HOW SWEET IT IS!

Serving a “birthday cake,” complete with candles and the singing of “Happy Birthday To You,” is a powerful tradition and something that is expected at literally every birthday party. With so much attention focused on this culinary crescendo why settle for a simple 7 Layer Cake, when you can have a baked birthday bonanza worthy of an art gallery? It is amazing what a creative baker can do with some sharp knives and a palate of colorful frosting. You can easily brighten your birthday celebration with a scrumptious sculpture of edible art! What cake creation would make your kid’s party extra special? You can see some neat ideas here, and clearly, almost anything is possible. Creative cake baking doesn’t have to cost a fortune either – I bought the “Hamburger Heaven” cake pictured above for my son’s recent birthday at a local Publix Supermarket, for less than $20. Zach is a chef and I wanted to get a cake that had something to do with cooking or food. The hamburger cake (with ladyfinger fries) was a big hit, and hit the spot after a great birthday dinner.

How about you? Have you ever tried celebrating with unusual birthday cakes? Share your ideas and experiences (and links to pictures) in the comments!

Jeff Sass is the proud dad of ZEO (Zach, 21, Ethan, 19 and Olivia, 17).  He is also a seasoned entertainment and technology exec and active social media enthusiast.  You can see more of Jeff’s writing at Sassholes! and Social Networking Rehab.

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Lots of parents worry about their legacy. The legacy they leave through their children is often the way we worry about it most. Gone are the days many adults worry if they’ll be remembered as famous for something, but all but a few parents don’t want to be known as a good father or mother.

The legacy we pass down through our wee ones is often still haughty. We want for them to be doctors, lawyers, or millionaire moguls. Some of us want them to be actors or writers, and a handful, well, we’d settle for street musician. Oddly enough, none of those is about character or what kind of person that child grows up to be.

It’d be nice if we could do something to guarantee our sons and daughters would go up and be on the straight and narrow. Even better if they’d lead the world to peace. Most of our children though will end up contributing on a much more intimate level with friends and family. So let’s give them an appreciation and interest that’s immediately sharable and doesn’t require a fortune to nurture.

Let’s teach our kids to be foodies. Yes, foodies. It’s a term some of you haven’t heard. It’s someone that actually enjoys food. All of us eat to live, but a select few of us learn to appreciate food beyond sustenance. It gives us a chance to take real joy at even the most odd dish served.

Being a foodie isn’t about being the biggest eater, the one that finds the most exotic thing to eat, or spending the most. A good foodie is one that enjoys the variety of things they eat, from the textures, to the seasonings and the scents. It’s about finding something special in every dish. Sometimes that bit of special might be the history of the dish, the chef that created it, or yes, the rare ingredient.

Foodies don’t just fall from the tree, they have to be nurtured. The best way to grow your own foodie children is turning food from drudgery into fun. Kids in the kitchen is a big plus, but there’s more. It can be indulged at every meal.

Here’s some suggestions:

• Let kids explore how to eat each food. Let them eat broccoli spears with their fingers, pizza with chopsticks, and more.
• Get them to explore tastes. Throw some unusual things on their plates at an early age. Tomatoes, asparagus, and oatmeal to start with. These are staples here in the states. Beyond that, introduce plantains, avocado, and hominy.
• Eat on the floor. Not off the floor, but try sitting on pillows on the floor, and spread out small tables to eat off, or the coffee table. Make it an adventure
• Picnics. Yep, blanket, basket, easy foods. Put those together with a little patch of grass and some sun and you’ve got a great experience.
• Eat with friends. Take every opportunity to have your children eat with other children and with adults as well. Don’t limit these interactions to just formal events or informal ones. Variety and exposure are key.
• Eat with strangers. Take the family out to eat. It doesn’t have to be exotic, fancy, or expensive, but getting them used to eating in groups of unfamiliar folks helps break down barriers. For best experiences, go to a restaurant where they don’t speak your native tongue and the menu isn’t in your tongue either. Help the children explore ordering.

It’s not about what foods you get them to eat each time, but expanding their ability to enjoy food in all circumstances. This may seem like a trivial and unimportant skill, but across the world, few things work to break down barriers as well as breaking bread together. True peace is rarely brokered in brightly lit staterooms in crowds but often over a drink and a bite to eat.

Understanding the food of a culture or area helps us to understand the people. It aids us in finding something interesting and even fun about those strangers, bridging the gap.

As they say at Joe’s Crab Shack, peace, love and crabs.

Todd R Jordan is a father of two boys and grandfather of three girls. His personal blogs are The Broad Brush and Folding Paper, as well as a contributor here and at Remarkable Parents. Find him on Twitter.

Both my daughters and I stay in touch a lot through email and sites like Facebook, they have friended me and I feel privileged to be given access to their “private” lives through the images and posts that they share. Seeing the pictures made me realize how grown my youngest daughter is now. Of course like many parents I have both of my daughters fixed at around 8 years old, the time they stopped seeing me as the greatest guy in the world.

Going through the 117 pictures that she posted, from the limo ride to the venue, to the meal, to the dancing afterward was like experiencing the event as though I were an invited guest. For American parents I am sure the sight of all the alcohol would be a shocking and troubling vision, but the attitude toward drinking and the legal age is different in the UK. The amount of out of focus pictures as the evening wore on perhaps said more about it than the actual content.

The real lesson for me in looking through these pictures was just how responsible they all were. Yes of course there was celebration, yes there was drinking but, as evidenced by the great email I got from her this morning, there was no harm done. The values that I had hoped to instill in my daughters are displayed on a regular basis.

I was once asked about being the Father of two teenage daughters, who were 17 & 15 at the time, the young man asked me wasn’t I worried that because I wasn’t there to check on them daily that they could be doing all kinds of things. I replied that if they hadn’t learned the lessons that I was trying to teach them by that age it was unlikely they were going to suddenly learn them.

What Facebook pictures and the emails, along with the summer visits show me is that, while worrying is a natural activity for all Fathers about their daughters, trusting that they were actually listening to you at times is a better activity.

The other day I heard my middle son say to my wife, “Mommy, I love you as fast as an airplane and as high as the moon.”

We should all love that hard.

Photo credit: Originally uploaded to Flickr by Wilson17(newly remarried!)

Benjamin Strong is the Director of Marketing for the United States Coast Guard Amver search and rescue program.  He is the father of three boys, the oldest with Down syndrome.  You can follow his professional exploits on the Amver blog or on Twitter.

We are proud to announce a new member of the Dad-O-matic team, none other than Good Morning, America’s anchorman, Chris Cuomo! I first ran across Chris on twitter after some very strong recommendations to do so from my wife who said he was a very devoted dad like our guys on here. So I checked out his tweets and sure enough the very first thing I see him sharing is how he and his daughter Bella know all the words to the movie “Finding Nemo”. I then shared a post I had written for Dad-O-matic, ironically enough, about “Finding Nemo” called “Lessons Learned from Finding Nemo”.

Much to my surprise, Chris replied and we began to communicate on Twitter as proud dads and loving husbands. I also learned that there was much more to the reserved anchorman we all see on television. He’s actually a regular guy who enjoys the same things we all do such as fishing, sports (He’s a big Cavs fan) and doing handyman work around the house.

I was thrilled when he told me that he had checked out Dad-O-matic and said he liked what we were doing. Ultimately, I got the crazy idea (and a lot of nerve) to ask Chris if he would ever consider contributing some of his experiences as a dad in a high-profile position with our readers. Once again, he shocked me by agreeing to join our daddy club! We look forward to sharing Chris Cuomo’s sweet and funny stories about his beloved Bella and little Mario.

Here’s a taste of what’s to come. This is the wonderful Father’s Day tribute to Chris on GMA in front of a national audience from his children thanks to his wife Cristina who coached them well. Bella and little Mario sure know how to tug at the heart strings! My favorite parts are when Bella says she enjoys her daddy’s company very much and when Mario says his dad is his best friend. I don’t know how Chris managed to maintain such composure. I know I would’ve melted into a great big ball of mush but then again I’m not a big time anchorman.

If that didn’t get to you, then you must check this out. Here’s Chris on “GMA’s The Hot Seat” where he shares some very open and honest feelings about his children. I have to be honest and admit that it’s a truly touching piece.

Before parents were able to easily acquire disposable diapers in any warehouse store across the country, the vast majority of children in the United States were potty trained prior to blowing to their first birthday.

But that all started to shift in the late 1950s and 1960s when American parents first started to dance with the idea of putting off potty training until after their child’s first year, the idea being that they would take care of potty training their child prior to age two.

At the time, this was a radical philosophy. The new notion was first introduced by a Dr. Brazelton, the good Dr. arguing that children aren’t really ready to be trained until after they are able to walk by themselves. Since children generally don’t start walking until around one to one and a half years old, the entire American potty training paradigm experienced more than a subtle shift.

Though Dr. Brazelton’s philosophy was considered a substantial delay at that time, jumping through five decades now finds the majority of American parents being advised to postpone the potty training of their child until they have the verbal and motor skills more often associated with a 3 year old toddler.

Is this postponement considered progress?

In the meantime, the rest of the world continues to happily potty train their children without the use of readily available disposables – or pressure, undue punishing, or any other form of psychological damage. When you consider that throughout the history of the world children have been trained far earlier than what is now commonplace in the United States, you have to ask yourself, “Are we doing the right thing in this country?”

Here are a few potty training facts to consider:

• The average age for potty training in this country is steadily rising. In the 1940s, the average was 18 months. Today, it has jumped to 35 months for girls and a staggering 39 months for boys.
• Potty training a child early has no effect on the development of their personality, as clearly demonstrated by countless studies.
• Parents can start the process of potty training at any age.
• Teaching a child to use the potty can be as easy as teaching them to manipulate a stack of blocks.

If you would like more information on the potty training in the US vs. the rest of the world, you can download this free report, “The Truth About Potty Training in America.“

Sean Platt is a ghostwriter and dad. Subscribe (for free) to his feed here.

I use Twitter for that. Here’re some Tweet-worthy comments from my boys.

Seven-year-old Zachary

Zachary the Clown

Zachary to Lucas: “We’ve got to be in bed by 7:30 or else Daddy’s going to get punished!”

Showing Zachary: M. Jackson’s Thriller for 1st time. Zach: “Why are all the monsters dancing?” Momma: “Because they all like the same music”

Mom: “Zachary, wear your windbreaker.” Zach: “How can a jacket break wind?”

“I know why they call it a pen pal. He’s your pal and when you write to him you usually use a pen.”

Easter at the Hages. Zach: “Wow. I can’t believe how good we’ve been!”

Reading “Curious George.” 7yo Zach: “Why do they call him ‘The man with the yellow hat? Why don’t they give him a name like Ralph?’”

Daddy: “Zachary, make a card for Momma.” Zach: “I already made a card and a Shrinky Dink!”

Wrote his name + a message in a new book: “Zachary Hage. No reward if returned.”

RT @CardiacScience The SCAA clock http://budurl.com/DeathSCA just turned 128,000 cardiac deaths YTD. Zach asked me, “Why does God do that?”

Zachary now old enuf to shower. Dad: “Put shampoo in your hair.” Zach: “What?! Put some poop in my hair?!”

“Why are all the signs in Spanish?” during a daytrip in Mexico.

Zachary thought it was “Our Father who Wharton heaven.”

Five-year-old Lucas

"The Dude," Lucas

“Did you know? When girls have on lipstick, the lipstick gets on boys.”

At Father’s Day church: “How come I didn’t get one of those cookie things?”

“Momma, underpants and punderpants rhyme!”

Lukey’s afrd of ghosts 2nite. “Lukey, even if there are ghosts, they can’t touch you.” “Yes they can. There are people inside of them.”

Having trouble with a yo-yo: “Momma, this thing is being uncooperative on me!”

Lucas runs into the bathroom, “Mommy, make sure Daddy doesn’t eat my dinner.”

“The computer’s being really, really rude. It’s not letting me play my video game.”

How to teach a 5yo to blow up a balloon? 5yo Lukey: “I don’t have enough air in me.”

Lukey’s prayers tonight: “Thank you, God, for my most important brother. Thank you, God, for sunshine.”

Lukey to Mom: “I’m drawing a picture of Daddy with his penis on.” To me: “Look, Daddy, there’s your penis.”

Lukey slept without his “monkey light” last night. Dad: “Were you scared?” Lukey: “No. Just a little.”

…

I get a lot of comments from engaged followers. Give it a try.

P.S. You’ve heard a lot about cardiac arrest in light of Michael Jackson’s sudden death. You might not know 7,000 kids in America die from sudden cardiac arrest each year. I donated an AED defibrillator to protect my kids at school. Consider doing the same for yours. Email me for details at joe@joehageonline.com. Thanks.

:: Joe Hage ::

Other posts from Joe Hage:

Dad’s Life Lessons: Rule #1

Dad’s Life Lessons: Rule #2

Tweet Your Kids + Tweet Your Kids #2

Emploment Opprotunities

The waiter poured the glass of wine for my son and we raised our glasses to toast…   Despite my instinctive fatherly discomfort and concerns, it was a ritual we could not avoid. After all, we were celebrating his 21st birthday…

IT’S MORE THAN I CAN BEER…

Yesterday, my son Zach turned 21. It is nerve wracking enough to have three kids of driving age. Now I also have one kid of drinking and driving age. CORRECTION: There is NO appropriate “drinking and driving age…” I should have said “now I also have one kid of both drinking age and driving age.” Ahh, the antics of semantics… It should be more easy to speak easy about such things…

Speaking of Speakeasy’s, it seems that here in the United States of Puritanical Past and Politically Correct Present, we have had an awkward love/hate relationship with alcohol since the days of Prohibition. Were I raising my kids in Europe, I would likely have been serving a dinner glass of wine to my children when they were far younger than 21, and nobody would bat an eye, including them. Even I, growing up in New York State, was able to legally booze it up at age 18. Now our kids must wait until they are 21, and though I’d be a fool to think they didn’t, especially at college, indulge a bit before becoming of legal age, the official “wait” perhaps creates an artificial desire to binge on their birthday. With that in mind, in the months approaching Zach’s coming of (legal) age, I have repeatedly reminded him (ask him and he will say I perpetually pestered him) of the dangers of binge drinking, and of the many kids who have literally died of alcohol poisoning on their 21st birthdays by partaking in an ill conceived “21 at 21” drinking ritual. I hammered this message home to Zach well beyond the point of being the annoying dad (yeah, I was “that” guy) but I felt it was more important than maintaining my “cool dad” persona. Knowing that Zach would be celebrating with friends after our wine wielding family dinner, I was assured and given complete confidence that Zach’s girlfriend Amanda was responsibly anointed the dry and designated driver for the evening.

THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR IS BEER ITSELF…

Sometimes it seems that parenthood is an endless journey of letting go. As much as we want to, we cannot control our children’s lives. From the moment we let them out the door to go to school, or ride their bikes, or play in the backyard or neighborhood park we have to accept that ultimately, they have to be responsible for their actions, big and small. We have to let go a little bit more every step along the way and (sometimes painfully) come to grips with the fact that things can and will happen to them when we are not by their side, holding their hands, and ready to protect them from the big bad world around us. They will skin their knees, and break their arms and have their hearts broken and bust up their cars. They will have successes and failures, they will do wonderful things and make blaring mistakes. They are, like us, human, and must thus face all that is fabulous and all our collective foibles. We can guide and teach and set examples, but in the end, they have to pick up the reigns and steer their own lives in the right direction. It would be easy to spend all my waking hours worrying about my kids driving, worrying about my kids drinking, worrying about my kids drinking and driving, or their friends doing the same. However that wouldn’t be healthy for me or them. Rather, I have to let go once again, and trust as we pass another parenting benchmark, that we have done our best to give our kids the knowledge, tools and wherewithal to make smart and safe decisions.

Turning 21 is an incredible milestone, for Zach, and for his parents. We couldn’t be more proud of him and the wonderful young man (a legal adult!) he has become. I look forward to responsibly (and legally) enjoying more cheers and beers with him!

How about you? Do you have kids of drinking age? If so, how do you feel about raising a glass with them? It is a new phase for me, so I would welcome your thoughts in the comments. Cheers!

Jeff Sass is the proud dad of ZEO (Zach, 21, Ethan, 19 and Olivia, 17).  He is also a seasoned entertainment and technology exec and active social media enthusiast.  You can see more of Jeff’s writing at Sassholes! and Social Networking Rehab.

Photo Credit: © Mikko Pitkänen – Fotolia.com

My wife and I work somewhat separate schedules.  I work a typical 9-5 schedule while she works part time at a hospital.  That means I spend some time watching our three boys by myself.  When the kids get all spun up and I start to get frustrated we need to find something to calm us all down.  How do I manage to keep three restless children (all under six) from driving me nuts?  I play the guitar.

I am horrible at playing the guitar.  I only know three or four chords.  I have an eclectic repertoire that doesn’t suite itself for children.  But when the going gets tough out comes my axe and we all sing The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald, I’ve Got Friends In Low Places, or Crying.  The boys absolutely love it!

Research has shown music has a positive effect on children.  Why deny them something so much fun and entertaining?

Even better than calming my herd is the look on their faces as I strum and sing and they dance and smile. Am I ready for American Idol? Hardly. Do I deserve Daddy of the Year? Unlikely.  Am I happy I can calm the savage beasts and give them an appreciation of music? You bet!

What tactics do you use to help quiet or calm your children?

Photo credit: Originally uploaded to Flickr by _RobertC_

Benjamin Strong is the Director of Marketing for the United States Coast Guard Amver search and rescue program.  He is the father of three boys, the oldest with Down syndrome.  You can follow his professional exploits on the Amver blog or on Twitter.

I’m also going to attach a photo taken from my iPhone.

You haven’t? You must not want your kids to succeed. In it Gladwell provides evidence that the only difference between so-so violin players and master violin players is the amount of hours they practiced. The masters put in about 10,000 hours of practice before hitting twenty years old. The so-so players? Only 8000. That’s only 1.466 hours of practice a day, seven days a week for fifteen years. What slackers! If only their parents had driven them from age five on to practice a measly .366 hours a day more — a mere sixteen or so minutes.

Learning that I wondered if I had failed as a parent and doomed my children to mediocrity for the rest of their lives.

“I’m so sorry, girls! You’ll never amount to anything!”

They stared at me slack jawed and wide eyed and I knew that it was true. Clearly they were all brain damaged.

“But it’s not too late!” said I. Quickly calculating, I realized that if I put my seven year old with Cerebral Palsy into ice skating today, she could be a master by twenty with only two hours of daily practice. My ten year old, who wanted to play the harp, would only need to practice 2.75 hours a day for the next ten years if she wanted to amount to anything in the harp world. She could fit all that practice in while we were at the skating rink and during the ride home. Most kids spend more time watching TV than that, so it was completely doable.

My fourteen year old was a dancer who wanted to compete in the Irish stepdancing on the world level. She’s already put in about 2000 hours since she was eleven, so she’d need 3.66 hours of rigorous dancing a day to hit 10,000. Easy. We could just leave her at home with some plywood planks, a mirror, and some food. She doesn’t like doing homework anyway…

My seventeen year old posed a problem, though. She’d been singing since she was two, but not with a dedicated daily regimen. She’d only amassed 6000 hours of practice — such an abject failure. I was deeply ashamed for her. She, too, would need to squeeze in 3.66 hours of daily practice if she wanted to be a master vocalist in three short years.

But she could do it. I mean, she’ll have to if she doesn’t want to grow up to be a complete loser.

In fact, they could all do it if they did nothing but practice non-stop. Who needs playtime?

Fortunately, it’s not too late to shape and mold my seven year old. I can just imagine the conversations we’ll have when I prepare her for Charter High School next year…

“But Dad, I don’t want to major in system administration, pharmacology, and neuroscience!”

“You’ll do as you’re told. Now hush, we have to get you to the skating rink for your Olympics training.”

Douglas Cootey is a married, full time dad raising four girls in the Salt Lake Valley of Utah who has long ago overcome his aversion to the color Pink. Douglas blogs about overcoming AD/HD & Depression with humor & pluck over at the award winning A Splintered Mind. He also co-produces a podcast with his 17 year old daughter. The random thoughts of his addled mind can be found at DouglasCootey and SplinteredMind over on Twitter.

Earlier in the week I wrote a poem for my grandfather, but I would like to honor him by repeating it here.

A Poem for my Papí

Jose Ramos, Daddy, Papí. A man impossible to copy.
He had a one and only inclination to live his life with such elation,
joy and mischief, mirth, and cheer; too much for one century, minus a year.

Papí was gentle, and impossibly funny. He valued his friendships far above money.
He always looked forward and without regret. He never walked away from a window to bet.
He meant so much to me in his immovable place. I can look in the mirror and stare at his face.

Ever since that time when I was small – a sassy little know it all -
he and my Honey guided me, to the best that I could be.
Every weekend of my youth, with conduct ungrateful and a little uncouth,
they took me in and taught me well. But more than simply to speak and to spell.
They taught me other messages, a lot more essential, like meeting and making my moral potential.

They trained me not to cheat or lie, to never quit and always try,
to speak my mind and wait my turn, to show compassion and concern,
to all my neighbors, lend out a hand or maybe an ear to understand.

The best from all these lessons learned, a powerful example burned
(in my mind like it was branded), they both taught me single handed
how to treat my only other – as though the world could hold no other
soul who could ever compare, no matter who and no matter where.

They loved each other without doubt, without dearth, and without drought.
Even though I was only a kid, I know exactly the good that it did.
It showed me what to want from life, then led me toward my perfect wife.

If I could ever travel back, take the years and flip the stack,
I’d look them in their younger eyes and thank them true for being wise
and providing me a perfect picture to follow like a written scripture.

I grew up, and added years, a bigger nose and longer ears.
By the time I was mature, walking tall and talking sure.
I saw Papí from a different position, with what I’d already seen plus another addition.

It’s not the years in our life but the life in our years, the gray in our hair and the salt in our tears.
The smiles we carry and people we meet, the flavors of life from sour to sweet.
Papi’s a man who met wisdom with age, by living his life like he lived it on stage.
I’ll never forget him if I’m a hundred and five. In my heart I will always keep Papi alive.

Sean Platt is a ghostwriter and full time father. Subscribe to his (free) Writer Dad feed for awesome thoughts twice a week.

We added this widget to my website so we could get there any time we want.  I am considering creating a webpage for my daughter that is nothing but links to the few things she loves.  Webkinz, baby animals, and games.

This day always makes me think of my dad who passed away rather young while I was in my 20s. We weren’t on great speaking terms because he abandoned my mom and four sons when I was a toddler and I’d never made peace with that fact. I never got to speak to him as I planned man to man to find closure because he passed away very quickly. Years later I visited his resting place and finally found closure in a profound way but still, it would have been so much better if I could’ve done so in his living years.

The song “The Living Years” by Mike + the Mechanics is one of my favorites. It still stirs up so many emotions and reminds me of a valuable lesson I learned the hard way as a young man. Life is so precious and so brief, we need to tell those we love how we feel and show them with actions while we still can. We truly never know how long any of us has in this beautiful life. I highly suggest you to find forgiveness in your heart while you can and conversely apologize for anything you’ve done or else live with regret.

I remember this not just on Father’s Day but do my best to do so each and every day. I’ve been blessed with three beautiful children (Nicholas 10, Matthew 6 and Rachel 3).
I continue to be the dad I never had.

Mike & The Mechanics – The Living Years

Every generation
Blames the one before
And all of their frustrations
Come beating on your door
I know that I’m a prisoner
To all my father held so dear
I know that I’m a hostage
To all his hopes and fears
I just wish I could have told him in the living years
Crumpled bits of paper
Filled with imperfect thought
Stilted conversations
Im afraid that’s all we’ve got
You say you just don’t see it
He says its perfect sense
You just cant get agreement
In this present tense
We all talk a different language
Talking in defense
Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
Its too late when we die
To admit we don’t see eye to eye
So we open up a quarrel
Between the present and the past
We only sacrifice the future
Its the bitterness that lasts
So don’t yield to the fortunes
You sometimes see as fate
It may have a new perspective
On a different day
And if you don’t give up, and don’t give in
You may just be o.k.
Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
Its too late when we die
To admit we don’t see eye to eye
I wasn’t there that morning
When my father passed away
I did’nt get to tell him
All the things I had to say
I think I caught his spirit
Later that same year
Im sure I heard his echo
In my baby’s new born tears
I just wish I could have told him in the living years
Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
Its too late when we die
To admit we dont see eye to eye

ANYTHING FURTHER FATHER?

There are countless things I cherish about my own childhood and the role my dad has played in my life, and countless more things I cherish about my children and my role as their father.  I am so proud of my three children, who are now wonderful young adults and good citizens.  Their accomplishments roll up to their parents, and in turn, that sense of pride and accomplishment rolls up to my parents, and their pride in me and my children rolls up to all they learned from their parents, etc., etc…  It is a wonderful cycle that is often too easy to take for granted and lose sight of.  We are both the influenced and the influencers.  We are the sons and the fathers.

THE SON ALSO RISES

To every dad out there, today is a special day for us to look forward and look backwards, to give and to receive, to acknowledge and be acknowledged.  Accept the special love and praise of your children with pride as you most certainly deserve it.  And give your dad the love and praise he deserves for helping to shape the wonderful dad in you.  Happy Father’s Day!

Jeff Sass is the proud dad of ZEO (Zach, 20, Ethan, 19 and Olivia, 17).  He is also a seasoned entertainment and technology exec and active social media enthusiast.  You can see more of Jeff’s writing at Sassholes! and Social Networking Rehab.

Photo Credit: © Warren Millar – Fotolia.com

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

The gift of a book is unlike other gifts. Like Dickenson’s poem, it has the power of words to lift the imagination and embolden action. But where does one begin?

If Dad has a penchant for poetry, Favorite Poems Old and New is a rich anthology which includes poems of Wordsworth, Yeats, Blake, Stevenson, and Dickenson’s A Book. However the book that I recommend most frequently, and give most often is Gladys Hunt’s Honey for a Child’s Heart: The Imaginative Use of Literature in Family Life. It is a breathtaking view of the beauty of literature that the role that it can play in the family – replete with an anotated bibliography of great books for children at each age. I have yet to find a more inspiring book that makes reading with my kids a true joy.

Books, great books, have the ability to inspire awe and wonder in a Dad and his children. There are few gifts that should be higher on a gift list.

Graham Scharf is a father of two, and co-founder of Tumblon.com. He blogs at Essential Questions and produces a podcast series for parents of young children. You can follow him on Twitter @tumblondad.

Earlier tonight, I set out to write a blog here for Dad-O-Matic with a suggestion for how to handle a crying child and found myself writing about distractions in the context of life. Ironic how that happened, being distracted by my own inspiration to write! Anyway, upon finishing that up and posting on my own blog, I promptly came back to write about my original topic: using distractions with our children to help them to stop crying.

The Situation

Being a parent we are often confronted with a situation where our child is crying and there just seems no way to get them to stop. This can happen at bedtime, lunchtime, when you are out running errands, or anytime that is just inconvenient for us parents. It’s a true test of parental patience. Some parents are very patient with their children, while others don’t even have a fuse to burn for 2 seconds!

The way it usually starts is the child wants something they can’t have, like candy or toys. Or they want to do something they can’t do, like stay up at bedtime or run up and down the store isle shrieking at the top of their lungs. Sometimes the crying is due to sheer exhaustion, depending on the child’s age. These are familiar situations for most parents. And it’s not that anyone’s child is truly unruly or badly behaved. There are various reasons for defiant or rebellious types of behavior that causes children to cry uncontrollably. The most common I have found with my own children are that they are just testing me to see what they can get away with or they simply want more attention.  

Our Reactions

I’m not a psychology expert, nor did I study child behavior. But as a parent, I can guarantee you I have become an expert at raising my children. My children are a blessing for having taught me so much about human conditioning. As men it can be easy to gravitate to aggressive means for control, especially those with higher levels of testosterone. Some men have been raised to believe, through their own childhood experience, that force is the way to gain control. And the images we see in movies and on TV certainly glamorize that type of behavior, even though we know it is wrong. When things don’t go the way we want, we can get upset. This may be more true for men than women, as women tend to be nurturers. However, when your nerves are shot because your child won’t stop crying, emotions can take over that are not constructive for either gender. You want it to end, but you have no solution. And all the books and articles you’ve read on child rearing somehow don’t answer your specific situation. When you step outside of your own conditioning you can learn a lot about what you are experiencing.  

Finding Solutions

Fortunately I was also blessed with ample patience. My dad was extremely patient. He was careful and enjoyed paying attention to small details. I learned a great deal about patience through watching him. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my own moments of frustration. But when I stop thinking about me and what I want, to turn my focus on what my child wants I have found myself to be even more patient than I am under normal circumstances. This can be a difficult thing for anyone to do, especially when there is such urgency felt to solve the child’s problem immediately so they will stop screaming and crying. It’s easy to lose control of your own thoughts and switch to some sort of survival mode. But if you have reached that place in life where you place others ahead of you, because it pleases you to do so, then it is easy to learn to focus on your child.

We are a society of “instant gratification needs“. When our children scream and cry, we want it to stop immediatley, especially when the cause is not related to being hurt in some fashion. It’s hard to find anything more aggrevating than a child screaming because of something as simple as not getting a piece of candy. And it’s easy to reprimand and lay down the law with our brow wrinkled and force in our voice saying “because I said so, that’s why“. But it really can be the least effective method, only creating more disharmony with your child. So how can you get your child to stop screaming and crying quickly? Distract them.

Distraction Works

With our third child Sam, we had a hard time with him at bedtime. There were many nights where he would just cry and cry and cry before finally falling asleep. When he was a baby I would hold him until he fell alseep. But as he got to be a toddler, this became more difficult. So, I would lay down next to him to appease him, but sometimes even that didn’t help.

One night when he was about two years old, while laying with him as he was crying, I just started talking to him and asked him some questiions about how his day went. I asked him to remember a couple specific events. I was pleasantly surprized when he choked back the crying and answered me! I had managed to distract him from why he was crying. I continued with other questions and dialogue. And not too long after he dozed off to sleep in the middle of his sentence. I had used this technique before with my two older ones, but had never really realized what I was doing until with Sam.

This technique of distracting also works with my youngest who is now two. One night recently while we were having supper she had no interest in eating. After three or four stern warnings to eat, she began fussing because she just didn’t want to. I pulled out my distraction technique and began asking her questions unrelated to our discussion of eating supper, like what color her shirt was. She loves purple, and usually is wearing purple so it was an easy question for her to answer. After a few other questions, I then pulled some reverse psycology and told her she shouldn’t eat because it would make her strong and she didn’t want to be strong. She promply started eating, and smiling while doing it.

All Things In Moderation

Distraction is one of those things where after a while, children will pick up on your antics. So you should use it in moderation. Don’t try to employ distraction as soon as the child starts crying. This may aggrevate them more because they haven’t been able to vent their frustration yet. It will be more confusing as they are trying to process their frustration at the same time as answer your question. It usually worked best for me several minutes (3-5) into the episode because my children had forgotten why they were crying to begin with. I have found it to work well with my children 2 to 5. Sam is now 5, and I am still able to distract him when necessary. If you have a baby (under 2), since they likely can’t answer you back yet and have some kind of conversation with you, you should practice talking to them with a soothing voice, rather than expect them to understand that dad’s big booming voice is the authority!

Ultimately all children respond differently to various rearing methods. I have learned that with my children, distracting them helps me to calm them, and generally we are also able to solve their discontentment in the process. I’d love to hear how this works for you, or if you have your own methods for calming an upset child. Feel free to contact me here http://contact.charlieprofit.com.

About Charlie

Charlie Profit has been happily married since 1997 and is father to four wonderful children. He has Faith in Christ, is a Conservative Libertarian, and believes in limited government with free markets. He is a Talk Host, Podcaster and Blogger at www.charlieprofit.com. Charlie is a veteran broadcaster and owns his own broadcast and new media services company CAB Radio, coaching Internet Talk Hosts and helping companies with their Social Media presence.

In celebration of Father’s Day tomorrow, I thought it would be nice to list a small handful of my favorite fatherhood quotes.

Enjoy!

“It is a wise father that knows his own child.”
~ William Shakespeare

“Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance.”
~ Ruth E Renkel

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
~ Mark Twain

“I’ve had a hard life, but my hardships are nothing against the hardships that my father went through in order to get me to where I started.”
~ Bartrand Hubbard

“By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.”
~ Charles Wadsworth

“A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again.”
~ Enid Bagnold

“It is much easier to become a father than to be one.

”
~ Kent Nerburn

“One night a father overheard his son pray: Dear God, Make me the kind of man my Daddy is. Later that night, the Father prayed, Dear God, Make me the kind of man my son wants me to be.”
~ Anonymous

“Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is “soap-on-a-rope.”
~ Bill Cosby

“My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard.  Mother would come out and say, ‘You’re tearing up the grass.’ ‘We’re not raising grass,’ Dad would reply.  ‘We’re raising boys’.”
~ Harmon Killebrew

“He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.”
~ Clarence Budington Kelland

“A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty.”
~Author Unknown

“There are three stages of a man’s life:  He believes in Santa Claus, he doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, he is Santa Claus.”
~Author Unknown

Writer Dad is also a Ghostwriter for hire and occasional potty training expert. Subscribe to his feed here.

We all worry about our kids and how they use the Internet. Thanks to a safety filter application called littleye, however, a lot of our worries and fears are now taken care of.

Put together by a community of parents and teachers, littleye takes the concept of existing online safety filters on step further.

The very fact that it’s parents and teachers who have put the service together is a great starting place – after all, it’s who our kids will spend most of their childhood learning from.

What is littleye?

The best way to describe littleye is in the company’s own words:

“littleye is a virtual fence around safe websites that have been reviewed and approved by our community of parents and teachers. Kids can surf the Internet, but only within that virtual fence of a trusted safe list of websites.”

So it’s like letting your kids play in your virtual backyard – they have the freedom of playing but still within eyesight of us. If we think their playtime is getting out of hand, we can call them back indoors.

While you can do this with other safety filters, littleye separates itself by having some cool extra features for parents to use.

More Ways to Keep Our Kids Safe Online

Because littleye is a collaboration between parents and teachers, much of the legwork that other filters require has already been taken care of for you. You can pretty much open your account and you’re good to go from the start. So what are some of the key features?

• Online monitoring from any location means as long as you have an Internet connection, you can see what your kids are viewing. This lets you either approve or filter that site.

• Time limits for both sites and daily use make sure your kids aren’t wasting all their time online and leave room for other activities.

• Customized and pre-set website filters let you approve your own sites or choose from tens of thousands of littleye-approved sites.

• Keyword filters that make sure your kids can’t search for any questionable keywords, or find adult sites that use keyword masking to hide their real content (think searching for Snow White leading to a porn site because it uses this term to trick web browsers).

The filter itself is an application that you can download for either Windows or Mac systems. There’s even an iPhone application for monitoring regardless if your location isn’t anywhere near a computer.

As the web becomes more useful for kids for personal and school use, so the risk of viewing unwanted websites goes up too. With littleye activated, the chances of this happening are greatly reduced.

INCREDIBLE SPECIAL OFFER

Until the end of August 2009, you can grab a free lifetime subscription! After that it’s either $4.95 per month or $49 for an annual subscription. You can find out more (including a nifty set of videos) on the littleye website, or follow them on Twitter if you’re on there.

Danny Brown is a business branding and social media consultant, and the father to a beautiful little girl. He is also the founder of the 12for12k Challenge, a social media-led charity initiative. Say hello to him on Twitter.

Don’t worry, the self-reflection homework doesn’t come until the end.  Painless, I promise! 

First I have to admit I don’t know much about dads. In fact, they’ve always been a bit of a mystery to me.

My parents divorced when I was 9, but my dad was out of the house before that.  Even when my parents were married, my dad worked at night so I saw him rarely. In fact, after the separation and divorce, I saw my father more often than when he was living with us.  That only lasted for a short time though.  My father came from a different generation, one that was taught that child-rearing was “women’s work.”  He didn’t have much patience for small children.

When I would meet friends’ dads, I’d be fascinated.  I would instinctually recognize the same “type” of dad, the distant, strict, no-excuses father like mine (which, honestly, were the norm in the small community I grew up in).  But sometimes I’d meet a dad who was, well, a DAD. A guy who sat and talked with his kids, who coached the pee-wee team, or who helped sell girl scout cookies.  I disregarded the strict dads, as I grew to be quite independent (my father-in-law wasn’t at all thrilled with me when we met) and I feared yet longed for the closeness and influence of the “hands-on” dads.

I could wax on forever about my own life, but I’ll wax off and always look eye, Daniel-san.  Here comes the self-reflection part.

Even before Freud and his cocaine-frenzied ego-orgies with bored ladies-who-lunch, mothers were blamed for all the mental disorders kids could manifest. For the past few decades, psychologists have started looking at the influence fathers have on their kids (this is actually good news, not just for us scapegoated moms).

It may sound ridiculously obvious, but you dads actually shape your kids’ world views, not just by your discipline but by your daily behavior. For example, more and more psych research comes out about how the father’s personality determines how a girl will find a mate later in life, and about how fathers act toward women is the defining lesson a boy learns about relationships.

In the book, “The Role of the Father in Child Development” (.pdf of intro here), Editor Michael E. Lamb outlines the 3 areas that many researchers concentrate on when researching the father/child relationship: Engagement, Accessibility, and Responsibility.

Here’s the homework:  If you’re a dad, perhaps you can use these few days before Father’s Day to self-reflect on how you are involved with your children, how approachable you are to them, and if you are fulfilling your duty to them (as your children see it, and as you see it).  Maybe spend some time thinking about how your own father rated on these scales. This can take 5 minutes or 50, it’s up to you.

See? That didn’t hurt a bit. For extra credit, you can share your thoughts in the comments section.

To my fellow writers on Dad-o-Matic and every other Dad on the planet, Happy Father’s Day!