DadsMind

Send a Year In Review Letter with the Holiday Cards

Sending a “Year in Review” letter with your holiday/Christmas cards is a great way to let your extended family and friends know what is going on in your family’s life. But if you are going to write one, there are some do’s and don’ts you need to consider. My wife has written our Year-in-Review letter for the last 15 years. I help with the design (borders and pictures), proofreading and offer thoughts on how my family may interpret some of the information (sometimes they miss the intended message…then again, I over-analyze …well actually I…oh never-mind). She was an English minor in college and has been influenced by the large volume of books she has read (and re-read.. David Sedaris) over the years. Lorraine is a fantastic writer with a hilarious sense of humor. Hopefully she’ll write that book I keep asking for so that she can get a fat publishing deal and I can retire early but that is another post I should write..anyway… If you can find the time between Christmas shopping, attending the company holiday soiree, and decorating your house, then you will find that writing (or at least helping to prepare) one of these letters can be a lot of fun and a good time to reflect back on the year. If you are still reading…great! I am guessing you’re considering a letter. If so, your first question might be what do you write about? Well, it is really not too difficult. Think about the [...]

Just Dad & the Kids Day

When are you at your best with the kids? Is it after fighting the daily commute home when you get yourself psyched up to walk in the door and say “Daddy’s Home!” Does that time go something like this? Moments after you announce your arrival, the kids come running. The savory scent of dinner reminds you that while your wife is cooking in the kitchen, you need to get the kids off her back and spend some quality time with them regardless of how tired you might be. During dinner, you submit to merely assisting your wife while she gets the kids eating since she knows what they need and when they need it. After dinner, you spend some more time with the munchkins for their bath-time and ending their day with bedtime stories. This daily ritual is a good one for maintaining your relationship with your kids, even though you might be exhausted sometime they hear you say, “The End.” Wouldn’t it be better if you were rested and worked on your relationship with them outside of the weekday “daily grind?” I think so. Tough day at the office Dad? For me, Just Dad & the Kids Day came out of necessity. I had gotten laid off from my job when my daughter was in kindergarten and my son was in nursery school. I treated my time out of work like a job where I would spend 8 hours a day working toward getting a job. We were [...]

More on Getting Kids to Talk – Use a Dinner Game

I have to say that there is a lot of good insight contained within the Daddy-Man Blog-o-sphere. Another good example is today’s post at Daddy: fun stuff with my boy titled Getting the kids to talk. I am sure his degrees in Psychology, Religion, and Education help to shape his outlook on parenting. I agree with the open question approach when trying to foster a dialog with our teens. In addition to Mr. Macfarlane’s advise, I want to add this game my family plays at the dinner table. We called it the “Good and Bad Game.” I have found dinner is a good place to glean a lot of information, plus you get to share a bit with them while they stuff their gullet. Some of the problems with dinner conversations with kids, both elementary and teen ages, is getting them to give you insight into how their daytime hours away from family went. Plus, each person needs to contribute. So, we used a simple game format with turns and a moderator. Since it was dinnertime, everyone was attentive and since the game had no winner or loser, the rules and format can be loose. It went like this: 1. Someone would say, “Let’s play the Good and Bad Game!” 2. Pick a moderator. Try to pick someone different each time you play. The moderator’s job is to keep track of who’s turn it is and to ask the game questions. 3. The moderator picks someone to start (the moderator [...]

The Tooth Fairy – Going a Little Over-the-Top

A child’s imagination can create the craziest, most fascinating, scariest, incredible worlds. It can be filled with fun zany animal friends or sometimes monsters under the bed. Children can become powerful allowing magic to stream out of their fingers and bullets to shoot from sticks. I have enjoyed hanging out in this exciting world with my kids. But should I be feeding into this frenzy with lies about fairies and elves? I didn’t tell my kids that the bedtime stories we read were real, so why should I portray the Tooth Fairy as a real being? Was I putting my kids intellectual achievement in an imagination headlock? Now that my kids are teenagers and believe in new fantasies, like “Mom loves cleaning up after me, it helps her feel needed” or “Donuts are actually good for you” (I do believe in donuts…I do…I do). But my teens still remember the old ones. I worked pretty hard on keeping those fantasies alive. For the Tooth Fairy, it all started innocently enough. They had friends who had the tooth fairy replace their baby teeth with cash and I was going to make sure she (yes, the tooth fairy seems to be female in the US) was going to do the same for my kids. “How much money do you think I will get Daddy?” “I don’t know Alexis. Since this is your first tooth, maybe she will give you more than usual.” She left five bucks! But cash was not [...]

Pink: Progressive Parents Struggle Shows Worth in Teens

I was just visiting a few other Dad blogs and I found Oren Miller’s like-minded post on his site A Father and a Blogger, Pink: The Futile Struggles of Progressive Parents. I was planning on posting a Nature vs Nurture post and probably still will write that post in the near future. But Oren’s view on the subject reflects my views on the subject quite well. When my first child Alexis was born I was in my early 30’s. At that time, I had more than a handful of years experience working with young people. In the years just before she was born I was a high school teacher. Before that, I worked for an elementary school in an after- school program with K-6 kids. During my college years, I took several psychology courses, including child development, educational, and adolescent psychology …And before that, I hung out with my Uncle a lot while he was working on his masters and doctorate degrees in psychology. I felt all of this knowledge and experience prepared me for fatherhood. And it did help…some. On the Nature vs. Nurture continuum, I leaned pretty heavily on the Nurture side when Alexis was born. As was the case for Oren, I too did not want society forcing my daughter to believe she was in any way, a member of the weaker sex. I made it a point to be rough and tumble with her. As she got older, I would include her when I was fixing [...]

Parenting: The One Rule Plan

I am sure you have rules you want your kids to remember AND to follow… No whining, No hitting, No leaving the table without being excused, No talking with your mouth full, and the list goes on. I can think of at least 20 rules I have heard of and read that different families have. But should parents rear their children using lists of family rules? My wife and I came up with one rule and focused on one of our of family values to back it up. One Rule: Do what Mom and Dad tell you to do. That pretty much sums it up. Thank you and good night! What…You need a little more explanation than that? Look here pal…Just read the rule again and make it your family’s rule. There. Are we done now? Just because I am not YOUR dad, you’re not going to follow my rule? Oops! Wait a second…I am sorry. I forgot to mention the family value to back it up with, which is why you would not just do my bidding blindly and devoutly. Children, not adults, are supposed to do that. In the words of Lord Tennyson, “Theirs not to reason why.” Right? Wrong! Why is it wrong? Well, to tell someone to blindly follow your rules lacks a practice of the family value I meant to mention earlier, mutual respect, which should be given as often as possible. By George, this house is a veritable cesspool of talent. You [...]

ADHD Medication – A Story of Fear and Acceptance

October, …the weather is a little brisker and the school year is now in full swing. There were new schedules, changes in drop offs and pick-ups, and new school mates. All of this has been incorporated into your daily routine and you know what to expect each day and when. Life is good and you are in your comfort zone. Warm dancing puppies…happiness is them. Progress reports should be arriving from school any day now. What do we hope for? Well, good academic progress of course! Your kid was diagnosed with ADHD last year, and ended the year with good grades after a ton of work. Now he or she is a little older and knowing they have ADHD is half the battle, right? Knowledge is power! The envelope containing your child’s school progress report arrives and you really want to see some academic goodness from you child. And why shouldn’t you…I mean, you did start off the year right with good communication between you and the teachers. Based on last year’s investigation, you all know your child has a hard time with homework. Plus everyone agrees there is lots of potential for high academic achievement, including the psychologists who gave your child a range of tests where high scores came back on linguistic, logical-mathematical, and spacial tests. No one questions the fact that your kid is a bright bunny. There HAS to be good news in that envelope because you talked to the school counselor on the first day [...]

Four Daddy Do’s for Every New Dad

You ain’t the Mama! That’s a fact. And unless you’re a stay-at-home dad during your child’s infancy, you will have to go the extra mile to get anywhere near the parental bond that the your new child has with his or her mother. There have been plenty of studies like the PSID, the NSLY79, the HSB Study and others that show children who have a good relationship with their father will lead happier, healthier, and more productive lives than those who do not. Thousands and thousands of children have been studied for over 40 years now. The data leads most psychologists and sociologists to the same conclusion, dads are important to children. Okay, so you probably already knew this. And maybe your dad did a great job in raising you and helping you become the well adjusted adult you are today. Awesome! Good for you. Or maybe you grew up without a dad or worse you had an abusive loser for a father. And now you worked through any issues your history may have created for you and find you want to try on the role. Or maybe you are surprised by this sudden change in role and are wondering how to approach it. If you are like a lot of people (well, a lot of people in my experience) maybe you had a relationship with your old man and you feel he did the best he could… but you’re thinking you could improve on the family’s track [...]

Daddy’s Home! I hope he’s not a zombie again

It's the end of a tough Monday. Whew! You made it. You got up early to get a good start to your week, but you are paying for it now. You are tired, stuck in traffic on your commute home, and looking forward to relaxing and recharging. But hold on there Daddio! Your little one has been waiting all afternoon for you (by the way Mommy waiting too since she needs a break from said little one). So…although you might feel like a zombie, it's time to rev up your engines and burst through that door yelling "Daddy's Home!" I just want to eat you up Honey. Growing up, my Dad was a bit of a grouch after returning home from a long day's work as a prison guard. Now that I am an adult, I can't blame him. I know now that working at a prison is not all sunshine and daisies. But when I was a kid, I did not understand. Dad's arrival was more like a threat my Mom would use to get me to behave. "Well Christopher, you just wait 'til your father gets home and we'll see what he has to say about the crayon marks on the walls!" "Oh please Mom! Don't tell. I promise I'll wipe it all off and never do it again!" Do you want your arrival home to be something your kids dread? Or maybe it is something even worse, a non-event? Slogging through the doors and slumping into your Lazyboy while your toddler stares at you like [...]

Why Public Education Must Change

In December of 2010, the AFP reported the three-yearly OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, which compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world, ranked the United States 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science and a below-average 25th for mathematics. If we don’t change, public schools will drive more students to: 1. Need ADHD drugs to cope with the industrial age style of teaching, 2. Graduate as clones of knowledge due to standardized testing rather than original thinkers, and 3. Drown in information chaos when they should navigate information for meaning. When I graduated from college, I became a high school physics teacher. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I was very good at teaching. I LOVED teaching and let everyone know it! When discussing my experiences as a teacher, I would hear comments about how tough it must be to teach high school these days with all the drugs, alcohol, and violence, plus the general contempt teenagers have for school and authority. But from the viewpoint of my classroom, these were not problems I dealt with in my classes. The students who took physics were mostly the brightest bunnies at the high school (well some were brighter and more bushy-tailed than others). But I do have experience teaching younger less motivated students. I taught a physical science class my first year and I did teach elementary age (4 to 9 years old) for a few years [...]