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“Here is a sobering statistic: The average American child spends five to eight hours a day in front of a digital screen, often at the expense of unstructured play in nature. The good news is departing from this trend is easier than you think, and quality outside time can fit into even the busiest of schedules. It is worth the effort; the benefits go beyond a little time spent in the fresh air.” May 29, 2018 article in Washington Post
At age forty, I was so excited to take my then ten-year-old daughter Victoria to see the house in which I grew up in Dallas, Texas from 1953-1967. This was the house where my imagination grew wings outdoors and took flights of fantasy–a time when kids spent countless hours outside in their backyard acting out adventures from comic books and television heroes or playing outdoors with other kids in the neighborhood. A time when a section of a fallen branch transformed into a sword, unicorn, rifle, scepter, magic wand …versus so many of today’s kids spending countless hours indoors texting, Instagram-ing, and online video gaming with kids in the global neighborhood.
As a parent of two children and now a grandparent of seven glorious kids, my wife and I have converted our gift-giving to that of moments–future memory markers that will live on well beyond our time and possibly become a tradition in their own families to come. Our shift of focus was less about trying to live out scenes from simpler Rockwellian times, and more about combing the benefits of nature to the benefits of our technology-enhanced society.
In our current time, we are all victims to what I call the A.D.D. (Always. Doing. Doing.) Society. The related symptoms:
1. Children are busier than ever from all the activities to which parents think children need exposure: reading, sports, ballet, music, arts, Cub Scouts, Brownies, etc.
2. Due to the fact of many families requiring two working parents to make ends meet, many allow their children unlimited access to endless cable channel selections, iPads, smartphones, and video gaming–distractions offering parents brief respites from chronic busyness and sensory overkill.
3. These activities result in damaging outcomes: on-screen addiction, inability to be still and not bored at the same time, minimal face-to-face peer interaction, disconnects with family members, hurtful confrontations when trying to limit screen time, little-to-no desire to spend time outdoors, or reading, or even simply having a casual conversation.
Some proven winning activities fathers can do–I’ve done them all–with their kids to create moments and memory markers:
1. With each of your children age five and older, take a weekly 60-minute My Dad Time. This can be at-home activities such as a craft, card game, storytelling, jigsaw puzzle, walk and talk, sitting on a porch swing and chatting, make-believe adventure, yard game, hide-and-seek, or the like.
2. Take your kids to a movie THEY want to see. Then go to a restaurant and talk about what they liked best, what things made them uneasy, what scenes reminded them of things in their own lives, etc. This builds evaluative and sharing skills about emotions they would otherwise not share.
3. Take an older child on an overnight getaway to a local hotel, B&B or destination not more than two hours from home. I took my 12-year-old grandson to a cabin where we played cards, backgammon and practiced card magic. We grilled steaks and vegetables. Hiked. Rode horses. Told dorky jokes. No electronics. What we learned about each other in two days, added to our building relationship of trust and openness and shared love. Unlike a fancy hi-tech video game controller or Barbie Dream Home, these personal memories will never wear out.
These are just a few examples. Use your imagination. The key to remember: What you actually do with quality time spent with your kids is not as important as the fact that you did take the time. This commitment tells them that they are more important than life’s many distractions. The hours will add up and become lifetime memories. And benefits will be realized on both sides.
Pick up that fallen tree branch, transform it with your shared imaginations, play away the hours…and stick with it.
And just in case you’re wondering, here’s the actual story of what happened on a visit to Dallas many years ago that inspired me to inspire other dads.
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I had been playing alone in our front yard at age five, armed with two holstered silver cap guns and wearing my Lone Ranger mask—it was actually one of Dad’s black dress socks I had stolen from his dresser and cut to make two jagged holes for eyes.
“Five coyote-yelping Apaches closing in atop their painted Appaloosas. The warriors had sun-toughened faces painted with blood-red symbols and raced in a tight formation with bows and drawn arrows. That’s when a vengeful summer thunderstorm struck without warning from the left flank. The gale’s howling and thunderous blasts transformed my electrifying chase scene into a frantic run for cover.
Ten yards ahead, a dense row of tall spired evergreens bent submissively from the tempest’s barrage. The Apaches were replaced by hordes of violet-bruised cloud ogres charging down the mountainous sky. Defeat’s stench hugged everything around me in its vicious arms. I
raced for cover in a cave-like gap created between the trunks of two beefy evergreen sentries. Sweat stinging my eyes, I dove headfirst into the verdant cover and landed hard. Though I was safe at last, my hands throbbed from gnarly root and twig wounds.
As barbaric gusts continued thrashing my shelter, a new threat in the form of a menacing growl rustled through the evergreens’ folds. My panic-riddled wits screamed, “Warning! Warning!” in response to what sounded like the ravenous snarls of a wolf. I’ve struggled all my life with chronic Canis Lupus Stress Syndrome from having seen the horrifying wolf in Disney’s animated Peter and the Wolf. Scared out of my chaps, I jumped up and clawed my way through strangling branchy fingers, finally bursting out in full sprint. Tears streamed. Heart pounded. I could feel the wolf’s foul hot breath on my neck and Prokofiev’s nightmare-inducing tune crescendoing in my head.
Racing from the cover of the evergreens and across the front yard, I screamed out as I neared the front door, “Mommy…Mommy…help!”
It was thirty-five years later when my ten-year-old daughter Victoria and I were in a car together in Dallas and she had finally stopped laughing. I had just finished telling her my spine-tingling tale of storms and hungry wolves. At ten, she was tall with lean features, thick russet hair and piercing hazel eyes. As her laughter subsided, she caught her breath, wiped the tears away
with the sleeve of her pink My Little Pony sweatshirt and said, “Dad, you’re such a dork.” I treasure this photo from that time.
“Well, maybe so,” I replied with a shoulder shrug added for emphasis.
“I know you’re making it up,” she added.
“Oh no, it’s a true story. I’m not making it up, sweetie.”
“Right. Uh-huh,” she said nodding in mock agreement.
Victoria was sitting next to me in the front seat of a red Toyota rental. My wife Valerie and I, son John and Victoria were visiting my mom and dad in the summer of 1991. Just Victoria and I were driving to see the house at 6822 Lakehurst where I grew up. It was the home my father moved us to in Dallas from New York when I was two years old.
“Are we almost there, Dad?” Victoria asked, eager to see the house I had spoken about so many times.
“Almost. When we get there, I’ll show you the row of evergreens where I hid, the backyard where your Uncle Alan shot me in the butt with the BB gun and all the other places I played make-believe by myself.”
“Okay, I’ll believe it when I see it, Dad.”
Dallas was just a big town when I was a kid. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, vast expanses of ranches and farmland bordered ranch-style homes slowly appear- ing as if they were paint drops on bare canvas. Having just finished sharing an episode from The Best of Young Dad’s Adventures, I was itching—figuratively, not a nervous rash—to park in front of the sand-colored brick home where I grew up. I had anticipated painting imaginary murals for Victoria from my palette of childhood memories.
I would recapture the time scary monsters searched everywhere to suck my brains out through my ears while I hid and watched out for them from inside my secret cave—in reality, I was looking out through the small, hinged wooden flap from inside the built-in clothes hamper in the hall bathroom. Victoria would gasp when I retold the Tarzan saga in which I was staked to the savannah floor—the top of the tool shed—with hands and feet bound in wet leather strips, stretched out under the blazing African sun while eager black scorpions clacked their pincers like castanets. We would look up at the mimosa tree in the corner of the front yard where perched for hours in a crease of its smooth arm, I captained a man-o-war in pursuit of treacherous pirates; the tree’s pink-feathered blossoms were feathery cannonballs blasted from the ship’s port side.
To complete my selection of stories, I would milk each word when I told Victoria about one dreadful moonless night when Mom and Dad were out and Alan was babysitting me.
“It was late at night, and Alan was already asleep in his room down the hall. Suddenly, I heard scratchy footfalls coming down the hall toward my room,” I’d say, and watch Victoria’s eyes spring wide open. “I pulled the Roy Rogers blanket over my head, listened, and then squoonched my arms against my sides to keep from shaking when I heard the scraping steps growing louder and closer. I wanted to scream for help, but I was petrified. I kept real quiet. I was certain it was the drooling and slimy Creature from the Black Lagoon, who had come to tear out my guts and eat them while I was still alive.”
I’d pause to build tension, just like the moment before Jason jumps out from the dark, wielding his bloody ax in Friday the 13th. Then I’d continue. “Closer, closer, closer. And then the footfalls stopped. Frozen with fear, I waited . . . and waited . . . and then veeeeery slowly maneuvered my head out from beneath the tangle of covers. Pitch blackness. No sound. No movement. And then the sudden shock of wet and cold touched my left cheek.”
Victoria would gasp, lean closer, and plead, “What was it, Dad?”
“It was the nose of our French poodle, Can-Can.”
What joy and laughter we would share from those brief scenes from my childhood. We would talk about how I spent most of those early years playing alone and feeling lonely, having been teased and rejected by other kids because I was fat. I had hoped sharing these memories would help her understand more of her own childhood times spent alone—she was teased because of a learning disability that contributed to her feeling ostracized by the “popular” and “cool” kids. Then we would laugh when remembering all those years during which I was her preferred playmate for everything make-believe, including acting out scenes from The Little Mermaid and The Smurfs, and pretending we were Barbie and Ken while playing with her dolls. And maybe then we would agree that spending time alone can open doors into a world in which solitude fans the flames of imagination and creativity; just like her daddy had discovered.
We headed south down Hillcrest Road in North Dallas, speed limit a snail-paced thirty-five miles per hour. We were only four blocks away. My pulse quickened. I slowed down. At the intersection of Hillcrest and Lakehurst, we would turn right and arrive at 6822.
Two blocks away.
“Okay, our house will be the second house from the corner on our left,” I said. One block.
“Here it comes, sweetie.”
“Okay, Daddy,” she responded. She sounded excited, too.
I braked and turned the steering wheel sharply to the right and prepared for the reveal. I stopped the car with an abrupt jerk. My eyes widened like those on a vintage Felix the Cat wall clock.
An empty swath of grass. A mound of dirt. Rubble. Gone. The redbrick ranch house, to the right of where 6822 once stood, aligned with the corner house to form what resembled an openmouthed smirk with a missing tooth. All that remained of my childhood sketches were eraser dust and pencil ghosts scattered across a sheet of withered drawing paper.
“Where is it, Daddy? Where’s your house?”
“It’s gone,” I answered.
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t believe it. It’s really gone.”
We sat together quietly in the car for a few minutes. Victoria’s head rested tenderly on my shoulder, her hand cradling mine. I continued staring at the vacant lot where fragments of my past hung frozen as if suspended in time.
“But I wanted to show you the place in the back- yard where I burned down my dad’s shed, where all my cowboy hideouts were, and where I . . .”
“It’s okay, Dad. I believe you.”
I felt erased. So much of my story was lost forever. I took one final, lingering look and turned the key in the ignition. As we pulled away from the curb, I felt a soft tug on the sleeve of my OU tee shirt.
“So, you really burned down a shed? Tell me that story, Dad.”
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Have you read the original anthology that was the catalyst for The Good Men Project? Buy here: The Good Men Project: Real Stories from the Front Lines of Modern Manhood
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Photo courtesy iStock.