Me & My Dad: Offering a Catalogue--and a Philosophy--for Fathering

Matthew Back and his wife, Susan, agreed before the birth of their first son that he would be very involved in their child’s care, but Back didn’t fully realize what that agreement would mean.

Back, who was changing careers at the time, took time off to become a “house husband.” Susan Back, a consulting psychologist, went back to work after the baby, Aaron, was about 3 months old.

“Like many men, I was very naive about what that entailed. My idea was that while he was napping or whatever I would get a lot done. I would take care of my projects, my phone calls and whatever else,” Back says.

“Of course, it turned out that wasn’t the case. It’s a full-time job. Mostly for the first few weeks it was just very frustrating. I couldn’t get anything done. Then there was the house. The laundry and the diapers and the bottles. It was incredible. I was overwhelmed.”

Fathers Were Left Out

Back also started noticing certain things.

His wife got on baby and child care mailing lists. All the information they received talked about mothers and their babies. Books left fathers out.

He also noticed that much of the baby equipment they had purchased was designed for women, not men. The baby stroller was so short that Back got lower back pain bending over. The diaper bag was a floral quilted sack that was too small and too feminine for Back. A child carrier didn’t fit.

“The stuff just didn’t work,” Back says.

Those thoughts went into storage because Back, then 35, began getting heavily involved in his new business as a clinical psychologist.

Made a List

About three years later, with some time on his hands during a summer vacation in 1984, Back started jotting down a list of baby and child-care equipment items that he wanted to buy or make to replace the inadequate ones he had dealt with. Susan was then pregnant with their second son, David.

Tops on the 10-item list was what Back calls an “all-terrain stroller,” big enough for him to push comfortably and strong enough to take on hikes on dirt trails.

After drawing up the list, he sought companies that made the items he wanted. He also added to the list some children’s books which had a role for fathers in the story line.

The idea for a catalogue advertising the items for sale flowed from the list, but it was another year before Back--aided by a friend with business acumen, Larry Horowitz--got the idea onto a practical track.

Hard-to-Find Items

The name for the catalogue and the new company, Me & My Dad, came from eldest son Aaron, whose favorite expression at the time was “me and my dad,” as in “Me and my dad are going to the store.”

Back found companies that made all the items he needed for the first catalogues, except for matching father-and-child barbecue aprons with the company logo.

The latest catalogue, issued in the fall of 1986, includes about a dozen fiction and nonfiction books and about two dozen toys, games, educational items and other things, like the “all-terrain stroller” that Back wanted. There is also a more masculine diaper bag as well as a tough child carrier.

The catalogue has been very much a family enterprise. Susan Back, whose doctorate is in educational psychology, has helped choose appropriate toys and books as well as the copywriting. Sons Aaron and David also help select items and in “product testing,” as Back says.

Wider Distribution Needed

Back thought the enthusiasm he had for the project would carry over into sales, and was shocked by the small response. He has since learned, he says, that the 4% response rate is actually very good in catalogue sales but that he needed to vastly increase the number of catalogues distributed if he was going to make any money.

There wasn’t any spring catalogue this year because of a lack of funds, but Back said in a recent interview that he has arranged the financing for a fall catalogue to meet about 10,000 outstanding requests. He also is negotiating with a New York financial institution for funding to enlarge the operation.

Back brings a crusader’s enthusiasm to the catalogue. He believes that it is vital that fathers play a major role in the upbringing of their children.

“In general, what I try to do in the catalogue is to choose items which will bring fathers and children together, and enhance the interchange between fathers and children,” he says. “The toys all tend to have an interactive component. There are things that kids and dads can do together.”

Plans to Offer Expertise

Back would like to include some of his own professional expertise and beliefs in the next issue of the catalogue.

“Some of the mail we get is interesting. We get these requests for catalogues, but we also get men saying: ‘Dr. Back, please help me. I’ve got this problem or that problem.’ The one I think I get most frequently is from fathers of young girls, who say: ‘I was fine with my son. We’d play ball. I don’t know what to do with my daughter.”’

He’d like to write columns in the catalogue dealing with father-daughter relationships, competition, nurturing, how men deal with their emotions. Men provide something different in a relationship with children, he said.

“They are more playful; they are more physical; they are more tactile; they rough-house more,” Back says.

Ability to Nurture

Male play may even have physiological benefits for children, giving them improved balance, as well as psychological effects.

“Children respond differently to mother and father. (In a study) they’ve carefully observed infants when mother walks in a room and father walks in a room. What happens when dad walks in the room is that the child begins to move and smile and gurgle and has a kind of active expectancy of what’s going to happen with dad.

“With mom, they’re much more calm, much more placid. They smile, but they don’t start emitting all these excited sounds. Very early, as early as six months, infants show a different response to mother and father.

“Men are different and they have something different to offer a child. They have an affection and an ability to nurture, but it comes with gusto, it comes with enthusiasm, it comes with a certain physicality. Boys and girls thrive on that stuff.

“There are a remarkable bunch of studies about the differences between children who have an active, nurturing father and those who don’t. Children with active nurturing fathers have higher IQs, better self concepts, they perform better in school, have better relations with peers and generally have a brighter future than children who do not have that kind of a father.”