The Daily Dad

It’s easy to think that money is the solution to most of the problems of parenting. After all, we remember our own childhood and the things that money could have provided us. If only we could have had Invisalign instead of those awkward braces...If only we could have lived in a better neighborhood...If only Mom and Dad didn’t have to be so stressed...If only we could have afforded coaches or tutors, we could have gone pro or gotten into Harvard. 

It’s true, money does make some things better. It’s certainly better to have it than not have it (Seneca was right when he called wealth a “preferred indifferent,” not good or bad, but nice to have). But it’s a mistake to think that money will magically create a magical childhood for your kids. It’s not true that money will guarantee them a good life or prevent them from feeling pain or loss. It’s not true, as we have written, that money is even high on their list of needs. 

What kids actually want is you. What kids actually need is Dad. As Dear Abby quite brilliantly put it in a column back in the 1950s, “If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money.” You can’t pay someone to be there for your kids. You can’t pay someone to do the job only you can do. Sure, money can make things easier, but it is no substitute for quality time (or garbage time). It will never be as important as what you can provide by being hands on, by being a good example, by showing them you care for them and value them. 

And the proof of this is how many people—including you and your own childhood—were able to turn out just fine without much money.

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It’s so easy to make threats as a dad. If you don’t stop that, I’m going to turn the TV off. If you don’t start being nicer to your brother, we’re going to go home. You have to pick up your clothes first, or else there is no snack. You do it when they’re little, and if you remember your own childhood, it keeps happening all the way through—about curfew, about grades, about keeping their room clean, about how you talk to people. 

But while making threats is easy, keeping one’s word is harder. Because the link you made between a clean room and the TV was totally artificial and you didn’t really mean it. Because you still want to go to the basketball game with your daughter, and really don’t want to have to enforce it as a punishment. Think about Obama and the red line he drew in Syria. He meant it...but he didn’t really mean it, and when his bluff got called, the whole national security picture changed. 

As a parent, it’s critical that you mean what you say. So enforce every threat with the firmness of a dictator? No, how about you make fewer threats? How about you stop forcing things together that you’re not serious about? This way when you do make a causal link, it’s because it matters. When you draw a line, know that it’s worth enforcing. Know that you will enforce it. 

So your kids learn that words mean something. Specifically that your words mean something.

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Falling in love with your spouse is great. Making a lot of money is awesome. Crushing it at work is too. It’s nice to have a big house or to go out and have a wonderful night with friends. But nothing is quite like coming home and having your kid rush to give you a hug. When they fall asleep on you on the couch. When they climb on your shoulders. When you hear them coming around the corner, excitedly saying your name and they jump into your bed. 

Nothin’s better, as Bruce Springsteen put it, than blood on blood. 

There is a lot of great stuff in life, but nothing is better than family. That’s what he’s saying. The blood relation is not what he’s talking about. He’s talking about the bond. The people you look the other way for. The people you’d do anything for. The people who you are doing all this for. 

So the question to think about today is: If this really is the best and most important thing, are you really building your life around it? If nothing feels better than that hug, than wrestling on the floor, than carrying them in your arms to throw them in the pool on a summer afternoon, then why isn’t it happening more often? 

We pull extra hours at the office to get promoted. We take risks to make investments with our money. We make plans to see friends or have fun. But do we actively sacrifice and scheme so that we might have more of the one pleasure that tops them all? Do we actively prioritize the thing that truly matters most? Those moments when blood is on blood, when family is together?

Crazy, isn’t it?

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You can sit your kids down to watch what you think is the greatest movie of all time, and they’ll get bored and fall asleep. You can get floor seats to an NBA game and they’ll roll their eyes. You can introduce them to your fanciest, most important friends and they’ll want to go back to whatever they were doing before you called them over. 

It’s almost a rule that kids don’t care about what you really, really want them to care about. And yet, there is something about kids that also seems to resemble that hilarious line from Homer Simpson. “I’m not easily impressed,” he tells Mr. Burns as they’re driving. Then he looks out the window and shouts, “Whoa! A blue car!”

Your kids might not understand how expensive those floor seats were, but they love that there is free popcorn. They might not appreciate that classic movie, but they can also play in the dirt with rapt presence for three hours. They don’t care about your billionaire boss, but they think Grandma and Grandpa are the two coolest people in the entire world. Whether they admit it or not, they think you are cool. That’s why they copy you, that’s why they want to put on your shoes, that’s why the t-shirt you gave them from when you were young is the one they love to sleep in every night. 

Kids aren’t easily impressed, and yet somehow they are. It’s really that they see through most of the constructs us adults have taken for granted. They can naturally do what Marcus Aurelius practices in Meditations, the art of stripping things of the “legend that encrusts them.” Meanwhile, they also see simple, ordinary things for all the wonder and beauty that the rest of us miss. They see how little most things matter, and see how much other things do. 

And in this we can learn a great deal from them.

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Perhaps you’re familiar with the scene in the Bible where Moses—aided by God—parts the Red Sea. It was a miracle of epic proportions that allowed the Israelites to race through and escape the Egyptians who were chasing them. Lesser known about the miracle is what happens next. When Moses released the sea, the Egyptians were trapped. The water crashed around them and thousands perished.

Naturally, the Israelites broke out in song and celebration. As the angels went to join them, God rebuked them, according to the Talmud. “How dare you sing for joy,” it was written, “when My creatures are dying.”

Now whether any of this actually happened or not doesn’t change the lesson. It is easy in the midst of victory and success to think of how wonderful this is for you. It’s also easy to forget who or what your “winning” might have come at the expense of. We must be careful not only to be good sports in this life, but empathetic and caring enough to realize that things are not always as great for other people as they are for us. Proverbs 24:17 expresses it well: “Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth.” 

It’s these kinds of ancient and timeless lessons that we must pass along to our children (to say nothing of following ourselves). If you are reading this email, you are privileged in some way. You can afford a computer. You are alive. You are literate. You are lucky enough to have children and know that they are safe. Fate has not been so kind to everyone else. There are others out there drowning. Somebody at a factory in China had to make the computer or smartphone you are looking at right now. Others didn’t get to go to school. They have no help, no one is looking out for them. 

You can still enjoy what you have and you should still want to win in life. But don’t be so clueless and self-absorbed as to not care that other people are suffering. And don’t raise children who are indifferent to it either. 

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There’s a story that occurs constantly in the biographies of many creative and brilliant people. It goes something like this: As a kid they had a question—maybe it was about how car engines work, or what Antarctica is like. It doesn’t matter if the question is about history or science or animals, because their dads all had the same response. They said, “I don’t know, but let’s go figure it out!” So they went to the library or the hardware store or the computer and they dug around and they found they answer. 

What this experience did was instill the young versions of these notable figures with a few essential lessons that set them on their paths: 1) their fathers actually listened and cared; 2) curiosity is the starting point of a great adventure; and 3) there are places, like the library or the internet or some wise old neighbor, where answers can be found. Most importantly though, they learned something well-expressed in the title of Marie Forleo’s new book: they learned that “Everything is Figureoutable.” Problems can be solved. Ignorance can be eliminated. Answers can be tracked down. The unknown can be made familiar. Things can be discovered.

Your job is to teach that. Today and every day. It’s to actually listen to their questions...and then help them find the answers. That doesn’t mean give them the answers. It means teaching them how to figure things out for themselves. Teach them to love the process. Teach them to get excited about it. Teach them to head to the library or the laptop, the telephone, or their science teacher. 

Everything is figureoutable. Big and small. But it takes someone to help them figure that out. It takes you.

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We take care of our own, we say. Family is family. Blood is thicker than water. These are noble sentiments that have encouraged beautiful sacrifice, forgiveness, and accomplishments. One problem with it though is that it too easily justifies provincialism and nepotism. 

A recent social critic observed that not long ago when people talked about getting together to do something “for our kids,” whether it was build a swimming pool or invest in education, it was obvious that they meant everybody’s kids. Or, at least, they meant more than just their biological kids.

But unfortunately, that’s changed. When we say “our own” we don’t think Americans or whatever country we live in, we think race. Or we think our blood relatives. That’s awful. This system we live in demands that we think of ourselves as more than just parents to our own kids. We have to think generationally. We can’t just think about getting ours, or protecting ours. We have to think like a village, like a group.

The Stoics remind us that we are “made for each other.” Marcus Aurelius spoke dozens of times about the “common good.” He didn’t just care about his kids. He cared about everybody’s kids. Because that’s what justice—what doing the right thing—demands of us. 

It’s better to think of “our kids” as everybody. We’re all in this together, every single dad. We’re all better if we’re doing better, together. 

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Emily Oster is a writer and a thinker after our own heart. Frustrated with all the bad parenting advice—most of which seems to be based on old wives’ tales and ridiculously bad data—she set out to apply her economist training to the subject of parenting. What kind of sleep training is best? Formula or breastfeeding? Screen time, good or bad?

The result was her book Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting from Birth to Preschool, which is worth reading and recommending to anyone with young kids. But what’s so interesting about the book is where it ends, which is not with some data driven insight but something completely anecdotal, and yet totally true. Oster, about to take her daughter on an international trip, anxiously asked the pediatrician what would happen if her daughter was stung by a bee while they were away. What if she’s allergic? What if something bad happens? You know the script, what if, what if, what if?

The doctor’s reply: “I’d just try not to think about that.”

As Emily explained in an interview:

I think about that advice all the time because it’s pretty broadly applicable to a lot of things in parenting. We can get caught up in every tiny decision and miss the enjoyment of parenting and the part of this that’s supposed to be fun. It just pushed against some of my worse instincts as a parent to just obsess over everything. Sometimes you just have to accept that you cannot control everything. That’s hard, but it’s part of the fun. Also, the kid was eventually stung by a bee, and it was totally fine.

Selective ignorance seems like a dangerous parenting strategy, and, of course, if practiced all the time, would be. But there is no way you’re going to be a good dad if all you do is worry about everything that could possibly happen. There’s no way you’ll be present or fun or attentive if your mind is constantly running through worst case scenarios. There’s no way you’ll get the big decisions right if you’re sweating every tiny decision. 

There are some things it’s better not to think about. There are some times when we just need to accept that we’re winging it. There are some problems we’ll just have to solve when we get to them--if we even have to get to them. In the meantime, we’ve got plenty of other things to do...so go do it!

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There are going to be moments in fatherhood—when you’re dancing to Baby Shark to entertain your kid, or you’re way into the third book in the Twilight series for your daughter or you’re making the lamest dad joke of all time—where you might be tempted to step back and think: Oh God, what would the twenty year old version of me think of this? I told myself, I’d never be this guy, and here I am setting up a tent at a soccer game and putting sunscreen on my nose. If they saw me right now, would they mock me mercilessly? Would they kick my ass?

We all think that. We all have that 16-year-old or 25-year-old in our head with their strange, arbitrary and always critical standards for what selling out, or settling, or giving in looks like. Here’s the thing though—and hopefully your own kids give you some perspective on this—but you had absolutely no idea what you were talking about when you first thought those things. You were inexperienced. You were entitled. You were completely self-absorbed. And you were insecure and you were scared and you had not even an inkling of what real love and happiness was. 

So that you would be different now, at age _____ with _____ kids? That you would be doing things now you never thought you’d find yourself doing? That’s not selling out. That’s not settling. You’re not a loser. No, you just know something about life now. You know what really matters now. You know what is important to you. And you don’t care as much what people think anymore...starting with that naive teenager in your head.

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Did you know DJ Khaled has a son? And his name is Asahd? Of course you did, because if you’ve heard of DJ Khaled even once in the last couple years, it’s probably come up. His social media feed is like 100% photos of his kid (Asahd had his own Instagram account with nearly 2 million followers). His dad named his most recent album Father of Asahd. He put a picture of his kid on the cover. In interviews, he even claimed his son “produced” the album. Dad even designed a signature shoe with Asahd that they sell at Kids Footlocker.

All this for a two year old. 

It’s cute at first. But if you think a little bit more about it, it raises some red flags. Is this really what the kid wants? Is this really healthy or appropriate? Or is it just a cheap way to get attention and exploit his cuteness? 

Most of us are not rappers or influencers, so the ethics of a lot of those questions are sort of irrelevant. But we are dads and it’s important we draw some clear boundaries when it comes to our kids. Our kids are our kids. They are not status symbols. They are not extensions of us (or our brands). They are not here so we can impress people—at dinner conversations or in the media. Where they go to college says nothing about us. How cute they look dressed up for their birthday says nothing about us. 

Our job is to take care of them, not exploit them. We’re supposed to let them get to be normal, to have a childhood—not to draw them into our adult world prematurely, or because it’s easier for us. That’s the best gift the Father of [Insert Your Kid’s Name] can give them. It might not seem as cool as a platinum record or a shoe deal or bragging rights in front of your friends, but it will go a lot further in making sure they have a healthy, balanced, happy life.

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