If you are a parent who attends science fiction conventions, writes fan fiction or filk, makes fannish artwork, appreciates filk or fanfic or fanart, participates in long Internet (or Real Life) discussions of science fiction or fantasy works, reads comics, plays role-playing games, or anything else that YOU define as being part of the fannish lifestyle - then you're a fannish parent.

If you're a new parent, things probably just changed for you. If you attend conventions, your costs just went up, unless you can easily drop the kids with the grandparents. If you do any kind of writing, your time to do it just got cut to about a tenth - and that tenth is parceled out in ten-minute increments. Going out to play role-playing games is now only possible by negotiating carefully with your co-parent(s). If you're a voracious reader, finding that you haven't read a novel or even a comic book in a month is a cause for tears. You find yourself scrambling to put away beloved books and stuffed animals soft sculptures where the children can't get to them. And your children are budding techies, wandering off with cellphones and TV remotes, changing the settings on the stereo, coming up and typing on your keyboard and losing an entire essay or story or renaming your files.

If you've been a parent for a while, things are a little different. The kids might be in school - but they need your full attention when they're home, for help with homework and boredom. What you watch on TV when they're home and awake is vastly different than what you watch when they're asleep; even shows as gorgeous and inspiring as Avatar: The Last Airbender or Samurai Jack are hardly appropriate for the under-12 set. (In my house, Jeopardy, Good Eats, Mythbusters, and How It's Made are examples of adult shows we can still watch around the toddler. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are on the cusp.

But there are amazing benefits to being a parent, particularly a fannish parent. You probably have a bright, curious child, who may or may not be on the autism spectrum (it's more likely than in the general population, for the same reasons that we fans are drawn together and that the term "mundane" is used to describe non-fans) and who really wants to know things. Most children, fannish or not, generally want to be read to, sung to, told stories. And those of us who grew up reading have our favorites, and our friends have their favorites... and before you know it, your child's library rivals yours. There are an amazing number of wonderful kids' books and CDs out there - and an amazing number of bad ones. Same with TV shows; you have the opportunity to sit with your child, watching TV, and offer running commentary; in fact, developmental specialists encourage this. Even if you MSTie Sesame Street, you're getting your child to pay better attention to what's going on simply by paying that much attention to it yourself. And when your child starts "reading" books back to you, or singing favorite songs, it's an amazing thrill for any parent. But a geek, a fan? For us it's also a science project. I love my son Wolf Cub and my daughter Tiger Kitten dearly, and nothing will ever change that. But for me, having some clue of what's happening as they go through various developmental stages informs and adds depth to the observations and interactions.

So that's what I'll be writing about - the issues that affect fannish parents. Columns might include the difficulty of finding a quiet-but-not-isolated place to breastfeed at a con, silly stories about children "outing" their parents as fans in public, or the varied experiences of parents of children on the autistic spectrum. I'll start with my own experience, and continue by interviewing others. I encourage any of you to write to me and ask me to research topics that interest you.