Episode #50 - Billy Yalowitz | Great insight and Vision on Fatherhood

Billy Yalowitz will share some of his great insight and vision on fatherhood. Became a father at 55 years old Billy leads workshops on parenting and fatherhood, helping parents from all around to network and connect, helping break the age old culture that fathers and men in general have no feelings or deep connections especially with other men and fathers. “I love introducing Zevi to the world. I love being with her. She discovers it on her own and I come with her. I love the parts and the ideas that I can show to her. But it is the relationship and the unfolding of the relationship. I like to think of Zevi as my contemporary.” From his inspiring and beautiful relationship with his daughter we learn once again that fatherhood is much more than just providing and protecting. It is also exposing and guiding, it is an active role in the family and in the raising of the children.   “Find another father and get really close to him. Find another father, or two or three other fathers that you can create regular play dates with and that you can turn to for support, that you can listen to each other about what is going well and what is hard about fathering and develop your network of other fathers to be close to.” He made his mission to teach parents through his workshops that networking and connecting with other parents is a key point in learning and growing as people and parents. He takes to heart the old saying that it takes a village to raise a child and takes it to another level from all of his own experience with his fathering project. It is amazing to listen how this project came together and the great things they have achieved so far. “It is like a daily practice that is a kind of a recovery practice. Any parent knows it is physically taxing work. Whether you are in the paid labor force or not. And for stay at home parents, stay at home moms and stay at home dads that is very physically and emotionally and intellectually challenging work. So how do we recover? How do we do that?” Tighten your seat belts and prepare for an amazing interview that will take your fathering skills to a whole new level and change yours and your family life for the better.     OTHER QUOTES: “There is this daily struggle at the society that does not recognize parenting as such an important job. I see it as a job. Some of the women who ave been my mentors for decades have for a long time said that the work of giving care, parenting, teaching, the maintenance of the home, domestic work are all kinds of labor that are completely undervalued in the society.” “It is like a daily practice that is a kind of a recovery practice. Any parent knows it is physically taxing work. Whether you are in the paid labor force or not. And for stay at home parents, stay at home moms and stay at home dads that is very physically and emotionally and intellectually challenging work. So how do we recover? How do we do that?”  “If you are on a heterosexual relationship particularly, notice the effect of the difficulty of parenting on you and your co parent, you and your female partner. Because I have noticed for me for sure and around the dads that I am close to that with the challenges of parenting the relationship with our female partners takes a really hard hit and we are more apt to act out in ways towards them in the moments of stress and challenge and fear than we might have been before.” “For a while I didn’t know what to do as an artist. I really wanted to keep Zevi, that is my daughter, central in my life and I was aware that work and specially the kind of work I do which is very encompassing and could take me away for periods of time, I wanted to change that, I wanted to keep my family and my daughter really central.” “Virtually all men I know in this society and other societies that I am familiar with that we are systematically separated from our children and that process of our socialization as males I think begins at birth, in the uterus. We get treated differently. I think males get dehumanized in how we grow up as boys. We are kept from our own feelings, we are kept from really close affectionate contact with other boys and with everybody.” “For me part of the work of fathering, apart of the opportunity there is I need to keep up with myself and I need to draw in further support from other adults whether they are parents, whether they are female or male. I have to challenge my own isolation every step of the way because when I am in close contact in good relationships where I can really talk and feel what I need to feel and have people listen to me and I listen to them then I show up in much better shape for Zevi.”     LINKS: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/billy.yalowitz   “Let’s learn together. Let’s grow together. Let’s be dads together. Peace.”