“A father carries pictures where his money used to be.”
~Author Unknown

Becoming a dad was the best thing that ever happened to me. Once I got over the complete loss of privacy, the inability to capture a clear thought, and swallowed the fear of the thirty-eight bajillion ways I could potentially mar the mental fabric of my children’s minds forever, I was ready to dive head-first into being a dad.

Every father has fears, some well earned, like wondering if you will be any good at this parenting thing. And others, a bit less likely, what if f I sit my baby down next to another one and then walk away with the wrong kid because all babies look the same?

I am hardly qualified to write a treatise on great parenting. My oldest child is starting second grade and my youngest is about to enter kindergarten. By no means am I attempting to hand down tablets from above filled with universal commandments. The following list is rather a list of suggestions I would have most liked to have been given prior to becoming a father.

10 Ways to be a Great Dad

1) Patience is everything. Practiced composure is like that single drop of super serum that turns that skinny kid into Captain America. It’s easy to lose our patience, and infinitely more difficult to reign it in and redirect it toward a more positive route. Yet allowing our children to see us overly frustrated is never a best case scenario. Go for a walk, take a deep breath, count to ten… or 100. But practice patience from the beginning and you will likely find you have raised a patient child.

2) Read to your child as often as you can. You are reading this right now. You have every tool you need to help your children grow up smart. Endowing children with powerful vocabulary at the earliest possible time is critical to their cognitive development. Start when they are babies, and don’t stop just because they are suddenly able to read the words themselves. Reading with your child is not only a wonderful time for mutual bonding, it also helps to establish a habit that your children can carry forever.

3) Treasure your time with your little ones. The years will turn to vapor soon enough. I am right now having difficulty believing that both my children will be in school full-time, in just a few scant days. Though part of me is, of course, eager for the time I need to blaze through my work load without interruption, there is also a part of me mourning for those minutes I will never hold again. Make the most of your time, no one will give you any more. You’ve probably watched the clock enough at work, don’t do it at home.

4) Treat mom with respect. This one is so big I considered writing it in all caps, but I didn’t want to be annoying. Seriously, don’t drop the ball here. If you show disrespect to your lady, you are crushing a part of your child’s soul and damaging a bit of their future. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, respect is always free. Abuse doesn’t have to be physical and often isn’t. Remember, children learn by example and you are their constant model. Show your son how to properly treat a woman and show your daughter what to look for in a man. Do your small part to make the entire world a slightly better place.

5) Model appropriate behavior. Similar to #4, but different enough to warrant its own entry. Don’t do things in front of your child that you wouldn’t want them to do, at least not in excess. I’m not saying you shouldn’t drink or smoke, but I am saying if you do either one excessively, the behavior will become branded in your child’s eyes. The same goes for all poor manners and negative attitudes; sloth, greed, laziness, anger, and the like. Be yourself, but be your best version as long as your children are watching.

6) Teach independence. Children are often far more capable than what many adults allow themselves to believe. The earlier you start inoculating your child with independence, the more they will be able to help you and themselves to become more capable, well-rounded people. Yes, it can feel frustrating to take the time to teach a two year old to do something that you could do in a fraction of the time, but soon she will be three and have a strong skill set you can easily build upon. You can raise a child with a “Yes I can!” attitude, if you start with “yes you can” first.

7) Let your child’s individuality glimmer. Each of us are unique, yet it is all too easy to project ourselves and our desires onto our children. This rarely does them or us any good. It’s okay to guide them in the right direction, but we should never try to mold our children into what we want at the expense of allowing their true selves to flourish. The best you can do as a parent is to instill your child with the best values you can until those valued are internalized, then stand back and wait for the tree to bear fruit. You want your child to be their best, but sometimes they have to find it themselves.

8) Stand united. Never allow your child to think they can come between you and mom. Unless there is blood or vomit involved, it is probably best to agree in front of the extra set of tiny eyes, and then settle your differences in private. Mom and Dad must always be a team and stand together with every decision. If you want your child to know they can’t penetrate the perimeter of your unity, you have to prove it. And on that note, it’s okay to say NO and mean it when you do. Don’t surrender to their whining or you are only teaching them that it is an effective means of getting their way.

9) Be human. Yes, almost all of us are required to work and no, we can’t always be attendant to our child’s every need. But we can do our best with the time we have, and never make our children feel as though they are a burden to our schedules. Make sure to set aside sacred time each day exclusively for them, and don’t allow anything frivolous to breach the significance of that time. From the lingering minutes when you exchange anecdotes about your days to the memory card moments filled with games and recitals, your focused attention is something they’ll never forget.

10) Be real. You don’t have to be John Wayne. Let your children see all sides of you. Be funny, strict, tender; affectionate, serious and vulnerable. Humans are complicated creatures. By allowing your children to see all sides of you, you will be helping them to understand themselves infinitely more.

No list of ten tips will make you a better anything, not without application placed behind the copy. Do your best every day and if you fumble, do your best to start over tomorrow. The best tip, however, isn’t on the list above. Use common sense and know that your children are watching everything you do. Though you might not realize it, you are the world to them. Do all that you can to make that world a pleasant place to live.

Writer Dad

This post was originally written for Zen Habits, but has since been turned into a mini ebook by Dave. Just one small example of the work we’re doing for clients at Ghostwriter Dad each day. Enjoy!

Nature and nurture are in a never ending battle to claim the disposition of our children. While it’s true that the apple rarely tumbles too far from the tree, it is also true that there are a multitude of things we as parents can do to safeguard the childhoods of our children, limit their exposure to the more damaging elements the world will see fit to introduce in time, and do our best to raise a healthy and happy child.

We might not be able to help the variety of our branches, but we are the ones who control the nutrients in their soil and the sunlight in their sky.

In addition to the obvious things such as making sure your child is consuming the right nutrients, staying hydrated, and getting the quantity of sleep and exercise a growing body needs, here are 7 secrets that can help you raise a happy child.

1. Let your child know you are excited to see them when they enter the room. Let them see the light dance inside your eyes when their gaze drifts into yours. Be mindful of their presence by showing them your smile and greeting them warmly. Say their name out loud. Not only do children love to hear the sound of their name, they also long to feel validation from their loved ones. Think about it from an adult perspective – wouldn’t you love it if the face of the person you loved most lit like a holiday parade every time you entered the room? Your child loves you the most, imagine the returns after a childhood filled with such affection.

2. Teach your child it’s okay to be bored. As parents, it’s often our instinct to entertain our children each and every waking hour. When we don’t possess the time or energy, it is all too easy to allow the glowing blue babysitter in the living room to do the heavy lifting. But when we rely on television, or any other form of autopilot attention, we succeed only in limiting our child’s development. Children have vivid imaginations that flourish upon nurturing. But without the opportunity to coax their creativity, it will only whither on the vine. Allow your child idle minutes to develop their creativity with hands-on activities to stimulate their thought. A few sheets of paper and a box of crayons can keep a well rounded child busy for far longer than an episode of Dora.

3. Limit your child’s media. Related, but not limited to number two. Limiting your child’s exposure to media isn’t only a positive move for promoting their creativity, it is an excellent method to broaden their attention span while grooming their ability to stay calm. Your child will have plenty of exposure to more than you want soon enough. During those precious years when you are the designer of their decisions, you must make sure they are learning to live a life independent from the over-exposure that is often too easy to rely on. Yes it is difficult, but we owe it to the next generation to search for the right road rather than the easy one.

4. Let your child know they are more important than work by giving them eye contact and attention. Your child doesn’t just need you around, they need you present. Play with your child, interact with them, find out what is important to them by asking questions and listening to their answers. Your child deserves at least a little bit of you each and every day, at least a few minutes where you are not considering your email or allowing your thoughts to wander over what’s been left sitting on your desk. Letting your child know they are important is like giving them an insulin shot of happy.

5. Let your child make a few of the rules. You don’t have to make them the boss to let them feel empowered. Often, power struggles with our children are the direct result of them feeling a loss of control. You can easily curb these instances by allowing your child to feel like they are part of making up some of the protocol. By at least appearing to give your child some of the control, you are helping them understand household law inside and out. This will lead directly to a willingness to follow.

6. Teach your child – don’t assume it’s all happening outside the house. Home schooling is every parent’s job. Whether your child attends public or private school, or receives all their schooling at home, it is essential to the world’s best future that parents are the ones to fill in the blanks. There are plenty of skills not taught in school that play a massive role in determining who your children will grow up to be. Children are not raised in tupperware, and when they finally leave us to enter the world far away from our watchful eyes, they must have the sharpened tools that will help them be the best that they can be.

7. Model appropriate behavior. In my opinion, this is the most important item on the list. Children do as they see, not as they’re told. If you want your child to be mindful of others, you must be mindful of others yourself. If you want your child to by happy, you must smile without hesitation. There is no one more influential to your child than you. At least for now.

Raising a happy child is hard work, but it is something that can and must be done.  Once you focus on the needs of your child and ensure you are doing all you can to meet them, your efforts will be rewarded. You will have a healthy and happy child, fortunate to have been raised in a family where childhood wasn’t permitted to simply fade away.

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“Are we not like two volumes of one book?”
~Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

Working from home has afforded me with the luxury of observing my children’s evolution up close, watching them grow to sapling from seed in bits and starts, never quite knowing whether a particular behavior is endangered or simply getting started. The inevitable minutes that will one day end up missing from my memory will slip away due to the detritus of old age, not because I was absent or too careless to pay attention.

Like any parent, I observe things about my children that I could not be more proud of, often chasing or trailing some other thing I wish they did better. There are habits I long to break, flaws I wish to iron, and character traits I wish to strengthen.

My son talks endlessly – a million miles a minute with rarely a breath between laps. He can talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk, and no matter how much I love the storyteller spinning inside him, sometimes it’s just TOO MUCH. I long for the quiet and have several times slipped into the bathroom in search of a few scant seconds of solitude only to hear the tip tip tap upon the door as his story continues to unfold. He is a Tommy Gun spattering blasts of verbiage that rarely cease whether invited or not. Just like his father.

My daughter will do anything for a laugh, even when her humor is hinging on the wrong side of obnoxious. She will rudely slice into the conversation of others without a second thought so long as it tilts the spotlight in her direction. When not receiving the attention she feels she deserves, my daughter will turn up the dial, assuming the problem is her volume and rarely accepting the suggestion that perhaps the reason no one is laughing is because she isn’t being all that funny. Just like her father.

My son will sometimes fall into the seemingly endless loop of a semi-eternal thought, as though frightened of its release. He will repeat the same question over and over, hurtling past learning until he lands in the lands of reassurance. He will parrot his own thoughts with enough fortitude to make you half believe an army of repetition can wage a war powerful enough to twist imagination to truth. Just like his mother.

My daughter gets feisty when things don’t go her way, her fingers curving to tight commas nested inside her palms. A fierce determination will wash her face like the moon settling in front of the sun. She is willing to fight for what she believes to be right no matter how shaky her footing, and willing to battle even when no fight is required. Just like her mother.

My son sometimes pouts when he does not get his way. He will purse his lips and cast his eyes downward, revealing with a quick stroke of his chin the precision of his injury; a wordless manipulation to let those who love him most know his needs have not been met. I look at him with an inferno of conflicting desires – one to satisfy what I otherwise am not and the other to put the manipulation in its place. I cannot help but feel certain he knows exactly what he is doing. Just like his father.

My daughter is a sometimes slob, allowing appetite to consume her with the same ferocity that drives her to shovel food into her mouth as though she were the new puppy in an overcrowded kennel. Unwilling to take a breath, too busy inhaling; the sight is embarrassing beyond measure. I would wonder if she eats this way when we’re not around, but of course she does. Just like her father.

Like it or not, our children are fractured reflections of us, and we have but a fraction of their years to give them our best. We must highlight the best inside us, and do all we can to rinse the worst. In those inevitable moments when we look at our children and see something we do not wish to see, it is often all too easy to look beyond our own borders to find the root of the problem. More often than not, those roots are right beneath our feet.

Writer Dad

This post revisits a theme I’ve written about previously in, “Dad, DAD, DAD!!!” Any one of us who has ever given birth, brought a baby home from the hospital, or been in the same room with a child for over 5 minutes can probably relate.

Has anyone ever considered that the universal hearing loss of the elderly might be entirely by choice? I wonder if there’s a line that could be drawn between hearing loss and children raised. I’ve no idea what kind of capital it would require, but it’s probably worth the fund raising to get a team in Geneva to start working round the clock on the research.

“Dad, it’s my turn to choose. Mia picked last time and it’s not fair.”
“That’s not true! He picked two times in a row and now he’s trying to steal my turn away from me!”
“Nu-uh. Two Fridays ago, when it was cloudy and the man outside was yelling really loud and the phone rang and you said you’d be right back and then you were gone for a bunch of minutes and then when you came back you said that it would be my turn but then it wasn’t my turn because we had to go eat dinner and then we had stories and then we went to bed and I never got my turn and now it’s my turn and it’s not fair.”

Perhaps there are only so many decibels our ears permit before the drums finally swing the door closed. Just maybe, the more annoying the noise, the lower the tolerance.

“Dad, Max is antagonizing me.”
“I was just -”
“He came into my room after I told him that he couldn’t. Then he took my Minty pony and threw it on top of the shelf. Then he laughed. Six times. Then he kissed me two times even though I told him he was in my privacy. Now he’s taking all the books off my shelves and he keeps meowing like a kitty and won’t stop. He also said that someday I’m going to die.”

I haven’t had a day of quiet in almost 8 years. At first it was fine. I was a new dad, eager to slip into my new responsibilities. The scream of an infant is immediate, sends your heart sinking straight to your deepest depths, demanding you do whatever you can to stop it. Change, feed, or comfort your child. I must provide them with all they need, for I am one of the two threads sewing their safety to the world.

“What’s for dinner?”
“Are we almost there?”
“She started it!”
“It wasn’t me.”
“I’m hungry.”
“I’m thirsty.”
“I’m tired.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I’m not thirsty.”
“I’m not tired.”

I LOVE listening to my children. I think they are awesomely articulate, wonderfully imaginative and endlessly engaging. One of my favorite things in the world is to discuss the best and worst parts of our days, dig deep into the depths of who they are and who they want to be, and listen to stories both real and invented as they unspool our of their mouths from the bobbin in their brain.

BUT

“Dad, dfaklejk; fdlkdsjfiel;k Dad kdfja;iefj;ajf;dfkd k Dad i;jf;leif;ejf;alseifj;lasdjf;lsaefj Dad faielalmcmiel Dad fjiejaiae;lfij Dad fjie;lajef;j Dad   ajf;iealfjs;fj  ;dfij;a eisjfa;lsijf;lseajf;ajef; asfj;as  fj;afj Dad Dad Dad Dad Dad Dad Dad!!!!!”

Some days I feel as though my mind is mired inside the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan. My eyes are shallow crimson pools, scanning the same paragraph for the 47th time while listening to an endless loop of banter between my offspring that’s been bouncing back and forth for one half of forever and making me question whether time has finally started to fold back upon itself. Suddenly I hear the hint of a nearly silent sizzle, like ice cold water drizzled across a flaming skillet. A single second later and the space between my ears begins to detonate. I feel my sanity take flight, my reasoning collapse upon itself, and the atoms of my body constrict then explode as they fly off and scatter in fifty different directions. I smell the sudden stench of burning flesh and look around the room to see steaming piles of myself littering the hardwood floors. I shake it off and attempt to stand but the iron weight of discomfort from the unrelenting din and discord continues to beat on my battered body like a wayward and angry bolt of lightning.

If I hear Dad one more time, it might be enough to send me sailing straight over the edge.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“You’re my best friend.”

Writer Dad