Adventures in Fatherhood

I recently discovered a Dove commercial that, as a dad to an 8-year-old girl, gives me pause.

It’s called “Evolution,” and shows the 60-second transformation of an average-looking woman with straggly hair and a blemished face into a billboard knockout who is selling foundation makeup.

She can only become that knockout after a professional makeup artist does her hair and face, a professional photographer takes pictures of her, and a computer whiz alters her digital image.

This is all shown in fast motion, so the transformation in a bucketful of heartbeats is dramatic. Anyone looking at before and after pictures alone would be hard pressed to tell that the woman in both images is the same person.

The short video then states the obvious: “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.”

The video is part of the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, and encourages people to take part in the Dove Real Beauty Workshop for Girls. The goal of the fund is to help teens and young women develop a broader definition of beauty and build positive self-esteem.

I think of my daughter when I watch the video, though not about her needing to feel like she must be beautiful. She’s beyond beautiful. She’s stunning.

I say that, of course, as an objective observer and not a doting dad.

OK, so I’m not objective when it comes to my children, and I fawn over them way more than I should (as if that’s possible) but Celeste could be a model.

Her eyes are like chocolate chip raindrops and her smile makes the brightest rainbow seem gray. A natural blonde streak sprouts from the top of her head like a sunflower, highlighting her hair with accents women envy.

But I worry for two reasons.

The most obvious is teenage boys. I was one. I know how they think. I realize I have a few years before I have to worry about this, but it’s in the back of my mind nonetheless.

I’m not sure how I’ll handle it when boys start calling, but it won’t hurt to have copies of Soldier of Fortune strewn around the house along with a display case in the foyer featuring all my sharpshooting medals, plaques and trophies. And it won’t hurt to hang a few black belts, either. (I don’t have any of those things, but teenage boys won’t know they’re not genuine.)

I worry more about her self-esteem and the pressure society places on girls to live up to the advertising industry’s definition of beauty. Will her peers expect her to act a certain way because of her looks?

It sounds silly, but I think of the social statements that John Hughes makes in his classic movie, “The Breakfast Club,” and realize I’m not too far off the mark. The best movies and novels speak truths about the human condition, even if told under a veil of fiction. I wasn’t a big fan of the movie when it hit theaters in 1985, but it made a valid point about stereotypes and I’ve grown to appreciate it over the years.

When the movie starts, the characters have preconceived notions about each other based on their appearances and the clique to which they belong: the princess (Molly Ringwald), the jock (Emilio Estevez), the nerd (Anthony Michael Hall), the delinquent (Judd Nelson), and the disturbed loner (Ally Sheedy). I won’t spend time explaining the stereotypes of each character because everyone who attended high school knows what they are.

None of the characters like each other, and they all think the others either have it made or are a waste of flesh. As a result, none of them give the others the time of day. But throughout the movie, they learn about each other and the imperfections in their lives. They ultimately see reflections of themselves in each other, and gain a new respect for one another once they realize that stereotypes don’t always hold water.

They all learn that regardless of one’s appearances, all teenagers deal with emotional issues and similar pressures, albeit from their respective peer groups and the expectations placed on them.

For this reason I worry about my beautiful 8-year-old daughter, and how she will handle the pressure our society will inevitably place on her as she matures. Will she be allowed to show her intelligence even though she’s beautiful? Or will she feel like she must hide it, lest her peers mock her?

I’m not as worried about my 5-year-old son, so maybe I’m part of the problem. Or maybe I am just a product of our society’s stereotypes and the different expectations we place on girls and boys.

Maybe it’s time to watch “The Breakfast Club” again.

This is a re-post of a column that ran in The Gazette on June 10, 2010.

I will never understand how some adults can be so void of morality that they sexually abuse children. In fact, I loathe the thought that my kids could one day fall prey to such a heinous act.

Our pediatrician surprised me several years ago when, during our then 4-year-old daughter’s check up, she said it was time we started teaching her about inappropriate touching.

On an intellectual level, I knew the doctor was right. I’ve been in the news business long enough to have reported my share of stories about children who have been abused, most often by people they know and trust. A teacher. A baby sitter. A pastor. Their own parents.

But on an emotional level, I couldn’t understand how someone can commit such an act. All I see when I look at children (mine especially) are defenseless people who need adults to watch over and protect them.

What reasonable adult could see them in any other way?

And that’s when I realize the rub, the problem with such a thought. Not all adults are reasonable. Some are downright evil.

So over the years my wife and I have seriously taken on the task of teaching our children about inappropriate touching, and how they should tell us without hesitation if anyone touches them where they shouldn’t.

It’s one of our most important roles as parents. My wife and I are in a better position than anyone to teach our children how to protect themselves against predators, and I do not appreciate anyone else trying to fill that role.

So I did not take kindly to information my 8-year-old daughter brought home from school one day a couple of months ago explaining how teachers were going to teach “personal safety.”

I knew it was going to happen. The Frederick County Board of Education decided in August 2008 to make it difficult for parents to opt out of the lesson by making them meet with the principal to explain their reasons.

How arrogant, I thought. I should not have to meet with the principal to tell him that it’s my job, not the school system’s, to teach my daughter about protecting herself from sexual abuse.

Then I thought about parents who abuse their children. Who will watch out for those kids?

The people in the best position to do that are the teachers who spend more than six hours a day with them. They know the kids better than anyone else, barring their parents, of course, and since they can’t know who will abuse their children and who won’t, they must teach the same lesson on personal safety to everyone.

Statistics from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children are chilling: one in five girls and one in 10 boys will be sexually victimized before they turn 18, but only one in three will tell anyone.

I came to the conclusion that the school system plays an important role in protecting children against sexual predators, and decided not to make an issue out of it. After all, we’re already teaching our children similar lessons, so it may reinforce what we are telling them.

The day of the lesson came. I knew what school officials said they were going to teach, but I wanted to know what my daughter learned. Given the sensitive nature of the subject, I had to wait for the right moment to ask her, but didn’t know when that would be.

A car is a good place to have difficult conversations with children because it’s private, your kids don’t have to look at you, and you have to pay attention to the road. But we were never in the car alone long enough to have that conversation. I had to figure out the next best place and time to bring up the conversation.

Then it hit me, just as the moment was happening.

We let our daughter stay up until 9:30 on Friday and Saturday nights, an hour or so later than her younger brother. (Please don’t tell him. I don’t want to deal with a jealous 5-year-old.)

Sometimes we play silly games, and other times we watch Food Network or Animal Planet while eating an Italian ice. (Yeah, please don’t tell her brother that either. His time will come.)

She loves this time alone with us. She feels like a big kid because she can do something her brother can’t, and she doesn’t have to compete with anyone for our attention.

She feels safe.

So on a recent Friday night, I ask her.

“Sweetheart, remember that lesson on personal safety?” I ask between bites of Italian ice, Food Network on in the background.

“Yeah,” she replied without missing a beat.

“What did they teach you?”

“The difference between good touching and bad touching.”

“And what’s the difference?” my wife asked.

Again, my daughter answered correctly without missing a beat. We might as well have been talking about the weather.

“What if someone tries?”

“I tell a responsible adult.”

“And who’s a responsible adult?”

“Like you or Mommy, or my teacher or the principal.”

“And what if someone tells you that you’ll get in trouble if you tell?”

“Oh, you guys would never get mad at me for that.”

“That’s right. They would get in trouble, not you.”

“I know.”

I smiled. She never looked up from her Italian ice, but I know she learned a lesson appropriate for her age.

And I did, too. While I still believe it’s my job to teach my children ways to protect themselves against sexual abuse, it’s OK for school officials to fill the gap for children whose parents do not.

This is a re-post of a column that first appeared in The Gazette on April 29, 2010.

More than 10 years have passed since I learned I would be a dad, but I will never forget the mix of joy, excitement and trepidation that came with the anticipation of becoming a father. It’s the cliched feeling we all have moments before the roller coaster crests that first hill.

Having grown up fatherless, I had no male role model to whom I could turn to look for advice and managed to muddle through by reading the books my wife was reading about pregnancy and doing what seemed right to me at the time.

But it would have been nice had John Fuller written “First-Time Dad” (Moody Publishers, 2011) a decade ago so I could have read a book directed to a first-time dad and written by a man who has six children.

Fuller, co-host of the Focus on the Family’s Daily Broadcast, wrote “First-Time Dad” with John Batura from a Christian perspective, but he offers sound advice for men of all faiths, or even none.

It carries future fathers from the beginning of the pregnancy (Chapter 1: Great Expectations) through the dawn of adulthood (Chapter 12: Blink).

Through stories of his own experiences in fatherhood and those of other fathers, Fuller speaks with the authority of a child psychologist who has enough initials after his name to fill a bowl of alphabet soup but the tenderness of a grandfather sitting on the porch sipping tea on a cool summer evening.

The book is organized well, and forecasts to future dads what each chapter contains, so if the topic doesn’t pertain to you, you know what you can skim over or skip all together.

For example, Chapter 4: Break the Chain tells the reader how the chapter will help future dads avoid the mistakes of their fathers (divorce or emotional distance, for example), which unfortunately is a must read for many men these days.

Chapter 8: Boys-n-Girls is one of the more poignant of the book. It explains key, natural differences between boys and girls and how men can adapt their fathering skills to each.

I see such differences between my 9-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son. While Celeste would sit quietly on my lap when she was 3 months old and listen as I read a story to her, Gavin wanted little if anything to do with listening to stories until he was nearly 18 months old.

He simply wouldn’t sit still, and we didn’t push it until he was ready.

“First-Time Dad” confirmed that such an approach was correct given that “boys have less serotonin and less oxytocin, which makes them more impulsive and less likely to sit still to talk to someone” (page 94).

No point in fighting nature.

The book ends with a reminder to dads that children grow up fast, in the blink of an eye, so Fuller reminds us to spend quality time with our children. He offers a list of 31 activities that dads can do with their children (ride bikes, take a hike, color together, to name a few) to be an engaged father, something every child deserves to have.

Though I am not a first-time dad, I have plenty of firsts ahead of me and expect to keep “First-Time Dad” on my bookshelf.

Few dates of my life stand out as memorable, but I hope the one I had on May 14 ranks up there with the first date I had with my wife 15 years ago.

Of course, the differences between the two are huge.

I didn’t realize in 1996 that the dinner I was having with my future wife was a date. I knew I was on a date last week.

I desperately wanted to impress the woman sitting across the table from me 15 years ago while I wasn’t concerned the least about impressing anyone on May 14.

And 15 years ago, my date barely wore any makeup (the prettiest girls need little, if any) whereas my date Saturday wore so much she looked like a cat.

OK, it wasn’t so much makeup as it was face paint, and it was perfectly normal for my date. After all, she’s only 9 years old, and we had attended our neighborhood’s spring fling earlier that afternoon at which the only thing she wanted was her face painted like a cat.

My date on May 14 was with my daughter Celeste as part of National Daddy-Daughter Tea Date, only we went out for donuts.

It was nothing fancy. I merely wanted to spend a little time alone with my daughter without distractions to begin connecting with her on a different level. She’s about to become an adolescent, and her world is about to grow beyond the walls of her home and elementary school.

I want to make sure she doesn’t outgrow me, which is one of the goals of National Daddy-Daughter Tea Date. I turned off my phone, left everyone else and everything at home, and we went to the donut shop for a few hundred calories of fried dough covered with sugar, sprinkles and chocolate.

I was glad to have the time alone with Celeste, but our conversation followed a predictable path for one involving a 9-year old girl. As she devoured her donuts, I asked about her best friend, her favorite subject in school, her favorite activity — all questions to which I already knew the answers.

She asked the same of me, and by the end of the donuts I felt no closer to my daughter than before. We’re close now, mind you. We spend a great deal of time together, though much of it is as a family, with my wife and our 6-year-old son Gavin.

I don’t know what I hoped for Saturday, but it was more than answers to superficial questions one would ask of a stranger while waiting for the bus.

I decided to try a different strategy. Since we ate in 30 minutes enough calories for half a day, I suggested we play basketball. We picked up Karen and Gavin, and we all went to the court.

But it was chilly and drizzly. Gavin was not enthusiastic about playing basketball, or even on the playground with the other kids who stopped by. He wanted to go home, while Celeste wanted to stay.

I suggested Karen drive Gavin home, and Celeste and I walk back when we were done. It’s only a mile, and it wouldn’t hurt to burn a few more calories given the donuts we ate that day. She agreed, and we strolled home bouncing the basketball and shooting the breeze.
Along the way, we passed a woman sitting on her front step smoking.

“Is she allowed to smoke, Daddy?” Celeste asked after we passed the woman.

“Yes, there’s no law against an adult smoking,” I said.

“Why do people smoke?” she asked.

A light went off in my head. Though I had no intention that day of talking with Celeste about peer pressure and the dangers of smoking, our walk home gave me the perfect chance. We were both relaxed and walking alone.

“Well, babe, smoking is incredibly addictive.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means people feel an uncomfortable feeling, a strong urge to smoke, and smoking takes away that urge and makes you feel comfortable. It’s a chemical in the cigarette called nicotine that your brain gets used to having and it doesn’t like it when it goes too long without it.”

“I don’t get it,” she said.

I paused for a moment to think how a 9-year-old could understand addiction. “You know how you feel hunger?”

“Yeah.”

“Does it feel good or bad?”

“Bad, I guess.”

“What makes it feel better?”

“Eating,” she said.

“So, eating satisfies that hunger, that urge, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you feel better after you eat, right?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s the same kind of thing with smoking, but there’s a big difference. Smoking will kill you.”

“Oh.” She paused for a moment. “Then why do people smoke?”

“Well, smoking doesn’t kill you right away. It’s takes a long time, years even, so it’s easy to think it’s harmless. But it makes you stink, it turns your lungs black and your teeth yellow, and makes it hard to breathe.”

“But why do people start?” she asked.

“Most people start when they are teenagers, and they simply can’t beat the addiction when they grow up. It’s peer pressure. Teenagers pressure their friends into smoking. Some kids think it’s cool to do things other kids are doing. They want feel like they are part of the crowd.”

“Oh,” Celeste said. “I don’t smoke.”

“I know you don’t, babe.”

She said nothing, so I pressed on. “You’ll soon be a teenager, and you need to know about peer pressure. You need to know that you don’t have to do things just because your friends are.”

“I know,” she said.

By this point we were walking by a neighborhood swimming pool under construction, so our conversation veered off in a wildly different direction.

I know I’ll have to have more conversations with Celeste, and Gavin for that matter, about the dangers of smoking and peer pressure as they mature, but the date I had with my daughter on Saturday afternoon planted a seed in my mind for the right way to approach such subjects.

This is a repost of a blog entry I wrote for www.forfathersproject.org on May 16.

I remember staring down at a plastic stick resting on the bathroom counter waiting for a pink line to appear. The line itself was small (no more than an inch long) and barely visible, but it represented a huge change in my life.

I would no longer be just Jeff. I would also be Dad.

My wife and I didn’t know if we had a son or a daughter, nor did we want to find out until our child was born. But we prepared for the change as any set of doting parents would. We painted the baby’s room; bought toys, diapers and clothes; and waited anxiously for that fateful day to come.

When it did, 10 years ago this September, I learned I was the father of a baby girl we named Celeste. I could not have been happier, and have played a major role in her life.

My back still hurts from the 1,673,937 circles I walked around our kitchen hunched over as I held Celeste’s hands while she learned to walk. She always wanted one more spin across the linoleum.

My arms are still sore from catching her the 935,074 times she jumped to me from the side of our neighborhood swimming pool as I stood in waist-deep water. She always wanted to do “just one more time.”

And my cheeks are still wet from the tears of joy that ran down them the moment I helped her learn to ride her bike. The image of her smile is carved into my memory.

But adolescence is approaching, and Celeste is starting to need me less, or at least she’s starting to think she needs me less. She still asks me to go outside with her to play, but is quick to leave me behind if she hears her friends running around. It’s only natural for a child to want to play with friends, so I always gracefully tell her to go play as I watch from afar.

During these first 10 years of Celeste’s life, she had no choice but to look to me and her mother for assistance because we were her world. But her world is expanding, and I need keep up with it.

She doesn’t need me to teach her how to walk or ride a bike any longer. The lessons in these next few years are about to become much more complicated: morality, boys, tobacco, boys, alcohol, boys, drugs, and boys.

I’ll need to find that perfect place of fatherhood in which I can assert my influence without seeming overbearing or controlling — both of which quickly turn adolescents away from their parents.

That place does not come about with the flick of a switch or the twitching of a nose. It takes work, a foundation built upon mutual respect and forged with time. And I’ll start on May 14-15, or the National Daddy-Daughter Tea Date.

The day is billed on Facebook as “the rally call for men to invest in communicating how truly significant our daughters are to us in the hope that we can change the culture of sexting, poor body image and other issues which often begin in women’s life as a result of absent of disconnected fathers.”

While Celeste and I probably will not drink tea (milk and donuts are more up our alley), the choice of drink is not as important as choosing to set aside time alone with my daughter so she understands how important she is to me.

After all, she may no longer need me to catch her at the pool, but she needs to know I’ll still be around to catch her when she falls.