Hardest part of being a dad
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
In today’s episode, Dave and Jim discuss the challenges of fatherhood
During this episode we’ll discuss:
Needing time to recharge
Mealtimes
Social issues
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Transcript
[music]
Dave: In today's episode, we're discussing our greatest challenges as fathers. Hey, everyone, welcome to the Papa est Fatigué podcast. The podcast for dads, by dads. Today we're discussing the hardest part of being a dad. As parents, we go through these phases of struggle, and I think oftentimes men, in particular, have a hard time asking for help. We've touched a little bit on this in Episode 15, about how to support new parents. The goal of this podcast really is to share some of our struggles, so you can see that you're not alone.
Here's my deal. I'm Dave, I have a now eight-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son.
Jim: That's right. I'm Jim, I've got a-- she's eight now. Mine is about two weeks away. I've got an eight-year-old girl and a five-year-old girl.
Dave: Here's a few data points from Pew Research to help ground this conversation. Dads made up 17% of all stay-at-home parents in 2016. That's up from 10% in 1989. 57% of fathers say parenting is extremely important to their identity. 54% of dads report that parenting is rewarding all of the time. Most dads about, 63% said in a 2017 survey that they spend too little time with their kids. 39% of fathers said in a 2015 survey, that they were doing a very good job raising their children.
47% of fathers said they were somewhat more likely to say their children's success and failures most reflect their job they're doing his parents versus 40% that said that those issues reflect their kids own strengths and weaknesses. I thought these numbers were really interesting. If you think about it, you can see the level of stress that fathers are going through. Dads find that they're spending too little time with their kids, most feel that they're not doing a very good job raising their kids, and almost half view their children's failures as a reflection of their own parenting.
This is not to discount the pressure that mothers feel, but obviously, we're focusing a little bit more on fathers here in this particular podcast. I thought that that was really an interesting way to say that we're all struggling, and we're all having challenges. To set the stage. Jim, can you provide a little bit of background on the division of labor at your home, and that will give us a baseline as we start getting into some of the challenges that you're facing as a father?
Jim: Yes, sure. My wife and I, we strive for a 50/50 for childcare and domestic responsibilities but the reality is I end up taking more because I'm self-employed. I'm self-employed by choice for this exact reason, to have this sort of flexibility to spend time with family and to do other things. When there's a conflict, it's going to be me that's going to end up taking them to the doctor or picking up them from the sick day, just because I've got that flexibility. My wife has a very demanding job that works with teams, and so she's much less in control of her schedule.
I can drop things or reschedule meetings whereas she's got other people that are relying on her for that schedule. Because of that, I can do things like do most of the meals, often help the bedtime routine, and like I said, pick them up from school and take them to the doctor and that sort of thing. Overall, we'd strive for the 50/50, but just by virtue of having more flexibility, I pick up more of the childcare.
Dave: Yes, I have a similar situation. I'm not self-employed, but my schedule is more flexible than my wife's. My wife, she works in one of these "what you kill" kind of jobs. She's always on 24/7, and the weekends, and evenings, in particular, things can get pretty hairy for her. I tend to take on a lot of the primary caregiver role. First of all, I like to cook so I handle most of the meals. That's my responsibility. Then like I said, I usually have the kids on the weekends so it's like, "What are we going to do? How are we going to plan?"
Occasionally she can plan in advance, but that doesn't always happen. We might end up on a Friday night, she's like, "I got to work all day Sunday," or all day Saturday. We literally have just a few hours' notice before that weekend starts. It's handling the kids on all the weekends. Then also at nighttime again, as I pointed out, that my wife's job is one that it can go from 0 to 60 quite frequently. When things hit, they hit and she has to take care of them and so the nighttime routine usually falls on me as well.
With that as a backdrop for both of us, Jim, if you could talk a little bit about the challenges that you have as a parent.
Jim: Not to beat a dead horse, but I am frequently tired. That's been a challenge since the beginning. I don't think it's unreasonable, or I don't think it's unique to me. Just being a parent can be very tiring. There's one thing about the physical exhaustion, which that's fine, we've all been tired before. I've had to work all-nighters at my previous jobs and study late at night. That's something that we can handle. For me, it becomes an issue with an emotional fatigue. I'm an introvert and when I have social interactions, I need some time to recharge.
I just do it, it took me a while to figure that out by myself. I know that I need some self-care, some downtime, just to recover. It becomes more important, dealing with kids and dealing with my kids because there's so much nonverbal communication. There's so much empathy that's involved in trying to figure out where they are in their world, and how I can interact in that world in a way that has a positive impact. If I'm not well-rested, I'm not picking up on those cues. I'm being more selfish, meaning I want them to do something.
I need them to go to bed, rather than understanding that their behavior is about something else and figuring out how to address that rather than trying to just hammer home the thing that I want. I want them to go to bed, I want them to put their shoes on. Being able to have that empathy and get on their level, mentally and emotionally and be able to help them. Being tired interferes with who I'd like to be as a parent. Part of that is just having that downtime is having some self-care. Making sure that I am rested enough as much as I can anyway.
Making sure that I'm eating right, rather than just eating mac and cheese when they are. Making sure I get some exercise. That's a physical sort of struggle. Then like you and I were talking earlier, lately, I've been dealing with this. Trying to figure out, I don't know how to say it, what's my stuff and what's their stuff. Specifically, I'm trying to encourage my daughters to be more assertive and more self-assured, and have more confidence. I don't know if we touched on this before, but girls' self-confidence peaks at age nine and that's coming up pretty quick.
Yours just turned eight mine is turning eight in a couple of weeks. I want to make sure that that's going to continue so that, however it goes down, I don't want there to be an opportunity that I've missed. That somehow I haven't encouraged them to have more self-esteem, to be more self-confident. Also, it's got to be balanced against their personalities. Being able to and that's what I mean, recognizing what's my part, what's my stuff, and what's their stuff. How are their personalities? What are their needs?
Figuring out how to support that in a way that's child-centric, rather than I think that they should be a different way. Or that they should have different characteristics, and how am I going to structure those or model those for them. I just have to pay attention. To tie it all together, I need to have that sort of empathy and self-awareness to be able to handle that right and handle that in the right way.
Dave: When you're talking about the time to recharge, we were just coming back from a trip. We had just gone on a day trip this morning. We went out to dinner and across the street from the restaurant that we ate at, there was just this old carriage that was there where the kids could have run around. When they were done eating, they were like, "Oh, hey, can we go across the street and play in the carriage?" My wife was done eating so they went across the street. My daughter took the plastic water cup with the straw in it when they went to go play.
I said, "All right, well, you guys aren't coming back, right?" They said, "No." We get in the car and we're driving away, and we're 5, 10 minutes down the road. My son is like, "Hey, I want my plastic cup." "Really, this is the thing." It was a whole conversation we have for like 10 or 15 minutes about this cup. He's like, "I want the cup." I'm like, "It's a plastic cup." I think the reason I bring this story up is that when you talk about that time to recharge, it's not that he's necessarily being difficult or anything, but just the constant-- For us, it's very simple.
I said, "Before you leave, you're not coming back, right? I assumed that you didn't want it." In my head, it was done, but for him, it wasn't. Now we have to have this long conversation about this plastic cup that was left at the restaurant, and it's just tiring. At the same time, I think the thing is to focus on not freaking out and trying to understand his point of view. It's easy to dismiss it and just say, "Look, we're not going back. The cup is done." I'm trying to stay calm and just talk him through this whole issue about, "Why is this cup so important to you? It’s a plastic cup. What's the big deal?" I think it just goes back to that whole time to recharge. It doesn't mean that they're being difficult but they're constantly these things that because they're kids that there's things that are drawn out that you think, "Why are we even having this discussion over something so small?" but for them, it's this big thing in their world. That those little things happen all the time, every day, multiple times a day. After a while towards the end of the day, you're like, we've had five of these just super random conversations about things that don't matter and it just tires you out.
That's certainly one of the things that I feel I'm like, let's just maybe put this to the side and move on to another topic. Or actually what I'll do, sometimes if I'm at home is, I would just maybe take a step away for a couple of minutes and then just read an article, and then come back in, "All right, let's finish that conversation."
Jim: I was going to share a similar experience. I was going to share a time where my daughter lost something. She had a mask, she was waving out the window in the wind, and it blew away and she had a disproportionate emotional reaction to losing this mask. We've got maybe hundreds of masks between the four of us at home, we've got so many masks. My reaction was, "It's just a mask, don't worry about it, it's not important. Why are you upset about this?"
We were driving at the time, and it was several blocks later, where, because I was rested, and going to have this awareness, I realized that she was having an emotional reaction to something else. There was some other moment of grief or some other moment of loss that she was connecting and was just coming out sideways with this mask. It took me a while to figure that out, several blocks, five, six blocks, whatever it was before I realized that she wasn't really upset about the mask, she was upset about something else.
That's the kind of thing where I have to get out of myself and think, this is really important to her for some reason, and I want to find that thing and honor it. It's not something I would have been able to do, not something I can do when I've jet-lagged or tired or whatever it is.
David: That's a good point is that there's, I think often something behind it that as adults, we don't see the connection but it's so clear in their heads that this thing is so important to them because of X, and we're just not capable of making those connections because it's hard to think as a five-year-old or an eight-year-old, at these times.
Jim: [laughs]
David: It is important to slow down and I think I'm trying to focus certainly on also explaining the things that I asked them to do and why I'm asking them to do things. It's not just like, "Hey, do this," but it's, "Hey, I'm telling you, you can't watch the screen right now because x and this is why I can do it a little bit more than you can." Really trying to be conscious of having the discussion whether it's because it's something that again, I feel as they're blowing out of proportion or whether it's something that they don't understand from me." Or I'm just saying, "Hey, do this."
It's really trying to get to the deeper underlying information that's there, that's tying all this stuff together. One thing that we were talking about before you brought this up in the prep for this conversation, is that-- We'll get to my struggles in a minute but what I think is interesting is we had talked about how the challenges that you're facing are very, very different than mine. I think it is that Maslow's hierarchy of needs of, I am focused on the day-to-day process stuff. You've got a lot of that figured out, which allows you to get more focused in on the higher level of things like the self-confidence and those things.
I'm working on those, but maybe not in the same way that you are. A lot of the way that I try and do that is through books. One of the things that I have learned through this podcast in particular, and some of the podcasts that I've done with Tim, about gaming, and movie night is having this dialogue. It's not just that we read this book, but it's also, "What did you learn from that story? What's the kernel of information that I'm trying to teach you when I picked this book out for you?" and getting that across.
Maybe as a transition into the kinds of things that I'm struggling with, and then we can get back to that. If we go back to these issues of being more down in the weeds, like you, I struggle with finding time for myself. Pre-COVID, certainly, the kids' schedules were all over the road. Our daughter was scheduled six days a week, so it was just constantly running all over the place, taking her to afterschool activities. Pre-COVID, my job, I was actually self-employed also like you. That absolutely fell to me. It was three o'clock pick her up from school.
Go to jujitsu for an hour and a half or an hour and then come home, cook dinner. Just all that stuff, just being the chauffeur, and that was difficult. Then you moved to the birthdays and the weekend plans, so there's never any downtime, even when you get to the weekend. One thing is, I always thought I was an extrovert, but it feels like I might actually be an introvert, which seems like maybe late to be learning in life but there it is. I think that that's a function of COVID, it seems like I've actually done pretty well.
I think that's one of those things, they say, the introverts are thriving in COVI because they have some time for themselves. It turns out, all things being equal, I'm actually doing okay. I think that again, that finding time for myself is important, and I can't find that time. There's the stuff that the kids are responsible for, in terms of not allowing me to find my time. Then on my own side, I've got five different side hustles, which once the kids are done, then it's off to do the next thing. The only way that I can find any time for myself is, I work out in the morning, so I get up at about 5:50.
That gives me about 20 minutes to just sit in bed and read the news and just see what's going on in the world, 20 to 30 minutes, that's my alone time. Then it's workout, breakfast for the kids, and then I start my routine. Then at the end of the day, pick up kids. Start cooking at five o'clock, dinner's done, maybe around-- I probably clean the kitchen first, that takes me to 5:30, almost six o'clock, then cook dinner. By the time dinner is done, 7:30, put the kids to sleep, read until about 8:30.
Then my son in particular loves to come out once it's time to go to sleep and ask me random questions like, "Are their firefighters on the moon?" and then we have this little discussion or just all sorts of really random stuff. We have a discussion, it's okay, and then he goes back to sleep. If he's had a nap because he was at school, that might go on until ten o'clock and that's really my bedtime. Sometimes I can get like an hour in of work and then there will be times where he's a little bit more needy and I'll have to sit with him or be around him until 10:00, which is basically my bedtime. There's effectively no downtime at all at that point.
That's one of my really, really big struggles, finding time for myself. I don't think that's necessarily unique but it is something that I really do struggle with. There are a lot of things that I'd love to be doing but well, maybe once the kids are older-- and my guess is that once the kids are older, there's some other excuse to not be able to do the things you want to do. The other thing is, I always feel like I'm not doing enough. Even when I have all of these things, I feel guilty when I'm working on these side hustles that I can't spend more time with the kids.
If I'm doing some work on the weekends then I look over to my left and my son's playing Lego. Or my daughter's reading a book or doing an art project, I feel like I should be helping them or working with them. We've had some of these conversations where I don't want to end up, the kids in 20 years, they look back and go, "All you did was work." There's a reason we work hard, is because we're trying to get to a point where we can retire early, and then we can do all we want with the kids. We're not there yet and right now we're in the hardcore hustle phase of that plan.
Already our daughter's like, "Mommy works too much." It's a hard thing to hear because they don't necessarily understand why you're doing it. We do explain why we do it and we're like, "Look, this is what pays for vacations and this is what pay--" all of these things. It's the house and it's the food and it's the car and the gas and the clothes, all that stuff but it's still a hard concept, I think for her to grasp. What she knows is that mommy works all the time. She says this a little bit less with me because I do a lot of my work when they're asleep but that's certainly something that comes through quite a bit.
Then the last one, actually two more than, the next one is super down in the weeds. It really is mealtimes. Mealtimes are a train wreck over here.
Jim: [chuckles]
David: It's like Lord of the Flies. The first thing is our kids can't seem to sit down which that's completely my fault for being a little bit lax. There's a little bit walking around and he'll bring toys to the dinner table. It's a mess, fully my fault, so I'll own up to that one. That's a mess. On top of it, when he brings the toys, they decide they won't eat anything. He's a super picky eater. He eats like literally three or four things, which also creates a tremendous challenge for lunches as we start planning for the week.
It's the same grilled cheese, mac and cheese, pizza. There's always so many times a kid can eat it. I'm starting to work on that. Breakfast is now becoming a non-choice issue. Again, actually, the food thing is my fault too. I've created a restaurant here, "Hey, you don't want to eat that? Let me know what you're going to eat." Right now we're in the process of changing that. About a month ago, we moved to, "Here is breakfast. Eat it or don't. I don't care. It's not my problem anymore."
Then lunch, when he would come back from school for lunch if he hadn't eaten lunch and he was hungry, I said, "Okay, you can have a snack after you eat your lunch." We're going to start with that and that seemed to work out pretty well. Then dinner, I'm still at the point where I'm making two dinners, one for the adults and one for the kids. I'm slowly moving away from that. My daughter had her eighth birthday a little while ago. I told her for her birthday, I was getting her off the meal plan so that she was going to eat what everybody else is eating.
I haven't fully implemented that yet. She obviously wasn't super excited about that, but that's how I grew up. It was, "Here's what we're eating. Eat it or don't. That's your call". I need to get to a point that that's what we're doing and we're starting to get there with the kids. Picky eaters can be really problematic, especially when you're traveling. We just came back from a two-night vacation and just finding stuff for this kid to eat you'd have to, "Oh, you want to go to this restaurant?" Well, he's not going to eat anything, so we can't go there.
We got to go somewhere and that's not a great way to have a vacation. That's something we're moving away from.
Jim: You said that if they eat it or don't eat it, that's your problem. It's my problem. Is that how we got to deal with them without having eaten anything. That's like fuelling the fire. It's like being a hostage.
David: Yes. My plan is that we just deal with it. I think the big thing is that for us, we had to both sit down and agree to that because my thing has always been like, we need to do this. It's that you either eat it or you don't. I understand where my wife is coming from, like, well, we need to get him to eat something, but that is the slippery slope right now. Then you're back to the restaurant thing where, okay, he knows that if he doesn't eat the first thing, you're going to eventually give him something that he will eat.
What we do is we say, "Look, you--"Actually, we've had a couple of times where he's like, "I'm hungry," and I'm like, "It's because you didn't eat lunch and so now you're going to have to wait until dinner. You'll figure it out pretty soon that you're going to have to eat lunch because you now know what it's like to be hungry." Otherwise, when you're giving him snacks and sometimes the snack is fruit, but that's still he's not learning anything from that, right? He's like, "Okay, well, I know I can skip lunch and they'll give me fruit in the afternoon. It'll be fine."
That's not helping things. We're moving more towards a cold turkey kind of thing. Right now, what I am doing is I'll allow-- For my daughter, one of the things I said was, "If I'm going to make you eat what we're eating, I will allow you to choose the meal once a week." That seems to work out. If I make enough of it, I can get a second meal out of it for her, either a lunch or another dinner. I always plan the meals around making enough leftovers, which helps her and helps me also. We talked about that, that he gets a choice.
It's not like the kid's like, "Oh yes, let me ask for this crazy meal". He knows like five things. I guess we'll rotate his five things once a week. It's not ideal, but it's better than I think what we're doing now. That is a daily, daily challenge. Then the last one, I guess, is maybe a little bit more towards where you're going with the more esoteric 30000-foot view things is the social stuff at school is starting to become a point of stress for me because the issues are becoming tougher. It's not simply like-- I don't know whatever this kid lied or something whatever.
It's getting to the point of, "Well, this girl said she didn't like me to my face, and now this person doesn't want to be my friend." Those things, they're just harder to deal with because there's no clear-cut answer, and there's not certainly a clear-cut answer for me. We had this conversation recently with-- somebody stole something from my daughter. How do you approach that in that instance? I talked to the parent and we worked it out. Everything was pretty cool, but you don't know how all parents are going to react. I think the things that are really difficult now are the social interactions.
"These girls say they don't want to be my friend and I don't know why," and I don't know what to tell her. I think that's the hardest part is not being able to have a solution. It's to feel powerless, to feel like you can't help your child. Those are becoming the real big things. I'm unclear also how much of this is that I have a daughter and that it's just different. I don't remember having the same issues. I had a best friend in first grade and we were best friends until seventh grade. It's just a little bit easier.
Whereas her best friends, they come and go and it's just very, very complicated. The social structure is complicated. That's the thing that is really tripping me out the most right now. Thankfully, we're in summer, so I get a couple of month break from those kinds of interactions. That's the stuff where I'm just like, I don't know how to handle it. I assume that as we start moving into third grade and middle school and social media, it's just going to get worse. I hope that in these early days, we lay the foundation as parents that they can come and talk to us about anything.
Certainly, as things get more challenging in middle school with the social interactions and things like that. That's going to get even more tough but I'd rather it be tough and go through it together with her than her dealing with it on her own. Those are the things that are stressing me out as she gets older. We'll learn as we go along, I guess.
Jim: It's an interesting point because you've been very charitable in thinking that I'm in the higher part of the hierarchy but I'm dealing with all these things, too. Particularly with the social issues, I think what we're describing are things that we don't have very clear answers to. A lot of the things we've talked about in the podcast, this one, and the others is the strategies. We've got strategies to deal with a lot of the day-to-day stuff about parenting. When we're talking about actualization, self or other actualization, how do we help our children in that way?
I think the social issues and this assertiveness thing that I'm dealing with, there's no real clear strategies. I think they're so specific to my personality and your personality and our children's personalities. There's no book on that, maybe there is. Maybe there's some child psychology book that helps with that but for the average parent, I think that these are murky areas and they are difficult to deal with. Just to join in, the social issues are hard. Similar to the event that my daughter had, where she had this disproportionate reaction.
My inclination is to say, "It's not important." It's not important you're five years old or you're seven years old, you're going to live a long time. This best friend that isn't your best friend anymore, it's not. You're going to forget about it in six months. That's obviously not the right approach. It's hard to keep that perspective and to honor that experience in a way that's constructive for everybody, myself included. Again, that's back to this awareness and being able to communicate, as you said, with our children in a way that we can have that conversation so we can do it together.
David: Yes, I think it's so easy to just dismiss it. That's the thing that I want to avoid but it's so hard. We just went through a laundry list of challenges. When you're feeling that you don't have a lot of time, this thing that seems completely insignificant is just taking up cycles for you where it's just like, "Look, let it go and move on already."
[laughter]
That's not really how it works. This cup thing was the biggest thing in his life where it was like, "This is the worst day of my life because I didn't get my plastic cup." Wow, that's a lot of drama for a five-year-old but I get it. It's a lot easier to get, though, I guess when you feel a little bit more rested. When you have that time to go, "Okay, I know what I should do," and I'm willing to sit there and take the time to just sit down and do it. By the way, this is not to say that I'm able to do this all the time. I certainly have challenges doing that.
I think one of the other things is that if we go back to this issue of time and just the level of stress that we all have as parents, is that there's certainly times when we all snap. I do always make it a point to go back to the kids and go, "Look, this is why I did this," or just straight up apologize. "Sorry, I lost it. I shouldn't have done it. My fault." I think it's important to own that piece if in fact that you were in the wrong or to explain it when things go sideways.
Here's another thing, I talked about this before, where my daughter had snuck some video time and she's on a two-month ban, and then she did it again so I added another month and I figured we were done. It turns out we're not done. I busted her yesterday and I pulled the whole, like, "I'm not mad, I'm disappointed in you" card. I pulled the "disappointed in you" card and that did it, man. She started to cry. I didn't yell at her, I said, "Look, I don't know what to tell you. I've explained to you why this is the way it is and I don't know what to say. You know what the rules are, you have violated the rules and I'm just disappointed."
Then I walked away and then she went into her room and I just let it sit. Then when everybody hits-- Again, I wasn't mad, but she needed to calm down before we could have a conversation about it. What it allowed me to do is I went back to her the next day at the end of the day. It also gave me time to process what I was feeling and I said maybe the thing is, I need to go back and explain to her why the rules are the way they are. Certainly, if you tell an eight-year-old, "You can't watch TV," but there's no rhyme or reason to why they can't watch TV.
Jim: Totally military.
David: She knows that at night I watch stuff. She knows that when I'm cooking, I've got an earphone in. I'm not watching stuff, but I'm listening to a TV show, she knows that's happening. I don't know, we'll see. I tried to explain it to her again in maybe different ways and that it was really a function of, "Look, I'm doing this for you. I'm not doing this because I like you not watching video. Oh, by the way as you get older, these rules start to relax because your brain has started to develop. Now the reason I'm asking you not to do this starts to go away."
I think she's started to understand that. However, she won't get the chance to prove me wrong for a while because I'm like, "Okay, we're just done with screen time altogether." There were a few monitored screen-time activities and it was like you can do this, but you have to be in the room with me without your phone so I can hear what's going on. I think those days are gone. I will give her the opportunity for trust in the short term, I don't think, but maybe in a month, I'll start to loosen up. I do want to get back to a point where she's earned the trust back.
That's ultimately where I'm trying to go with this thing, but we'll see. Going back to this issue of the challenges that we have and how it affects parenting in terms of just straight going from zero to freak out. The kid not really understanding why you're asking them to do what they're doing. It's so easy to do that when you're feeling stressed and when you don't feel like you have time for yourself, it's just easy to go from 0 to 60. That's one of the things that I'm working on too, it's just okay, like take a minute, walk away, give yourself five minutes and then come back.
Then all right, now that I'm calm, let's start over again and have a conversation about it. That's my strategy that I'm working on.
Jim: In the meanwhile, have you thought about changing the passwords?
David: Yes, we've changed passwords, but part of it is she needs access to an unlocked iPad to do certain things. We talked about Epic. She's supposed to be doing Epic and instead, she's watching YouTube. Things like listening to podcasts and things like that, those will be unlock it, you pick your story, and that I lock it back up again because you've lost the trust for now. She'll have to regain that trust and that's another thing that we're working on is the level of trust that they're given. I do want to give her that latitude because she needs to learn that will trust her.
As the kids get older, there are all sorts of ways we can track them but I don't want to be doing that. I want them to feel like I trust them. My first instinct is to be like, "Okay, you're going to share your iPhone location with me when you finally get an iPhone and when you get your license, I'm going to stick one of those dongles in the car that's going to monitor your speed and your location and all the other stuff. The amount of tracking that you can do on a kid, I'm sure there are all sorts of ways they try and get out of it.
There's a lot of things that we can do as parents, but I don't want to do those things. It certainly wasn't something that our parents had. I remember I was over at a friend's house when I was younger. I don't know, must've been in 11th grade and I just didn't come home. I was like, "My parents are going to kill me." I was tired. The thing is she lived like 10 minutes away from my house, but we decided it was, whatever, 3:00 in the morning, she's like, "You might as well just crash here." She had an extra bed. She's was like, "Just crash here it'll be fine."
Didn't call my parents. Nothing. I just assumed that they were going to kill me when I woke up and came home the next day like, "No, we just assumed that you crashed at her place." I'm like, "Okay, well that's pretty chill." I do want to be able to trust my kids but they're young. We're all learning and that's the other thing that I'm trying to tell her too, is that "Look, I get that you broke the rules. Now you know why they're in place and you're learning. I'm not going to ding you forever for this. This is part of being a child. You're going to try and break the rules.
I'm going to tell you why they're there, there's going to be some punishment along the way and we're both going to learn how to live with each other in a way that's respectful of each other. That's just part of growing up." The same thing where the kids are learning to steal now at school, that's the process. I think that's also part of it is to understand that they're not fully formed adults, they're going to do stuff. It makes sense in their heads, it doesn't necessarily make logical sense to an adult, but that's because they're not adults yet.
I do find myself sitting there reminding myself like, "Yes, this is probably pretty normal. As long as it's not happening when she's 15 or 18 or 20, it's fine. This is what growing up is all about. We're getting there slowly but surely I think. We hope you found today's episode informative. If you'd like to support the podcast and hear more discussions around fatherhood, please subscribe and drop us a review. If you have any questions for us, hit us up on the Facebook page, facebook.com/papaestfatigue that's P-A-P-A-E-S-T-F-A-T-I-G-U-E. Thanks for listening.
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