The Daily Dad

The world is a scary place right now. Your retirement accounts have taken enormous hits. Events are getting cancelled. Government officials are failing, publicly and embarrassingly, to protect us. Nobody knows quite what the next few weeks or months will look like. 

But one thing that is certain? Your kids need you to be calm. They need this as much as they need anything right now. Because this wasn’t their fault. Because they haven’t been through stuff like this before. Because they are looking to you for guidance, for an example of how to be and behave. 

If you’re freaking out, if you’re letting your anxiety run wild, what will they think? More importantly, how is that helping them in any way? People in the sway of their passions or fears don’t make good decisions. They don’t inspire confidence. They are not their best selves. 

Well, this is a moment that requires the very best of you. It requires you conquering your fear, discarding your anxiety, and focusing on the task at hand. It requires you to truly be there for your kids. To make good decisions, in the calm and mild light of good philosophy.  This is where you teach them what leadership and citizenship look like. This is where you teach them how to be strong and calm precisely when a situation most calls for it. 

They need you to be calm. So step up. 

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On their deathbeds, fathers think about a lot of things. They think about the world they’re leaving to their sons and daughters. They think about how they parented. They think about the mistakes they made. They think about what they did right. They are warmed by the thoughts of their children, and, if they are lucky, they find themselves surrounded by them, the hospital bed serving as the final crowded table we have talked about here. 

The question for you to think about today, on a day hopefully quite far from that moment, is what decisions are you making now and how will you think about them then? Think about what most dads regret as they come to the end of life: They regret not spending more time with their kids. They regret not telling them how proud of them they were (not doing it nearly enough). They regret taking things too seriously, they regret letting petty differences or petty problems loom larger than the love that they felt in their hearts. They regret not being present, spending all that energy trying to organize perfect “quality” time when there was so much ordinary, wonderful garbage time to be had. They regret not “engaging with the slime” because they cared too much about keeping the house clean. They may regret spoiling their kids, not teaching them the right lessons, not having the conversations that needed to be had. 

Well, you’re lucky. Because you’re not on your deathbed right now. Because it’s not too late. Nor is it ever too early. Today you can adjust and change to make sure you don’t have those regrets—or at least you can seek to minimize them. 

You only get one go at this. Learn from the people who have come before. Learn from your own parents. Try to get it right. Before you regret it. 

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Each of us, no matter how old or successful, has things we wish we knew how to do. We wish we could speak another language, or change the oil in our own car, or play the guitar. It’s not that we aren’t up for learning these things now—more so even than when we were young—but it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, as they say, even when the dog wants to learn. 

It can be a frustrating experience. Sometimes, when the desire is deep enough but the capacity for comprehension is not, it can even produce resentment toward our own parents for not encouraging or teaching us these skills earlier—when we had less going on, when our mind was more pliable, when we had the time. 

The French philosopher Jean de la Bruyère (who we’ve quoted before) has spoken about the importance of laying the foundation for language learning in our children: “when the soul naturally receives everything, is deeply impressed by it, and when the memory is fresh, quick, and steady.” 

That is, as early as possible. It’s true for more than just picking up française or español.      

When we’re young our mental maps have yet to be fully drawn. Our neural pathways are still being carved. Our brains are lumps of clay waiting to be molded--by exposure, by experience, by accident, by parents. When we’re young, our view of the world has not yet been colored by the kind of preconceptions, desires, and passions that seem to define what is possible for adults. Kids aren’t tied down by the familiar and they aren’t yet burdened by the responsibilities that adults know too well. They can be excited easily with games, they are impressionable, they are not yet jaded, and, most of all, they have time. They have so much time. 

You have to recognize that they are clay in your hands. You have to help them seize this window. You have to help them open their minds. 

Jean de la Bruyère said that language especially will “clear the way for the acquisition of solid learning.” But so will dancing, learning to tie a tie, computer programming, drawing, piano, and a million other skills. More is better, as we’ve said before. Help them develop range. Let them learn to love not only the benefits of range but the pride of depth and the process of acquiring both. 

It’s not too late. But earlier is better. 

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Sometimes it’s good to acknowledge our biases. And one of the biggest biases in our lives is our kids. Not just a bias in the sense that we prefer them, but a bias like one of those ones that cognitive behavioral scientists point out that prove we’re totally and utterly irrational.

We love our kids and love makes us crazy. It is irrational. And that’s okay. In Herman Hesse’s beautiful novel Siddhartha, the titular character—who had spent his whole life in the solitary pursuit of enlightenment—suddenly finds himself a father. This changes him. Makes him feel all sorts of things he had never felt before, feelings that, in many ways, he had denied and pushed away for so long as part of his journey. 

“He was madly in love, a fool because of love,” Hesse writes of Siddhartha, but also of you and every other parent who’s ever lived. “Now he always experienced belatedly, for once in his life, the strongest and strangest passion; he suffered tremendously through it and yet was uplifted, in some way renewed and richer.” 

Our kids make us drive. They drive us crazy. They mess with our minds and our priorities. Love does that. Mad, mad love is powerful, skewing things. But it’s also a wondrous, special thing. It makes us suffer, but it also rewards us. It uplifts us. It changes us, sure, but they change us so much for the better.

It’s good to acknowledge that.

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Imagine that you’re gone and able to look down now and see your kids from above. Or imagine that somehow you had magical powers and could see inside their heads and read their thoughts. What is it that you would never want them to witness? What is it that you would never want them to feel?

Not failure, obviously, because you know that’s a part of life. Not suffering—within reason—because that too is a part of life, as the Buddha says. But you would never want them to feel stupid, or feel unloved, or feel that they had to earn your approval. You would never want them to feel worthless. Or find out that they really needed you but were afraid to come to you for help. You would never want them to think you were too busy for them, or that you cared about their success more than their happiness. 

This is basic stuff, right? Okay, but honestly, if you really looked at your behavior, do you think you contribute to those exact feelings? They came to you and instead of listening… you rushed right in with judgement or a lecture. You criticize far more than you compliment. You are cold or easily disappointed… because you’re still dealing with your own issues. You lost your temper. You say harsh things. 

Every father does this. We make our kids feel a way that if we heard their boyfriend or their boss made them feel that way we’d drive down and kick their ass. We do it because we’re not aware enough, because we don’t take our influence seriously enough. And that’s not okay. We can do better. We have to do better. 

Imagine you could see the world from inside your kid’s heart and head. Now look at their father—look at the way you act towards them. It’s not the picture you want to see, is it?

So change. Now. 

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If you’re in your 30s, then your parents raised you through the global financial crisis, SARS, the bursting of the tech bubble, and 9/11. They saw two wars in Iraq, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Black Monday. If you’re in your 40s, they experienced that and the crack epidemic, the AIDS epidemic, stagflation, Chernobyl, and the final saber rattling of the Cold War. If you’re in your 50s, then your parents raised you through Vietnam and Watergate and the Berlin Wall. If you’re in your 60s, they raised you through the Civil Rights movement, the counterculture revolution, the draft, Vietnam, the Kennedy assassinations, MLK’s assassination, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. If you’re older than that… well, now we’re getting into even headier territory: the war in Korea, the Iron Curtain, the Second World War, the Marshall Plan, and god knows what else. 

You think that was easy? You think there weren’t moments where they shut the door and wept out of anger or fear? You think they didn’t spend a lot of nights sitting up in bed, talking quietly to their partner about what was going to happen, about how (and if) they were going to make it? They were scared. They were overwhelmed. They wondered what kind of world this was to bring you up in. 

And then you know what? They put on a smiling face and made you breakfast. They went to work. They saved their money. They prepared for your future. They loved you. They protected you. They soldiered on. 

You come from that tradition. You come from parents who didn’t have it easy… and grandparents who had it harder, and great-great-great grandparents who definitely had it worse. What we face today is tough. These are real economic, political, and medical crises. But we’ll get through it. We’ll get through it as our parents did. We’ll keep smiling. We’ll keep protecting. We’ll keep doing our job. 

Because we have to. We have a tradition to uphold. 

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Your job today as a father is to do one thing. It’s to read this poem, which dates back to 1895, and then to think about how to incorporate its lessons into how you raise your kids. Ignore the gendered language (it was written as advice to the poet’s son) because it doesn’t matter. There isn’t any child, boy or girl, at any age who won’t benefit from this wisdom. 

If— 

BY RUDYARD KIPLING

If you can keep your head when all about you   

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Go!

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These are strange times to be a father. Fathers have never been expected to do more—around the house, in their children’s lives. This is wonderful. It’s also challenging and confusing because societal expectations and the actual process for preparing new dads for doing these things are not quite in alignment. At the same time, the word “masculine” is not indelibly connected to that idea of “toxic masculinity.” So much of what it has and continues to mean to “be a man” are now denigrated and criticized. The modern picture of a dad is somehow simultaneously an overweight oaf who tells lame jokes and a patriarchal tyrant. A control freak and a checked out layabout.  

And this isn’t even getting into the extreme theories about how having kids is unconscionable in an age of climate change or feminist arguments for “abolishing the family.” 

The point is: It’s confusing and overwhelming to be a dad sometimes. Who should you be? How should you act? Are you doing the right thing? Or are you a monster?

Blake Masters, the founder of Spar! (an awesome fitness/habit app that will help you get better and stay healthy) and the co-author of Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, has a rather refreshing and inspiring message for dads out there. We asked him what fatherhood has meant to him and his answer cuts through so much of the noise:

I am *proud to be a father*, not only in the sense that my particular children have this or that specific quality, or that I teach them x or I learn from them about y. I'm proud to be a father because fatherhood is important, fatherhood is a key half of what makes the whole human enterprise keep going, and fatherhood specifically is about raising formidable young people that understand and respect what's good about the world their predecessors have made, how to keep up that good work, and indeed, maybe even how to make things a little better, without getting crushed or discouraged or too jaded along the way. *My* kids are great, I love them very much, and I'm proud of and cherish our relationships. But every once in awhile, when they have finally gone to sleep for the night, it's nice to zoom out and try to understand the big picture: we are participating in the timeless institution of watching over and rearing small people, who will before too long take up that challenge and do it again themselves. 

Don’t let anyone make you feel down about this. Don’t let anyone kick you around for doing your best. This fatherhood thing is important. It’s a long tradition we are a part of. We are doing the work of our grandfathers and their grandfathers, and at the same time, we are also moving the world forward, questioning old assumptions, setting new norms. 

Give yourself some credit. Feel the power of that bigger picture. Know that you are engaged in a timeless process, one that the human species would not survive without. You are a father and that’s a good thing. 

Keep going. 

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Seeing your own parents now, as an adult, is stressful. There’s a great Ram Dass line that the comedian Pete Holmes has used in relation to his own parents: You think you’re enlightened—go spend a week with your family.

The point is, having Mom and Dad come stay with you is few people’s idea of a relaxing weekend. It’s stranger still once you have kids, because suddenly you start to see and think about your own childhood differently. Some insights you get are good, but some of the behaviors you see make you sad. Because you see it through the eyes of your own kids now, you see how it affects them. How could I have handled these people as a child, you think. This is no way to live.

As we’ve said before, each one of us needs to examine these feelings and process them. Your kids are a second chance for you. You have to heal your inner child. You have to wipe the slate clean. But this exercise—of seeing your parents and their flaws through your kid’s eyes—should also humble you. 

Because how do you think it is living with you now? Do you think it’s easy to be a kid in your house? Or might it be incredibly stressful and disorienting—what, with all your anxieties and vices and issues? Remember that your kids—like you all those years ago—have no idea that this isn’t normal. They have no idea that you mean well but are flawed. They have no idea that this is stuff you’re working on in therapy or in your journal or with your spouse. All they feel are the effects. The residue of your unaddressed anger. The insanity of your need to control things. The stress of your work. 

That’s not fair. They can’t handle it. You have to handle it.

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People are freaked out. Events are cancelled. Schools have been let out. You’re working from home, or, at least, not going out like you used to. Money is being lost. The elderly and vulnerable are at risk. We are seeing, laid bare, what incompetent leadership looks like...and how fragile our institutions are. 

Is there any good that can come of this? On a large scale, no. But there is one silver lining to look at here: You’re spending more time with your kids, as a family. You’re being reminded, vividly, of what’s truly important in this life. You’re able to see just how much you took stability and the modern global world for granted, and how when that falls away, what’s left is the core unit of family. What’s left in stark relief are the people and relationships you care about most. 

So as you sit here, going a little stir crazy, push those fears and anxieties out of your mind and focus on what matters. Drink in this time with your family. Go play a game with your kids. Watch their favorite movie on the couch tonight. Work on a project in the garage together. FaceTime with your brother or sister or son who lives across the country. 

Heed this reminder, seize this moment. The present is all we have. Nobody knows where this is going to go—-except that, like all things, it will eventually pass. But right now? Right now, the silver lining, the gift of it, is that it’s an opportunity for you to cherish your loved ones. It’s a chance for you to be a good father. It’s a chance for you to be together. 

Take it. It was bought at a high cost and it would be a tragedy on top of a tragedy to waste it. 

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