But I Just Want You To Be Happy

As a parent, what is your primary goal in raising a child or children in today’s world? Some parents argue that making their children happy is a top priority. Parent’s lives are spent trying to smooth the way for a child. They labor over their child’s homework, do all the household chores, schedule a busy calendar of just-the-right activities and play dates with just-the-right playmates, and all the while providing for every need and almost every desire. (See iPhones, iPads, iTouches, i-anything and i-everything.)

I argue that the real goal of parenting kids in today’s world is not about happiness at all. Rather, it is about helping create resilience. Deep down, most of us know that happiness is fleeting anyway. Certainly working toward an overall sense of well-being is a worthwhile lifelong pursuit. But outright happiness? All the time? Not a chance. It is a passing emotion at best, along with joy, sadness, worry, anger, etc. Don’t get me wrong. I want as much happiness as I can get, but I know there has to be room on the shelf for all the other emotions and feelings that come with being alive and conscious.

So why the obsession with trying to make kids happy? Are we as parents trying to live out our version of the Family Fairy Tale? Is this the continuation of the Happily Ever After Fairy Tale where the prince and princess fall in love and live happily ever after? But that’s not how it ends, is it? The rest of the story is that they wind up having kids. Then they ALL have to live happily ever after. Right? So how do you do that as a parent? How do you create happily ever after childhoods for your children? You spend your waking hours and hard-earned dollars in the relentless pursuit of their happiness.

In the actual fairy tales of old, life is hard, scary, and treacherous. It is not all roses and sunshine. Life intervenes. Bad things happen. Wolves eat grandmothers. Children are abducted and fattened up in cages. Witches cast spells. Beauties eat poison apples. Knights lose their way and wander aimlessly in dark forests for years. But isn’t real life just like this? Just read or listen to the news on any given day. Nothing there has anything to do with happiness.

So what is it that life demands of us each and every day? Above all, I argue that it demands resilience. And resilience is precisely the quality that is needed in order for children to grow up and make their way in the world. Resilience is needed more than ever in these rocking and reeling times. It is resilience that will carry our children forward in a world that demands so much of them in so many different ways and on so many different fronts.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines resilience as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.” So, in order to cultivate resilience, one first has to actually encounter difficulties. And therein lies the rub, my friend. What parent has the stomach to stand by while their child struggles – and struggles mightily – with something? There are a million somethings – a million opportunities – for each child to build resilience: potty training, navigating social circles, doing the dishes, being dumped, failing math class, sitting the bench, etc.)

As a parent, how do you teach resilience to your child? Resilience can not be taught, it can only be cultivated. The art of authentically parenting a child involves providing ripe conditions and environments for resilience to be brought forth from within the child. That means allowing the child to fully face his or her own unique challenges, and to be beaten and battered by them. They need to fully feel the cut of life, the heat of the dragon’s fire, the bitter taste of the poison in the apple, and to get lost every now and then in the forest of life. Parents that cultivate resilience in their children make sure the wounds are not lethal, the fires do not consume, and that the child finds his or her way home.

Each child has to have authentic setbacks, disappointments, and failures early on in life in order to access inner resources, build resilience, and gain wisdom. A parent’s job is to watch closely and to cheer them as they fall nine times and get up ten. Parents that are cultivating resilience hope that a lot of the falling happens on their watch so they can help children notice what it feels like to tumble, have the wind taken out, and to muster the courage to rise again.

iFamily 2.0

iFamily 1.0: Al Gore discovers the internet and plugs everyone in. iFamily 2..0: Steve Jobs creates the iDevice and stuffs at least one of them into the hot little hands of every man, woman and child on the planet.

A recent National Geographic had a picture of Kyrgyz nomads in a remote part of the world playing with apps on an iGadget while tending a flock of sheep. The cost of a phone is one sheep.

Closer to home, my 11-year-old daughter has had her iGadget surgically attached to her palm since it arrived during the holidays. The other day, she proudly announced that she has 127 apps and is on her way to 200. I am still trying to figure out how to use just one: GoogleMaps. Somebody, please…

So what does all this iBusiness mean for children, parents, and families? As a parent, I am overwhelmed, outgunned, and virtually (no pun intended) helpless against the Invasion of the iStuff. Not only have we lost the control-over-technology battle with our children, I am not sure we ever really had a fighting chance. It is not just in the culture or in the family. It now feels like it is in the DNA. Just try leaving your own iThing at home for a day. It is a bit of a surreal feeling.

It is harder and harder to carve out ‘quality time’ with children and family. Even when I can convince them, always begrudgingly, to shut their devices off or even just to take out their ear buds so that we can try and make some space for the potential for a conversation to spontaneously occur, then my own device starts ringing or alerting me to an incoming text message. ¡iCaramba!

I now live with a constant background level of worry and concern about the devices that now command a large portion of our children’s attention. I am impotent against this iOnslaught that has oozed into every crack and crevice of family life.

There is the illusion that I have some control over what my kids are exposed to. I could have adopted the “Just Say No” approach to iJunk, but they would have gotten their fix through their friends anyway, and I would have caught pure hell along the way for it. (My 11-year-old was already a pro at her device before she even unpacked it.)

I accept iDefeat. As I take my last iGasp, I knew that the odds were overwhelmingly stacked against me, and that resistance was futile. We have all been iAssimilated.

It is unconscionable that the best and brightest minds developing these products and marketing them directly to children have turned a blind eye to the needs of parents and families for some way to REALLY regulate them. Without a simple way to control them, we are relegated to the role of iPolice doing shakedowns and confiscating devices on a daily basis – all in the name of just trying to spend some quality un-iTime with our kids.

¡Ay Yay Yay! iGiveUp!

If I Had a Hammer

If I had a hammer, I‘d hammer in the morning. I’d hammer in the evening… all over this land…

Or more accurately:

All I have is a hammer. I hammer in the morning. I hammer in the evening… over this land…

I have sneaking suspicions that there are a LOT of dads out there who have inherited hammers as their parenting tool of choice. Every now and then, it feels like I am still swinging a 9-pound hammer around the room. And that is after a lifetime of introspection, hard work, and the melting down of all sorts of hammers, and the forging of new tools. (Funny how hammers still keep popping up just when I thought I had found them all!)

If you are one of the guys whose parenting tool shed consists of One Big Hammer, (and a wing and prayer) then you already have three very important pieces of information: (1) That is how you were parented, (2) This is your inheritance, and (3) This is where the work begins if you want to do something different with your child(ren) and/or partner.

The convenient thing about a hammer is that it is pretty easy to use. Just grab and swing. It’s not rocket science. Hammers pass easily from generation to generation, and you can take them with you wherever you go. The good news is that you can use them on just about everything and everyone, and in most situations.

Even when you don’t know what to do, you can always just pull it out and start pounding. Many of us get so good at it that we don’t even have to think about it anymore. We live on autopilot just swinging away. But hey, at least it looks like you are doing something! It sure feels like you are doing something. And at the end of the day, you can always say, “It’s not my fault. I have been pounding on that thing (or that person) for years. I did the best I could. I did my job. That’s the way it was done when I was growing up.”

But what is a guy supposed to do with his hammer now that something totally different is being asked of him on all fronts? Dads are now being asked to play nicely in the sandbox: to be patient, loving, insightful, present, intuitive, gentle, supportive, attentive, sensitive, wise, communicative, non-defensive, soft, warm, kind, sharing, open, giving, etc. I don’t know about you, but that looks like a mighty tall order, especially if all you got to do it with is a hammer. Bang, bang! Clang, clang! Wham, wham!

It feels like I can’t do any of that other stuff with just a hammer. Maybe it’s time for John Henry to put his hammer down, and quit driving spikes (into people’s heads). The work of everyman is to tend his own hot fire, to throw his hammer into it, and begin the melting and re-forging process. Over and over again, until he has created for himself a master craftsman’s set of tools for all sorts of situations and instances. And he must practice with his tools until they become as musical instruments in his hands, and he a virtuoso.

This is very hard work. Indeed, it is a lifetime’s worth of work. And that, my friend, is a mighty inheritance to pass down to one’s children. A shed full of parenting tools! It is not the gold of this world (which can bankrupt on the inside), but the alchemical gold (which forever enriches) that is passed down from generation to generation. Smelted anew each day in the fires of family life, while trying to raise your children with your eyes wide open.

The Dad Life!

I typically feel compelled to write about the hard stuff of fatherhood. (See deepfatherhood). Since I am living it, I am drawn to the shadowy places where many fathers, sooner or later, find themselves.

There is not much in the popular literature about just how hard it can be for a guy to actually become the kind of father that he dreams of being. Our culture tends to paint the darker side of dads into narrow emotional corners: Workaholic Absentee Dad, Angry Bitter Father, Distant Dad, Bumbling Out-of-Touch Man, The Drunk, etc. But as all moms and dads know, there is a whole other side of fatherhood.

Today, it is time to give a nod to that other side of the fatherhood coin: the light and sunny side. It’s that sweet spot men often find themselves in when they surrender into the day-to-day life of being an engaged dad in today’s society. They have survived the changes brought on by pregnancy and childbirth. For men, these changes very often include weight gain, nesting behavior, hormonal changes, relationship change and strain, and even depression. These guys are weathering the storm. They are making it through.

Men who find themselves in this sweet spot have stopped fighting the bit. We are learning that resistance is futile. We are becoming dad. And oh, what a sweet spot it is! All the cliches start to apply. We start living “The Dad Life.” Check out the depiction of The Dad Life in this short 3-minute video of the same name. This is guaranteed to make any dad (or mom) crack a smile at the very least! Watch and enjoy The Dad Life.

As a dad, think about all of the little ‘Dad Life’ moments that you experience day in and day out. Those little taken-for-granted moments, everyday routines (“took my daughty to the potty”), and honey-do’s provide a wealth of opportunities to sink into the good stuff of fatherhood. The guys in “The Dad Life” bring those moments front and center. They turn the drudgery of shuttling kids, mowing lawns, and sweating the small stuff into a celebration of all things suburban and fatherly. It’s the Dad Life!

What To Do When You Don’t Know What To Do

Let’s face it fellas… Being a father (or stepfather) means spending a lot of time in situations where you just don’t know what to do. Many of us are “fix-it” kind of guys. We see a problem, and we try to solve it. If the grass gets long, we mow it. If a tree is rotting, we get a chain saw and cut it down. A ball is thrown, and we try to hit it. We do something. It is engrained in us throughout our lives: fix, solve, do, conquer, attack, defend, etc.

I come across dads who are hammers that treat each child like a nail. (If this sounds familiar, perhaps you yourself were a nail as a child.) Some dads see children as shrubs to be pruned and manicured to be perfect representations of their own egos and hard work. (See, look what I created! Look what I did.)

Being a good dad means spending a lot of time not knowing what to do and having the courage to rest into it. Good dads learn to hang out and be comfortable in that place of not doing. As a dad, if you are trying to find that place, it is located in that vast “gray” space that exists between all of our black and white thinking. Black and white dads are busy trying to do something – anything – to alleviate the discomfort of not knowing what to do. As a result, they aren’t really present with their kids. These dads are often thinking, “I don’t know what to do, but I gotta do something!”

Gray dads (no pun intended) have figured out ways to rest into that uncomfortable place filled with question marks. It is not easy to be there. It takes courage not to act. Being there is not a sign of weakness. Gray dads are decisive, firm, and clear when they need to be. However, they realize that what is called for most of time is their authentic presence in the room. They have come to know that most of the time there is really nothing that can be fixed, no problem to be solved, and nothing to do per se.

So, what do you do when you don’t know what to do? Do nothing. Try and become more present. Breathe deep into your own belly. Accept the fact that you don’t know what to do. Find yourself in the room. Look at your child and really try to just be with them. Let them see you – as much as you are able. Try and create connection. It sounds easy – almost clichéd, but it is really quite a challenge because of our inclination to act.

Black and white dads throw up their hands and storm out of the room saying, “Well, if you won’t take my advice, then I am abandoning ship. You deal with it.” This is their opportunity to check out. What I am talking about is just the opposite. If you can move toward this place with your children, you are actually checking in! You are showing up, perhaps for the first time, in an authentic way. If you do, you will surely find yourself on the path toward deepfatherhood.

The Myth of Sisyphus

Ever had a day like this? A week? A month? A decade? This video form the 1970s does a masterful job of depicting the fate of Sisyphus. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king who angered the gods and was sentenced to pushing a huge boulder uphill only to have it come back down and then being forced to repeat this task over and over for all eternity.

The imagery is a powerful reminder that when we feel like all of our efforts are in vain or that we find ourselves right back where we started (again) that we are not alone. From the dawn of civilization, humankind has pondered its lot in life. What hope is there for those of us consigned to a life of seemingly fruitless struggle and endless turmoil? Have you had times when you have felt a bit like Sisyphus? What have you been pushing uphill? How long have you been pushing? Is your rock a physical one? An emotional one? A spiritual one? Are you fated to struggle with it your entire life? Does it get the best of you no matter what you do? Can you not escape it?

It is ordained that Sisyphus push uphill forever. What are his options in the face of this? What are your options in the face of what you are pushing uphill? At first blush, Sisyphus has no option. His fate is sealed. But upon closer inspection, there is yet a place for movement. Faced with the fact that there is no possibility of external change, Sisyphus’ only recourse is to explore his own internal landscape. It is only there that he (and perhaps we) will find that fundamental shift that allows for the work to be carried forward.

Quote – Difficulties and Failures

“We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.”

Alain De Botton

Quotes

“Where we do not go willingly, sooner or later we will be dragged.”
James Hollis

In the News

Chores Around the House

A great article on giving young children (ages 2-4) tasks and chores around the house. Real responsibility early on will pay big dividends down the line!

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/benign-neglect/201102/talking-trash-or-taking-it-out

Benign Neglect!?

An anthropologist takes aim modern parenting trends calling for a little more ‘benign neglect’ with our children. The word ‘neglect’ is scary and loaded, yet think about the free time most of us had as kids. (Be home before dark!) With the rise of helicopter parenting, cell phones, and continual worry, maybe its time to have the pendulum swing back the other way just a bit.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/benign-neglect/201010/leave-the-kids-alone

Is your child addicted to the internet?

This is a short blog on the definition of Internet addition from Psychiatric Times. Discerning between addict and avid user is fuel for self-examination.

http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/blog/frances/content/article/10168/2097033