You Can Count on Dad

If you have read much on the website, you have probably figured out that my wife Linda and I have 4 kids. The total separation between the oldest to youngest is only about 7 years. With so many kids (not all at once fortunately), the kids counted a lot on Mom.

I was acutely aware that my little kids recognized that Linda was their #1 care-giver from the get-go. After our oldest was 2 or 3 years old, I distinctly remember how overwhelmed I was when she would be gone for even 4 hours and I had kid-duty all on my own. It didn’t come as natural to me as I wished it had, in large part because my style is just different than Linda’s and the kids knew it.

It turned around though on one such occasion when I decided to change my attitude. Rather than let myself feel like I was in over my head with the kids, I decided that I would use the opportunity to prove to my kids that I wanted to and could take care of their needs just as well (ok, almost as well) as Linda could. The key word was opportunity rather than burden.

I know that the economy out there is difficult and crazy right now, and our kids have a sense of it too. There is no better time, however, to demonstrate true love to your kids than when the world has thrown a myriad of difficulties at you, and you prove to them that they can still count on dad by making time for them. It’s like the Gene Hackman movie “Crimson Tide” when he orders a drill right in the middle of a galley fire emergency. Hackman reasons that there is no better time to run a drill than in chaos because real war has a lot of chaos.

There is no better time to prove to your family how much you love them than when you are busy beyond measure and pressed to the max.

My 4 children are all young adults now, and how I cherish the times when they still need some advice or a word of encouragement from dear old dad. But it all started way back when they were little kids and I took the genuine time and interest to be part of their lives.