Excellence in Fatherhood - Success in Parenting

Talking with (not to) your kids on a daily basis is vital for keeping them focused on your message as opposed to what they are being exposed to elsewhere.

What is new is not that peers and marketers and predators and others are competing for your kids attention, but that there are so many media outlets and that they are all in real-time, and many are interactive.

Besides the constitution of this great country (which unfortunately is being disregarded and attacked on a daily basis by lobbyists and the current executive branch), the family unit is the basis for what makes America great.

It is absolutely imperative that parents guide their kids through the constant influences that have access to them daily.  

The traditional news outlets all report the same stories, which are essentially propaganda.  The agenda driven stories unfortunately are designed to promote fear and anxiety within our kids so as to influence them to support ideas and concepts they are many years away from actually being able to understand.

The public schools system has a very narrowly focused, often politically driven agenda, that limits the factual knowldege disseminated in lieu of agenda driven information.

The Internet, which is a wonderful thing, but can be quite subversive, and definitely creates the risk of exposing your child to information, pictures, people, and influences that are completely inappropiate.

Cell phones with email, text message, Internet access, and picture taking consume our kids time, and barrate them with opinions and information.

Instant and constant communication, the lack of privacy and solitude, and the exposure to everything and anything that is our kids reality today is obviously influencing your child directly and indirectly, conciously and subsconsiously.

Its not as if this is all bad stuff.  There are a lot of benefits to the speed of life these days.  

However, in order for you child to live life at this speed, and remain grounded, and focused on what matters to become educated, respectful, happy, trustworthy, loving, and stable, you as a parent must make time to be together.

You must spend time with your kids each day, with the TV off, no one on the phone or the Internet, no friends over, just being a family.  Kids need time without all the information and communications overload.  They need time to relax, play outside, catching frogs, or chasing the dog around, or swimming with dad.  

So as a parent, you must slow things down in your own life, so you can help make this happen in your kids life.

Early on as a father I felt a great sense of responsibility to provide for and ensure that my son had a fulfilling, joyful, and relatively secure life. Of course, nothing is guaranteed to any of us, but I was going to make sure that I did everything in my power to raise my child with the best possible perspective on life, to ensure he felt loved, and to ensure he had a financially adequate, if not abundant, upbringing.

There was so much I felt I wanted to share with him that I started to catalog what I would tell him and when, what books I felt he must read, what life lessons I wanted to share with him so he could have more success more quickly, and so much more including but not limited to family history, financial advice, political beliefs, athletics, fun, philosophy, freedom, the United States constitution, ….

My goal was to quickly create a series of videos of me doing a brain dump to ensure I got this information documented in case I died before my son was an adult.  My video camera was not working well and the process had several annoyances, so I decided to write instead.  I am currently writing a book about this, but felt it would more fun and also a great resource to share my ideas with others and get their input.  So here I am.

My hope is that this blog will interest many parents like myself, and result in an active exchange of ideas about life and the human experience.