Enjoy the Now: Being Present With Your Children

Image via WikipediaOctober is Attachment Parenting Month and "Giving Our Children Presence" is the theme. Here's my contribution:

In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don’t try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.
-from the Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation

One of the greatest gifts that the natural father can give to his children is to be present. To be here now. To be actively engaged in their lives. Your presence as a father, as a man, is something completely different than what they experience from the mother as a woman. So make it special. Be present.

To be present, you have to mentally let go of all of the loose ends in your life. You have to let go of all of the things happening this afternoon, next week, this winter, five years from now. You have to let go of the past. Let go of everything from yesterday, from your work, from when you were a kid…

Sounds easy. It’s not. Our minds are like monkeys, jumping from one thought to the next. “I’m hungry. Wow, look at that sweet bike. I need some new socks. What time is the show? I sure could use some cash. Where’s that book I was reading?” All of our wants and needs and disappointments and triumphs and losses and opinions are competing for space in our head.

Observe yourself. Get to know yourself. Maintain an awareness of the source of your thoughts and judgments. When you speak, ask yourself why you are speaking. When you eat, ask yourself where your food came from and why you are eating it. When making a choice, ask yourself why you decided the way that you did. Chances are, you’ll learn an awful lot about yourself in a short time. Then you can begin to make different choices, consciously. Like the choice to be present with your child.


You can start by actively looking them in the eye when they are speaking to you, and by asking them what they think about things. Let them teach you about themselves by being an engaged listener and giving them your full attention. If you get down on their level with the Legos and let them lead, you’ll find that they are present. They are here now. Makes you wish maybe you could be a kid again.

The next time they ask for something they don’t usually get, say yes, and enthusiastically involve yourself with them. The natural father understands that most rules for kids are silly. So many times, “No” is the answer simply because it’s the usual answer, the regular answer, not because there is a valid reason for it. Kinda like “Because I said so.” So surprise them. Surprise yourself. Be impulsive and irrational because you can, because it doesn’t matter what you did in the past.

This is now.

Go for it

It’s all you’ve got.

Originally posted at API Speaks

Finding Balance Through Selfishness

For busy families, fitting one more thing into your day might seem impossible, but adding something extra every day will actually revitalize and refresh you.

After fighting his way home through traffic, an exhausted dad arrives at home ready to put his feet up. At the door, he meets the also exhausted mom holding a crying toddler, ready to hand over the kids and have her body back for a little while. They both need a break. They have both spent the day meeting the needs of others.

Modern life is fast-paced and heavily scheduled. There are jobs to report to, meals to prepare, soccer carpools to drive, groceries to buy, bills to pay, gardens to care for, and lawns to mow. There’s diapers to wash and toilets to scrub, crayon on the wall, and fourteen dirty baby outfits to launder each day. It’s stressful. It takes a lot of mental energy to cope with all of the demands of our jobs and families, let alone our friends and relatives.

Strive for a healthy balance in your life.

We have to take time for ourselves. When we get stressed, we can’t fully nurture our loved ones or connect with them on a deep level. On the airplane, the flight attendant teaches us that in an emergency, we should first put our own oxygen mask on, and then we put the mask on our child. If we pass out first, we will be of no help to our child. We can’t take care of others if we aren’t first taking care of ourselves. The classic mom (or dad) burn-out is someone who takes care of everyone else’s needs first, trying to be everything to everybody, putting herself last, and then being stressed out both physically and emotionally because of it.

If we can add one more thing to our daily schedule, we can come to our relationships and obligations with a fresh attitude and a renewed sense of purpose. Exactly what that one thing is, only you can know. It’s different for everybody.

We are not just parents and partners.

We are artists and writers, cyclists and runners, quilters and woodcarvers. We have passions and interests that extend beyond the family, but we may be out of touch with that side of ourselves if we’ve spent all of our time meeting the needs of others and putting ourself last.

Think about the activities and interests that you enjoyed as a kid. Do any of these still pull you? Why not start again? It really does all come back to you.

If you’re stumped, maybe you need to start the process by just being physically active every day. Get that bike out of the garage and go for a ride. Pick up a jump rope and start spinning. Go to the pool and do some laps. I always find that when I get my heart pumping, my brain gets quiet. This lets me listen a little deeper to what’s going on inside me. I can see clearly which things in my life I need to change, and when I’m “back to the world”, I can use those intuitions to guide me in my daily life.

Some days, the easiest way to get my personal time is by riding my bike to work, and then taking a longish detour on the way home. I ride until all of my job-related stress melts away, and by the time that I get home, I’m ready to take over the kid department while my wife gets a workout in, or a sewing project finished, or goes for a bike ride for herself. We’re both taken care of: I’ve got my ya-yas out, my partner gets to focus on herself for awhile, and the kids (and our marriage) benefit.

Take some personal time every day, even if it’s only 15 minutes. Set aside work and family and social obligations to follow your heart. Sit and meditate. Work on your yoga practice. Do a puzzle. Go for a run. Start a blog. Nurturing yourself plays a huge part in finding and maintaining a healthy balance in your life.

Take time for you.


Your spouse and kids will appreciate it.

This was originally posted at API Speaks.

Natural Fathering

Natural parenting would probably describe our style of parenting. I've heard of natural mothering, but natural fathering? Not so much.

I named this blog Natural Father because I wanted to put it out to the universe that the natural father is the natural state of a man. An intuitive and grounded and connected man will be a strong model for his children and his community. A natural father knows his power as a man and respects the power of his wife as a woman. He supports his partner through pregnancy, birth, and the raising of the child.

Natural fathering, to me, is about learning to live simply and naturally while raising a family in an increasingly hectic and competitive world, a world where all kinds of dubious substances are in our food and water and air. It's about teaching our kids to stand up for their beliefs and to have principles that guide them.

We have birthed two of our babies at home, unassisted, and we can't imagine doing it any other way. Our first was a planned homebirth, but my wife had severe sympoms of toxemia/pre-eclampsis, so we ended up in the hospital. She was induced a month early, and our daughter was perfect and healthy, just very skinny (4 1/2 lbs.). Our next child was born in water (an Aqua Doula set up outside), at dawn, unassisted, and the experience was awesome. Our youngest was also born in water, the Aqua Doula set up in a tipi in the yard, and witnessing that birth really hammered home the fact that women's bodies know how to give birth, without any outside assisstance. I highly recommend homebirth and unassisted birth for DIY-type fathers.

Our children have slept in our bed since birth, and will continue to until they are ready to have their own space. It just made more sense to not have a crib or a separate room. As a new parent, with all of the new experiences and challenges that you have, the last thing you want is more work. So when the baby wakes up for nursing or diaper change or a burp, why go to another room to comfort and tend him? Let them have the comfort of you always being there with co-sleeping. It won't always be that way. The fear of rolling over on your baby is completely unfounded and is just plain silly.

We started teaching our youngest sign language from very early on, and it made communication so much easier. It takes babies a long time to be able to make certain sounds, but they can mimic and remember signs easily. Teaching infant potty training with signs and sounds was a huge help in getting to diaper-free very quickly, and all it really takes is commitment to doing it. Our youngest was diaper-free at 1 1/2, and mostly diaper-free at age one. I built her a wooden potty chair just her size, and she loves it. We love it too, as we don't have to put her up on the big toilet and be with her the whole time.

We homeschool (I should say unschool) our children, and we really enjoy it. Anything that they are interested in, we try to get them involved in. We may not know vaulting, or ceramics, or how to play the fiddle, but there is usually someone in our community that can teach it. I'm always amazed at how fast we manifest opportunities through our connections.

I was at a workshop the other day with JL Glass, a motivational and leadership speaker, and he brought up the fact that very early on in school, we are exposed to messages or lessons that really mess with us. He said "You are given a piece of paper with a group of objects and told to circle the one that doesn't belong. Right off the bat, we are being told that things that are different don't belong." Wow! What other "harmless" activities and lessons are out there? We want to raise our kids with positivity and openness and compassion, with the ability to think for themselves, not to spit back memorized answers to get a better grade.

Our children are comfortable wherever they are, even if it's different from what they have been used to. They are great campers. We camped for 5 weeks in a row last spring, and they are so comfortable being out in nature, that the only complaint we heard was that our oldest had run out of books to read (and she soon got over that). There's something that kids get from digging in the dirt, climbing a tree, scrambling up a hill, cooking outside, going to sleep when it's dark and waking up at dawn, that they really need. A connection to the natural world is key when teaching them about our place in the universe. Of course, we need to be comfortable in nature before they will, as so much of their learning takes place through watching and imitating us. If we don't have an issue with squatting over a sawdust toilet or a hole dug behind a tree, then they don't either.

I know that there are specific definitions out there for natural parenting and attachment parenting, but I don't think that there is one for natural fathering, so I'll be exploring that in upcoming posts. A lot of work has been done in the women's movement and the mothering movement, but I see a big need for a primal fathering movement, one that honors men in their power, that strengthens the father/son and father/daughter connection in a positive way. We've been demonized by the feminists and marginalized by the media, and now is the time start anew.

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