By Jama'l Chukueke
The podcast currently has 88 episodes available.
Today we will learn a lot from Charles Jackson’s history. Learning how to put family first and how to deal with divorce and the distance from his kids. A big cautionary tale that will certainly make better fathers out of all of us diversity dads.
“I am involved in their social media that my kids are on, the Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. I see those as the tools for me to keep a constant connection. It was a blended parenting watching because I wasn’t there every day, I’m not there to hear the small conversations but to really monitor what my children are posting, what are their thoughts, what are they responding to that may be an influence up there and try to understand that but to also pick up the habits of using these tools. I snapchat the goofy faces to my kids just to kind of keep that connection with them. It is constant communication.”
From using social media to shorten the distance from our children to the importance of keeping in touch and keeping constant contact when we dads are far away, Charles will share some of his struggles and lessons learned from living far away from his children.
“For me is when I hear them overcome the objectives they have, I look at my youngest and right now the focus for her has been school. We will talk about her classes and she will talk about how hard her classes are but she will say “you know dad, I got flash cards” or “I put this app on my phone to overcome Spanish” or “Science is really difficult, but I am looking at some youtube videos to help me understand things”. I think that is the proudest moment because I feel like that is what we are here to do, we teach our kids how to deal with life as it comes. For her to have that smartness to say “I am going to go look at other resources” that is my chemistry, so I feel like that is my child right there.”
We have had other divorced dads on our show and the message is still the same, a message that is still very powerful to any dad out there, make sure that the environment when things get bad don’t impact the kids in a negative way. Charles Jackson will reinforce that message from his very own perspective.
“It was very challenging, divorces can be complicated. One of the things that we didn’t want to do was make sure that the kids were mixed into those complications. Being able to get up there and see them on a regular basis and going through some of the things at the time, financially it wasn’t permissible at times. A trip up there, gas, hotel, doing things with the kids because I wasn’t going go up there and just have them sit in a hotel room with me all day but to do things with them it took money that sometimes I didn’t have. It was difficult. It was difficult at the beginning to try to see my children on a regular basis as much as I wanted to.”
We hope that Charles Jackson’s history teaches you as much or even more than it taught us. And inspires us to go to the next level and become better dads, and parents, tomorrow than we were yesterday.
OTHER QUOTES:
“I used to get those questions at the beginning. Probably the first couple of years after the divorce, you know “why am I away”. The situation was that my wife moved away and then it would be the question “why didn’t you follow” or I would get the comment from other men, black, white, other cultures, who would make comments about “I would always be by my children”, I mean, it was a hard pill for me to swallow at the time but I knew the environment that it would create, being as close as I was to my ex at the time and I didn’t want my children to be part of that environment. There was still a lot of negative feelings and negative impulses from the divorce that I didn’t want my children to be victim to. So I felt that the distance was something that was best suited and I would just have to put in a lot of the extra work to try and keep that connection with my kids.”
“Probably the biggest one is just not putting work first for a lot of years in my daughters young age and during my first marriage, I put work first a lot because I felt that career an money was the foundation of stabilizing our family and making sure that the roof was over our heads and the lights were on and things of that nature. I took some real hard knocks in life to understand that it was more about me first. I had to learn to really balance that out. To make sure that the kids were taken care of first. I didn’t see that growing up. I didn’t have a family environment where I see God, Family, and Career in the household. So I didn’t know what that looked like. I missed a lot of opportunities with the kids, I was there for some key moments, the first bike ride, letting them go, watch them take those pedals, there is a lot of memories I cherish, but there was a lot of opportunities that I recognise I missed because I stayed in work late, or because I took shifts I didn’t need to take.”
“I think you have to create a discipline. For me it was a discipline. I didn’t have the kind of job where I physically brought work home. I didn’t have to log into a computer when I got home and do extra work that way. That was definitely some saving grace, but I carried enough of a responsibility as a store manager to bring it mentally home and think about things that I needed to do tomorrow most of the night. So it was really messing me up. It was messing my whole family dynamics up. My children would have homework, I am helping them but they are not getting my full attention and I am not understanding where I am not being as helpful where I am so the minute the transition happens everything felt more in line. I was better at math and helping them with the math homework, my wife at the time, she was better at the grammar piece. I think when you let work be where it is at, being at home 100%, I mean 100%, can’t be 90%, can’t be 80%. It is very magical and you become a different kind of man, you become a better father at home.”
LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/charles.m.jacksoniii
@3cjackson
https://www.instagram.com/3cjackson/
“Let’s learn together. Let’s grow together. Let’s be dads together. Peace.”
We hope you get inspired to let it loose and have some fun after today’s episode with Robert Douglas. We hope you get inspired to slowly stop taking everything so seriously and focus on the present, focus on the good you have now, focus on being a fun parent and having fun. This is what Mr. Douglas will teach us on his interview today.
“Don’t take everything so seriously, that one piece of advice I would give because you will stress yourself out, being a parent is a big deal anyway, bringing a life into the world, being responsible for a life, it is a massive deal, but don’t think of that in that context because it will stress you out and you will not enjoy and not cherish the moments with your children. So don’t take everything so seriously is probably one of the best pieces of advice I could give.”
His story and words are certain to bring out the fun inside ourselves once again and let it shine. Let it shine through the way we love our children and through the way we love our families. Robert will teach us how to ground ourselves on the present and enjoy the moments and the little things once again.
“We have talked about recognizing stages, recognize stages of your children and enjoy what they do when they do it. Don’t expect them to be someone else, don’t wish their life away by thinking “I wish they could hurry up and walk” or “I wish they could grow up and move out” or whatever it might be, don’t wish that time away, cherish it, express your love because that is all that they will see.”
Most importantly the constant reminder we keep getting on this show to be there and be present. To spend the time to not only raise but also grow with our children. We hope that today’s episode change yours, your children’s and your family life for the better just as it did with us despite all of the obstacles and challenges that will keep showing up on every moment but that will cat as reminders that it was worth it.
OTHER QUOTES:
“When we had our son, 4 years ago, we brought him into a home which was filled of laughter and filled of fun. We made sure that we took that time with him, that we were always laughing around him, that he saw that life isn’t so serious. (…) We make sure my son is laughing all the time, we make sure that he is having fun because you mentioned earlier that they pick up on everything that you do so if they see us having fun, if they see us laughing, if they see us not putting barriers in the way all the time then that is how they are kind of grow up.”
“I think the most exciting thing for me is living life through their eyes. Seeing that amazement at things, the simple things that now I take for granted. Just recently we went to a safari park and we saw animals and to me animals are animals, I have seen them many times but to him, to see his amazement when he saw the lions or when he saw all the penguins, or when he got to hold a snake. Seeing his amazement, his wide eyes and his big smile, that is what is most exciting for me.”
“It goes so quickly, especially, I found, in the first few years of their life, they go from crying and sleeping to walking and talking in what feels like days. It is a few years but they go so quickly and you forget those times and like you say, you need to stop him and cherish those times.”
“The biggest obstacle that I have is actually dealing with the various stages of childhood and dealing with my son in the situation that he is in or the stage that he is going through because what went from an always cute little toddler and baby has grown into a 4 years old boy with his own, his own will, his strong will pushing boundaries.”
“Quite often there was a story behind the pictures and over time I used to forget what went behind the picture and it used to just become a picture. So I would have thousands of pictures on my iPhone and I got to the stage where my iPhone kept telling me that there was not enough storage on my phone so I had to delete some pictures.”
LINKS:
http://thisfatherlife.com/
INSTAGRAM:
https://www.instagram.com/this_father_life/
@this_father_life
“Let’s learn together. Let’s grow together. Let’s be dads together. Peace.”
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.”
Jeffrey Cheatham, single father and kids books author will share some of the life lessons about fatherhood he has learned the hard way and has been sharing through his books on today’s episode of the Diversity Dad Podcast.
From finding his passion and calling on authoring books for children to raising his young girl the best he can we will go through some of the challenges and beautiful moments that Jeffrey has to share with us today.
“My daughter teaches me things. As a parent we all go through things where we get super upset with our kid because they keep forgetting to twist on a cap of a drink in the refrigerator and it keeps spilling over, and then we learn a lesson of patience. Or the lessons of comunication. The lessons of understanding, because this is a child that we have to guide in the world.”
From many things we will be reminded that fatherhood is something that we learn and not something that we should be good at straight from the start. Being humble and patient is a big part of that big learning process.
“You got to make sure that your foundation is strong enough so that way you can help someone else. This kinda goes in anything where you can’t help people if you can’t help yourself. It doesn’t do any good for your child if you are not okay but you are trying to make sure that your child is okay. It means digging a bigger hole than the one you started with.”
Jeffrey will also teach us a lot from his humility. About being humble enough to admit our flaws and mistakes, learn from them and move on. Something we need to be reminded of sometimes on an hourly basis.
“It is all about growing. And also from my perspective living life and making mistakes, the journey in that is fun because you get to learn something new, and I really enjoy learning new things all the time.”
Most important of all, Jeffrey will teach us to have fun on this long and difficult journey that fatherhood is. He will inspire us with his joy for challenging himself and for learning new things whenever possible and taking the best of it.
“Make fatherhood fun.”
We hope that you get out of this episode feeling the passion and strengh towards the betterment of yourself and achievement of your goals, inspired by Jeffrey’s journey just as we did.
OTHER QUOTES:
“What makes me a diversity dad is the fact that I am not too proud to admit my mistakes as far as when it comes to raising my kid. Because my whole purpose in life right now is to make sure that my daughter becomes the best person that she can be.”
“I’m not afraid to admit my flaws, but I am willing to give 100% to life in order to develop something greater for my kid to grow up in. And also, I am not afraid to work with others if the common objective is to create a better way of living for our kids and our kids kids, if that makes any sense.”
“The thing that stands out to me the most is the fact that my daughter always asks questions about everything. And that makes me proud because that means she wants to learn. And that does my heart good.”
“She will ask me what’s the next story is going to be about or who is going to be the next character of the story and then I explain it to her in a way and stuff like that. It just depends on what she is curious about. She will ask me because I always tell her always ask questions, if you don’t know, ask.”
LINKS:
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/jlcheatham2/
INSTAGRAM:
https://www.instagram.com/jay_elcheatham2/
“Let’s learn together. Let’s grow together. Let’s be dads together. Peace.”
Jeremy Maynard will share all the knowledge he have been gathering from his personal journey. He will inspire and teach us on how to be better man and better father through the core values of his enterprise called Furthering Fathering.
“Instead of complaining about it which is looking at the common and plain, we decided to focus on what we could do to build our fathers. Initially we had three core principles which are honor, accountability and training but God has a strange way of making things make sense and as we added encouragement and reconciliation he exploded his word to us, it formed the word heart.”
He has such an amazing story. As if being father of four young adults was not enough he has also experienced the big transition in and out of a divorce and the amazing experience of finding a life partner again. We learned a lot from his experiences on today’s episodes and we hope you do as much or even more.
“They may not be listening now, but you train them in the way they should go so when they are old, when they are adults, when they are older, they will not depart from it. The first learning style of a child is observation.”
We are going to talk about the core values of Furthering Fatherhood which are honor, encouragement, accountability, reconciliation and training and how we can use those core values together with all the people we have around us, from spouse to family members, friends and, although on a smaller scale, people we pass by on our everyday lives.
“(…) understand that it is okay to be whom you are and how you are designed and perfect how you are designed.”
We hope everyone absorbs at least a bit of the powerful message Jeremy shared with us today. And if you do come back for more!
OTHER QUOTES:
“You have to honor others. Especially if you see other dads doing well, you have to encourage others to do the right things, the right way, for the right reasons. And you have to be accountable yourself. On the flip end, you have to have an ear for those who honor you.”
“To operate in the best possibility for your child is to provide both aspects, the male and the female, the father and the wife, so that they get a balanced view of how life is. The men tend to think long term, woman are more detailed oriented. Those are generalizations, but true generalizations”
“(…) understand that it is okay to be whom you are and how you are designed and perfect how you are designed.”
“If you reduce a man to a wallet, he only becomes as valuable as what is in it. And fatherhood is so much more. Actually the best provision you can provide to your child is presence. Your presence and your wisdom.”
“You get a picture of what agape love is. Unconditional love. Your child looks at you and loves you just because you are their daddy. They don’t have add-ons, or I want this I mean, they look at you and love you just because you are their daddy.”
“We like to deal with symptoms, we like to march, and we like to do all sort of things when we see something go wrong. But we never get to the root of issues. The root of many of the core issues in society is fatherhood.”
LINKS:
Furthering Fathering Website
http://www.furtheringfathering.org/
Facebook - @TheFurtheringFatheringCorporation
https://www.facebook.com/TheFurtheringFatheringCorporation
Twitter – @FurtherFatherCo
https://twitter.com/FurtherFatherCo
Instagram - @FurtherFatherCo
https://www.instagram.com/furtherfatherco/
“Let’s learn together. Let’s grow together. Let’s be dads together. Peace.”
Trevor Alexander – Diversity Dad show notes
Today’s episode is all about your hobbies and balancing your life around your partner and your kids. Trevor Alexander is our guest and he will share his experiences being a dad, a gamer and a husband and how he and his friends came up with the podcast New Dad Gaming.
“I was always really dedicated to work and always on the startup life. Which classically you can see as 80 hours weeks. Just complete dedication to the craft and the work and trying to build something new and great. With fatherhood what that represented was a need to shift, you cannot have those types of hours and then reasonably be a good father. You have to commit time as you well know, your son or daughter becomes the most important thing in your life.”
Trevor is a great example of “work hard, play harder” as we will learn from all of the experiences he shares on this interview. Through the course of the conversation we will learn how he slowly started to realize that he needed to find a way of balancing all of his responsibilities and passions as he was getting ready to be a dad and it is amazing to see how he makes that balance happen in his life.
“I think it goes a long way to support and focus on the partner as much as it does on the child.”
And he does not do it alone, one of the main aspects of his approach to this balance in life is the way he builds this beautiful partnership with his wife where they are constantly switching roles and enabling each other to dedicate time to all of their passions, the biggest one being parents to their son, which in turn makes them not only better people but also better parents.
“It is like who are you as a human or as a father if your entire impetus is just that very narrative (being a dad) as opposed to having some likes, having some interests, like having hobbies, having opinions and thoughts beyond just fatherhood. So having these tiny moments, or these hobbies or these things that you can participate in kind of draws you out as a person I ultimately felt. As long as your priorities are set properly, you are never impacting proper development or the responsibilities you have, there should absolutely be some time where you can express yourself into the hobbies or the interests that you have.”
Trevor is the living testimony that balance is a reachable goal. If everyone works together a strong family, with strong parents and strong kids and strong relationships can be created. But it is not all roses, certainly there are hardships and troubles that will come from time to time, and time and time again we have heard about being patient on the Diversity Dad Podcast and Trevor makes the message even stronger through his experiences.
“My wife, about six months in with our son had suffered very severe postpartum depression, which is hard to describe just how horrific kind of disease that is. (…) That was really just a matter of stepping up, being patient, getting the help that we needed, which is a lot of honesty about it. It certainly was a really dark time to go through but I don’t that I would ever be able to express how incredibly strong my wife was to be able to weather it as she did and to the strength that it would take for her to reach out and for us to find the help that we needed.”
Finally we hope that you come out of this interview inspired to pursue your passions and help your partner in the same journey. Inspired to create a strong family that can overcome any barriers and issues that can and will come as a unit that work together for each other.
OTHER QUOTES:
“I am very fortunate my lovely wife is from Colombia and that has become a really important part for us. We really want my son to know his Colombian heritage, that half of his life. So we are teaching him Spanish, we had a number of trips to Colombia to make sure that he soaks up as much of the culture as possible. Just insuring that his upbringing isn’t just a product of exactly where he is at but really a representation of everything around him and where both parents are coming from. So you can speak to both sides.”
If I had to break it down I would probably say (what has me the most excited about being a dad) getting to know my son. I am very sure you must have experienced it yourself where as they start to grow their personalities start s to bud. I think in many ways a lot of the way he will be will be result of how we raise him of course, but so much of it does seem to be his makeup, like he is himself, and he is really just becoming himself. And to watch that, to see who he is growing to be, to see how he reacts, to see his personality, his likes, dislikes, like “is he going to be a dancer?”, “is he going to be a basketball player?”. How he approaches life, how he interacts and talk, it is incredibly exciting to see where he is going to go.”
“Right now his imagination is starting to take hold. And you are seeing where he is just taking two or three random toys or random objects and interacting. Like playing, driving story lines between these things. You can’t quite get into his head but you can see the gears starting to turn, starting to have this imagination. And that has been just mind boggling.”
“If anything that is really the very impetus of the show (New Dad Gaming Podcast), it is the constant struggle of that desire to partake in this hobby that you have always enjoyed so much and the rigors and the requirements of fatherhood.”
“What has brought me a lot of relief in many ways has been what I call the easy dedication. The son absolutely takes priority over anything. I almost call a blessing to say I have never been torn where it like “oh, I have to hang out with my son instead of playing games.” I feel very lucky that that has never really been the impulse.”
“It is all about finding that escapism. What takes your mind away from the pressures of life or just other things going on in your life. And I think Trevor nailed it right there, it is having that appreciation for both (being a dad and gaming).”
LINKS:
New Dad Gaming Website
http://newdadgaming.com/
Twitter – @NewDadGaming
https://twitter.com/newdadgaming
“Let’s learn together. Let’s grow together. Let’s be dads together. Peace.”
Sheldon Barrocks – Diversity Dad show notes
Today we will learn from Sheldon Barrocks, a father that talks about imperfect, but intentional fatherhood. Emphasis on intentional specially when besides working full time, kickstarting his own business and writing for his own The Amateur Dad blog he raises his family with four kids.
Coming from an early age Sheldon had the dream of raising a family and we can certainly tell that from the way he writes and speaks and from the amazing nuggets of wisdom we get from him in today’s episode. Having three kids at the time and from his dream to be a writer The Amateur Dad blog was created as a way of inspiring other men, specially black men, showing that they can also be great fathers and raise great families.
“It was intriguing for me to talk about being a young black father that loves being a dad and that loves spending time with his kids and talking about the challenges of having different kids.”
Sheldon shares a bit of his experience juggling all the responsibilities and worries that come from work and family together with having his own blog. We will learn how he manages to find the time and energy to not only keep everything together but also help other young people around him to get motivated and excited not only about their own lives but also about the fact that there are people around them that truly cares about them.
“I stayed up late and I just have a passion for writing and that is what I did. I stayed up late, sometimes 2 am, putting on a blog post for the next day. I enjoyed it so much that it was easy for me to stay up in the wee hours of the morning to get it done.”
“I think it is important for us father and even us that are just older, more mature, men to really take time and really show these younger people that we do care about them. We care about where they are going to be, we care about where they are at. It is not just a blood thing, it is a human thing, and I think that when they see more of that they are going to want to be that. I know when I was growing up, when I saw leaders at my church and of course my ultimate leader, my dad, I wanted to be that. I wanted to be a father like my father. I wanted to be like these leaders I saw growing up when I was going on mission trips and whatnot. So when you see leaders care about you it makes you want to be like them.”
If we can take one huge lesson from the Diversity Dad Podcast is that it is very important to spend time and quality time with our children. And today Sheldon will share some very nice tips and tricks to keep at it, from being spontaneous and intentional with a few unconventional little gifts (we are talking about food!) at unconventional situations to simply smiling when at home even though things might not be so happy in other areas of the family, personal and professional life.
“Do surprise them. I was coming late home and I ordered a pizza ahead of time and I paid for it online and I sent it to my family and they were so happy when I got home, that was the greatest for me to send food and not be home and they had pizza. Stuff like that makes a huge difference.”
“Always let your kids see you smile. Always be that joyful person within the household that brings joy, brings happiness despite what you are going through. It is not always easy but I think that for our kids’ sake it is good for them. They feel safety in that. When kids see their dads smiling, when kids see their dad willing to get on the floor and roll on the floor with them, to get silly with them, to listen to the things they are working on, it is a big deal for dads to disconnect from their interests, our responsibilities and just for a moment spend time with them. To let them know that you are there any time they need.”
We hope you finish this episode as inspired as we were, ready to catch all the opportunities to be intentional and surprising in all the little (and the big ones too) things related to the family life. Maybe not only your own family but also the other families around you.
OTHER QUOTES:
“More than anything else, seeing my father raise me and my other three siblings, I wanted to be a father, a husband, and I couldn’t wait to do that. I got made fun of at school for it. When people asked me what I wanted to do and I were “Yeah, I want to write and stuff, but I want to be a father, I want to get married, have kids, grow a family.”
“It was always important to me to be a father, to be a strong black father role model for my own kids and also for other young men that want to have families and let them know that despite what they have been through and despite what they have seen, there are many black fathers like myself that are passionate about being a father.”
“Whenever you come across kids it is important to show them that love, that motivation. We were at a party and my niece was talking to me about things she wanted to do. She has a great father, she has an awesome father, my brother in law is an awesome father and she has an awesome mother but it takes a village and with me raising my own kids and looking at her I just encouraged her, I said “go for your goals, if you want to do this, you know, you want to be a doctor, go do it, you want to be a lawyer, go ahead and do it. Don’t let anyone stop you.””
“It’s all about just having young people in your life that look like you. And the joy of you knowing that as we get older we are going to have these kids get older and when we are on an old age we are going to have these people on our life that we can love that will love us back and that will be parents themselves.”
“My parents have four kids and they have 11 grand kids. They are so happy. They have their simple house and their simple lives but when they have this big family around them they can be happier. To me, I am excited about what the future holds.”
“I think the biggest thing is finding that unique time to really get them one on one and really hear their heart. I try my best to do, I am not the best at it but I try to take my daughter for breakfast and just talk to her. I try to take my son on walks Saturday morning and just hear his heart, it gives me a chance to kinda of impart some wisdom into him. My 4 years old, I have taken him for breakfast too one time and just let him know that in the midst of a big family I still love him and he is still special. He might get lost in the mix with so many people in the house.”
“That is what I think is the biggest challenge. Just finding authentic, unique time to really get deep with your kids. I think it is very important. Because I think it is better to talk and address some things now before it gets too late. Because you don’t want to turn around and find out when they have become 14, 15, 16 years old and they are getting their information from their friends or from other people and making decisions based on that. Instead of hearing your voice which they remember from when they were 8,9, 10 years old.”
“Our jobs as parents is to prepare our kids for the future and at some point we have to let them go and let them be, but for now at this age where my kids are, it is important that me and my wife take time and we really have those one on one’s.”
“I have to really get into their world. My son is doing all sorts of things, he is a nick nack kind of guy. He is learning how to put things together, how chemical reactions work, he is breaking down these big electronical parts and putting them back together, so I got to get into his world and he is telling me things “men I didn’t even know this” it is kind of crazy.”
LINKS:
AMATEUR DAD BLOG
http://theamateurdad.com/
TWITTER – Sheldon Barrocks@theamateurdad
https://twitter.com/theamateurdad
INSTAGRAM:
https://www.instagram.com/sheldonbarrocks/
“Let’s learn together. Let’s grow together. Let’s be dads together. Peace.”
Jason Mackenzie – Diversity Dad show notes
Today we will have the chance to share a bit of the incredible life story of Jason MacKenzie, father of two daughters, husband, writer, life coach and the guy behind thebookofopen.com.
“In my first marriage my wife, and the biological mother of our children, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder which is a mental illness that causes pretty radical and dangerous behaviour in deep and oftentimes suicidal depressions and just a very wide ranging spectrum of behaviour and it is all painful and destructive and it is really a horrible thing to witness somebody you love going through or anybody going through.”
When we think about struggle and how to overcome it as a family we know we can have on Jason an example, and a good one, on how to deal it. It wasn’t easy for him and it took a great deal of effort and failed attempts but he fought, he learnt and he became a better man, a better father and now he knows how to succeed in life together with his family.
“I really didn’t have many tools to cope with the incredible emotional trauma of what was happening to me and I started drinking very heavily and it was because I couldn’t cope with the feelings I was having. So I tried to drown them basically in alcohol.”
Besides going through a very bad time with his first wife he also had to deal with his alcohol addiction, which he fought and won through an amazing story that every son, daughter, father and mother should listen to at least once.
“It really took me a long time, it took me 4 years after my first wife’s death to stop drinking and it is amazing how that happened. I had promised my daughter, Melody, who was 9 at the time that we were going to have a special day together and I really hyped it up, that it was going to be great and the whole thing. You know when the day rolled around I did what I so often did, I waited for the clock to strike 11 o’clock, I went to the pub, I took her with me, had a few beers there, went to the liqueur store, came home and drank the day away. Did nothing special with her and when my wife came home she talked to her and Melody came up and looked me in the eye and told me she was disappointed.”
Coming from his own experience and amazing story, a great example of how powerful your relationship with your kids and close family can be, he learnt to overcome the problems and we are sure many of the Diversity Dads out there can also learn and will certainly feel inspired by his story.
“I had this incredible moment of clarity and I just knew I was done drinking. And the reason is I allowed myself to be vulnerable enough with myself to take a fearless inventory of myself. And I was able to say for the first time without judgment that “I am 41 years old, I drink every day. I am causing my wife, this incredible woman who has come into our life and helped rebuild our family, I am causing her no end of worrying and concern and now my kids are telling me they are disappointed at me. I want something different.” and that was the first time I was ever able to just say that to myself. The truth, without judgment. And it freed me. It just freed me to create something different.”
“It is more than father to daughter or father to son. It is human being to human being. When our kids know that we feel what they feel they will come to us when they feel those emotions too. It is the simplest and the most profound way to form a unbreakable connection with our kids.”
It is not all bad experiences and overcoming our problems and addictions though. We will see just how much Jason was able to take out from his relationship with his daughters and how many amazing things he has to say.
We hope you take as much wisdom, knowledge and have such a great time listening to his story and to what he has to say as we did!
OTHER QUOTES:
“What we typically do is, we are told whether it is on our personal lives or professional lives too, the path to improvement is through solving problems. In other words, we find what is not working about us and we fix it and then by doing so we automatically get better. The problem is what we focus on grows.”
“So, appreciative enquiry is a method of really helping people understand what energizes them and gives them life and what is already working in their lives.”
“Let’s say your child comes home from school and they get a specific mark on a test. So they get a 85% on the test. There’s two ways to handle that. One way is to say “Oh, good job. What did you get wrong?”. And then, maybe an approach would be “okay, to not get those questions wrong in the future you should study more.” That’s a pretty standard response. But another approach, and the appreciative enquiry approach would say “let’s understand by asking questions, what worked for you to get an 85% and then how do we do more of that?” so maybe it was “how did I as a parent support you in getting that mark?” and what you might find out is that you didn’t give me chores three days before the test, you created a space for me to thrive, you committed to me that if I ever had a question for you, you would be willing to stop what you were doing and answer. (…) You are taking what is already working and just finding ways to do more of that to perform at a higher level.”
“During that time I had a very narrow definition of what it meant to be a strong man and father. That definition was strength is logic and strength is using the power of my mind and the power of my will to influence events. But I thought emotions were weakness because they are irrational and I just thought weak people let themselves get bogged down or hampered by their emotions.”
“We all experience every human emotion. Whether we choose to admit it or not is another matter. But every single one of us feels anxiety, fear, discomfort, grief when something tragic happens and we also feel joy, passion, gratitude and hope.”
“I am seeing the woman that they are going to become. I can see how they are interacting with the world and I can see how they have such a high level of awareness. Of their place in the world, the power their choices have to create their world and the impact that their thoughts, and words and actions have on other people. I compare it to myself at their age. I was sticking Lego up my nose at eleven years old.”
“I was driving her to figure skating and I just pulled the car over and I just said “I don’t really think you probably remember this moment; I am sure you don’t.” And I walked through that, I sort of recounted or relived that moment when she told me she was disappointed at me. I just thank her for having the courage to be honest and telling me how she felt. Because her having the courage to be honest with me gave me the courage to finally be honest with myself.”
“After I told her that we had that conversation she looked at me and said “Daddy, you always made me feel really special”. That moment was, I don’t know if magical is the right word. It was just so powerful.”
“My biggest obstacle, as far as a specific moment, was sitting them down and telling them that their mother was dead. That was a very very hard thing to do obviously.”
“We as parents think we are supposed to know everything. And we don’t know everything and our kids know that we don’t know everything. When we pretend that we know everything our kids think that everything we say is suspect.”
LINKS:
THE BOOK OF OPEN WEBSITE
http://thebookofopen.com/
Twitter - @TheBookOfOpen
https://twitter.com/thebookofopen
INSTAGRAM:
https://www.instagram.com/thebookofopen/
RESOURCES:
jason (at) thebookofopen (dot) com
“Let’s learn together. Let’s grow together. Let’s be dads together. Peace.”
In this episode we will learn a bit of the story of Steve Roy, a fitness coach specialized in working with dads and helping them find the time and the motivation to change their lives becoming better for themselves, for their family and for their children. He is the single dad of two girls. He is also the founder of the Fit Dad Nation website and community with thousands and thousands of dads from all over the country and from all different backgrounds.
We will learn invaluable lessons from Steve as he shares his experience with his divorce and all the changes it brought to his life at a personal and family life with his daughters. It is beautiful to see parenthood from his perspective after the split.
“When I was married, of course I loved my kids, I loved being with them, but it was almost like I took it for granted, my time with them. A lot of times I would be doing mindless stuff not really paying attention to them, not REALLY connecting with them and so, now, literally, every time I see them it just comes to the front of my mind how precious my time, just a limited time, I just have them for a couple days a week, is with them. I am really, really present with them. I am excited because my relationship with them has grown tremendously because I am sitting with them and I am talking with them. I am listening to them and not just sending them off or playing on my phone or doing something else.”
It is an amazing thing to see how he was able to come from his own struggle after the separation to change his own life for the better and then create a strong and positive community on Fit Dad Nation to help other parents often on a similar emotional situation dealing with a divorce or just dealing with the big and time consuming adventure raising a kid is.
“The way I ended up starting the website was I fell into a deep, dark place for a long while and really let myself go and just felt terrible, I looked terrible. Well, I was just a physical mess, and I was in the fitness business as well so it wasn’t a great thing. I kinda got a wakeup call one day from a good friend of mine and I started to make some changes and I ended up just running with it.”
Time and time again here on Diversity Dad we will learn and re-learn on several different perspectives and ways that spending time with our kids is one of the most important things we can do as parents. Steve’s experience not only taught him how to be strong and improve his own health but also how to be a better parent by spending more time, and quality time, with his children and teaching them valuable lessons while at it. A lesson all of us should regard as a very important one.
“We do a lot of stuff with them. It could be looked at as “hey, you know, we are out spending money on them.” That type of thing, the typical Disney land dad, but what we are actually doing is giving them experiences that they will remember forever. They are not going to remember sitting at the couch and watching cartoons, they are going to remember going out for that hike or you know, the other day we went out and gave some money to some homeless people and talked to some homeless people. Those are the types of things that they are going to remember. And that is what we are trying to do every single weekend.”
We will learn not only from his experience with his divorce but also from his experience dealing with a lot of parents on his daily routine and if he says something that he learned from his experience spending time with those parents we should really listen to what he has to say. The second most important lesson he takes for himself and shares with us comes from the way he sees some parents dealing with their children. His answer was amazing and we do hope you can take that and a lot more from today’s episode just like we did.
“Talk and actually listen to your children. Talk to them, not at them. I see a lot of parents that cross the border of “I am your father, I am your mother, this is what to do, period” and coming over the top and I understand that philosophy and I have to do it at times but I really think about the respect issue and I don’t think a lot of people think about that. I think the bigger picture is giving them the respect that you in turn expect from them.”
We hope that after listening to this episode you feel inspired to change, either in the way you handle your children or on the way you handle your couch and your free time!
OTHER QUOTES:
“I typically don’t exercise on the weekends unless it is with the girls, we will go for bike rides, hikes, fun type of things. But I don’t actually train on the weekends because I don’t want to take my time away from them.”
“Regardless of what time you have, it is just finding that time that you spend with your kids and Steve does a really good thing incorporating fitness as well as that quality time.”
“I was a very hands on dad. When I was married I did a lot for the girls and as soon as we split I was left with them only on the weekends. I wasn’t with them every day for school and so I had to kind of figure out again the right way to handle all of it. How to talk to them about the divorce, how to handle the emotional side, how to teach them what I needed to teach them on the weekends, they are getting one thing from their mother and something else from me. It has been a challenge to say the least.”
“We decided to handle it as a positive thing (the divorce). When I sat down with my in laws and we had the conversation about “Hey, this is what we are doing.” It was terrible. My ex-wife comes from a very catholic family where divorce is not an option. I mean, that is not even on the radar. So when we talked about it, it was not well received and so there was a lot of negativity. We chose to talk the girls as “hey, listen, this is what we are doing, you are going to have two houses now. Daddy is going to be here, you are going to spend the weekends with him and you will stay here with mommy and we are going to be happier separately. So we really tried to make it positive.”
“If you are going through a divorce or a separation, make it about the kids. I know this is easier said than done because, not as man but just as human beings, we have those emotional things that we want to make sure that we get across to anyone that we are talking to or have feelings for.”
“I work with a lot of single dads and unfortunately a lot of them succumb to anger, hate and the bitterness, and it is so bad for the kids. They will see it, they will hear it. I just refuse to go down that route. It has worked out, I feel like the girls are doing really well because of the way it has been handled.”
“Why would you waste your time sitting on your ass watching television drinking beers when you haven’t seen your kids. And they don’t think about it. A lot of married dads, obviously not all of them, don’t even think about it. “Oh, you know, the kids are fine, they are right here, I see them enough.”. But what is going to happen if that is taken away and you can’t see them.”
“I do think that personal time is very important, regardless of who you are you need your down time, you need to unwind, unplug. And a lot of guys do that through drinking beer and watching the game. I am not saying there is anything wrong with that but I am saying is when you already barely seeing your kids as it is, I just can’t understand why you would want to go off hunting with your buddies or spend all day on a weekend when this is a perfect opportunity to connect with your kids.”
“I just really wanted her to feel better and have more confidence, she just was looking like she was miserable out there, the other kids were running circles around her and I felt bad but she wanted to get better but didn’t know how. We went to the very first game and she ended up scoring the very first goal of the first game. It brought tears to my eyes. I felt so good for her.”
“They need to be kids, they don’t need to be involved in that stuff and they don’t need to hear anything bad about their mother regardless of how I feel about her. That is not something that my father believed in. He was not happy with my mother and let me know all about it. That created some problems. I didn’t like my mother for a long long time until I was probably in my thirties I was still pissed at her. Until I finally realized that it wasn’t her. That is what I am trying to avoid.”
LINKS:
FIT DAD NATION WEBSITE
http://www.fitdadnation.com/
Twitter – Steve Roy@TheFitDadNation
https://twitter.com/TheFitDadNation
INSTAGRAM:
https://www.instagram.com/thefitdadnation/
“Let’s learn together. Let’s grow together. Let’s be dads together. Peace.”
The podcast currently has 88 episodes available.