Here are four practical tips for improving the quality of your time together:

1. Make sure your child is the center of your attention, and not just a distraction while you do other things (errands, calls, emails, etc.)

2. During your time together, do activities you both enjoy—or, put your needs aside and do something your child enjoys, even if you don’t.

3. Invest time and energy into their lives everyday, not just when it’s convenient (this applies whether you live with your child or not).

4. Spend ordinary time with your child just hanging out…with no particular purpose or goal in mind.

Lost, Then Found - A Song For My Father

"Is Gramps going to die?"

The day before Gramps actually passed away, my wife and I sat our kids down and had one of the most difficult conversations I’ve ever had. My friend Donna, the director of The Childrens Room, had given us a few very key pointers, but for the most part we didn’t prepare much. The plan was to keep it simple and concrete, reassure them that all of us were okay, and not to try and hide our emotions.

We explained that Gramps was very sick, as they’d known for many months, and that no matter what the doctors tried, no matter how much we loved and prayed for him, he was not going to get better.

“Is Gramps going to die?” Jake asked immediately. My wife and I looked at each other. Probably for the first time in this difficult journey, my wife definitively faced this awful truth.

“Yes, Gramps is going to die.” We both shed a few tears, then she continued, “We don’t know when, but it’s going to be soon because he is so sick.”  

"Grammy, what are you going to do without Gramps?"

The next evening, my wife, my mother in-law, and I were with Gramps all night. He passed away as the new day began. Driving home from the hospital knowing the two little faces who would greet us at the door was almost unbearable. Again, we gathered everyone together and told the kids simply, sadly that Gramps had died and gone to heaven.

Keenly attuned to her distress and sadness throughout the day, Jake’s natural instinct was to try and comfort his Grammy. Soon after our family meeting, seemingly out of nowhere, Jake asked, “Grammy, what are you going to do without Gramps?” At the very moment we adults were reeling in the silence of our grief, Jake’s words seemed to turn us gently back towards or deeper into our own hearts.

Later that day, Jake asked Grammy if he would still be getting Gramps’ train set. Yes, she said. Momentarily delighted that he’d been anointed to carry on the family tradition Gramps had started - setting up the tracks around the Christmas tree - Jake quickly grew quiet. As if suddenly realizing that his gain was going to be Grammy’s loss, Jake said to her, “I’m going to make you a train set Grammy.”

 “Don’t worry Grammy, I’ll take care of you.”

The day Gramps passed away seemed to go on forever. That evening, Jake repeated his question from earlier in the day, asking Grammy what she was going to do without Gramps. Before she could answer he said, “maybe you can get a new husband?” Though he was quite proud of his solution to Grammy’s sadness - and his own - Jake seemed to understand it wasn’t going to be so easy. We praised him for caring so much and gently explained why Grammy, or any of us, wouldn’t want to replace Gramps.

Jake sat quietly, perhaps letting the reality sink in that Grammy would not be getting a new husband and he would not be getting a new Gramps. “Don’t worry Grammy,” he then said, “I’ll take care of you.”

Jake is no different from any other male - child and adult alike - in that he is innately an emotional being, fully capable of experiencing and expressing a wide range of feelings. The question we're asking ourselves as parents is, "how do we help this boy stay connected with his own heart, with himself?"

“Can we bring flowers up to heaven and give them to Gramps?”

On the evening of our first day without Gramps, I read the kids a fantastic book, When Dinosaurs Die: A Guide to Understanding Death. One section of particular interest to Jake explained how when someone dies, their body stops breathing, they no longer eat, sleep, awake, etc. In other words, it’s explicitly concrete about what happens to the body after death. 

I then fumbled my way through an explanation of how we believe that Gramps‘ soul and spirit goes up to Heaven. Struggling to wrap his head around my less-than-stellar explanation of Heaven, Jake asked, “Can we bring flowers up to Heaven and give them to Gramps?”

In the days before Gramps’ passing, we bought Jake and his sister sketch pads and colored pencils. Finding creative ways to help our children express what’s going on inside of them and make sense of what’s happening around them, has been a major priority.

By exposing them to a variety of mediums -  reading, talking, listening to and playing music, drawing, painting, building, making - Jake and his sister have each found their own unique ways to communicate and express themselves throughout these difficult times.

“Grammy, I’m sorry Gramps died...He's happy in Heaven”

Whether it means leaving work early to make a performance,  joining the parent organization at school, becoming a stay-at-home parent, many modern dads are determined to show up for our families in ways that our own fathers could not or did not. However, we’re also just discovering what most mothers have known for years: doing it all ain’t so easy.

Unfortunately, the emerging discussion about modern fatherhood – as it relates to work-life balance, gender roles, parenting, and women’s issues – is already devolving into ‘who’s got it worse or who is less appreciated, mom or dad?’ I was disheartened to see so many unproductive responses to both a recent  Boston College study detailing the challenges men face in a mostly father-unfriendly workplace and the NY Times Magazine article, "Now Dad Feels As Stressed as Mom".

If modern dads are going to step fully into parenting, we as a society must:

• Take the challenges modern dads face more seriously - whether that's a work-life conflict or an increase in stress due to the increasing demands of homelife. Moms' challenges matter too; this is not a zero-sum game.

• Acknowledge how radically and quickly the identity and expectations for men today are changing. For a man who grew up believing his self-worth is measured by his success at work, doing most of the childcare because his wife's earns more, could plausibly lead to his experiencing strong feelings of shame, anger, and failure. If not addressed, his health and the well-being of his family could suffer.

• Show boys and men (girls, women too) what the potential payoff of being a fully involved dad actually looks like. Leading parenting workshops in schools over the last decade, I've heard dads become more vocal about their desire to have closer relationships at home; I wrote a very practical book, The Modern Dad's Dilemma: How To Stay Connected With Your Kids In A Rapidly Changing World (New World Library) to inspire men with stories of everyday dads who are successfully - not without challenges - building emotionally connected relationships with their kids and their wives/partners.

To put a human face on the real challenges of modern dads - as well the potential payoff for more involved parenting - I give you LeWayne Jones. LeWayne, one of dads featured in my new book, is a great example of a modern dad stepping out of his comfort zone and more fully into fatherhood.

What is there to learn from this short video clip of LeWayne Jones?

1. How one dad deals with the new, initially uncomfortable reality that his wife earns more money than he does. LeWayne's identity, like millions of american men, appears to be more rooted in breadwinning than caretaking. Yet, despite having to shift in his seat during the converstion about his wife earning more than him, LeWayne describes how the "motherly things" he does benefit his family.

2. Why becoming a better dad and a better man requires stepping out of your comfort zone. Instead of resisting his changing role in family life, LeWayne views it as an opportunity to support his wife and show up for his kids in new, but unfamiliar ways. For instance, realizing that he needed better listening skills, he actively practices listening not fixing. It should be noted that many women have also stepped out of their comfort zones to become breadwinners or business owners.

3. What unforeseen benefits dads can discover by taking on the ‘second shift,’ or doing what has historically been referred to as  ‘women’s work’ – housework and childcare; In LeWayne's case, he details how his involvement has led to him developing a much deeper emotional connection with his daughter...the kind of relationship he wanted with his own dad. He has also developed a stronger partnership with his wife, Renea.

What is there to learn from this short video clip about karate?

1. How Sensei Kendall manages to know the over two hundred young people in his dojo. He does it the old-fashioned way: he pays attention, shows up, listens, spends time and asks questions. Knowing is an essential part of his practice.
2. Why knowing so important to dads. Just watch the video and pay close attention to my son's face. What you'll see a vivid picture of what the qualities of respect and care actually look like as they are transmitted from one person to another.

 

LORNE MICHAELS: "I think my job as a father is to make my children strong enough to walk away, and that is heartbreaking. I do it professionally as well, making [the cast] good enough to leave. It’s a very hard thing because who wouldn’t want to keep them young, dependent, and vulnerable? The key thing for me is that my children are not going to be the proof of my worth to the world — I’m not going to live through them. I’m not hoping to be able to say, “My kid’s the president.” It’s not about that. It’s a cliché, but every parent says, “I just want them to be happy.” To me, that means feeling useful, feeling busy, and having the emotional capacity to connect, to be there for another person. The joy of being a dad is watching my children turn into who they’re going to be.

I think it’s naive to think your kids are a young version of you. Sure, you see yourself in them or say, “I remember that expression or I remember being confused by that,” but they’re not you. And know your children you won’t really find out who they are until much, much later. If they’re fearful of expressing themselves or if the expectations are too high, it’s likely you won’t find out who they are at all. They still have to have rules — because in their perfect world my kids would just watch television all the time — and they still have to get their work done. But I can’t make them into something they’re not. I can practice with them — and I’ve thrown my fair share of pop-ups and passes — but I can’t make them into better athletes.

What I’m getting at is that if you’re observant and if you know your children — their eccentricities, their uniqueness — you begin to see more clearly the kind of kids they are, who they are at their core. As a dad, my job is to help my children truly be who they are, and that’s where putting in the hours becomes so important."

**

We all want the best for our children. It’s only natural to want to protect them from making the same mistakes we made or to spare them unnecessary pain and disappointment. Likewise, most parents want to provide their children with opportunities they didn’t have or didn’t fully realize. These well-intentioned and usually healthy parenting instincts, however, need to be kept in check every step of the way. We need to avoid the temptation to see our children as extensions of ourselves. They are not Mini-Me’s.

In his vision of raising two sons and a daughter to be unique, emotionally connected, and happy individuals, Lorne reminds us of this simple yet critical truth when he says that your kids are not a younger version of you. The potential problem with seeing your child as an extension of you is that he or she can easily become more of an object than an in- dividual. Under the guise of “wanting the best for him” or “making sure she has opportunities I never had,” you may unwittingly lose sight of who your child is or what she wants for herself. In other words, your influence and “guidance” can begin to overshadow your child’s individuality.