Hamilton Carter, author of
Cootermaroos: A Dad’s Guide To Raising Healthy, Happy, Well-Rounded Urchins
Hamilton Carter is an engineer, a published author in the fields of engineering, parenting, and pop culture, and most importantly a dad.
More specifically, he’s the dad of three unschooling, free-range kids in San Francisco who are now 13, 11, and 9 years old, and are known colloquially as ‘the gang’. Prior to the pandemic, the kids frequently traveled with him for and through work to places like LA, Manhattan, Boston, and Hawaii. While he worked, they explored the lay of the land. (It helps that his work frequently starts at 3:30 in the morning while they’re still asleep.) When work was done, they got to explore their new locales together. Hamilton was the first person each kid met. He served as the delivery doula—at his partner’s request; see Part 3 to find out why—at each of the their home births. He and the kids still hang out and work together every day.
Hamilton has written for theMarySue.com about physics and pop culture—he and his partner met in physics grad school; DesignNews.com about camping in the snow with kids and spotting UFOs; and among other places, for Winnie.com where he opined about the need for dads to embrace talking about menstruation. That piece landed him and the gang on the FeelingMyFlo.com podcast episode:
“So You Don’t Get Periods. Why Should You Care About Them?”
He was also interviewed by LetGrow.org, “
How One Family Got Their Young Kids to Start Going Outside On Their Own, Unsupervised — Without Freaking Out The Neighbors,” about how safe San Francisco is for kids and how the gang utilize the resources around town all on their own, and how he helped to set the tone both with the kids and the city. Many of the stories in Cootermaroos started life on Hamilton’s parenting, physics, and amateur radio blog CopaseticFlow.blogspot.com where he continues to write about the kids’ lives and his.