When my wife, Janine, got pregnant for the second time, we both agreed that we wanted a daughter. We loved our son, Joaquin, but we wanted balance and the opportunity to parent a child of each gender. At least that’s what we jointly stated as our motivation. Secretly, I had my own reason. I wanted to have a daughter to test the degree of my own sexism.
Will The Real Man Please Stand Up – Our children and young people find all kinds of challenges in this day and age. And yet, what has changed? Plato the ancient Greek philosopher is reputed to have said, “What is happening to our young people?
Be the man you’ve been called to be. Are we so insecure that we blame our wives behaviors for our inability to focus on the real conversation, what she’s really saying, her truth not ours? Are we so focused on ourselves our own ideologies & beliefs that we forget that not every ones behaviors are relevant to our expectations?
The transition to a dad is an interesting and challenging one. Like any other role transition, knowledge or if you will, inside information, will help us prepare for what’s to come. In this article, I have attempted to identify the main sources of information for the keen dad.
As a father, I’ve learned that giving children too much money prevents them from developing their own abilities to earn and manage money. A Dad’s gifts of money can become a straightjacket. Stop and think about the life of an average middle-class American teen today. He has far more disposable wealth than most people in the world.
New moms sometimes forget that there is a new dad as well. New dads are willing and able to help out and sometimes just need some direction from you. As a breastfeeding new mom you may feel like you are doing most of the work, but Dad can help out quite a bit and make the work load seem a little lighter.
Leadership is very important in every sphere of life; no organization ever rises above its level of leadership, this is true of corporate bodies and true of the home. What the human brain is to the rest of the body is the closest analogy of what a father’s role is to the family. When a tiny clot of blood lodges in the brain, it results in stroke or cerebro-vascular accident in medical parlance. The physical manifestation of stroke may be paralysis of a whole side of the body and malfunctions of some internal organs such as the bladder and anal sphincters. The damage caused by a small blood clot in a blood vessel in the brain is more widespread than if the same clot is lodged in a blood vessel of a limb or internal organ. When a father is absent or abdicates his responsibilities, the family is affected in diverse ways unless there are persons who will step in the gap to mitigate the effects of a father’s absence.
In a fatherless society, it is the male that is willing to give of himself to children not necessarily his own that builds the family. The solitary male, who often feels he has no purpose, adds stability and strength to the single mom unit that is so prevalent in American culture.
In your own mind, know what the real and absolute limits are for your son’s behavior. If everything he does is wrong, soon he will know that you have no idea what are your true boundaries for him. Learn to pass on the trivial things. In his own good time, he will most likely abandon things that are really foolish.
Volumes have been written about finding your life’s work but Dad was succinct; “You have to look forward to getting up on the morning,” he said and he did. At his memorial service a lifelong friend recalled Jesus’ parable of the talents, and called Dad a five talent guy, who invested all that he had and all that he was in service to others. Dad was one of life’s encouragers. I’ll always miss him, but the things he left behind will serve me all my life.
