THE FATHER LIFE

One of the many things that we try to teach our children is how to make a good decision.  Sometimes the problem can be that we may not always make good decisions ourselves, or we may allow emotions to influence our choices.  I found this to be true in a recent [...]

“Jingle Bells, Daddy smells.
Daddy poops on rocks!”
My three-year-old comedian thinks this joke is hilarious. I usually roll my eyes and remind my son that his take on the Christmas classic isn’t funny. My critique doesn’t seem to matter. I’m treated to about a dozen zingers about pee-pee, poop, and toots every day.
Don’t get me wrong. [...]

As a dad, I have found that one of the greatest temptations is to provide FOR my family at the expense of time WITH them.
It is so easy to do. Especially if this was modeled to us by our own father.
As men, we have a tendency to connect our identity with such things as our [...]

The parents of every generation expect and hope that their children can and will do better than they did. Ours may be the first generation, in a very long while, where it is both unlikely and unrealistic to have this expectation. The world has just gotten much more complicated, much harder, [...]

I’ve been playing video games for as long as I can remember.  It started one fateful evening when my family went out to dinner and there was this new machine at the restaurant, and it wasn’t a pinball machine.  It had two long blocks and the goal was to knock the smaller block past the [...]

When I was a child, my mother brought home a little dog that was so small that she carried it in her purse.  The dog was a mixed-breed of Pekinese, Pomeranian, and Chihuahua and my mother named it Su-Su. Fully grown, she weighed maybe 7 pounds.  Su-Su was cute, adorable, and [...]

Editor’s Note: We are honored to welcome guest columnist Don Harrold from practicaldad.com.  This article is the second in his three-part series exploring college planning. The first column, published in January, is “Rethinking the College Model.”
The experience of choosing a college is very different when you’ve got a teenager and are looking at it [...]

As I stepped through the automatic doors with my pregnant wife, I realized I was woefully unprepared for our first trip to the baby store. After an hour under the fluorescent lights, I was feeling lightheaded from the dizzying array of baby gear.
When the panic set in, I began sweating and [...]

What parent hasn’t dreaded report card time, especially when a child is under-performing?  How do two kids, born of the same genetic material, turn out so differently when it comes to school performance and work ethic?  When is it wrong if the “problem” child gets more attention than the one who gets his work done [...]

The scene: Four parents sitting at a cocktail table drinking a beer and munching on chips with salsa. The board game is splayed out in front of us. The category is “vehicles.” One parent shouts out, “bus.” Another parent states firmly, “airplane.” Sounds like another boring game night of Pictionary, right?
The “builder” continues to plug [...]