Another year ended huh? I bet it’s been a doozy. You had ups. You had downs. You had victories. You had disappointments.
And so did your kids.
So, how will each of you remember it? Will you remember it? What will mark the completion of a season, what will cement the lessons learned from its events, what will bring healing from its conflicts and pains?
Sometime late in the year, I heard someone mention the idea of capturing each year’s events and themes in a kind of family history. It got me thinking…
The Aldin family could certainly benefit from such a tradition.
And so the idea I came up with a few years ago was to keep a permanent record of the years in the form of a ‘book’. For all I know, it’s been done before. But not by our family. And hey, it only lasted a couple of years :) ... but your family might make it work better. (I think I waited til the kids were too old to get caught up in the idea).
Each of us gets to answer the questions below, and choose two digital photos that represent our favourite memories of the year just gone. Then on New Year’s Eve, we’ll read our answers and “talk story” about 2011, before placing them in the book.
The questions can be very simple:
My favourite movie this year:
I really enjoyed going to the __________ because _____________________.
Three cool things about my birthday:
My holiday:
A cool thing that God did:
My achievements:
The hardest thing I had to do was…
Something I wish didn’t happen:
A funny thing I heard:
2011 has been an incredibly emotional year for us, full of the extremes of frustration and celebration, conflict and making new friends, villains and heroes, kids celebrating milestones and my wife and I both changing jobs, etc etc. What was yours like? And do you have a family tradition to close out the year and leave a record for your kids for later ?
Not ticks like a dog would get but tics like a twitch...
Occasionally between the ages of 4 and 8, our Youngest Son would start blinking like crazy. Sometimes to the point of making a little headtwitch with it. He’s such a cool guy, it pained us to see it happen. It seems to have settled down now. Each doctor we took him to said it was probably an allergy, though we’ve not been able to find what out what kind. It's since disappeared...
However, I found information like the following both reassuring and helpful in terms of responding well to the ‘behaviour’ while it was happening.
NOTE: The following information and advice is taken from the Raising Children Network…
Tics are muscle spasms that cause jerky movements, such as blinking, twitching of the face or jerky movements of the arm or shoulder, that seem out of the child’s control.
The movement may start because of discomfort, e.g. blinking a lot may be caused by eyesight problems, and nose twitching may be caused by an allergy.
A child can usually stop a tic for a short time if asked, but it sometimes comes back when she is not concentrating on stopping it.
Sometimes tics are caused by health problems such as Tourette syndrome.
Tics may be triggered by stress in the child’s life, e.g. learning difficulties, family problems.
Tics can be very distressing to a child, and some children with tics are made more unhappy by being teased.
If there is no underlying health problem, it is important to try to deal with any stress in the child’s life.
Relaxation exercises may help.
If the tic is very distressing for your child, and it does not go away after a few weeks, seek help from a health counsellor.
I’m going to add one more suggestion. Don’t make a big deal of it with the child. It often reinforces the behaviour rather than stopping it. It can make them feel helpless in the face of it and if it is stress-related, that will exacerbate the problem. The best piece of advice from the list above for me was about dealing with the stress. If our son’s blinking thing wasn’t allergy related, he was (at that time) quite prone to getting very stressed about things (the complete opposite to our Oldest Son) and so perhaps our work on removing his stressors and helping him with stress-management has been of benefit there.
Launched on July 1, 2010, Australia’s Pregnancy Birth & Baby Hotline is a new service which aims to give women, their partners and families somewhere to turn for information and support on everything from reproductive health, pregnancy and birthing, through to their child’s first birthday.
The important things for readers of FoF is that male partners and new dads are one of the main focuses of the service. Hotline management said in a recent email to me, ’There is a growing understanding that dads need as much support during the early years of life as mums do, so there are two specialised male counsellors available on the helpline as well as trained staff who can provide information on local support networks and services for dads.’
Hi there Dads and Mums everywhere. Below is the link to the recent interview with myself and my work colleague Steve Reid, at Christian radio program Family Life Australia.
We chatted mainly about why the Freakedout Fathers website was created, and what might stress Dads out (as well as what can be done!).
I'm a life coach. No, no, don't close the window, hear me out!!
A Dad I was coaching (you don’t know him, folks, he’s never commented on this blog, stop guessing!), once lamented about the complete lack of time in his life to think, plan, pray. He lacked ”time away from the noise” as he put it.
Now this man deeply loved his wife and four kids, he loved his work. But he was the kind of guy (I think most of us are) who needed regular space just to clear his head, get some focus, think and even not have to think!
His wife and youngest child had health problems. His job meant 9 hours straight of interacting with people at way beyond the surface level, always giving out. He lived only a few minutes away from home and the trip home was nowhere near enough time to “change hats” from Worker to Dad.
Fellas, if you’re lucky enough to be living with your family (ie., not divorced or separated), and regardless of whether your wife is working or at home, whether you are a SAHD or a “working” Dad like my friend above (as if stay-at-home parents don’t work!), you need that time out that my friend was missing. (So does your wife, by the way).
I suspect this is why many men make the detour to the pub or bar on the way home, or actually stay back in the office when everyone else has left, just to have some peace and quiet where they don’t have to listen carefully, respond, mediate, etc etc. Unfortunately neither of these solutions is really meeting the need. You need time to relax and refresh, to let go of one role before taking on the next, a way to chill out…
Now don’t give me that crap about being too busy. If your wife said she’d been too busy to take the car in for its scheduled service 18 months ago, you’d go postal on her, so be consistent here dude…
Here’s some thoughts on the how and the what:
My coaching client above decided at first on ten-minute walks around the carpark at work during the day. He did this because his wife wan’t yet in a place to accept him taking a 30 minute detour anywhere on his way home at night. His workplace understood: most of them just thought he was exercising, while his mangers knew what he was up to and that he would come back into the office with a clearer mind.
A bunch of coaching buddies and I have a monthly practise, some of them call it a Refocus Day, I call it a Defrag Day. Some of them hike. I mix it up between a favourite sheltered cove/beach nearby and coffee shops, where I can just stare at the water, think, drink good coffee, read, plan, etc. Again, my coaching client above revived his own practises of halfdays away praying in the forest at a favourite spot by a stream.
One of my friends’ Dads had a great routine each night. He would come home, kiss his wife, say hi to the kids and then retreat to the lounge room with a paper (or occasionally with nothing) and just sit for 20 minutes. In that time, his wife enforced the rule that no one was to disturb him. And when he came back into the family space 20 minutes later, he was fully present with them.
This will take talking through with your partner, so get ready to sell it, to be vulnerable, to not be immediately understood. These go with the territory. But this is worth calmly persisting with…
Like most things to do with your inner world, you’re only going to get suggestions from me rather than a formula. You gotta try some things out, talk some things out, find your own solution here. The important thing is defrag your head and your life regularly and both will run better.
If you want to read a little more about this, try these posts:
I love the online world. You meet some great people...
I recently had the pleasure of "chatting" (as in chat window) with Aussie author George Ivanoff. It’s well worth checking out George’s site especially if you have middle grade to young adult kids who like to READ.
My son has a copy of George's Gamers' Quest and I decided to ask some questions and give George a bit of free PR....
PETE: What is the main theme of Gamers’ Quest?
GEORGE: Reality! The two main characters in the book are computer constructs within a game environment, but they don’t know it. They think they are real people in a real world. As they progress through the various challenges they are faced with, they begin to question the nature of their reality. Eventually, they rise above their programming and become what they want to be. In many ways, the reader is asked to think about what constitutes reality. Having said all this, the novel it primarily an action/adventure. So while this theme is running throughout the book, it is in the background rather than being slammed into the reader’s face.
PETE: I love the metaphor, and this might be a dumb question but why did you set your novel against a backdrop of computer gaming?
GEORGE:It all started with a documentary I saw on the ABC about online gaming. It was a fascinating insight into the lives of people who are seriously into gaming, but also an insight into the intricate worlds they ‘virtually’ inhabit online. That lead to me writing a short story called “Game Plan”, which was published in an anthology called Trust Me! (Ford Street Publishing, Melb., 2008). And this lead to me writing the novel.
There was also the desire to simply write the sort of book that I would like to have read as a teenager. As a teen I was obsessed with playing Space Invaders on my Atari console (yes, I’m a child of the 80s). I would have LOVED a book set inside a computer game.
PETE: Ah, Space Invaders. So many memories. So. Who do you hope will read this wonderful novel and what are they likely to get out of the experience?
GEORGE: I hope that EVERYONE will read it! [George adds a happy emoticon to his chat at this point :) ] It’s being advertised as suitable for 10+, but I think that teens should like it too. Certainly I’ve had good responses from teen readers as well as younger readers. I think that younger readers see it purely as a sci-fi adventure, whereas older readers see the deeper questions about reality. My greatest hope is that it might attract some computer game players who wouldn’t normally read a novel. And what I would hope they’d get out of it is a realisation that reading can be as much fun as playing a computer game.
PETE: So how have you encouraged your kids to be readers?
GEORGE: There’s an old saying: lead by example. My kids are growing up watching my wife and I being avid readers. And we have both read to them since they were babies. My eldest daughter has followed in our footsteps and is really enjoying reading. My youngest is still at the being read to stage, but she really enjoys the time we spend going through the plethora of picture books that she’s been given.
PETE: You told me you’re a SAHD? What do you find are the specific positives and negatives of the Stay-At-Home Dad as compared to “work-away-from-home” Dad?
GEORGE: By far the biggest positive is being there as the kids are growing up. Working away from home would mean missing out on all the little things — the first smile, the first roll-over, the first wobbly step, the first half-formed word, the first tantrum. These are the things that I wouldn’t trade all the money in the world for.
The biggest negative is that as a freelancer, my income fluctuates.
PETE: Bummer. So apart from cashflow, what challenges do you face in professional writing while managing a family?
GEORGE: The biggest challenge is find the time to write. Children require a lot of time! My eldest is at school now, but my youngest is still at home. She has a nap in the middle of the day, so there’s a stretch of anywhere between half an hour and two and a half hours every day that I can sit down at the computer to write. She also does one day a week of childcare. So I’ve got from school drop-off until school pick-up to write. Then of course there are evenings and weekends. Sleep? Who needs sleep?
PETE: Sleep? What’s that? So what’s your next/current project?
GEORGE: At the moment I’m working of a set of six educational books about nutrition. They are aimed at grade 2 level, so trying to simplify things like macronutrients and micronutrients and the function of various vitamins and minerals is proving a real challenge. And I’ve been told by the editor that I;m not allowed to use the word “poo”.
PETE: Seriously?
GEORGE: Yep. Try explaining the function of fibre in a healthy diet to a Grade 2 kid without using the word “poo”. My brain is swimming in euphemisms. I’m also desperately trying to find some time to plan out my next novel. And I’m also still promoting Gamers’ Quest — doing interviews, writing guest blogs and doing book signings. I always seem to be working on several things at once, these days. I think I’ve developed the skill of multi-tasking as a result of being a father. Although my memory now has trouble recalling all that much from the distant days prior to children, I have a vague feeling that I was only ever capable of one project at a time back then. Being a Dad certainly changes things.
PETE: Hopefully for the better. Thanks mate…
…Okay we’ll leave it there. Great to find a committed Dad writing action-adventure! Gamers’ Quest has a cool promo video which is below. Again, hassle your local bookstore to get a copy in for you. They might buy a few more while they’re at it.
My wife told me the story recently of a work colleague who found a way to catch her kids in a lie 10 times out of 10. It seems this lady once watched Pinochio with all three kids and when asked "Will that happen to anyone if they lie?", answered, "Yes."
"Furthermore," she went on, "The only way to stop your nose from growing when you lie is to hold the end of it with your fingers."
From then on, each time she would ask something like "Who broke the vase?", the culprit would always be apparent. They'd be the one with their hand over their nose.
Have you ever jumped in a rollercoaster car, looked at the track ahead and thought "What the hell am I in for?" Then it's blast off and you're in it, yelling your head off and wishing it would stop. Eventually it does stop. And you're thinking, "That was great!"
That's parenthood.
I had the privilege of chatting via skype with Genuine Dad a long while ago where we got to discussing some of the “stuff” which represents the huge highs and deep lows of becoming and being a Dad.
Here’s the more comprehensive list:
1. Pressure. Congratulations! You just took on another role in life. I bet that makes you so excited! “The Universe believes I can do more and be more!Whoo hoo!!”
2. Conflict with your kids, your partner and even with your own parents (who may want to question your parenting style). Put more than one person in a situation and conflict has to happen. It’s like a law of nature. However, how you handle it and use it is your choice.
3. Anxiety. This may or may not be the traditional up-all-night-worrying-about-where-your-daughter-is. It may just be wondering how to be great at your job AND great at your parenting role. Or trying to wear too many hats at once. Or worrying that your wife will never again have energy left at the end of a day for you!
4. Serendipity: this means accidentally discovering something wonderful. Expect the unexpected … in a very positive way. Your child will surprise you with their insight, their giftedness, their sense of humour, their perspective, their personality. You will also discover things about yourself and your partner that you’d never have discovered without kids. This is part of the pay-off. When you have one of these moments, savour it!
5. Mess: Dad, get used to it. If you are anally retentive, fussy, house-proud, or perfectionistic, then you’re in for a shock. No matter how wonderful your communication skills, teaching style or behaviour management techniques – KIDS MAKE MESS. They break things, stain things, rip things, colour things in – sometimes accidentally, sometimes intentionally. It is par for this course. (This is one of our bedroom walls below)
6. Learning Curve. If you thought life was interesting up til now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
7. Exhaustion. You’re about to get tired. Real tired. Plan to recharge your batteries as much as you can and don’t overextend yourself when you can’t.
8. Mentoring Moments. “Dad, can you help me with …?” “Dad, can you fix my …?” “Dad, what do I do here?” “Son, do you want to come with me while I …?”
9. The Apprentice eventually becoming the Master. Who helps me navigate a computer game now? My ten year-old son. Who keeps me in touch with what’s new in music, cool-speak and fashion? My kids. Who will probably help me solve a lot of problems in the future? My kids. And that’s as it should be. I don’t have to always be right.
10. Powerlessness. At times, no matter how much effort you exert, no matter how clever you are, you are not going to be able to change something.
11. Influence. Sounds like I’ve just contradicted myself, huh? But the truth is that by your daily behaviour and those moments of quality time, you will surely and steadily influence your child’s outlook and habits (as Maxwell Smart would say, either for niceness or for evil)
12. Responsibility. A word that 2 of my buddies (still single in their 30s) call the R Word. Maybe that’s why they’re not married. Manhood’s not measured by how much pubic hair you have or how hard you can hit a ball with a stick. It’s measured by the level of responsibility you are prepared to take – for yourself and for others’ wellbeing. You brought this child into the world and even as they increasingly take steps to take responsibiltiy for themselves, the buck will ultimately stop with you for quite some time.
So, new Dad, it’s a bit of a rollercoaster. And I seriously hope you can enjoy the ride as much as I have…
I currently work 4 days a week in a high school, largely with young people for whom school is just one of the major struggles in their lives...
Without breaching confidence, I've talked over the course of this year with a couple of dozen young men (13-17 years old) who don't see any other response to being provoked than violence. There are different reasons for this, but the thing I've found common in all of them is the involvement of their father in crafting this attitude.
For some, Dad has actually taught them to solve their problems with their fists, to not let anyone push them around. For others, Dad has not taught them anything...verbally. But by example, he's hit them, hit their mother, gotten into brawls himself...he's modelled violence as a first response to being bothered by anyone.
For others still, Dad hasn't been particularly violent and hasn't actively taught them to be violent. What he has done is simply stood back and let dog eat dog beneath his own roof. He has let the kids solve their own conflicts by whatever rules the kids choose, only intervening when something of his gets damaged (wall, CD, window, coffee table, etc).
I was thinking about this again today after another conversation with a wonderful young man whose intelligence, talents and emotional intelligence is undermined by the ugly spectre of a belief in the value of violence to solve his problems. Dad fits into the first and last of my categories above, at least as my young friend tells it.
Geez, guys. My boys are now 15 and 12. I haven't taught them to be pussies. But they've grown up believing that violence is a very very poor method of solving a problem, if it ever does solve anything. They see it as a lose-lose. Maybe it's easier for them than many of my students (whose lives have taught them that the world is out to harm them). But I'm proud of the times we spent in early childhood talking about these things, debriefing movies and video games and incidents at school, and I'm grateful for the adult males in my friendship group and family who've taught my boys that humour and empathy and giving a damn actually defuse a lot of conflict before it grows too large.
Dunno where I'm heading with this. Just venting, maybe.
A possible question as a conversation starter here is: How have you taught your kids to deal with provocation and conflict?
Here’s something I find fascinating. In every Dads group I’ve run over the last three years, at least one guy in the room has said something like this:
“My wife/partner tells me off for wrestling with the kids. She says I’m teaching them to be violent…”
“My wife/partner won’t let me wrestle with the kids…”
“My wife/partner makes me feel guilty for wrestling with the kids, so I try not to do it anymore…”
And then each time the fella finishes his comment much the same way:
“…but I feel like it’s ok. So is it?”
My answer:
“Yes. It is.”
I could finish this there. But. Every answer has to be qualified. And then when you’re writing (or speaking), you feel like adding more of your opinion as well. So here it is…
It’s a very very healthy thing for a Dad to play-wrestle with his kids. (Notice I added play there?) We’re not talking about molestation. We’re not talking about Dads beating up on their children or pushing them around. We’re talking about play.
Kids NEED to be physically touched by both parents. And at various ages and for various reasons, it becomes uncool to kiss or cuddle with daddy. So then what’s a dad to do? And what’s a kid to do? Shake hands? Nahhhh, you grab each other around the shoulder and start rumbling.
One of the other things this achieves, particularly with boys, is that it’s a way of teaching them boundaries, of when they’ve crossed the line and getting too rough. For boys to pit their strength against a bigger stronger male is a valuable way of learning to empathize and control-self.
Alright. So you’re saying (or your missus is reading this and saying) “Who are you Pete? What do you know about it? Why should I believe you? What makes you the expert?”
Okay, if you don’t trust me, go read these articles below. Then google dads wrestling with children. Or you could meet my sons and see the real life effects of a decade of Dads and Sons play-wrestling. Yes, I’ve gotten a couple of fat lips and a fair few bruises (and they’ve gotten virtually none!), but my 15 year old still gives me a hug. They’re both empathetic human beings (except with each other!). And they both play rough games with their mates without it ever escalating… Anyway, go read these other articles.
And feel free to share your stories (and objections if you have 'em) in the comments area.
