While the rate of children living without fathers reaches a record high of 24 million, Josh Misner examines the quality of fathering to the 50 million other children and prescribes six steps for engaged fatherhood.
We currently live in a media-saturated world that competes for our attention every second of the day. If you ever tell your child, who comes up to you to excitedly share a picture he just drew, “Just a second . . .” as you scroll through the Facebook news feed on your phone, then you have likely experienced this shift in priorities. Of course, I would be lying if I stated that I have never done this, because I have—often. This comes from operating on autopilot and allowing our attention spans to be monopolized by the allure of social media and connecting with others through a screen.
The internal reasons for disengaged parenting are considerably more difficult to identify. To figure out why fathers might subconsciously and unknowingly avoid spending time with their children requires a careful and reflective self-examination. Perhaps that’s the kind of home we grew up in, where being seen but not heard was the norm. Perhaps we are scared or intimidated because we don’t know what the right answers are, or for that matter, what the right questions are for us to be asking. After all, it is a well-known fact that parenting does not come with a simplified and easy-to-understand manual, especially for fathers.
Knowing the reasons for a lack of mindful presence can help us overcome barriers to achieving it, but here are some suggestions for developing and nurturing mindful presence in your relationship with your children:
- Begin keeping a regular journal. It can be loosely organized, such as jotting down your experiences and thoughts on experiences with your children, or it can be more structured, such as keeping a gratitude journal, where you spend time daily, writing down whatever you are grateful for. Either way, releasing your thoughts onto paper or onto a screen gets them outside your brain and allows you to analyze them and learn from them in a way that cannot be achieved by merely thinking your way through it.
- Set a date with your child and stick to it: a movie, lunch, ice cream, playing catch, going on an adventure, etc. Don’t let anything get in the way. On this date, allow your child to make all the decisions. Hand over the reins, let go, and watch their initiative unfold. Giving your child a sense of purpose can do wonders for the depth of your relationship.
- Go for a walk to nowhere. Grab your child and hit the road, without a plan. Walking aimlessly not only encourages conversation, but also physically enlarges your field of peripheral vision and engages your imagination.
- Take the time to tell stories. Tell your children stories of what life was like when you were their age. It helps them to understand that you were once like them. Tell them stories of when they were born, how they learned to walk, or what their first words were.
- Play. Go to the park and swing, cross the monkey bars, slide down the curly slide, and play freeze tag. Let go of all the seriousness that comes with being an adult and refresh your sense of childlike wonder. Go to the grocery store on a super-secret spy mission, all the while humming the theme song from Mission Impossible. Let go and laugh!
- Have your children help with making dinner (safely). Explain to them what each ingredient is, where it comes from, and who is responsible for getting it to your table. The more they know about their food and the more invested they are in creating it, the more mindful they will be while eating it.
Each of the above suggestions is designed to develop a culture of appreciation within the family dynamic. This shift comes with several benefits:
- Children as young as two or three years of age can and will notice your increased mindful presence, and the more of it they see, the more of it they will invite from you.
- Children of parents who invest themselves fully into the moment are more likely to develop strong initiative and a firmly embedded sense of purpose.
- Children who are taught to savor the moment grow up with less anxiety and stress, significantly reducing the chances for anger, depression, and substance abuse later in life.
It’s time for fathers in America to invest more of themselves in their children’s futures, because if we want to be a part of their memories tomorrow, then we absolutely must be willing to play a more active role in their lives today.
—photo by Pink Sherbert Photograph/Flickr
Wonderfully written article. Wonderful.
To add to what you said in the article and to what Tom wrote in the first comment, we’re also becoming a more multi-tasking society, which means our precious memory-creating time with our kids is often spent alongside the entire Internet, because we can’t bring ourselves to take a break.
We need to realize our kids see exactly what we’re doing. When we’re playing with our smartphones while we’re with our kids, they think of themselves more as a nuisance than as the center of attention for that moment.
Wow, it’s kind of sad that we need helpful hints or a handbook on how to be with our kids in a meaningful way. I’m not saying this to slam anyone but it’s scary. I appreciate your writing this in that a lot of lads that grow up without a dad have nothing to tap into to help them with their own kids. Last weekend my daughter and her family were at her in-laws lake house. My daughter texted me and said (reading it off my phone) “sitting here reading The Little Train That Could to Noah (my grandson) I… Read more »
You make some excellent points, Tom. It is scary, but it is also a trend that we have been observing in the U.S. (as well as other parts of the world) for the last four decades. Perhaps the next article I write will look at the history of how we arrived at 24 million fatherless children and counting. There are quite a few factors that went into this trend, and it’s considerably eye-opening to look at the development over time. Fact is, the problem won’t go away without intervention. Reminders such as these are a helpful start, but by no… Read more »