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Tag Archive - fathers

Shane and Shane on the Father-Daughter Relationship and God (and win their new album here)

August 17, 2011 in Marriage-Family, Pastoral Counseling, Therapy-Psychology with 51 Comments

Your daughter needs God. And she wants you to be the one to show her who He is, what He is like, and what He thinks about her. She wants to believe that there is more to life than what she sees with her eyes and hears with her ears. She wants to know that there exists someone who is smarter, more capable, and more loving than (even) you. If you are a normal, healthy father, you should be glad that she wants to believe in someone larger, because you know all too well that many times you will fail her. You forget her recital, miss games because of business trips, or lose your temper and say painful things to her. You are just a normal, good-enough dad doing the best you can. You need to have someone behind you, someone your daughter can turn to when you’re not there. You both need a bigger, better father on your side. (Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, by Meg Meeker, pp. 176)

When I came across Shane and Shane’s amazing new record and title song The One You Need and watched their video…it left me in a tearful and emotional place.

I’m the father of a four year old girl that I absolutely love and adore with everything that I have and all that I am.

And yet…everything I have to offer her, and everything that I am to her…at the end of the day is just not enough.

There has to be something more for her in this life…and so when I read the lyrics of the song I found myself resonating with it and saying, “Yes, yes, yes.”

Meg Meeker in her amazing book, Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters: 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know — and in her chapter Teach Her Who God Is talks about the importance of fathers teaching daughters about who God is. (By the way, this is the best book on fathers/daughters and one I can’t recommend enough)

Shane and Shane’s lyrics reminded me as well that as a father my most important role is to teach my daughter who God is….end of story.

Hey, hey, sweet daughter
I am so proud to be your father
Each day’s like a gift from God.

Hey hey sweet daughter
There’s no music like your laughter
And your smile is like a rising sun.

You know I love you from the start
So come in close take my hand
While daddy shares his heart.

I wish that I could be your everything
Be the one who give you all the things you need
Sometimes I am gonna let you down
But there is a way if you just believe
He’ll be your hero like He’s always been for me
Daughter Jesus is the one you need.

No matter what you walk through
He will always love you
Just the way you are.

for there’s nothing in this world
There all for my baby girl
Until be happy ever after.

The history at your life still untold
I pray the King of all the universe, will make your heart His home.

(Chorus)

Who will never leave spending it all alone
All in your where you came fight to Lord.

Shane and Shane have been so kind to offer up their new album to 5 commenters on this blog post. Here’s how it will work:

Leave a comment below answering the question:

What do you think is the most important piece of advice that a father needs to know about raising a daughter?

You have till this Friday (August 19, 2011) at 12pm Central time to post your comment and then I will randomly draw five commenter’s names and contact you with the code for a free purchase of their new album. So don’t forget to put your email in the comment section below.

And in the meantime….if you can’t wait to see if you win, check out their new album or connect with the guys online.

Twitter

Facebook

YouTube

Note to Fathers: Move Beyond the “Nuclear Option” Style of Parenting

November 9, 2009 in Marriage-Family, Ministry-Theology, Therapy-Psychology with 5 Comments

If you have heard it once, you have heard it a million times–it’s the phrase that every kid has heard–so much so that it eventually reverberates in their ears like that of noisy cymbals or a loud gong…if they even hear it at all.

It goes something like this:

“I’m your father…that’s why!”

or

“I’m the boss of this household and you must do what I say!”

Pick any variation of it cause I know you have either heard it before, or have said it yourself (and when you find yourself uttering the phrase yourself, it’s then that you know you have jumped the shark in your parenting style).

Why Point Out Fathers
This is a statement that all parents will eventually utter at some point in parenting, usually coming at the point of exhaustion, and with the helpless feeling that there are no other choices. Hence I like to call it the nuclear option of parenting. It’s the proverbial line drawn in the sand…and, if this doesn’t work, well then we are left there shaking our heads, or waiting for things to escalate.

Moms and dads both say such phrases, but I find that father’s most often resort to this methodology of parenting. I have noticed in my 15 years in youth ministry and in my recent years as a therapist that fathers tend to stick to this one way of parenting more than moms, while mothers tend to be more resourceful, often reading books on parenting, attending conferences and getting support in parenting groups. With these resources, moms find less of a need to resort to the “I’m your parent, that’s why” card, but instead have a plethora of creative parenting options at hand that dads often tend to lack.

Now, I know I’m stereotyping here, and I know plenty of dads who don’t only resort to this, but in my experience it is definitely more common. When your child was in the womb it was more than likely that it was your wife who was reading all the books and researching things on food, immunizations, toys and cribs, while you thought she was lucky to have you attend a birthing class or two. If it wasn’t for mothers, our babies would be born into this world and fathers would drag the babies back to a cave to eat the leftover meat of the mastadon that they clubbed the night before. And this doesn’t end there at womb and birth, but tends to be a habit dads carry on into their kids later years.

Stay at Home Dads: Are You One, And The Changing Of The American Family

June 17, 2008 in Marriage-Family with 2 Comments

I’ve really been interested in the topic of stay at home dads, or fathers who are the primary caregivers, and at the least are co-nurterers. And now that we are in transition to a new state and new jobs, I’ve currently finished up my job and am home full-time so I’ve been thinking about this even more. Last year, when my wife and I had our first baby we had to re-work our work schedules in some drastic ways. We did this for a few reasons:

We did not want our baby to be in full-time day care, and if we could help it, we didn’t want her to have to go at all. We have nothing against day care, but that was the choice we made.
We both have to work to sustain a living in Los Angeles, so we didn’t have the option of us quitting our jobs, though my wife went from 5 days a week to 4 days a week.
We thought it was important that we both played primary roles in our daughter’s life, and we were excited that I would have so much time with her since some fathers aren’t involved very much in their babies lives, or are unable to be involved.

I’ve been exposed to a lot of things that have really challenged my views on the makeup of the traditional family (i.e. the Bible, M.Div, MFT, marriage, reading, experience, counseling couples, etc.) recently. One of the books that I have found particularly challenging and helpful is Families at the Crossroads: Beyond Traditional & Modern Options by Rodney Clapp. I’m currently re-reading the book and will be sharing some thoughts with you, as well as hoping to get some feedback. But the Amazon review summarizes it nicely by saying:

“Scant decades ago most Westerners agreed that . . . Lifelong monogamy was ideal . . . Mothers should stay home with children . . . premarital sex was to be discouraged . . . Heterosexuality was the unquestioned norm . . . popular culture should not corrupt children. Today not a single one of these expectations is uncontroversial.” So writes Rodney Clapp in assessing the status of the family in postmodern Western society.In response many evangelicals have been quick to defend the so-called traditional family, assuming that it exemplifies the biblical model. Clapp challenges that assumption, arguing that the “traditional” family is a reflection more of the nineteenth-century middle-class family than of any family one can find in Scripture. At the same time, he recognizes that many modern and postmodern options are not acceptable to Christians. Returning to the biblical story afresh to see what it might say to us in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Clapp articulates a challenge to both sides of a critical debate.A book to help us rethink the significance of the family for the next century.

I know plenty of fathers who are stay at home dads currently. Some are in graduate school, so their wives work full-time. So they pull double duty as student and father and the wife pulls double duty as “breadwinner” and mother. Some fathers I know are married to women who make more money, so they have decided that the father would stay home instead. Others is a conscious decision to divide the caretaking responsibilities between them. Some fathers I know work from home and have flexible schedules, so they stay at home, and raise the children while they work.

I am going to continue this series in the upcoming weeks, but let me ask a question:

Are you a stay at home dad? What went behind that decision?