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Thank you for visiting! I have put together a series of blogs that I will gradually release that unpack my family motto: Help, Teach, Protect. Today's installment is about the first verb, Help. Please comment, subscribe using the button at the top of the page, and/or follow me on Twitter @maninmanyroles.
Help him to like… (acclimation) When we are talking about acclimation, we are talking about adjusting to the new. What a year 2020 has been to adjust to the new. We are talking about patterns. While it is hard to build new patterns into our lives, we boys love cranking stuff out with high quality and increasing speed. We will often challenge ourselves to do the work faster if possible and especially when we are in a pattern. Whether digging fence post holes, putting up drywall, outlining a chapter using headings, shooting free throws, or classifying Pokemon cards by HPs, we love patterns and picking them out. The card game SET is a great challenge to this ability. I highly recommend it. If we can do mundane things, like sort laundry or make our bed with precision and speed, we get a little more joy from it. Try this with your son or student. Ask him to do something semi-boring or undesirable like making his bed, but ask him to do it within a time frame that is just a bit shorter than usual. If needed add a prize. Then watch. Then try offering one pattern, or tip, like, “Do the furthest corners of the bed first, and try to match or beat the same time as before.” Just the prospect of beating his own time may produce visibly different results. Now try it one more time, and see if he does it faster. I bet 8 or 9 times out of 10, he will.
Help him to try... (adventure) Think of taste, sight, sound, touch, smell. Think of relationships, new school years, new schools, athletic skills, and first crushes. Boys need help to try new stuff, especially new stuff that might require more than they think they have. Some boys love the new, others avoid it or fear it. Please slow down now… Visualize the following in your mind: Think of how stimulating the Garden of Eden must have been to all of Adam’s senses. The colors, sounds, smells, and tastes of food in those early days of paradise, not to mention the feeling of touching all the new stuff God had made for the first time. How did the first man react to the first sunrise or sunset he saw? How did it feel to taste fruit for the first time? How did fruit smell? Whoa. God is good. What about when Eve came on the scene..? Don’t get me started! Help him to start.. (action) Imagine...what did Adam begin to build as the first man? What do young boys build? What do they create on their own? Ever started a club, just for a few friends, when you were young? You were starting things. Boys need help and modeling from those who love them, and if they get that help, they won’t stop starting things. The moment we stop creating, considering, imagining, or improving, we start to die. There are ways to start like diving in, taking lots of preliminary measurements, and asking others for feedback, permission, and ideas. Our way of entering the new is based on personality, nature, and nurture. If we love our children, we will study them and discover how our kids start things.
Help him to continue (perseverance) We are sporadic in many areas: working out, calling our parents, cleaning the house, cleaning up our room, or doing our laundry. We struggle to believe in God, or to think he cares, or to find a place to worship after a disappointing experience. We stop trusting after a divorce, or after a friend stops holding up their end of a deal. This is understandable but especially deadly for men. Simply put, we guys are forever simply becoming better or more bitter dudes. We need help to continue. Who will help our boys to hang in there with tough teachers, mean girls, bullies, and haunting accusations of the time they failed in front of everyone (or just that special someone)? What trajectory will we set for our boys with our example and our assistance when they struggle? What tone of voice will we use with them? What body language? How seriously are we taking the successes and failures of each boy we care about? These boys we love are not all the same, obviously, but we teachers, mentors, and dads, especially, can get highly miffed when what worked for José doesn't work for David. That’s just inconvenient. And we are busy dads, right? Help him to stop (inhibition) Left to our own devices, we all have bad habits and bad breath. We all know of a list of things we need to stop doing: lying, biting fingernails, speeding, interrupting people. We also used to do great things and we began to tell ourselves that those things were too childish, like hugging our parents, saying, “I love you,” writing letters, calling people, or having good talks without distractions (glancing at texts in conversations, for example). Admit it, if you have kids, you have yelled at some point something like, “Stop it!!! Just stop. Right now!” Whether you were irritated, infuriated, or just keeping them from running into the street as toddlers, we know there is a time to stop. To quit. To not indulge in the third or fourth cookie. Turn off the TV and go to bed, you have a long day tomorrow. I’m so bad at this at times, it was almost an afterthought for this post. A great athlete knows when to play out above the three-point line, and when to protect the paint. When to play zone or man-to-man defense. To ask a boy to focus is to ask him to inhibit all other stimuli, do one thing, and exclude all other things. In some ways, we are really good at this, but to be honest, I’ve found that my own and my boys’ attention is fragile. Focus is really hard! So, what motivates growth in our ability to focus? How will I teach my boys to stop, to focus, to filter? I have thoughts, but not much success in this area. The point here, as in the whole book I eventually write about the Help, Teach, Protect triad is to breach and try to guide some conversations about it. We need to Google it, discuss it, read about it, and take it as a learning adventure for ourselves and our parenting. A great book for personal and parenting growth here is Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal. She discusses willpower, won’t power, and not now power.
If we can help our boys (and our girls) with these five areas in which we all need help (acclimation, adventure, action, perseverance, inhibition), we'll be more creative, more humble and present as parents, and we can brainstorm areas to grow our children's characters.
Thank you for reading! What was helpful?
More blog content Mondays and Wednesdays, new podcasts Fridays. Follow @maninmanyroles on Twitter. Subscribe to email notifications using the button at the top of this page. Please comment below what was helpful to you. I will do my best to inspire you to live as a great father in many roles.
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