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While I was growing up, my dad was the Pastor of a church in inner-city Liverpool.

It was a tough neighbourhood, with more than its fair share of social issues, crime and deprivation. So there was a steady stream of people coming to our house and to Dad’s office, looking for help and support. He took his calling very seriously and, as a result, he was always busy.

Liverpool was a divided city in those days and, as is often the case, religious differences were a convenient excuse for a lot of violent behaviour. Under those conditions, it was not cool to have a dad who was the Pastor of a church and I was getting badly bullied.

It got so bad that the school would let me out a few minutes ahead of everyone else so that I could make my way home through the back alleyways and avoid being beaten up by one, or other, of the gangs that had formed in our area.

It was a grim time, that I would not want to repeat, but in the middle of all the fighting, the name calling and the isolation, I had one anchor that kept me secure - home.

My parents did a fantastic job of creating a safe, stable and happy environment for my sister, my brother and me to grow up in and I have hundreds of good memories of home in those days.

Ultimately, I had to find my own way to overcome the bullying but I was only able to do that because of the consistent affirmation of my parents and the confidence that gave me. I never took on the identity of “victim” and I never saw myself as “weak”. Like most children, I took the measure of my worth from my father’s opinion of me and it was only later in life that I realised just how fortunate I had been to have a dad who was so consistently encouraging.

He was very strict and certainly did not suffer fools gladly but I never doubted for a second that I mattered and that I was important to him. He said many encouraging things to me, over the years, but my abiding memory of those Liverpool days is of my father looking up from his desk when I went into his bedroom office after school, putting down his pen, sitting me next to him and asking me about my day.

I never remember him asking me to “wait” or to “come back in 5 minutes” and, when we were talking, he would never do anything else but listen. It was this undivided attention that spoke most eloquently of his feelings for me and his opinion about me. That was my bedrock; My secure foundation.

I am sure there were many things going through his mind and many pressing problems to be solved. So the fact that he was willing to put them to one side and focus on me gave me a confidence and sense of self-worth that has enabled me to weather some pretty big storms in the years that have followed.

In turn, I have tried to do the same for my own girls. Nowadays, it is easy because I love talking to them so much but, in the early years, when they were tiny and their days were defined by events that seemed rather trivial to me, it was the knowledge of what my own dad’s undivided attention had meant to me that kept me listening.

In our modern, inter-connected world with so many communication channels demanding our attention, it is rare to give our undivided attention to anything, but the simple gift of our time and attention can have a transforming effect on our kids.

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Years ago, I came home from work , one evening, and spent some time sitting on the couch with my eldest daughter who was about 18 months old. She used to like standing on the tops of my legs so her face was level with mine and I would make funny faces to make her laugh. 

At a certain point she reached out and pulled my glasses off my face. So, just for fun, I put them on her and this time we both laughed. I laughed because her eyes looked huge and she looked like a very youthful librarian. She laughed because of the sensation of having the glasses on.

I didn’t leave the glasses on her very long because I didn’t want to strain her eyes but she kept trying to take them and put them back on. She had made a new discovery: “Whenever I put those round windows on my face, daddy laughs.”  This was new information to add to her map of the world. Something else to remember and repeat. 

All children are mapmakers. They explore and test boundaries, experimenting with cause and effect, and storing their results and conclusions in a mental map of their world. Basically they are trying to determine how the world works and what they have to do to be safe, to be happy and to be approved of. They carry those maps into adulthood, adding and changing details based on learning and experience. 

No two people will have the exact same map, though, so, when the time comes to be parents, Mum and Dad will probably have slightly different starting points. A lot of parenting decisions will therefore be a blend or compromise between Mum’s outlook and Dad’s. 

Being a non-resident dad allowed me to parent based solely on my own map. I got to decide when bedtime was, whether they were allowed to climb that really tall tree and whether they were allowed to eat pizza for breakfast. I got to decide the kind of holidays and day trips we took, the books I read to them and the TV shows they watched (or didn’t). It was a brilliant way to let my kids get to know who I really was and how I navigate the world. 

I was talking to my daughters about this on FaceTime, yesterday, and they definitely see differences between their mum’s parenting style and mine - reliance on rules vs natural authority, different levels of openness to risk, routine vs spontaneity etc.

They see this as largely positive but they both felt it was really important, especially when they were very young, that the difference between my style and their mum’s was not too big. Too much difference was just confusing and made them feel insecure.

In those early years, I tried to keep the basic frameworks of life the same as when they were with their mum but I added elements of adventure, exploration, spontaneity and risk that they wouldn’t normally get. 

To be honest, there was some temptation to do things differently from their mum just to express my right to parent however I wanted but that would only have made life more difficult for my girls. There were also some times when I felt it was important to show them an alternative to their mum’s way of doing things. In either case, the key is to act out of conscience and belief not spite or competition.

As the girls have grown older, they have started to see the advantages of being part of two different worlds - each with it’s own strengths and weaknesses. They are both bi-lingual, bi-cultural and deeply connected to two very different parents. This has given them a confidence and maturity that they wouldn’t, otherwise, have had.

In the midst of all the difficulties of being a non-resident dad, the chance to help my girls draw their map of the world has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life. 

I think the key is to ask yourself what you can help your kids add to their map.

It could be introducing them to your hobbies, your friends, your favourite music, films and books. Maybe it is a skill that you can teach them or maybe it is a different way of thinking about things that you can show them.

There is an intrepid explorer in every child and who better to accompany them on the epic adventure of life than their dad?

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As men, we are used to our performance being measured and evaluated in minute detail. Our work lives are often dominated by KPI’s, Goals, Objectives, Must-Win-Battles etc. However, when it comes to our most important task in life - being a good father to our kids - there don’t seem to be any clear rules and it is very hard to measure success in any meaningful way.

I was talking about this with some friends, a while back, and one of them said he would judge how well he had done as a father based on the quality of the old people’s home his kids put him into when he could no longer look after himself. He meant it as a joke but his answer hinted at the question that almost all fathers ask themselves:

“How do I know I am being a good dad?”

I think being a good dad is mostly about following your instincts and learning by doing. However, the multiple demands on our time make it all too easy for our kids to slide down the priority list if we are not careful. This is especially true at the beginning of our journey as a “deliberate” dad, when our old ways of working are still driving most of our behaviour.

Measuring and tracking a few key fathering behaviours is a great way to hold ourselves accountable and keep us focussed until they become our natural way of thinking and behaving. It might feel a bit forced at first but, as an old boss of mine once said:

“People will put up with a lot of clunky behaviour if they believe your intentions are good.”

Out of all the crucial elements of being a great dad, the one that stands far out in front of all the others is the amount of your time you give your kids.

Give them your time

Time is the most valuable commodity we have got. Children seem to sense this instinctively which is why the amount of our time we give them has such a powerful effect on their sense of self-worth.

My two girls were just toddlers when their mum and I divorced so, in those early years, it was the quantity of my time I gave them, and the regularity with which I did that, that mattered the most.

I promised to talk to them every second day and spend every third weekend and half the holidays with them, no matter where in the world my work took me, and we have stuck to that routine for 14 years so far.

Talking about those early years, with my daughters, they say the predicability of my contact with them was really important. It wove me into their day-to-day routine and gave them a regular opportunity to tell me what they had been doing. This built a momentum of conversation and relationship that has formed the bedrock of the fantastic connection we now have.

Because they were so young, it would be hard to describe those early phone calls and FaceTime sessions as “quality time” to be honest.

My youngest was barely talking at that stage but the sound of my voice was important to her. My eldest was more fluent but even she would just wander off part way through the conversation sometimes. But still, it was incredibly important to both of them that I cared and that I wanted to be involved with them.

As they have grown older, quality of time has become more important than quantity. Any time together is better than being apart, of course, but it is the time we spend doing things together; when what I am doing is a response to what they are doing, or vice versa, when the real relationship building happens.

Playing games together, walking together, travelling together, having adventures together and most of all talking together have been the key to our success. We have done all those things for their own sake, because they are fun but, in the background, love, connection and a sense of family have been steadily growing. It is a slow and almost invisible process but, looking back after so many years, it is incredible to see how far we have come.

We will talk about some of the other key fathering behaviours in future blogs but, for now, if you want a quick snapshot of how well you are doing as a dad, just ask yourself:

“How much quality time have I spent with my kids this weekend; this week or this month?”

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One of the things that my girls and I really enjoy is walking in the forest near where we live. There is something magical about forests not to mention the vital role they play in replenishing oxygen, preventing soil erosion, providing building materials and forming a habitat for all kinds of wildlife.

However, these wonderful places have one terrible vulnerability - fire. So, if you walk through a managed forest then, sooner or later, you will come across a firebreak - a gap cut through the tress to prevent the spread of fire. All the vegetation is removed, down to the base soil layer so that there is no organic matter to provide fuel for the fire. The taller and more flammable the vegetation is, the wider the firebreak has to be.

Firebreaks make a great metaphor for holding back harmful forces, for holding the line and making a significant change in the landscape.

I love that metaphor and often use it when I refer to my dad as a “firebreak father”.

I guess the default for most parents is to copy their own parents - consciously or otherwise but a firebreak father does the opposite. He sets out to break with the pattern of previous generations for the sake of his kids. That’s what my dad did.

He was raised in poverty by working class parents in a suburb of London and was shown no affection whatsoever by his dad. Apparently, his dad was raised in the same way by his own father and there is every reason to believe that this pattern of behaviour went back for generations.

And yet, my dad was incredibly affectionate to me, my brother and my sister. He was extremely strict but he was also attentive, empathic, tactile and a brilliant story-teller. Serious illness and the second world war robbed him of any significant education but he still managed to instil in me a love of learning and an inquisitive nature. He was the firebreak in our family’s approach to fathering.

Like me, he was a deliberate father, not because he was separated from his kids but because he wanted us to have a better childhood than he did. He clearly had empathy and affection in his nature but rather than hold it in, like his own father had, he chose to let it out.

This was a risk for him and, looking back, it is clear that, at times, there was a struggle between his empathic side and the strictness he learned from his father.

I once asked him, just before he died, why he thought he had been such a different father to his own dad and he struggled to come up with a clear answer. In the end he said “ I wanted you never to doubt that you were loved and approved of so I just decided to be as loving and affirming to you as i could be. I wasn’t sure i had it in me but I wanted to give you whatever I could.”

As it turned out, he clearly did have it in him, it just needed his initial decision to be that kind of father. I suspect that all of us have a much wider range of fathering abilities inside of us than we realise or show and that means we have a lot more choice than we think about the kind of father we turn out to be.

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Almost 20 years ago, I was sitting on a terrace in Merano, Italy, having coffee with some work colleagues. One of them asked me if I would like to have kids. I said I assumed I would have some but I couldn’t imagine myself being a father.

One by one, the men around the table started talking about how they felt before they had kids. One of them, Bart, told us how he became so worried at his lack of feelings for his unborn child that he went to see a counsellor about it. He realised he was a very bad person and was hoping that there were some insights or techniques that would help him find his lost humanity.

His counsellor, asked him how long it was until the baby was born and Bart told him 6 months. The counsellor said he should come back and see him in 7 months time, if he still felt the need to do so. Needless to say, he never went back.

We all had a good laugh about it and the conversation carried on until my good friend, Bram, who headed up the Netherlands office of our organisation, said something that has stuck with me ever since:

“Whenever a baby is born, so is a dad.”

No one is ready to be a dad until they actually are one. There isn’t a father on the planet who has never made a mistake and the longer you are a father the more you realise how clueless you were at the beginning.

And yet, most kids survive their parent’s incompetence and turn out pretty well - just in time to be the next generation of imperfect but willing parents.

One of the lessons I had to learn, early on was the need to silence my inner critic - that voice in your head that keeps reminding you of all the mistakes you have made and how much you have still got to learn. All dads struggle with this but if you keep listening to your inner critic, it will shut you down and then both you and your kids will miss out.

Just remind yourself that being a dad is a lifestyle - not an exam. There is no requirement for you to be perfect and every mistake you make is an opportunity to learn and grow. Kids instinctively want to be fathered and their resilience and tenacity will get you through the rough patches.

They just need you to never give up and never hold back.

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It’s not often we are told to aim for average but for fathers, it can be the key to our sanity.

The biggest impact my divorce had on me as a father was that I would no longer get “accidental” time with my girls. I would never just walk into the house and see them there. The only way I would get to see them would be as the result of a lot of planning, travel and expense and that brought with it a huge pressure to make every moment count.

There is a positive side to this, of course, and, for sure, being a “deliberate” dad is the key to success when you are a non-resident parent. However the flip side to this is that it can feel like a huge disaster if your time with your kids doesn’t go as well as you wanted it to.

I remember one of my early visits to my girls in Holland. We had had a really good time but then, in the car, on the way back, they started fighting and I had to raise my voice to get them to stop. They did stop but somehow the mood was spoiled. I tried my best to get us back to a good place but it didn’t really work and all too soon we were at their mum’s house and I had to head back to the ferry.

I felt absolutely terrible and I would have given anything for a bit more time to sort things out but, as it was, I knew I would not see them, face to face, for another three weeks. I was still brooding about it as I drove onto the ferry for the journey home.

As the ship sails out of the river Maas into the English channel, it passes a signal tower, way out at the end of a breakwater, and that was always the point where I felt I was passing out of the girl’s world and back into my own.

I was staring out of my cabin porthole, at this tower, that night, when it suddenly struck me:

“My success as a dad is not determined by my worst visit with them or my best. It is the average of all the time I spend with them that matters.”

In his book “The 7 habits of highly effective people”, Stephen Covey talks about the concept of an emotional bank account between you and the people who are close to you. As long as you are paying in more than you are spending, all will be well.

I came to see that my time with my girls operated like that. The key is to keep banking experiences and memories and the resulting balance will cover those few occasions when things don’t go well.

As it was, when I FaceTime’d my girls, the next Tuesday, and started to apologise that things hadn’t ended well on the Sunday, all I got was two blank faces.

They had moved on - so I did too.