Close Quarter Dad

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The next possibility for victimization in a violent crime, is going to be basically poor judgment.

It is whether or not your children are choosing to go with another group of kids where they shouldn't be going, or your daughter or son, who might be in college and they're making the bad judgment to go to a bar. Possibly they go to a place that they know they shouldn't be going, or get into a car that they shouldn't be getting into.

I understand that this isn't the face of an individual of the actual subject. This is actually your child.

But I want to include this in here, because it's really important to understand when we're talking about assessing threats.

Could it have been poor judgment for your son to go into a bar using his fake id? And then they happen to be in the face of a criminal where a robbery is going on?

... Or there's a gang initiation that just happened ...Or something was about to escalate that had nothing to do with your son being there, and he happened to be there because of poor judgment. He happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time at the same time.

Yes, absolutely.

But I want to bring the issue of judgment forward, because this can actually influence whether or not your child is going to become a victim of a violent crime.

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There is really one of four faces or four situations that they're gonna find themselves in. If you're able to understand this, then you're able to move your own training, your own discussions and your own paradigm in the proper way.

 A lot of self-defense programs teach stranger danger. A lot of discussions and a lot of paradigms that parents have are don't talk to strangers.

 How many times were you told that when you were a kid, don't talk, just don't trust strangers?

 But, the reality is in possibly a situation where you get separated from your child; maybe you're in the city, you're looking in the window, you turn around and your little girl is gone; or maybe it's a situation where you're getting off a train and you're little girl drops her doll, she goes back to grab it, the doors close and the train goes; we could go on and on with all these different scenarios, but it's at that point that we really need to count on strangers.

The reason for creating close quarter parenting is, back in 2006 I began to recognize something that was pretty unique, and I don't know if I would have ever realized this if I wasn't in the unique situation I was in as a martial arts instructor and as a father.

As a teacher here, and the owner of my martial arts school, I started to work with and engage with obviously a lot of kids and had a lot of kids in my dojo.

The majority of my students are adults, but I had a lot of children here and we were able to build the school up to about 200 children and it's a lot of kids, so I'm engaging with a lot of parents.

What I started to realize after a while is the majority of the parents were moms and at first, for the first few years, I just sort of took it as a soccer mom thing that dads were at work and moms were at home and after school the moms took the kids to karate lessons.

Then I started to notice something a little bit deeper as being a dad myself, is that the father's, a few dads were coming in and those dads that came in were highly engaged with me.

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Let's talk about understanding the difference between improvisational training and functional training and how we should approach working with our children to give them a clear understanding and skill set of for personal protection.

How can they really take ownership of the lessons you teach them, and do so in a way that they don't get discouraged?

Training by nature comes with risk, and the risk exists in both functional and improvisational models of training. Understanding that first, (before I get into the differences between the two approaches to training) is important.

Danger exists physically and mentally in training. Mentally can be space or experience where someone gets discouraged iand they quit. We don't want them to do that, we want them to stay motivated, to enjoy the experience.

But we also want the experience to be garnished with reality. We want the experience experience to be at sometimes shocking, but of course not traumatic.

We want them to understand the experience and to slowly, gradually increase their threshold for fear and discomfort.

Full article, visit: https://www.closequarterdad.com/blog/functional-improvisational-training

Website: https://closequarterdad.com

We can empower our kids with the best techniques to stay safe if someone grabs them, or teach them how to prevent a bully from hurting them 

… or we can show them what to do if a group of kids tries jumping them 

… or we can even show them how to get out of the trunk of a car they're locked inside.

The scenarios go on and on.

But the reality is, if your children don't know how to manage and cope with stress properly, they will be at much greater statistical risk throughout their lives, to encounter suffering or self imposed violence. Read that again. 

In a previous episode I shared some basic exercises, tools and discussions we can have with our kids about stress and anxiety. 

I think even more important is making sure they model how you manage stress, as that's what it's going to come down to. The are watching how you manage it, during each stage of their life, and carrying that reflection with them as a reference.

How do they cope with this? Well, that’s up to you. 

If you're the you're the kind of dad who expresses himself with, “F**k! I'm so stressed out … leave me alone right now I’m in the middle of doing … too many things going on at work … “ and you're referencing all this tension, all the time, your kids are going to respond in that exact same way. 

Let’s take a step back, and consider a more mindful approach. 

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Over the last few days, I've been handling a situation with my oldest son. He's 18 years old and he's dealing with a fight that happened here in our community that involved his friends. 

My son called me from somewhere in about 12:30 am the other evening and explained to me that a group of his friends had been jumped.

I dug into the details a little bit more.

His friends had gone to meet a another group of kids to watch a one on one fight to settle something that had escalated at a McDonald’s parking lot earlier that evening; one of these stupid teenage dramas that sadly escalated to a point of no return.

His friends showed up at the designated fight location, and apparently all of them ended up getting jumped by a large(r) group of kids. 

The situation turned pretty bad. 

A baseball baseball bat had hit a kid’s head, a knife was involved in a stabbing, someone got hit with a hammer with the claw side of a framing hammer and these boys got beat down. 

Painfully and unnecessarily, group of kids ended up in the hospital. 

This situation escalated quick went beyond the point of no return. 

Young people got severely injured. 

When I heard about this for my son, I asked him calmly, 

How can I help you? 

After I listened to his confused answer, I followed with,

How do you feel about this?

He went on to explain that he had been playing basketball that afternoon with a group of the kids that were involved in jumping his friends. So now I could see the dilemma he's trying to figure out how to navigate. 

Well, the police got involved and are currently investigating, so we're sort of past that point. And like most dads, I would say Well, don't get involved. 

That's the first thing that comes to mind, right?

Not now. I’m not so certain that's what my son wanted to hear from his dad. 

He was sharing his anxiety with me over the situation. He had certain feelings. He wanted to lash out. He wanted seek retribution for what had happened to his friends. 

My response to him was simple and a bit unexpected, 

‘This is the outcome. If you want to be involved in violence… even as a witness, then you're opening the door to trauma. You are opening a door to allowing yourself to suffer.’

He’s just going to see a shoulder shrug for me, and that's about it. 

I've raised my son to understand this. He knows that I'm not a fan of violence. 

He knows that I understand what the outcome is. 

I don't really believe in the glorification of it. 

I don't believe in the monkey dancing.

But (in his paradigm) telling him to leave it alone is no different than telling him to not stick up for his friends. You've got to stick up for your friends, always. But how?

Those boys went looking for a fight and they got a fight. End of story. That's it. Go back to playing basketball. 

It's terrible what happened. The outcome was terrible. 

Young people got hurt. 

Young people were also involved in hurting other young people. And that's going to stay with them for the rest of their lives.

As mentioned, there’s a current investigation going on. It will affect family finances, college plans, future career potential even. 

Most of these boys are seniors in high school, good kids, from good families, getting ready to go off to College. Now what?

When you distill it down to the most basic level, in my opinion and the message that I had to my son was that, if you want to play with violence if it's you feel cultural pressure, social pressure, influenced by entertainment … to take it to that level because of some stupid incident that happened in a parking lot.

Well, guess what? 

Read the rest of this article at My Son Wants Revenge, at Close Quarter Dad

In this episode I want to challenge you to ask yourself what I call threatening questions. 

These are questions that as a parent, we don't want to face … they are dark. They are questions we may not even know to ask ourselves. 

• What if I get separated from you in the city, I get lost and it's dark? What do I do? 
• Will I really have to fight to save my life some day?
• What happens if you get hurt? What am I supposed to do
• What if a police officer tells me to go with him because you and mom have been hurt and they need to take me to the hospital to be with you? 
• If I hear gunshots at school, what should I really do? 
• That man makes me feel really uncomfortable, what am I supposed to say to him every time he talks to me? 
• You told me not to talk to strangers. But if I call 911 the operator that answers is a stranger also. So who really is a stranger? 
• What happens if a mean person comes at us in the parking lot and they want to hurt you? What should I? 
• I watched a kid get beat up today. What should I have done? 
• I heard the gas station was robbed last week. What happens if I was at the gas station when it got robbed? What should I do? What happens if you lose me?
• What happens when I see someone bullying or hurting another kid? 
• What happens if I get separated from everybody and I get lost in the woods? 
• What happens if one day someone pulls me into a car and I can't get out? What do I do? 

We could go on and on with these with these examples. What’s important right now is that you simply take some time and think of one question that truly puts you in a place of fear.

What is that one question you just never would want to face. 

Do you know the answer to that question? 

The reality is that if I put 20 men in one room and I asked them to write down the answer to any one of the questions that I just gave examples up, the strong likelihood is that I will receive 20 different answers.

There's usually gonna be no more than three appropriate answers given the situation. 

So if there were a couple questions that you had a challenge with don't worry, it's totally natural. 

You are invited into close quarter dad, our community of other fathers like yourself who are answering those questions and asking many more. 

We're addressing topics of, 

• Personal protection
• Family security
• Loss prevention 
• Last resort survival training. 

There's a free program called the Core Conflict Concepts, where I really break down the difference between the topics of personal protection and martial arts and why sending your child to a martial arts school may not be the solution for keeping your child safe.

You see, too many people, unfortunately, go forward with thinking, 

“if I put my kid into a martial arts school, they're gonna be able to keep themselves safe, able to fight off a bully” … or all this nonsense. 

It's just not true. 

Interested in joining our group of Dad’s?

Join us at Close Quarter Dad for more information on our courses and access our library of tactical parenting videos and articles. See you on the next episode.

As a professional martial artist, I've made it a career for more than a decade to teach people from all walks of life, young and old, how to remain safe. Discovery of self preservation and safety is not merely about learning a technique to apply against a bad guy, although most martial arts systems today are systemized like this. This type of approach is shortsighted at best, lacking the critical principles of escalation and de-escalation, both of which rely on the practitioners deeper understanding and exposure to reality based training at many more levels than is what is popular in most academies today. Easy to teach techniques make money, but very, very rarely equip a student to survive.

From my perspective, the study of true martial arts has nothing to do with sport. It even has little to do with neutralizing an enemy combatant in the field of battle. True martial arts has everything to do with developing the skills to remain in control especially under dire circumstances. Of course the skills and proficiencies of my students mature as their time spent training stacks up, but more important is the maturity of their ability to remain in control as anxiety, fear, shock, trauma or loss of life become extremely real within moments. Due to the constant exposure of survive at all costs simulation in the Dojo, my students can become more adapt to these circumstances and quell the physiological changed during escalation. It is about self control. These are the things of battle and being able to demonstrate control under horrible conditions is the hallmark of a warrior.

Any brute can cut another down with a blade or bullet, but the warrior will complete the battle before it escalates into chaos. They will survive and if they do not, the legacy they've left will certainly allow those remaining to share a higher standard of living. This is how I've come to know the meaning of martial arts and the ultimate reason we train them in the west. In Japanese, it is known as the Bushido.

The arts that I've dedicated much of my life to understanding have remained relatively unchanged since the Warring States Period in Japanese history, yet have adapted in many interesting ways to the times and technology of the present day. We still retain the old protocol and wear the old attire. Our Dojo smells of a myriad of incense, wood walls and sweat. In the winter the Dojo is frigidly cold and in the summer it is like working out inside an oven. Yet still, each day we are able to step our bare feet onto the tatami matted floor of the Dojo and begin to practice in formats shared by previous generations of warriors. The simulation of death and survival occurs over and over again, day after day, year after year. We are dedicated to preserving this tradition and these ways with all that we have while applying the principles of cause and effect found into our modern day routines and relationships.

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In this video, I challenge you to ask your child a question. Try it out and see what they say.

I discuss some first steps you can teach your child in case they become separated from you or a group they may be with - and suddenly find themselves alone and lost.