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Chris Erskine

By Kelly Burgess

Each month, iParenting.com spotlights a father who inspires and moves us, who embodies the qualities that we all admire in a person, a man and a father. Above all, the Dad of the Month is dedicated to his children. Rich or poor, famous or not, he shines as an example of what fathering is all about.

Our choice for October is Chris Erskine, syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times and father of four.

Discovering that Chris Erskine has four children ranging in age from a 20-year-old college junior to a 9-month-old baby, the first question almost has to be: Is it the same wife?

The answer is, yes, it is the same wife, Cathy, and he blames his sense of humor both for the new baby and for keeping him sane. Not that he doesn't understand the real cause of babies, but he was happily "baby-less" until he harassed a friend of his who found himself with a midlife set of twins and a teenager. Before he knew it, Cathy announced her pregnancy. He'll never laugh at anyone's children again. He's afraid to.

On the plus side, it did give him some additional inspiration for his writing. Erskine writes the column "Man of the House," a fall-down funny look at marriage and parenthood, for the Los Angeles Times. It's also syndicated in more than 800 papers worldwide. Now, thanks to the family's latest addition, he can relate to parents of children in virtually any age group.

On explaining why he and his wife still get their children off to school in the morning he writes:

I get up with them, my wife and I, convinced that if left to their own devices, they would make breakfast of microwave popcorn and Cheetos, followed by a nice cigar. Like many kids, they seem to know instinctively what's bad for them.

Erskine seems to know instinctively what's funny, which is kind of funny considering his writing roots are in the world of sports, not humor.

The sports pages have always been a breeding ground for some of the most eloquent journalists of our times. From the time he was a journalism major at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Erskine wanted to follow in their footsteps. "Sports writing is very personal and dramatic with a lot of inherent drama," Erskine says. "I would read columnists like Jim Murray and be in awe of their abilities and just want to be like them."

Then, in what he calls a "strange turn of events," he soured on sports. "Frankly, after you meet a lot of the athletes you aren't impressed anymore," Erskine says. "To move out of that I took some editing positions in regular news and completely quit writing for a while."

After Erskine took a position with the Los Angeles Times as a copy editor, he began to realize that he wasn't doing what he'd gotten into this business to do, which was to write. At the time, the newspaper had a column called "Laugh Lines" that ran bits from freelancers, syndicated sources and staff writers. Erskine began submitting regularly. Eventually, "Laugh Lines" was replaced with a slightly longer column called "First Person." Erskine's work began appearing there several times a month and he developed a following. One thing led to another and he started writing a weekly column in 1998 called "Guy Chronicles" that was recently renamed "Man of the House."

Erskine continued moving up the editorial ranks at the paper and is currently an editor for the weekly Homes section. Some of his best columns have recently been collected in the book, Surviving Suburbia: The Best of the Guy Chronicles (Los Angeles Times Books, 2003). Although he still loves sports, and is a football fan in particular, at the moment his chief involvement in sports is coaching his daughter's softball and soccer games.

His joy in his life on the sidelines is evident in the many columns he's written about coaching, but there are insightful glimpses there of the former sports writer he is and the sense of history that all good sports writers carry, such as when he writes the following:

Funny how the dads get into softball. We all scoffed two decades ago when Title IX attempted to give girls an equal shot at sports. Equal facilities? Equal spending? Yeah, right. In time, we had daughters, and if having a daughter doesn't change your view on Title IX, nothing will. "How did a girl like you get to be a girl like you?" Cary Grant once asked Eva Marie Saint. These days, the answer's Title IX.

But it's his sense of humor, not his sense of history, that has gotten him through every important phase of his life, even the tough years when he didn't seem to know where he wanted to go as a writer. He worries that this attitude is one that's on the decline at a time when a resurgence of laughter may just be what we need. "Being able to look at events with a humorous point of view is the great long-range crutch and the ultimate survival tool," Erskine says. "We need humor more than ever now because people are working longer hours, job security is poor and there don't ever seem to be any idle moments. It's hard to find time to even share a joke."

As for the jokes he makes of his life, he says his kids and wife don't mind. "It's a low level of notoriety and the kids are OK with it," Erskine says. "Their friends are aware that I'm writing about them, but they don't get recognized too much for it otherwise."

It helps that he doesn't refer to his children by name in his columns. They are called "the lovely older daughter," "the little girl," "the boy" and, now, "the baby." He very deliberately chose that rather unusual type of third person reference to distance his columns from his life so more people could relate the columns to their own lives. "The subject matter is kind of personal and that kept it kind of informal – as if you're writing a letter to someone," Erskine says. "This just makes it more generic and accessible. It's just my writing style."

Erskine talks like he writes, making gentle jokes about everything from his kids' sports to his wife's maturity relative to his (he refers to her as a single mother of five children – with him being the fifth).

But just as there is in his columns, there is a quiet undercurrent of how much he truly values what he writes about in the same way we all value our families. It is his children, he says, that have taught him everything he needs to know about life. "My kids have taught me how to deal with a variety of people – stubborn people, persistent people, rude people, you name it – and a kid can make you learn how to deal with it in a way that defuses a situation," Erskine says. "Once you've gotten yourself and a young child fed, dressed and ready to walk out the door, then had a box of juice squirted over your clothes, all the other crises you face at work and in life seem much less daunting."