The Daily Dad

A while back, we talked over at Daily Stoic about one of Seneca’s remedies for a hot temper. Try to catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror some time when you’re upset, he said, and you’ll be appalled at how you look. We talk about this exercise a bit in our course on anger, but the logic is worth considering for any dad. Anger might feel deserved or appropriate, but it almost always looks awful. 

The next time you are out, try watching for other dads who are getting angered by something their kids are doing. Or observe the crowd at your son or daughter’s next baseball game. Track that family traveling on vacation at the airport, or people at the table across from you at dinner. Because it’s as close to a look in the mirror as you’re likely to get. 

How do you think you look when you tell your son way too loudly to “Sit down. I told you already, sit down!” when they bounce around with too much energy? How do you think you look as you grab their arm with frustration and jerk them closer to you in line? Do you think you sound good threatening—like some tyrant—to take away some basic privilege of theirs because they’re not behaving exactly as you like? Or when you shout at them to hurry up at the airport? You think you don’t sound like a bully when you belittle and criticize them for messing up again? You think you don’t look like a monster when, after the argument escalates and escalates, you slap them across the face?

You look terrible. You look as awful and shameful as the people looked when you saw them do it in public, to their kids, as you tried to avert your gaze. You looked like Tom Izzo, yelling at that player during March Madness, and everyone else feels like the other players who wanted to step in and restrain him. No one looks good angry. No one would want to catch a reflection of themselves in the heat of the moment. 

Which is why we have to catch ourselves first. Which is why we have to do the work on ourselves now, before we become the thing we cannot stand to look at.

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One of the things you have trouble adjusting to when you first have kids is the crying. Not just because it’s loud, but because it feels like you’re being stabbed in the heart. We are not meant, evolutionarily, to be good at ignoring crying babies—especially ones we are related to. It provokes us in a very deep place, and that’s a good thing. 

But, as they get older, you’ll have to learn how to manage this. Because it’s inevitable that your children will be upset, even cry, throughout their lives. You son will fall and hurt himself. Your daughter will be angry that her toy broke. They’ll be sad. They’ll get dumped. They’ll be heartbroken. They’ll get fired and they will fail.

As a father, you have to understand this critical lesson: Tears are not indictments. They are facts. They are not problems for you to solve, or charges for you to defend yourself against. They are pronouncements. What your kids need is for you to listen to them. To hear what they are saying. No more. No less. 

They don’t need a lecture. They don’t need you to tell them how they can avoid this next time. They definitely don’t need to be told how this is not a big deal...or conversely, how this is a huge deal and totally their fault. They just need you. They need dad. They need dad to understand. 

Got it? By the way...this advice should apply to your marriage or relationships too.

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It’s fitting that one of the most important things you can do as a parent would require you to think about a thing that’s very nearly impossible for a parent to even consider. It comes to us from Marcus Aurelius by way of Epictetus: 

As you kiss your son good night, says Epictetus, whisper to yourself, “He may be dead in the morning.” Don’t tempt fate, you say. By talking about a natural event? Is fate tempted when we speak of grain being reaped?

Of course, this is not an easy thing to do. It goes against all our impulses. But we must do it. Because life is fleeting and the world is cruel. Marcus lost 5 children. 5! Seneca, we gather, lost one early too. It should never happen, but it does. It heartbreakingly-world-wreckingly-nobody-deserves-it does. And it’s not that we hope that Marcus Aurelius and Seneca’s philosophical training prepared them for the pain of losing a child (nothing can prepare you for that). What we hope is that this exercise meant they didn’t waste a single second of the time they did get with their beautiful children.

A parent who faces the fact that they can lose a child at any moment is a parent who is present. Who loves. Who does not hold onto stupid things or enforce stupid rules. A great dad looks at the cruel world and says, “I know what you can do to my family in the future, but for the moment you’ve spared me. I will not take that for granted.” Anxiety? Keeping up with the Joneses? Caring about getting into that exclusive pre-school or into Harvard? Who cares?

It can all go away in a second. There’s nothing we can do about that. We can, however, drink in the present. We can be what they need right now. 

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Douglas MacArthur was a man of routine, most military men are. So it shouldn’t surprise us that he built a family life around routine. But unlike far too many fathers who make routine a form of control, MacArthur’s morning routine was about fun—it was about starting the day off right.

As the peerless William Manchester details in his book American Caesar, the morning time was one of the best times at the MacArthur household. In fact, it was kind of scheduled crazy fun: 

When Arthur began to walk, and then to talk, father and son developed a morning ceremony. At about 7:30 A.M. the door of the General’s bedroom would open and the boy would trudge in clutching his favorite toy, a stuffed rabbit with a scraggly mustache which he called “Old Friend.” MacArthur would instantly bound out of bed and snap to attention. Then the General marched around the room in quickstep while his son counted cadence: “Boom! Boom! Boomity boom!” After they had passed the bed several times, the child would cover his eyes with his hands while MacArthur produced the day’s present: a piece of candy, perhaps, or a crayon, or a coloring book. The ritual would end in the bathroom, where MacArthur would shave while Arthur watched and both sang duets.

And it didn’t just happen when Arthur was young. As he got older, while his father ruled post-war Japan, Arthur would wake at 7am, and according to Manchester, “rush into the General’s bedroom and pummel him.

We talked before about Ulysses S. Grant’s evening wrestling matches with his kids. We talked about the epic games in the yard that Harmon Killebrew’s father knew was killing his grass but helping raise his kids. Well, we shouldn’t just be talking about this, we shouldn’t just be thinking it was cute that MacArthur and Grant let their guard down at home. We have to do the same thing.

No one is too important or too busy to have some crazy time at home. No one is above getting pummeled by their kid in bed. No father should hesitate before singing at the top of their lungs while they shave. These moments are the best moments. If they’re rare, you’re doing it wrong. They should be regular. Maybe like MacArthur, they should be scheduled every morning for 7:30.

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Cato the Younger was not an easy man to get to do something. If he felt it went against his conscience or that it was illogical, you’d have an easier time convincing a fish to climb a tree. That’s just how he was. All his life.

So, as you can imagine, Cato was not an easy student. He resisted anyone and everyone who tried to tell him what to do. Plutarch, one of his biographers, observed that “to learn is simply to allow something to be done to you and to be quickly persuaded is natural for those who are less able to offer resistance.” This is why we start instructing our kids in the important things so early, even when it seems like they are way too young. Because if we wait, they’ll be able to easily fight us off and resist the lessons they will need in life. 

Cato was an obstinate student, Plutarch tells us—“in each case he demanded the reason and wanted to know the why and wherefore.” But this resistance was nothing compared to what Julius Caesar and Pompey faced when they tried to bowl Cato over as an adult, when they tried to show him how the world really worked. It was nothing compared to what other corrupt and dishonest politicians experienced when they tried to show Cato what was in his “best interest.”

While Cato had been a resistant learner, what his teachers were able to get up and over his defenses really stuck. Those lessons about right and wrong, about doing your duty, about the history of Rome—those lessons were etched into steel. And no one was ever able to teach him otherwise...even with the threat of death or a bribe of many dollars. 

We have to teach our kids early. We have to push past their reservations. Of course they would rather play video games. Of course it’s more fun to goof off. But now is the time. Before they can fight us off with their full determination. Before the cement is completely dry. 

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One of the best lines from Seneca is that while we can’t choose our parents, we do have the ability to choose whose children we will be. In ancient Rome this was even more true than it sounds, because it was common for people to be adopted into families. Seneca’s brother, Lucius Annaeus Novatus, for instance, was adopted by a man named Gallio, whose name he eventually took (and if that name sounds familiar, it’s because Seneca’s brother is in the Bible).

In any case, this idea is worth thinking about now that you’re a parent. Instead of thinking about how you parents were, and using that as an excuse for whatever type of parent is easiest and most natural, why don’t you think about who you wish your parents were. Maybe that’s a specific person or maybe that’s just an ideal that you’ve seen in a movie or read about in a book. Maybe it’s a combination of the mother of one of your friends, and then someone else has become a father-figure and mentor to you since. Or maybe it’s Mr. Rogers and Ms. Frizzle from Magical School Bus. Or maybe it’s Socrates and Oprah. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you try to live as if that is whose child you were and are. 

We want to eliminate the excuse of “Oh that’s just how I was raised” and “It’s what I saw growing up.” Instead we want to flip it from a rationalization to an encouragement. I am this way because it’s what my “parents” taught me to be. I’m a great dad because I had a great dad (or dads). I am carrying on the tradition. I am passing along the love and the lessons I got.

You can’t choose your parents. They did the best they could. But you can choose whose footsteps you’re going to follow in, and in so doing, what kind of parents your kids are going to have.

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It’s a sad sight when you see a dad who has clearly stopped trying. He puts on weight. He checks out of his marriage. Maybe he starts drinking more. He resigns himself to the fact that he hates his job. He accepts whatever grades his kids bring home from school. He makes their behavior somebody else’s problem. 

We see that dad and we think, “I never want to be that guy.”

Good. Ok. But what steps are you following to make sure you don’t? In the startup world, they said that if your company isn’t growing, it’s dying. In a way, it’s sort of true for people too. If you’re not actively developing yourself, what’s happening? You’re atrophying. You’re getting worse.  

Epictetus liked to quote Socrates, that he delighted in attending to his own improvement day to day. Brilliant. And in a way, the perfect thing for you to be thinking about as we head into a new year. How are you improving yourself day to day? Are you working out? Are you reading? Are you setting goals for yourself? Are you clocking in at home as well as at the office? 

Your kids will be better served by a father that’s getting better. More importantly, they will be inspired by your example. Show them that you’re trying—that we can never stop trying—and they’ll follow you in their own way.

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It’s hard to picture Fred Rogers as a parent. Of course, we can easily recall him as Mr. Rogers, patiently and lovingly explaining things to generations of young viewers at home. But that was his work. Could he have really been like that at his home? Or was he much less perfect there—losing his temper, stressed about money, involved with himself?

Obviously no one really knows the answer to this but his kids, but from the various recent documentaries we are told Fred Rogers was a great dad. We know that Fred Rogers tried very hard to be the same kind and understanding man that he was for other people’s children with his own. Did he have his own issues? His own flaws? Absolutely. Who doesn’t? 

But he also knew the stakes were too high to simply leave it at that: 

When we choose to be parents, we accept another human being as part of ourselves, and a large part of our emotional selves will stay with that person as long as we live. From that time on, there will be another person on this earth whose orbit around us will affect us as surely as the moon affects the tides, and affect us in some ways more deeply than anyone else can. Our children are extensions of ourselves.

Our responsibilities as parents extend far beyond just putting a roof over their head and packing lunches for school. It includes working on our own emotional issues and ourselves so that the little people in our orbit don’t get thrown out of whack (remember John Wooden’s advice: A Little Fellow Follows You). We can’t be consummate professionals at work only to come home, loosen our tie or our belts, and then just wallow in our personal status quo. We have to be growing, improving, actively working to provide a good example and a safe place for our kids to grow and learn. 

We chose to bring them in the world. They depend on us and watch our every move. Now we owe it to them to live up to the stakes of the situation we have created. Every. Single. Day. 

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We’re always in a rush. We have to get them ready for school. We have to get them off to bed. We have to get to the airport. We have to get back inside. We have to finish up dinner. 

We are, as parents, it seems, perpetually short of time and always eager to get to the next thing. But it’s worth stopping and thinking this morning, what we are actually rushing to and what we are rushing away from. You’re wrapping up bedtime quickly, why? So you can sit and watch Netflix after they’re asleep? You cannot stand for them to be late to school, why? Fear of other parents judging you? You want to be to the airport how early? And for what reason? Because it recommends doing so on your ticket?

As dads, when we rush, we should know that we are hurrying through life. We are zipping through their childhood—the exact thing that we will stop and miss at some point not long from now. How much of this will seem important then? How much would we give for a few minutes back here, that right now we seem to want to be over as quickly as possible?

We are rushing through the 18 summers we get from them at home. We are rushing through the few hundred breakfasts before they are sullen, hormonal teenagers. We are rushing out early in the 4th quarter to beat traffic in one of the last football games we’ll be able to see together before they have kids of their own. We are rushing towards an uncertain future—one in which we might have cancer, in which a war might break out, or one in which we might be much, much busier with work than we are now. 

So slow down. Enjoy it. They call it “the present” for a reason—because it is a gift. Appreciate it. Don’t scarf it down. Savor it.

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The ubiquity of the word “energy” these days is probably a sign of how pervasive pseudo-science and charlatans have become. We are inundated with energy healers and energy crystals. You can hire consultants to analyze your company’s energy. You can take a sound bath to remove negative energy, or have an aura reader interpret the energy you put out into the world.

Yet for all that nonsense, energy is a real thing in parenting. Just as Cesar Milan talks about projecting the right energy to your dog, so too can your kids pick up on the energy you are emanating. Bad day at work? They can feel it. Hate where you live? They can feel it. Pissed off at your spouse? They can tell, even if you only argue when they’re asleep. 

Why are your kids running around like crazy, acting like monsters today? Well, maybe you ought to check what kind of energy you’re generating. Why is your son hitting his little brother? Maybe because you’re a ball of tension and frustration, and it’s contagious. Why is your daughter being such a terror? Maybe that resentment your wife is holding on to has something to do with it. Maybe she just couldn’t stand how things were at breakfast this morning—how awkward and weird it was.

When you see behavior and attitude problems, adjust your energy first. Look in the mirror first. If you want a happy home, a home with kindness and love and peace, then bring that energy with you. Project it consciously and deliberately—show that things are good with you and they will be better with everyone else.

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