has a brown wrapper, like the Cosmo should.

Or am I making too big a stink out of this? Am I just a prude, despite my protestations to the contrary? Perhaps? Perhaps.

Perhaps it is just me. Perhaps I’m over exaggerating the pervasive perils threatening my child’s innocence.

So I’ll let you decide. Here, for example, are just some — some — of the actual, totally-not-made-up headlines on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine that I have had to avert my daughter’s eyes from in these last few months since she started first grade.

His Best Sex Ever — Guys Describe the Mind-Blowing Moves They Can’t Stop Thinking About

Too Naughty To Say Here! But you have to try this sex trick

“Um, Vagina, Are You Okay Down There?” Easy Fixes for Freaky Issues

50 KINKY SEX MOVES — Men Vote on Their Favorites

100 Best Sex Tips of the Year

“Sh*t My Guy Says” Where’s a Muzzle When You Need One?

THE FIERCE SEX EVERY COUPLE MUST TRY (At Least Once)

When He Shouldn’t See You Naked

GUYS’ TOP SEX SECRETS — We Reveal the Midbooty Thoughts He’d Never Admit to… but You Need to Know

KINKY SEX — Tell Your Inner Good Girl to Get Lost for the Night!

Bigger, Better Pleasure — 5 Ways to Get Him, Um, Pumped

21 NAUGHTY SEX TIPS — Bold, Breathless Moves That Bring On That Crazy-in-Lust Feeling

4 Words That Seduce Any Man. Anytime.

Guys Answer YOUR SEXIEST Qs — WARNING: Some Are Sweet, Others Are Brutally Honest

Go Naked — 19 WAYS TO FEEL INSTANT PLEASURE

Naughty Thoughts He Has at Work

WHAT YOUR VA-JAY-JAY IS DYING TO TELL YOU

The grocery store has a line for “20 Items or Less,” “10 Items or Less” (some literate groceries even have them for “20 Items or Fewer”) and Self Checkout. Please, could they maybe have a line for children and their parents who don’t want to explain what a “va-jay-jay” is?

I have very, very few drawings from my youth. The oldest is from when I was nine, and it does not scream Art Prodigy.

My children, on the other hand, have collections rivaling the Hermitage. Not in quality, but in volume. Every day, new stacks of paper appear on the dining room table and the kitchen counters. And let’s not forget the mass that grows steadily in the playroom.

And God forbid I throw any of it away. Somehow, nobody buys the line, “Landfills need culture too.” So, unless my young artistes deign to contribute their work to the National Self Esteem Museum (whose galleries will cover the entire state of Utah), I am at a loss for what to do with all these precious works. That is, after the attic is filled and I can no longer rationalize it as insulation.

Today’s topic is injustice. Not the kind that causes one kid to cry foul when another kid has one measly extra chocolate chip in his cookie. This is about a very real, very painful bit of unfairness.

I’ve touched on it in the past, but I’m talking about it again because it happened again this week. And it broke my heart.

Let’s review the obvious. I’m a dad who stays home with the kids while my wife goes to work. It’s not for any ideological reason, other than believing that it’s preferable for kids to be raised by parents if at all possible. It was practical. My job had the flexibility, my wife’s did not. So she is the one who leaves the house each morning, while I take care of her precious babies. It’s an arrangement that is becoming less and less uncommon.

But, however practical it may be, it sometimes cannot contend with Nature.

You see, no matter what we do to raise enlightened children, no matter how nurturing we fathers are, when all is said and done, their real tether to this earth is their mothers. Mother Nature rigged it that way.

When the sky is toppling down on us, only mommy can make it better. I don’t know if other stay-at-home dads resent that, but I don’t. My stay-at-home dadhood was for practical reasons, so I may as well be practical about all that comes with it. I can wipe and sweep and hug and hold and nurture all I want, but I’m still Number 2 in the hearts of my children. I’m okay with that.

What I’m not okay with is the gouging pain in my wife’s chest when she has to walk out the door while there is a coughing, boogery, whining and inconsolable child crying out for “Mommy! I want Mommy to stay with me!”

It’s not fair. My wife, like a few million other mothers, did everything she could to make sure her child was taken care of by someone who loves them every bit as much as she does. She (and I) looked at the big picture and did her best to do what’s best for her children.

And this is the thanks she gets. Heartache.

My mother’s been dead for more than 20 years, and I still want to run to her sometimes. So I understand where my sick little baby is coming from. I’d cry the same thing if I was her, all achy and owie and snuffly and gooey.

It’s just that, while I know I should run to to my daughter and try to hold her in my arms even as she is smacking at me to go away because I’m not mommy, I also know I should be running to my wife at the same time and holding her to make her feel better because she is mommy.It’s so unfair. To moms. I know that. And I’m sorry. I only wish I had something glib and funny to say to make it better. But all I can offer is that your baby will still be there when you get home, and she will be happy to hold you and smear boogers all over your best business suit.

And accept from you several helpings of toast which dad could not get her to touch all day despite his cleverest attempts. See? You’re still the best.

Yes, stickers.

I don’t mean to be too flippant — or political — but that’s what caused last week’s internet blackout. Pundits claim that Google and others were protesting philosophical differences between the New Economy and the Old Economy about the relevance of copyright in the digital world. But it really comes down to stickers.

I’m perfectly serious.

The Old Economy generation grew up on crayons. They drew shabby stick figures that looked nothing like whatever images they were copying, and it was so damaging to their self esteem that they vowed to raise their children differently. And they did.

Their New Economy kids grew up covering a page with stickers and bracing themselves for the heaps of praise extolling their creativity, thus giving us a generation who have been taught that rearranging somebody else’s work makes that work their own.

Hence last week’s battle over anti-piracy legislation which is currently pending in Congress.

I’m not just picking on stickers because I’m anti-sticker. Even though I am anti-sticker.

There is no corner of my house that is not littered with stickers. They slip in through books trying to make stories “interactive,’ grocery store clerks currying favor with kids in line, doctors’ offices rewarding bravery during a shot, story ladies at the bookstore offering an incentive to come back.

Stickers have become an entitlement for kids, where it’s not about having stickers, it’s about getting them. After the getting, they’re disposable. Meaning that I am constantly peeling them off the floor, the wall, the rug, my socks and shoes and the seat of my pants.

Which brings us to the internet. The internet is one big sticker book. It has kajillions of images that people feel entitled to.

Oh, clipping web images started out innocuously, the digital equivalent of snipping a cartoon out of a magazine and tacking it to your cubicle. But soon the Stickers mentality kicked in. People began republishing other people’s work as if it were their own.

The sticker principle even showed up in Stickers Generation music in the form of “sampling.” (To you Old School types, that’s playing someone else’s record and talking over it.) And it’s not only digital technology that reinforces this principle.

Just look at those newfangled coloring books where kids can swipe the entire page with a single marker pen to produce every color in the picture, all neatly within the lines. And then they turn to you with big bright faces and say, “Do you like my picture?”

What do I say in return? “No! It’s not your picture, you intellectual property pirate!” Even to my Old Economy ears, that sounds harsh. So I struggle for words that are supportive but noncommittal. In other words, I look the other way.

Which means that I can’t totally demonize this modern disregard for copyright. I have to accept some responsibility for when my kids’ generation grows up believing that switching on the TV by themselves merits them their names in the show’s credits.

If there are any TV shows when they grow up. Even the reality TV shows by then will be no more than a camera pointed at some random group of people watching mash-ups of old reruns. Who will be able to afford to create new content?

And it’s all because of—

Wait! That’s it! STICKERS!

You know, like on NASCAR racers! All we need are sponsors for web content and to cover every image or video or MP3 with stickers.

There. No more fights in Congress. No more web blackouts. Just more stickers. Which should make everyone happy.

Except me. Because I just know I’ll be picking them out of my socks every night.