Burned as the Olympic Torch passed

The Olympic torch was passing through our neighbourhood last week, so my wife and I took our two boys out to see it.

Our two month old slept (future Olympic champion in this discipline) but Connor was quite excited. We got some free hot chocolate, a Canada flag, lined the street and then waited…and waited…and waited.

Connor was a little tired, so he sat on my feet. I actually told him to sit on them as the ground was rather watery and I didn’t want him to get his bum all wet and cold.

After a while, my feet were starting to get numb and sore, so I said, “Alright Connor, it’s time to stand up.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because,” I said, before continuing a conversation with my wife.

“Daddy,” he grumped, “‘because’ isn’t a very good answer.”

The little scamp had me.

“You are right, sweetheart. ‘Because’ isn’t a very good answer. I need you to stand up because my feet are starting to hurt.”

“Oh, ok,” he said cheerily, and popped right up.

For some odd reason, I thought of Cal Ripken Jr.  I’ve witnessed him give several baseball clinics, and one of his mantras when he is talking to parents and coaches is, “Always explain the ‘why.’”

His logic is that kids will digest and learn better if they understand why they are doing something rather than just being told to learn it by rote.

“Keep your butt down,” is far less effective than, “Keep your butt down. That way, your eyes are lower to the ground, you can follow the bounce of the ball better and you are less likely to get hit in the chops.”

I’ll mail $10 to any adult who found “because” or “because I said so” to be a satisfying answer when they were a child. So why do we pull the same BS on our kids? Your kids find it as unsatisfying and maddening as you did. “Because” is nothing more than a power game; it says, “I am more powerful than you, you will do what you are told.”

Don’t agree? If the boss asked you why the monthly report was late, would you ever consider barking, “Because I said so!”?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: dads can be saddled with the lion’s share of the disciplining of a child. By default, our actions in these moments can almost be unthinking—dictated by how we saw our dads act.

I challenge you next time the situation arises to “explain the why”—not only to your child, but to yourself. I can understand, when your child is stringing you along with seventeen ‘why’s in a row why the ‘because’ might come out, but most of the time it is a cop out.

Why do we even need to change?

I suppose it is a matter of perspective and priority. I feel like for all we’ve accomplished on this planet, we are still a mess. We still kill and wage wars. We continue to practice environmentally destructive behaviour against mother earth. We are still driven by the pursuit of more wealth and power, often at the expense of families and children on the other side of the world. We continue to elect and then turn a blind eye to leaders who wish to plunder and profit. We persist with using the wrong measuring sticks to judge happiness and success. Men continue to let bravado and testosterone drive the bus rather than compassion and reason. And as a whole we have long since lost sight that we are all connected to one another on this planet. When we kill, or bully or overpower, we are truly killing, bullying and overpowering our own children.

The short version of why we need to evolve as dads is because we need to evolve as men. We need to shed the illusions of power and wealth to help create harmony on this planet. Evolution takes time, however. At the rate we are going, time is a dwindling luxury, but hopefully our evolutionary steps as men and as dads will translate into huge strides for our children.

Fathers and men of this generation have made significant progress over dads of previous generations. But there is much more work to do. Until we strike a better balance as a planet —between the pursuit and the distribution of wealth, between the striving for and sharing of power and between testosterone and estrogen we will not evolve.

We have made mind boggling advances in science, technology, engineering, human kinetics and the ability to make something that has no chemical resemblance to butter make us say we can’t believe it isn’t. Don’t you think that parenting—particularly from a man’s perspective, needs to make this quantum leap, too?