“Ohhhh, turn it up! It’s Graduation Week!”

That was my message to my 4-year-old who was about to finish pre-kindergarten and to my 10-year-old who was graduating 5th grade. Yup, two in the same week!

Graduation Day will make any dad proud and, since my dad never made it to any of my graduations, it means even more to me. My dad never made it because he had to work. How many other parents are in that same situation? I understand some people can’t make it, but if you can make up for a lost day of wages and still choose your work or other things over an hour or two of showing love — that’s no bueno.

Kids can only graduate from a grade once, so missing it when you could be there is lame. It’s a proud moment that doesn’t happen every week, and you should never miss an event at which your child is the star. Pictures of this special day are cool, but being there is priceless.

Have fun with graduation

Graduation is supposed to be for the kids, but you know dads like me still have to have our own fun with it. We wake up every day and make sure our kids get to school, so we deserve this day as much as they do.

I found a deal for $5 “big heads” on Groupon and jumped on the opportunity. It was a simple and cheap process that brought us tons of fun and memories.

The look on my kids’ faces when they saw themselves as huge cardboard heads was insane. All their friends and parents smiled while asking where we got them from.

I’m a sucker for making my kids feel like stars and making sure I had fun with it helped big time.

Take lots of photos

We have all encountered rude parents who block your view and photo ops at graduation. Often they are so excited they don’t even know they are doing it. It is what it is.

If you have to get in someone’s way to take pics of your kids, do so but don’t be rude. Don’t just barrel people over. Think about what you are doing.

Whenever my kids got called for an award or even their diploma, I weaved my way to the front to take a picture. If you’re a little shy like me, you do need to get over it. If you don’t, you will end up with some wack photos.

I abide by the rule of asking for forgiveness later, not asking for permission to capture the moment. however, always make sure you don’t mess it up for someone else. Get out of the way once you have your shot.

In conclusion, graduations are special for everyone involved. Childhood goes by way too fast and you never get a replay of moments like these. Do all you can to be there, take dope pictures and have fun. You will thank yourself when you see how proud your kids are and the smiles on their faces when you hug them. That feeling is the best.

A version of this first appeared on Cool4Dads. It first ran here in 2019 and has since been updated. Photos: James Lopez family.

Back-to-school tips: we need them now more than ever, right?

COVID-19 concerns. Distance learning struggles. Hybrid-learning model hiccups. Screen time worries. Balancing working from home with a child schooling from home. It all adds up to more pressure on you and your family.

To help with some of these issues you may be encountering, City Dads Group has been working with longtime partner Dove Men+Care to create a series of “how to” videos to deal with various parenting issues. The videos are all part of the grooming products company’s 2020 “Dads Care” campaign.

Here’s some back-to-school tips you may find helpful — or at least entertaining — so your child and you can have a good time while learning during this new normal.

Reading is vital to learning. However, with electronic distractions and pandemic worries all around it can be difficult to get your children focused and into a reading routine especially at back-to-school time. Drew Bennett of our Boston Dads Group explains how he helped his kids become voracious lovers of the written word:

James Lopez of our NYC Dads Group demonstrates the fun way he has been helping his young son learn his numbers, thanks to a positive attitude and some colorful chalk:

Beating stress during back-to-school time is as important for your kids as it is for you. In this video, Devon Bandison of our NYC Dads Group helps you and your child learn how to meditate:

Healthy body, healthy mind, as they say. So while school work is important, don’t forget to let your child get away from the books from time to time to go outside for some fun and physical activity. Jason Greene of our NYC Dads Group offers some helpful tips:

Education shouldn’t be all facts and figures. For younger children especially, arts and crafts can provide fun while learning about colors, shapes, textures and much more. Graphic designer Brent Almond of our Baltimore Dads Group teach you how to get crafty with your children:

Back-to-school tips photo: © Evgeniy Kalinovskiy  / Adobe Stock.

Around the time children reach middle school (or certainly by high school), they often encounter an academic subject they do not like. Whether it’s English, history, science or math, they will find the class boring, meaningless or irrelevant to their lives — no matter how much they love learning in general. Then parents have to confront the inevitable question: “Why do we need to learn this?”

In my experience, there are several layers to answering this question. The surface, knee-jerk, I’m-very-busy response involves a stream of words like “because the school requires it / that’s the way it is / I had to do it so let’s stop whining and get to work or there will be consequences.” This is the least effective reply.

A deeper layer of understanding involves asking a few questions before responding. Are there any social, nonacademic reasons he or she does not like the class, or is it simply the subject matter? If they confirm it is only the subject matter, it might be helpful to review the “well rounded” argument. You could explain that it’s important for everyone to be exposed to diverse fields of knowledge to grow into educated, culturally literate citizens. Also, some topics might become more interesting to them later in life, and at the very least there is value in learning of their distaste for a subject early in their educational journey.

At this point, you risk an eye roll from your kid, which I know from experience. But that eye roll led to my deepest layer of responding to the “why” question: I consulted my former self. Determined to keep trying to answer the question, I recalled that I once wrote a column for my college newspaper over twenty years ago about this very topic. Because I’m a hoarder of memories, I eventually found a copy of the column.

My own voice from the past spoke to my daughters in the present

Sharing that column with my daughters was revelatory for all of us. First, the headshot proved that I did, in fact, have voluminous hair in the distant past. More importantly, it showed that when I was close to their age I empathized completely with their concern: “For a long time one of my major pet peeves about certain subjects in school was their apparent lack of meaning and value in my life.” So a frustrating history was repeating itself, but I felt that by addressing the problem, we were not destined to repeat all the frustration.

Speaking of history, my attempt at humor back then focused on the seeming triviality of learning about The War of 1812: “I once learned all about the War of 1812 and used all the best memory-retention study techniques at the time, but now I could tell you little more than the date the war occurred.”

Fortunately, however, my former self developed an answer to the why-study-this-topic question that has become food for thought for my daughters. I argued that “by achieving good grades in those classes we view as meaningless, we prove to potential employers and admissions committees that we have learned how to learn [original italics]. Attaining a good grade in a class outside our sphere of interest displays that despite our negative opinion of its value, we were still able to produce enough motivation, intellectual ability, and sheer hard work to learn the material. … In the future we will be prepared to master the skills of our careers.”

Granted, this answer contains traces of a college student’s overconfidence and overlooks the value of self-improvement. It also does not settle the issue. But my daughters read it with begrudging acceptance, and we continue to talk about the motivation issue for certain subjects. Most importantly, we have learned that their current selves and my former self have more in common than we thought. Such empathy and validation can go a long way toward helping your children find value in—or at least survive — their least favorite class.

To Whom It May Concern At My Son’s Middle School:

If you do not find my son’s name on your sixth-grade class list, it’s not for lack of trying. I attempted to register him at least two and a half times. And in two languages.

When the forms arrived in our mail this spring, I diligently verified the home address and phone numbers printed on them as instructed. They were correct. According to the phone book. That’s where I needed to check since I received the forms for someone else’s boy at a different school.

In all fairness, the school also sent me a form with the right information for my son. It was in Spanish. But that’s why we have Google Translate.

In May, I brought the requisite multiple forms of proof of residency and my sworn allegiance to the Common Core Standards to school registration day. However, I was turned away because I didn’t have his doctor-approved physical exam and immunization records yet.

“But the insurance company wouldn’t let me schedule his checkup until August,” I told the school nurse, who quickly gave me a copy of August dates when I could register him at city hall. Only two dates listed weren’t when our family was on vacation.

Months passed. The physical came and went well, outside of the pediatrician’s reminder to my son that “you don’t have to like vegetables, you just have to eat them.” On the appointed day I drove to city hall with his medical records, bilingual contact form and necessary DNA cheek swabs.

But not my driver’s license. I realized this halfway there.

After a vaguely legal U-turn and another 20 minutes, I arrived at a school registration traffic jam inside the government center lobby. It contained one set of frustrated people waiting to register their incoming kindergartners and a second, unaffiliated set of frustrated people wanting to get upstairs to testify before the zoning board against a local development plan. The air felt thick with enough negative energy to resurrect the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from “Ghostbusters.”

At risk of strangulation from those vacantly staring parents waiting for the number on their index cards to be called, I sidled up to a table and asked what I should do.

“Oh, middle school? Just give me your child’s medical information and someone will call you tomorrow,” the worker said.

“You don’t need my driver’s license? Property tax bill? I can quickly acquire blood samples, too.”

Nope, just the medical forms, she said.

I left, confused but relieved. A day passed, and then most of another before my cell phone rang.

Could I bring all the necessary ID forms to city hall tomorrow? “But we’re leaving for vacation early tomorrow. We’re not back until the day before school starts,” I said.

After nixing other options (“No, my wife can’t bring them. She is going on vacation with us, too. So is our dog.”), the official said my sister could submit the paperwork provided she brought a copy of my driver’s license. I felt confident about this because my sister is reliable. She also took enough college Spanish to translate my son’s forms.

Not to my surprise, while partaking in a late afternoon gimlet upon the beach house deck, my sister called my cell phone to say the person she turned the school registration forms into now couldn’t find any of my son’s medical information. At least the burning acid sensation rising up my gullet had a nice limey edge.

So, dear middle school officials, that’s why my son may not be on your list. However, if you don’t find him on the premises at all, he probably just took the wrong bus and instead ended up at one of the local high schools. His sister already set that precedent a few years ago.

A version of this first appeared on Always Home and Uncool.

The window of elementary school is officially closing behind our family with our youngest moving up soon. In fact, the boys are each moving up an academic notch, to middle and high school, respectively. Between them, we shall leave no path wanting wear, and little said of undergrowth. We are moving, quickly, into the big, bold future. Transition — it’s a thing.

I never really thought about life after elementary school. That is, I knew it would happen, but later rather than sooner. In theory, we’ve prepared. We have college savings plans for the boys and something growing toward retirement for my wife and me. But all of that was always far, far away, not next week.

It’s not that I’m blindsided by the existence of change, but with a combined 12 years of elementary school serving as the center of our life and routine, it has all blended with forever, and I lost track of time. After all, when one is floating across the sea eternal, it is understandable should they stop searching for land upon the horizon.

Land, ho! We’re beached.

I suppose the thing I find most surprising, is that I’m OK with it. That’s a big deal, considering I’ve made a career from melancholy, over a decade of waxing bittersweet nostalgia in real time for more parenting outlets than I care to remember. I’ve held to the early years of childhood like nothing else mattered, and, I suppose, at the time, nothing did. However, in doing so I have spent far more paragraphs pining for moments passed than pondering the escapades awaiting ahead. Fun fact: adventure is still out there.

It’s funny: the transformation of a moment, the loss of luster as first steps become a whirlwind of sprints and dance moves. While the beginning was and always will be a big deal, there is something deeply satisfying in seeing the learned become the applied, the steps into springboards. The boys can walk the walk, and now it is time to see where they are going.

There is probably a way to spin the downside. For instance, I can barely lift them, and unless we’re in the pool neither will ever again ride upon my shoulders. And, they eat everything. Constantly. To the point that we’re spending more money on groceries now than ever before. Also, there is less hand-holding and so many things that they’ve outgrown.

Yet, for all that, I see their growth as a wonderful experience: their strength of back and character, a hunger for nourishment and knowledge, and the daily reminder that hand-holding is also a thing done figuratively. The only downside is in failing to appreciate it as it happens.

One day, these moments, too, will fade into that blur behind us, the constant projection of highlights and gag reels, the montage of their youth upon the inside of our eyelids, but even then, spread apart as we may be, there will be new scenes to cherish. I can only hope the boys share them on Facebook because I would never want to miss them.

When was the last time you celebrated one of your children’s moral milestones? If you’re like me, the answer is probably not nearly as often as you have marked their physical milestones.

In her recent book, Unselfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in our All-About-Me World, Michele Borba laments this phenomenon. “Empathy is widely underestimated by moms and dads, as well as the general public … in trying to make our children feel good, we tend to focus on their cognitive, social, and physical feats,” she writes. “Overlooked are their moral accomplishments like compassion, generosity, thoughtfulness, and concern for others.”

She explains that one way a child’s empathy, or “moral imagination,” can grow is via reading. I can attest to this claim, for when I was 16 years old, my father strongly suggested I read John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me. Though my family is white, my father helped fight discriminatory housing during the civil rights movement, so we regularly talked about social issues like racism as I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s.

John Howard Griffin was a white man who had his skin medically tinted so he could “pass” for black as part of an experiment in the late 1950s. Published in 1961, Black Like Me recounts Griffin’s six-week journey as a black man on a Greyhound bus traveling through the racially segregated South. The indignities he detailed had a striking impact on readers of all ethnicities, causing a surge of empathy and adding fuel to the civil rights movement.

Reading Black Like Me had a large impact on me just as it does most readers. I did not realize at the time that people could still be treated so unjustly and that literature could have such a moral component. From that point on I gravitated to African-American literature as an English major in college, culminating in a dissertation in graduate school that focused on traumatic novels about American slavery and its aftermath.

Like my father decades ago, I recently encouraged my own 16-year-old daughter to read Black Like Me. I wanted to raise her awareness of racial issues that continue today. As she explained to me, “It made some things come to life for me that I didn’t realize.” It has also informed her reading of Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, which she is now studying in school and which I used to teach as a college professor. The combination of these powerful books has enabled our family to experience a generational cycle of awareness of black history, at least in part.

For my daughter, the most poignant line from Beloved is on the last page, when the narrator paradoxically states: “This is not a story to pass on.” We talked about how that statement has several meanings, one of which is that the horrible injustices of slavery should never happen again. But another meaning is that the story of slavery is not one to “pass” on, as in “I’ll pass on listening — or decline to listen — to that story.”

Black History Month reading for younger children

Black Like Me and Beloved are more appropriate for teen readers, especially during Black History Month. For younger children, other empathy-expanding recommendations might include Henry’s Freedom Box by Ellen Levine (ages 6 and up), Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans by Kadir Nelson (ages 8 and up), and Nightjohn by Gary Paulsen (ages 12 and up). Parents could also check their local libraries for additional age-appropriate suggestions.

Of course, while reading about racism helps build empathy, it is not the same as doing something more concrete to fight it. That’s why my wife and I were proud of our daughter when she recently became one of her high school’s Diversity Fellows, a group that explores ways to achieve a more just and respectful society. We made sure to celebrate her moral milestone, and quickly shared the news with her grandfather.