Purpose

Up until the age of 3, our daughter was often by mommy’s side and my involvement centered on playtime after a work day. All that changed after the divorce and I found myself with a little girl who still wanted mommy.

I coped. At this age, her needs were simple. She went to daycare, she napped, she had supervised play dates and pretty much every part of her day was managed, monitored and climate controlled. Then she got a little older and started asking questions and pushing beyond the bubble wrap. I was trying to raise a well-balanced, confident and forthright little female human. Now she’s acting like one. I was terrified! She has her own set of opinions and needs but little of the experience to manage and cope in new situations. She looks to me and asks me things. I have about 2 seconds to come up with a really good reaction, response or rebuttal and this interaction has the potential to form a core experience which she will remember for the rest of her life. I’m mortified at screwing up and psychologically damaging her.

As I scour the internet, there is endless material to help me be the super-dad, but I realized few gave me the ‘just-in-time’ parenting advice I desperately needed for a child whose brain is processing more information than I had ever been exposed to at the same age. While there are resources that tell you the 42 things you need to tell your daughter before she’s twelve, or the 10 best traits to develop in a modern daughter, there’s little advice that are anecdotal, practical, and applicable that I can readily use. Of course, even if these articles do exist, they are written far and few between and often vacillate between pedantic terminologies and vague generalities and make impractical for immediate use.

This is why my daddy blog exists: stuff that makes sense in everyday situations in about 500 words or fewer. The first article was published when the site was soft-launched around Halloween 2016 and I’ll do my best to chronicle our experiences every week. I’m starting at age 6 or Grade One. There is much material on the web for raising children younger than this age, but it is at this mile marker of Grade One that a child is exposed to new content and possesses the necessary thought process and language skills to ignite a truly precious father and daughter conversation.

This blog is about our conversations. In an increasingly sharing economy, I’ll share my experiences in the hopes that my successes (and failures) will be both informative and comedic to all fathers (or moms or any caregiver).