03 | Fatherhood, Trauma and Raising Boys

And by age 11, I had lost both fathers and it was my life's pain and her tears that reached far enough into me to say, "Dino, you have got to stop and do something different. This marriage is not going to make it." Somehow, even though I was trying so hard not to be like my father, I had come full circle and had the same effect on my family that he did. It wasn't drugs that took me away. It was working and focusing on providing financial aid that meant that I was spiritually emotionally absent. Is this why you say to men that your profession needs to be orientated around your family and not the other way around? She cannot bond if she thinks the house isn't care-ass, the laundry's not getting done. Did he think about litter? What you're talking about there is really parenting in seasons. I want you to know, Fatter, what your purpose is, hear how important and crucial you are in this child's life. I'm Ashley. I'm a family psychologist and this is Raising Humans Can't. The podcast that helps parents through their trickiest of seasons so that we can truly embody the leader our kids need and create the home that our family's desire. Today, my guest is Daniel Gross, a father of four boys at Devoted Husband and Apparent Consultant, who turned the pain of his childhood into purpose, showing other men how to break generational cycles and lead their families with both connection and strength. Thank you so much for joining me today, Daniel. I'm really excited to share this conversation with you and hear so much about what you have to offer. Before we start, can you share with listeners about your story and the role models you had as a son growing up and now what you're doing differently with your boys? That's a big question. Do you think thrift notes version or do you write the full story? You decide what you feel is helpful to share. Okay, well, in anticipation of what we're going to talk about on this, I'm going to give you the full story because to really know what shapes how I think about fatherhood and being a husband, you really have to go back to the beginning. And so my story when I say the beginning, I mean, four years old is where I'm going to start this thing. So I'll move through it quickly. But when I was four years old, my mom was married to a man named Cecil. He was my biological father. I call him Cecil because he was never really there. He wasn't present. I called him Cecil even when they were married and they got divorced when I was four years old and my mom remarried when I was five. So she divorced Cecil because she had caught him for the third time having an affair and she just decided this isn't the man that I want to raise my son. I was four. Obviously I didn't know any of this was going on. And when she remarried my stepdad, who I call father. So if I say my dad, my mom were referring to my stepdad, he came in like a night in shining armor. He was a fireman, energetic and young. It just such a good positive guy. He wrestled with us. He took me places. He took me to work with him. I was just so happy to just ride around in the truck with him. He was such a good man when he came in. It was great. And from ages five to 10, I thought things were awesome. I had obviously been some trauma and some hard times. But my mom did a very good job at protecting me from all those things. She never said anything bad about my biological father and three was just great. And then at age 10, things came crashing down very quickly for me at a really young age. I was 10 years old. I was on spring break in fourth grade. And I hadn't been able to go visit Cecil's. It'd been three months and I missed him. And I kept asking, why can't I go see him. And now I know it was my grandmother protecting me because Cecil had really fallen off the deep end on his drug use. And in his relationship with the woman that he was with at the time. He had always done drugs. He was just functional. And I saw him when he was on his uppers. So he always seems like he was in a great mood. He was really charismatic. Like addicts can be when they are on their high. I had never experienced him at his lows. So I didn't know what was going on. So my step dad and had me in one day and said, son, I need you to sit down on the couch. I've got something I need to tell you. And it was a tone I had never heard him take before. And I was a little awkward and almost wanted to laugh out of that sort of nervous tension. He said, this is the serious. I need you to sit down for a second. And he just laid it out for me. He said, son, your father has shot his girlfriend. And he is on the run from the police. We don't know where he's at. And we need you to come in the house because we're afraid that he might come and try to get you. And in that moment, as a teenager, I went into the closest thing that I can describe as an out of body experience or shock because I heard the information. I was processing it. But like my mind just couldn't really wrap around what I had just heard. But I was having a big physical reaction to it. Like I could just feel the waves going down my body. So I stood up and I was going to walk to my room. And I made it about five steps and then my body just went limp like Joo. And I fell to the ground and just started crying. And my stepdad, he held me and I just, you know, I cried. Why? Like that was the question from a 10 year old. That was when I was able to articulate like, why did this happen? I couldn't understand it because in that moment, Caesar was still my dad. And that thing about children is the work at their father through these rose colored glasses, no matter who he is. So to me, he was, he was strarer on. He was the life of the party. He had such a good personality. People oriented themselves around Cecil and family, get together. And I couldn't fathom how he had done this. To be honest, I never, I did not process it for years. But we laughed my mom took me and we left the house for a couple of weeks while Caesar was on the run from the police. And so he finally turned himself in. And that shifted things for me. I just went back to school, but I felt different. And I felt isolated. Like my friends have dads who are youth pastors and coaches and pilots and doctors and, you know, my dad is on the run for murder. And I don't even know what's going to happen with him. So it was this very traumatic moment that all of a sudden made me feel like I was on the outside. And so I would just take these moments of recess when everybody else is playing and I would just go in the bathroom and cry. Just to not even know, you know, what to think or what to feel is just an over whom of unprocessed emotion for it. It's a lot for a 10 year old to carry. What I didn't know was that my stepdad had a drug issue in the past in his life. And he had stopped before he married my mom and had been sober for years. We got hurt in a work accident that's around that same time and was prescribed some prescription pain pills. And that started his downfall over the course of the next 12 months and to heavy drug abuse again. So I had one father sort of ripped away from me in a moment and then over the next 12 months, my stepdad taken away from me through this slow process of succumbing to his addiction. And by age 11, I had lost both fathers in a sense. And from age 11 until I moved out at age 20, it was mostly chaos, mostly fear, mostly rocking on eggshells. My mom took us in a moment where he was angry and breaking things and we were scared for our safety and we would leave. And we'd be going for a couple of weeks and he'd promised to go to rehab. He promised to get better and we'd come back and there'd be no change. And then the cycle would happen again. There was a lot of stuff that made it a very, very dark household. It was a lot of fear. So as a 12 year old, I remember carrying these weights that a 12 year old should have to carry. I remember my father coming in my room and telling me, "Son, don't you pray for me because I don't see a reason to go on. I don't want to commit suicide. I want you to pray that I will even have the desire to want to get better." And I just look at the item, "Of course, Dad, of course I'll do this." You know, remember from ages 5 to 10, he was just our Superman. I loved him so deeply. And because he still had never been present where my stepdad came in, I took to him with reckless abandon as a 5 year old boy. I was missing a man in my life when I got run, I wrapped around him. And I remember in my teenage years, there was a moment where he was going through withdrawal and he begged me to take him somewhere to get pills. And I thought, "No way. I won't enable you. I won't take you. I'm so mad at you." And then I saw him bow up like a baby on the floor shivering and just hurting and in pain and begging me. And for a young man to see his dad, who he used to see as his hero in this state, it was just more than I could handle. So there was these really tough moments. So, I don't know how to use his drug use. It was very active, very angry, very aggressive. We were scared of him. We didn't go near him. We came home to add backpacks on the ground and went outside so that we were not anywhere near him. And at night, we stayed in our rooms and we just listened. We listened to him yell at my mom, we listened to him break stuff. The order he got, the more he just became comatose, and like a zombie on the couch. And he was just always eyes rolled back in his head, asleep, cigarette's burned down to his fingers and into the couch. And we preferred that because at least we didn't have to be afraid. So he was just absence. And it went on like that until I left the home at age 20. And I stayed home and so that age because I thought I had to be there for the family to keep the family from falling apart. And then I realized that I was that not going to be able to watch him do some of the things he did or say what he said to my mom, I couldn't live in the same house. So I left, I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee and I moved to Los Angeles, California, which is about as far as the state as you can get from Memphis, both geographically and culturally. And it was the most freeing moment of my life. So that's chapter run. I call that chapter one. And then I told you it's a bit long, but I went to Los Angeles and me and I was free and loving it. And I met this girl named Rachel at a salsa club and we were head over hills very quickly, like a lapped her. She was everything to me. And Rachel and I moved back to Memphis when we got married and it was a shock to me marriage was because I thought that I was so different from my father and that I was not going to be anything like him. And when we got married, something shifted in me and I went from just pursuing Rachel and just being in love with her to providing for her. And I put on this hat, this sort of serious business that I'm a husband now. I have to provide and create a life. And she felt the shift in my presence. Like when we would wake up and she thought I'm going to be with my husband, we're going to have tea and coffee and be together and be a lamb married couple, but I was gone. I was working. I had started a business and I was at the work of creating a life for us. And when we didn't have kids, it didn't come out. The cracks in our marriage were not so obvious because we still had a lot of time to just be with each other. But the cracks were starting to form that I was shifting and she was being the pursuer and I was being a distancer in many ways. She was wanting connection and I was saying connection feels oppressive. Stop. And when we had our second child, this is five years into marriage, I came home and she was crying as she was doing dishes. I asked her what she was crying about. Nothing had happened. I was like, what's going on? Can you tell me? And she said, I don't want to tell you because if I tell you, you'll just make it about you. You'll start talking about how you're just a bad husband. She's like, I can't deal with that. I just need to have my feelings. I need to cry about it. And I said, look, I promise I won't make it about me. I promise I won't blame you. Please tell me what's going on. And she just told me she was, I feel like all the responsibility of the home falls on me. You're at work all the time. And that's okay. I know that you need to work. I know you need to build this business and that we need the money. I'm not saying that's wrong, I'm saying you're a bad husband. But it doesn't change the fact that I am alone and I'm raising these two boys. And I can't talk to you about it because you always feel like I'm attacking you and I have no one to talk to. And I just, I need to cry. And that moment was the punch to my gut that I needed to realize. Somehow, even though I was trying so hard not to be like my father, I had come full circle and had the same effect on my family that he did. It was working and focusing on providing financially that meant that I was spiritually emotion and emotionally absent. And so I had this realization that I was running from being the man that my father was. And to me that meant working because he never worked. My mom did all the work. So I wasn't going to be like him. I was going to work and provide and I just didn't know any better. No one showed me. I didn't have mentors to talk to me about it. And it was basically my life's pain and her tears that kind of reached far enough into me to say, "Deno, you have got to stop and do something different." Or this marriage is not going to make it. So those are chapters one and two of my story. Before you go on to number three, can I just ask you, is this why you say to men that your profession needs to be orientated around your family and not the other way around? Absolutely. It is. When you think about what you do for a living, most of us just don't think about how we orient it. I mean, we get married and we get into a profession and it just goes. And then we start having kids and we have these new obligations and emotional needs at home. But we still have the profession we had when we were just with our wife and it was just the two of us. And we don't think about an intentional shift and then we get under all this weight and our wife needs things or kids needs things but our work still needs the same things. And we've been used to growing professionally and orienting our life around that. That work is going to come and go and even your kids are going to come and go out of your house, but your marriage, your wife was there probably before you got that job. And when you retire, she's the one who is still there with you. Your job must be oriented around your marriage and what is best for that. If your marriage is strong, your family will be strong. But the cornerstone of fatherhood is that is the marriage on the front end. So if your work is out of alignment with your ability to be emotionally present and spiritually present in a tune to your family, to even as practical as just having the energy to be with your wife and kids at the end of the day, then I think you have to take a hard look at your career and think, how do I make steps to change my career? So that it is oriented around my family and my family does not have to cater to my career. It's a big message and I'm sure hard for people to hear. But go on. Stage 3 is the healing journey. So that was about 12 years ago that that started 10 but 12 years ago because there wasn't like a moment and then all of a sudden there was this change. It was a hard process of growth. So to relate it to our last question, what are the first things I had to do was change my career. So I was a self-employed landscape designer at a small landscape design firm, but I was trying to grow it into this massive thing that to me, one day I'm going to sell this thing for a couple million dollars and this is the thing that's going to provide for our family. But I realized the amount of work that that was going to take, which was like 60 hours a week and I was wearing all the hats. The design hat, sometimes digging the holes, doing the invoice, sitting, human resources, meeting the class, I was wearing all the hats that self-employed people do. So I came home exhausted and it never turned off in my mind. I mean, I could get a text message at any time as soon as the kids were in bed. I'm like, wait, are you good because I need to get some work done? And would she feel like she could sew to me in that moment? No, I'm not good. I've been with kids. I would like for us to connect. That's a hard thing for her to say to a husband who's pretty much already implying. I need to go get work done. And I would always frame this to her like, this is my active love. I work, this is my left and my family. If you tell me that you're not being a supportive wife, you're not receiving the love that I'm giving you and you're going against me. And at that time, I had an immature understanding of what it meant to lead. At a very 50s and 60s, maybe mentality, it wasn't servant leadership. It was, you got to follow my direction. Well, I will gas like you until you're being unsupportive. And can you imagine what that's like for a wife to have to live under, which prompted that moment where she was, where she was crying. So the first thing we had to do is look at my business and say, we're just out of family need. And what it needed was a certain amount of money. That's real. And a certain amount of hours for me to be at work and a certain amount of hours for me to be at home. So we got pen and paper out and decided, if I work 40 hours a week, how much money do I need to make or can I make? And is that enough for us? And if I can make X amount of money, we will be fine. That's hard, but it's like we will be fine. And at this moment, if I work any more hours to make more than that, then that's she and I am making a conscious decision. I'm choosing to not be with you, to not meet your needs and to put the responsibility of our kids and everything on you so that I can make more money for us. So I've gone around in circles, but there's a really important point that I didn't get at the time is that I was providing for my wife and not building a life with my wife. And that's what she wanted. She didn't want me to just provide for her. She wanted to build something with me to be a community, a marriage. To re-change to the way I did business and had no idea that I was going to be able to continue to work less and less and my income was going to go up one above that number that we said we had to get. So that was step one. I'll real get into all the steps right now, but it was healing for my childhood trauma, going back into the wounds of my father. It was learning very practical skills like how to have conflict with your wife without getting defensive and aggressive. All things like breath work, taking care of my health. I think we'll get into this step as this conversation continues. But there were so many elements of healing and what I called becoming an integrated man who can live with Thana's heart, soul, mind and strength that I started learning over the next decade that started the third chapter, which I called the redemption. That's the redemption. chapter. I'm saying that times it was a long story. Don't apologize, I think it's such a powerful story and an exactly what people need to hear in terms of just the challenges and the changes and the throwing everything up and re-prioritising, okay, well actually if this is what we want how can we make it work? Because I think in this day and age with people working so much and families are getting left behind and children are getting left behind, I think it's a really powerful part of your story to hear where you came from and what you chose to prioritise in the end. And I think that that leads perfectly to our conversation today which is really I want to hear more about you raising boys and changing from the role models that you had. So I asked a friend of mine who's a father, I said you know I'm talking to this dad next week, what would you want to ask him, what would you want to hear? And he said I want to know how does he channel his aggression, what does he do with it? So can you share with us about that? Yes and it's a great question. I did a poll on Instagram one time where I asked 100 men, what are your what are your biggest pain points as a father? And it was work life balance and anger and aggression with my children. I yell more, I snap more and I meet her than I want to be to my kids. So I coach men and I kind of rock them through a lot of the stuff that I learned over the last 10 years. And one of the things we talk about our masculine archetypes, so I won't get into all that but it's how I've learned to channel aggression or it's one element channeling aggression there. There's a lot of components. There's kind of a holistic view of how to do that. But here's the main one that I think is very helpful for men. I'm in masculine archetypes. There's one called the king. That's sort of the first one of if there's a book called King Warrior, Magician and Lever and that text is sort of the basis for working through who should it man be and what's the narrative for masculinity that men want to live into. And the key has two shadows. The shadows are the weakling on which is sort of the passive shadow and then the tyrant which is the active shadow. So when my wife says something to me like you've got your dirty laundry on the couch, you told me two days ago that you were going to do it. It's still not done. Every time the kids go down there, they knock it on the floor. And I just I feel like that room is is in chaos until you do it. When really you're going to go do that. Right. Whether she said it in a condescending tone or as a total polite request, I may take offense to it and think I may want to react in one of the shadows. So I'm going to want to either be passive or have such a bad husband. I never have time to do this. This is unfair. She's always getting on to me and just kind of get into pity, which is the weakling or I'm going to pride and want to say something like, you know, you leave your laundry on the couch too sometimes like quit nit picking it everything. I've been busy doing that or stuff. Like I do all this around the house and you find the one thing I didn't do and you have to bring that up to me. It's sort of shame and do that. Those are both functions of aggression. When is aggression towards me in that pitting sense? And when is anger coming out of aggression towards her and sort of that tyrant energy? The worry that I channel my aggression is to say, I want to show rep and king energy, which means I'm suffering. I don't feel threatened. I don't feel criticized. I see that my wife has a need and I love her and that's what I care about. So internally, when I feel one of those shadows causing me to react in an unloving way to her, I channel my aggression towards my lesser self. I run out of it called my false self. So I'll feel in that moment the urge to say something like, why are you criticizing me? And my aggression fights against their urge to be defensive and accusatory back, right? And so I'm fighting for my better self to come out and say, you know, right? You're right. I did say I was going to do that. I had gotten busy doing prioritize it. Thanks for letting me know. It's bothering you. I can make time to do it tonight after the kids go to bed. Simple, loving, kind thing to say, I accept responsibility without pity. I commit to when I'm going to do it. I acknowledge why it upsets her. All these good things done. She was left. I feel proud of myself for not laying over in a pity party or attacking. But to me, that's how I channel that aggression. That's a beautiful example. I love that. And how is that something you actively teach your boys? Is that something you model? What do you do to support them to manage their aggression? So when it comes to my kids, the biggest thing I do to help them with their aggression is to just be calm myself. I have almost always found that my kids want to do the right thing. They're a little different than I am. So kept did that perfectly innocent. But I will say they tend to be more innocent than I am in many ways. They're reacting out of their gut feeling. Whereas I'm old enough to write can be a little more manipulative and selfish and conniving when I'm upset about something. My children, especially as they're younger, when they're upset and they're being aggressive, they're just reacting out of impulse and instinct and emotions that they don't know how to regulate yet. So the biggest thing I can do is just be calm because my sons want to do the right thing. They love me and they love my wife. They don't want to go against us. They want to be in good relationship with us. But what's happening is I'm asking them to do dishes or do their bedtime routine and they still want to play or they want to go back outside and play basketball again. So their impulse is being denied and that's triggering their lizard brain because you know their prefrontal cortex is developed. That lizard brain is going, this isn't fair. I don't like it and the aggression comes out as but why this isn't fair. My friends get to play outside and so then they come out disrespectfully to me. The first thing goes back to what I just said about my wife and being in king energy to not feel threatened by my kids to not feel like their disrespect is a reflection on me being a poor father. I struggled with that a lot especially when they were younger and I was still dealing with my father ruins because I wanted so badly to be a good father. My kids' bad behavior didn't mean there were children who sometimes get upset. It meant I'm not being a good dad and that's why. And so somewhere I would react angrily at them because I thought that my respect ability as a man and father was being challenged by my four year old which is ridiculous but every man almost every man I know feels that. Exactly. Yep. At some point. So recognizing that like they are not a challenge to my self-assuredness and myself worth, they need me and I have found that if I'm calm and come to them and just say whatever anger you have I can handle that and not get upset and not get angry back at you. They will calm down in the face of that. If I'm calm long enough and that doesn't mean giving into them and letting them go outside and play basketball you can hold boundaries and be compassionate and kind and calm at the same time. So the biggest the next biggest thing other than healing your own wounds so you don't feel challenged and triggered by your kids is to have empathy and understand what's going on with them. I'm his guide. Like I call it discipleship which discipline comes from the root word to disciple. It's not my job to punish my children for having anger and aggression. It's my job to guide them out of that emotion because they're chudder and they're helpless against it. Like they're captive to expressing anger in a way that they don't want to. Like they don't want to call dad something bad. They don't want to be disrespectful. They don't they're not thinking that far ahead and if I can guide them out of that then I'm teaching them emotional regulation. I'm helping them step into being a person that they can be proud of and it's so funny when I've come with them and I'll work through whatever it is at the end. They'll almost always say dad I'm sorry I got upset with you. I'm sorry that I said whatever it was they said that was mean at first. Yeah that true remorse can come out when they feel seen and heard and held but also contained not letting that aggression just spill out over everybody else. Like what I'm hearing you say is that there is real a real sense of containment in how you hold that so that you are guiding them through that big emotion. They're not just allowed to let it out over everybody else which I think is a really important part. Okay so I wanted to share a dynamic with you that I've seen a lot in my work and get your perspective on it. What I often see is that in the respectful parenting world especially the mother often wants the father to nurture and be like her. Nurture in the same way sound like her sound like the respectful parenting script. And then often the father goes well that doesn't feel authentic that doesn't feel like me. I'm not quite sure where my role is here and and tends to feel criticized a little bit like what you were talking about before. It tends to feel criticized not sure what his role is not sure how to show up and this dynamic can fester for a long time and then as that son gets to be five six seven now. I don't mean to say that he doesn't need his dad the whole way through he absolutely does but really when he moves into that dad's world more what I'm finding in my work is a lot of dads have step back because they felt criticized or they haven't known what their role is or they've moved into as you said in your initial story they've moved into that financial provider. Okay well I'll just focus my energy here because I know I can do this and I know I can do it well and I'm not quite sure how to do Do this part and feel free to go. in criticize or put all my energy here. And so I wanted to get your perspective on that. Do you see that in your work? And if so, what would you say to these dads? Let's start by sharing for the dads who are in that early years where they don't know what they role is, they don't know how to provide other than financially. What would you share with them? Yeah, that's a huge question. First I'll say you're your dad on all men want to be respected and they want to know that they're enough. Like we always say this, that's the question on the heart of every boy. Am I enough? Do I belong? Do I have what it takes? And that's sort of the question that it's the dad's job to answer that question for their son with a yes. But when a dad doesn't know the answer himself and he does feel inadequate or incapable at home, we double down on the thing that we know that we can point to and say, I am worth something. And the thing that work is that it only requires a portion of who you are, not all of who you are. I always say the reason marriage is the hardest relationship is because no part of you gets to hide under a rock. Every weakness gets exposed. Father has the same way. At work, that's not so. You can take the most masculine traits and bushing competitiveness and get rewarded and validation for those. At home, when you are clad upon to be a man of a nurture and have some softer aspects and you don't know how to do that, it is really hard. So you do just, I'll cut that off. I'll do the thing that I know because I've got to feel somewhere like I'm a good person. So the first thing I would say is knowing what your real is is really important. So my kids are two to 13. And so I'm in different rails with every single child all the way up. So you started at the beginning with the nurturing aspect. So I will tell all dads that even at that age, you are a nurture science now has told us that your testosterone level goes down when you have an infant in the home. And that's for good reason. They need a little bit more softness from you. So I do think dads have a nurturing in them. I would say it's sort of a masculine expression. I've got which is different from the mother. And it's gonna be when Rachel hards an infant. She's soft like that infant already has a relationship with her milk and all that and rooting around on her. She's soft, she's less hairy than me like I have a bit like dad's dad's face is a little itchy. My voice is deeper and when I'm upset, it's more alarming. Rachel's voice is sweeter. She soft, she says she's gonna be more nurturing in every way. But that is a no-no excuse for me not to also be really nurturing. And my kids respond well to that when I nurture them. Like they'll have me, that kills me. I still kiss best my eight-entend year-old sons on the lips at night, which for some people is weird, but they don't think it's weird. So I'm not gonna act like it's weird at all. So I do think men need to understand like it's okay to step into that softness and it's not unmannedly. But on the other side of it, especially if the child is I would say six months before birth to two. I really think that's an important space for the mother to have so much bonding with the child. And when the dads at work, especially if you have more than one child and the mom's got an infant that needs all this attention, our second born child was so needy and clingy. I was when it's going to skin contact. Cryed a lot. Did not nurse well, but wanted to nurse, and that was painful and hard. And Rachel's going through armies and motions. Meanwhile, she's still got a toddler running around and me working 60 hours a week. And that's what mubs are often asked to do. And I don't remember the stat. Nassau don't quote me on this, but it was really cool to read that it takes something like 30% of a woman's daily energy at her calorie intake, just to produce best milk. So my pooriness, it's the father's job to create a bubble around mother and infant or toddler at that age so that she can just lift her, have energy and emotion to bonding. She cannot bond if she thinks the house isn't Keras, the laundry's not getting done. Did he think about dinner? So when you have a young child, your job as a husband, which it shouldn't make you feel like a man, like you should get excited about it is I'm creating a protective bubble. So I'm taking responsibilities that my husband I used to share. I do not usually Tuesday Thursday. She didn't mind. It was a fatally right. She cooked I cleaned, but in this time period, you're like, no, I'm doing all of it. And I'm reorienting my life for a specific amount of time to take on the load that she used to take on because she's got a new load which is taking care of the infant, my son or my daughter who needs their mother. And I really, that they don't quite need me. So if American channel his energy, members such purpose and that. And I mean, it makes you feel awesome when you do that for your wife. Then you see her smile, you see that life that she has being able to bond in that magic versus she needs me to come home early because she can't take care of the kids. And now I'm having to do all this extra stuff. She feels like that energy. And that's that's a tough thing. So I think men understanding that's a huge problem with my purpose to be a nurture, but to really provide a protective bubble around my wife in this early stages. So that's the beginning. So that's what I would say to men get ready for that. And I'm going to get your life around it because this in the States, it's like two weeks, paternity leave at most. And then you're back at work. Before you have children, you and your wife need to set up how we're going to orient our lives around this child that we chose to have. Instead of just fiving the child in to what we were doing before the baby was born. That doesn't work. That's a recipe for burned out parents that are so stressed out that the weight they're carrying drives a wedge between them. It's too drowning people are fighting for the same life raft. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And they're not questions where encouraged to ask enough before children. I think it's so important. And thank you. I think that that's great clarity for for parents in that season. And what about for a father of a son who's a little bit older now and going, oh, that, you know, that's the pattern we've been in. I felt criticized. I've stepped back. I've moved into that provincial provider role. And now my son's a little bit aggressive, frustrated, having a hard time. What's the message you would send to that father? So as soon as a child gets older, I want you to know, father, what your purpose is here, how important and crucial you are in this child's life. And I want moms to know how important dad is to, you know, I have first son. So I speak a lot about sons. So this will be sons or boy specific. But you know, five year old boy wants to marry his mother and be his father. Right. He wants to do what his dad does. It's very rarely opposite of I want to be my mom and marry my dad. I'm not saying that never happens, but just statistics. The other way around, but a child at that age is getting his identity. He's rooting himself and grounding himself in this room based on who you are as a father. So that wouldn't ask you about your life, about your work. My kids want to heal these same stories about my childhood over and over again every single night. Because they're wanting to whom is dad? Where do I come from? And they they weren't your, but they just want to be with you. Dad, can I go outside and watch you? And I used to have one of my sons, I would move the grass and he would fire behind me with one of those toy push mirrors that like has the bubbles that come out. And I have this picture. I've had they just want to play at doing the stuff that dad does. So they're mimic them. So they're they're going an identity at this point based on being robbed and accepted by you at that point. So spending as much time with them as you possibly can so they know dad wants me. He's proud of me. My seven year old was about to turn eight literally two hours ago came to me with a Lego ship and it's got like 15 blaster guns on all sides. And I was actually looking at notes for this interview. So I'm busy and I'm thinking about your rep. What questions might we go through? How about I word my answers to this? He's like, Dad, let me show you this ship. In that moment, that's dad's call to put everything down and give you attention. So that he knows this is cool. I think you're awesome. I think you're creative. I think you're capable. You giving him that attention of froms for him that I belong here. And that's what I would say to dads. So it's time as presence. It's attention. And is this I've heard you talk about the idea of taking boys out of the mother's world of nurture and bringing them into dad's world. Is this what you mean? Of pulling them into what you do and how you work or for people who haven't heard that before. Can you share a little bit more about that perspective? Yeah. So again, this is very specific to them. I had to young boys. I probably not an age three through seven a little bit. But it's a different relationship. My wife and I, and that's me two stereotypical. But you know, if one of our kids gets in a crash on their bike, you know, she's going to want to go and take care of them because she's their nurturer. Whereas I'm going to put my hand down her and say, stop. And I'm at first going to assess, does he need me to go over there and help him or should I let him get up from this fall and learn that he's okay. And I'm assessing it to figure that out first because it's a different instinct because she's just wanting to take care of him because that's her nurture mothering instinct, which is beautiful and good and necessary. I need my sense to learn how to stand on their own. Rachel does that too. It's not a complete dichotomy, but it's an instinct. So I'm definitely going to say, I want them to be able to do that because what their moms are going to be there and dads aren't going to be there. This is also every question you have is a big conversation. It could be a whole hour. I couldn't find out. Sorry. It's a whole hour. But because I do men's work, what I see is the end result of married men who were 35, who were never brought out of moms world and into dad's world. And ultimately, a young bird wants to know that he belongs in dad's world. He wants to know, can I cut it? Do I belong to the world of man? Am I accepted there? Am I going to be a good man? And that requires pushing yourself and testing yourself and being a little willing to come to the end of yourself. That's like challenging and pushing yourself because if you never tested and never pushed to your furthest capacity, you can't know what you're made of. It's good to know my capabilities end here. Physical, spiritual, emotional, they end here. And so to get to this next point, I need to grow. But you also know what you can handle. So if you're ever going to step into what I refer to earlier is King Energy, you have to have that self-assuredness. If you've always been nurtured and taken care of later in life, you're going to still need that from your wife. And it's going to, you're going to be a grown man who riddled with insecurity and unanswered questions about your capability and your masculinity. And those men grow up to have marriages whether or constantly looking to their wife for a source of approval or validation or direction. And I've always seen that be extremely taxing on a marriage. It's a way that a wife should not have to carry as her husband's validation because that means she can never be needy. So go back to my wife saying, I can't talk to you about why I'm crying because you're to insecure in your masculinity to handle the truth of my emotions without having a pity party yourself. And so I did not have the strength because I was never invited into my dad's world. I was most of the band in by him. So it is very important for a dad. As the son gets older and becomes more capable to say, I want to bring you with me. And I want to teach you what it is to be a man. What you're talking about there is really parenting in seasons because I think that this with all this information, this is where we can get so muddled of the nurturing and the lup like you're not saying don't do that. You're just saying really do that in the early years. And then as they get older and they get more capable, then you gave that example of holding back before you go and pick them up off the bike. And I think that those two pieces often people think it's either or and it's not. It's the both end. There's a season for more of one. And then there's a season for slowly moving into more of as you call dad's world. That requires wisdom and intuition. It's it's a pain. Yeah, I was asking me though, there's a silver belt for parenting. Like when do you do what? How do you handle the situation? I'm like, there, there's no there are no ABCs to it. Parenting and it's hard because that means like you're going to do it wrong a lot and you're going to mess it up. And you're going to be too hard when you should have been soft. And you're going to be soft when you should have held a boundary. But if you're present and intuitive and thinking of your kids and growling, you're going to get better and kids are so resilient that they're going to keep growing as well. What you don't want to do is what we've talked about going into the extreme of just, I don't know how. So I'm not present and I'm not trying. I'll leave the nurture to my wife. And I'll do my portion if and when that ever comes. Yeah. But it's your saying like, tilly stepping up, stepping up into that role and saying actually now it's now it's a bit more of this way. All right. So I want to wrap this up. I know we're almost out of time and talk a little bit about how you see heavy work and chores. I've heard you when I see this similarly and you've said that chores are a tool just like play, just like family dinners that can actually bind a family together. And I think that that's such a powerful view. I just want to take a few minutes to unpack that a little bit. Most people are going, what do you mean? Chores just feel like disconnection. How do you see it in a way where family contribution and chores can actually bring more closeness? Yeah. So let me go back to this idea of a family vision and family economy. And my program always tell me and you need to sit with your wife. You need to talk about where is your vision for your family? What do you want it to feel like? What do you want the home to feel like? And most of the time that it's not my turn. I don't know who started it, but called the family economy. It's where you take the total resources of everyone in the home to create the home that you want to have. So the work of the home, the shared responsibilities of the house are a big part of that. So when your kids contribute to it, you're inviting them into creating the home that they want to be in. So I talked to my kids about this. Where is it? What kind of home do you want to be in? Do you guys like it when it's messy and when it feels chaotic? And when we, when mom and I get really frustrated because we can't find your shoes and it's time to go somewhere and nobody wants to go anywhere. So we talk about the way that they're able to contribute to the home because they want to be capable, capable that we want to do things. So I talk about this stuff to them in family meetings. Like this is the home we want to create. I talk about it then because they're not going to like it when it's after dinner and they want to go play. And I say, now it's time to do chores. But instead of giving them a task, the to drudgery that they have to do it, if I connect it to, this is your act of laugh for your brothers, for your mom, this is contributing to the home. It helps. Now they're kids. Sometimes they're going to be like, I still don't want to do it. Yeah. But in their mind, like I said, they want to do the right thing. They want to be good people. And they want to show love and respect to their mom and dad. And then I think it's, I tend to do chores with them. It's fun to work. Like we're doing work together as a family because I'm also teaching them. So my attitude towards chores is that I bark orders and you do this. And if it's not done and I come back in here in 10 minutes in this room, isn't clean. Then you know, you're doing extra chores or you're going to bedtime 30 minutes early. I don't do that style of it. It's art is an opportunity to teach. And for my birth, specifically as sons, the order they get, and this is part of that environment to dads world and what is it to be a man. I like connecting household work that sometimes gets a very roundly put into what women do. It should not be that way. A man should do the housework really well. Right? And I think this is what it is to be a man. It's to serve and love either. So we're going to do chores together. Me with you and we're creating this home that we all said that we love and we're going to be a part of. I love that we do family meetings in our home as well and they've been such a powerful shift in just, we're not going to talk about chores in the moment, but every Sunday night we have a check in and we share what people are grateful for or what it is that my boys feel appreciative about somebody else and then also anything they want to change in their life. So if they're not liking something about their week or whatever we can bring that. And even my four year old mum, is it the day where we get to talk about the things in our week? And it's such a really beautiful way to talk about this is how we want our family to be, how is everybody contributing to that, but not in a sense of frustration or like you said, power over, this is how you're going to do it. And one of the things my husband brought to our conversation around chores was he said, "I just remember being told to go over there and do it by myself." And he said, "I almost felt like I was just doing the chore that no one else wanted to do." So we've really brought in that idea as well and we all do it after dinner. We all sit around together and do our little bit and it becomes something that we can connect over. You know, actually there's so many, there's so much isolation and fragmentation with families. Dad goes to Eric, mom often goes to work, kids go to school, they have practices, and with screens, even when you're at home, there's screens that take so many people away. So I think it is really important, especially if your life necessitates that both parents work and kids go to school. And so you're kind of robbed of 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. That 5 to 9 is treasured, protected, and guarded time. So that's family dinners, that's family chores, that's bedtime routines that are slow and present, it's play time, because so much has been taken from your kids and we believe in families. We're all enough families, that's why we have kids. And your children want to be in a family. They don't want to be just the parents' obligation and their parents' roommate. So they may not like chores in the moment, but later they will feel the sense of belonging that came with doing family work with everybody. And you just have to do that with your kids. It's such an important message. I just want to say thank you so much, Daniel, for this conversation. I think what you share with the world is absolutely needed and so powerful and it really just brings back the family culture that we all need. Thank you again, Daniel. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. (gentle music)