The most prevalent examples of fatherhood tend to be built around the same story. It’s one about lazy, uninvolved, and at its worst, abusive dads. These often come accompanied by complaints about men not taking on their fair share of the physical and mental load of parenting. These stories of weaponized incompetence fill pages and pages of books, magazines and social media. Rarely do these tales offer corrective advice or give solutions.

Meanwhile, the handful of positive stories about fatherhood that have made headlines in recent generations tend to center on people later discredited or found disreputable (hello, Bill Cosby!) or sports stars who are gone from home half the year. Not that you’d find even these or any stories about dads in parenting publications and websites — unless, of course, it’s related to that one day in June.

It can be quite refreshing when fathers are ignored, though. For a minute, we can at least imagine we are part of the parenting world. The quiet doesn’t last long, though. Soon, more words are written. Did you hear about fathers who go on fishing trips with the boys and — wait — they end up in a strip club? And the question that is asked, if one ever is, is this: Why are all fathers like this?

That’s where I want to push back.

Dads need support, inspiring examples

Richard Reeves of the American Institute of Boys and Men has written much about the issues our gender faces. (His Substack is fascinating. He also wrote the book Of Boys and Men which is also a great read.) One of his many concerns is the lack of environments where boys can exist and learn from each other. But not as some “old boys’ network” of the past, but as a new way forward. Somewhere young males can develop their emotional intelligence and build friendships. Sounds great, right?

Another upcoming book, BoyMom by Ruth Whippman, is another great read about the issues facing our sons. She is one of the first to actually go into the “manosphere” and talk to incels or “involuntary celibate” males. One of her major research findings is the lack of good examples of masculinity. But after reading it, I also noticed — once again — a lack of good examples of fatherhood.

Society seems primarily to want fathers who are stoic men of action. These are the dads who “man up,” ignoring their own problems while fixing the world for everyone else. Other times, it wants dads who can cook a 12-course meal, make $200,000 a year, and do so without so much as a thank you. What it doesn’t show are examples of a dad who simply exists in the same space as his children and peers, parenting the best he can without feeling like he is letting someone else down. Why? It’s not dramatic. It has no diabolical twists and turns. It’s a straightforward tale of a man who works hard to fulfill his paternal responsibilities and shows up. Every. Single. Day.

Positive fatherhood role models are out there — right out in the open — and everyone seems to miss them. For some reason, at-home dads are rarely held up as the example of what fatherhood and masculinity could be at their best. Instead of showing these fathers (and other good ones who are not at-home dads) caring for their family, giving out hugs like it’s a beer share, or spending countless nights sleeping next to a crib, we inevitably hear, “Why aren’t dads doing more?”

We are. But it’s not very dramatic and, thus, rarely headline-worthy.

The silent story of fatherhood

I recently wrote about football player Jason Kelce’s retirement announcement. In that article, I used the phrase “silent story of fatherhood.” It served as a nod to Jason’s description of his dad, Ed, who supported him every step of the way from childhood. No fanfare. No awards. No recognition. And that is fine. But this is a story I think is way more common than the clickbait articles that allegedly “speak for fathers.”

To me, this is what at-home dads are. It’s what single fathers are. It’s what married fathers who work 60 hours a week and come home and still find the energy to let a toddler crawl all over them are. None of us want condescending credit or hollow compliments. We just want to spend time with our kids, and we’d appreciate it if we got some support along the way. We would love to be part of a world that recognizes our difficulties without turning them into a competition with other parents. And, we would like to turn on our computers and TVs and see a better example of fatherhood — one that speaks more clearly and personally to our reality.

Using these fathers as springboards, we should be able to change the story of fatherhood. We can develop narratives that show what we do well, what obstacles we face, and how we try to overcome them. We will still need to call out the bad fathers who leave their kids and never come back or who refuse to change a diaper but because they don’t deserve our respect they will serve far fewer words in our story let alone headlines.

Fathers DO have their own support groups: either online or in real life. Some are even specific types of fathers: at-home dads, dads with daughters, and so on. In these places, men can come together, simply exist and support each other like Dr. Reeves recommends. We can talk about the latest sports news and, just as confidently, tell another dad, “Hey, I don’t think I’m doing so well.” It’s where we can be vulnerable and further develop our emotional intelligence, just as Ruth Whippman wishes for her sons. It’s a place where we can be whole human beings, not the fraction of ones that much of the world has taught us to be. We should hold these men up as examples of and role models of fathers working to be, if not acting like, strong, competent and caring parents. I know they are because I see them every day.

And we need to do all this in a way that does not demean women and mothers. They need to be celebrated for their sacrifices as much as we need to be recognized for ours. Parenting isn’t a competition, so we should stop treating it that way especially when we speak and write about it.

So come to a dads’ group gathering sometime. Talk to the single dad who is an expert at French braids and who can also build you a deck. Find the at-home dad who gave up his career for playdates, doctors’ appointments and volunteering behind the scenes at his child’s school plays. Listen to the divorced father who would rather have a tea party with his child than a tee time at the links.

We exist. You just have to look and listen.

Fatherhood story photo by Pavel Danilyuk via Pexels.

I’d been an at-home dad for more than six years and thought I’d seen it all. Poop explosions, playdate fiascos, cicada collecting. And through it all, the one constant has been my wife. She was always close by. Even if gone for a day at work, she’d always be home by the evening.

However, the truth is that when you’re an at-home parent or primary caregiver of any type, you will eventually have to go it alone.

Solo parenting.

Just you.

Without any adult support.

It’s sometimes planned — a business trip, a class reunion, or some other event. Sometimes it’s unplanned — an illness, a funeral, or a family crisis. So, how do you survive these moments?

First, as Douglas Adams writes so often in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Don’t panic.”

Solo parenting seems like a lot, but when this solo journey ends, you’ll be stronger and closer to your kids. At the same time, it’s worth recognizing that you can’t keep everything the same.

For example, on my first day with my wife away, I quickly realized a number of our routines didn’t work without an extra adult in the background. Take bedtime, of which we have two. Normally, one of us puts our 3-year-old daughter to bed, while the other stays up with our 6-year-old son. Once our daughter’s asleep (or at least in her room and not screaming, which — let’s face it — is all you can really wish for from a 3-year-old), the other adult puts our son to bed.

Well, obviously that wasn’t going to work. And on top of that, the “Where’s Mommy? When is Mom coming home? I WANT MOMMY!” chorus of screams was growing louder by the moment. What could I do?

Get an older kid to help

Two screamers versus me: that wasn’t working. But what if my son helped out? As I made dinner, I asked for his support. He was going to help with the dinner, and then help me put my daughter to bed. He heartily agreed, and then asked if they could record a video to their mom saying goodnight.

Send videos

When your spouse or partner is away, send them videos. My kids wanted to say good night and smile, they even sang a bit. I found that this worked far better than Zoom. We tried Zoom and it always ended in tears. Maybe with older kids it would’ve been fine, but pre-recording the kids using my phone worked like a charm. They loved smiling and singing to her, and those recordings are honestly treasured memories we’ll keep.

Keep solo parenting expectations realistic

As the time away from their mother continued, the novelty wore off for the kids. Each day started to get a bit more routine, but also a bit harder. This is where the expectations really come into play. If you usually divide chores between adults, don’t instantly try to do double the work when one is away. All you’ll do is drive yourself nuts. Similarly, recognize that the kids will complain and miss your spouse, but those whines do start to wane. For us, counting down to our pickup at the airport helped, as did pointing to all the planes in the sky. My kids asked if Mom was on every single one of them. The answer was obviously no, but they enjoyed asking anyways.

The pickup trials

The hardest part of the entire time away, for us, was the airport pickup. It was very hard, practically a disaster. We arrived late, at the wrong terminal, and couldn’t find my wife. There was no food for us or the kids. And, of course, my daughter had an accident in the car on the way there and another on the way back. My biggest advice for the pickup circus is preparation. I needed to have those kids fed before I drove up, and I needed to do a better job finding the correct terminal. And I needed to be far, far earlier. If we’d arrived earlier and brought our computer tablets, maybe the kids would’ve been fed, entertained, and accident-free. Or maybe not. I’m sure we would have still run into problems.

Well, my wife’s packing to go away on another business trip next month. I’m not nervous this time about solo parenting this time. However, I know there’s still a lot to learn.

Photo: © Snapic.PhotoProduct / Adobe Stock.

EDITOR’S NOTE: City Dads Group is working with longtime partner Dove Men+Care to create “how to” videos for the grooming products company’s “Dads Care” campaign. We will be featuring the videos and scripts our members appear in. This one features Flor Mercado of our Orlando Dads Group, with a little help from his daughter talking about co-parenting while social distancing during the pandemic.

Co-parenting can be a struggle sometimes and, let’s be honest, adding social distancing to it can bring up even greater challenges. For those unfamiliar with co-parenting, it is when a mom and a dad live in two different households and still do everything possible to take care of their child.

Take care errands when your child is away

When my daughter is with me for the week, her mom takes care of all her grocery shopping, any post office runs, doctor visits — anything that would involve her leaving the home and coming in contact with others. That way it keeps all of us safe and her out of harm’s way. Next week, I will basically do the same on my end.

Keep others away

Another precaution we take is to eliminate visits from family and friends. Although we love them and we want to see them every day and as much as possible, we have put that on pause for now. We instead utilize video calls, sometimes multiple times a day. This, again, is keep both households and ourselves as safe as possible and away from any potential threats or viruses that we may encounter.

Quarantine when necessary

Sometimes life happens and we may have to come in contact with others. In that case we do quarantine ourselves for 14 days. Even though this is outside of our routine schedule, sometimes it has to be done to ensure the safety not just of our daughter but also for us, her parents. We don’t want to be transferring things from one house to the other so a 14-day quarantine is something that we do for ourselves just to make sure.

Photo: © Satjawat / Adobe Stock.

Editor’s Note: Orlando Dads Group co-organizer Flor Mercado spoke at the recent Dad 2.0 Summit as a featured “Spotlight” reader. He read this piece advising divorced/single fathers raising children, especially daughters, to the audience in Washington, D.C. A version of this piece first appeared on his website Dad Style 99.

Getting divorced is something no one plans on when they get married. Having a child in that marriage adds a whole different level of challenges. This is a difficult step for either parent to go through. All you can do is hope to have a civil, respectful relationship between the parents and equally provide for the child.

I couldn’t find myself to be without my daughter and I couldn’t take her from her mom. If both parents are present, then that child needs both parents. Co-parenting is a lot more work, but the focus should only be on the child.

Raising a child isn’t a walk in the park. Raising a daughter, though, opens dads up to a world where we aren’t experts. It can be terrifying. You can feel lost and clueless. There are things that you need to know as a parent and also things your daughter needs to learn as she becomes independent. Here are some of those things I have found important during this journey.

Learn and teach

I knew my daughter would go through changes, as a girl, that normally her mom would help her understand and teach her right from wrong. As a single dad, I needed to learn these things. How to brush and style her hair. The importance of female hygiene. How to generally be a lady. The steps to becoming a big girl. These are things dads’ usually do not have to learn. In my case, I needed to do my part when my daughter was with me so she doesn’t only learn this in mommy’s house.

In addition, teaching her to be a problem solver helps her become independent. Now, I do have to get better at this as I’m by her side with every lost direction and every fall. Allowing her to think of how to get herself out of a problem, get herself up and brush off the dirt will help her to be more of a leader in the future. Giving her small chores will give her a sense of responsibility, making her feel like she’s a big girl and included in the household. Kids usually want to do everything and anything, so use that to your advantage. It will help you with time and help your children sharpen those skills.

Family

My daughter knows her immediate family consists of herself, her mom and her dad but the concept of an extended family is made difficult when the parents are no longer together. It’s up to mom and dad to bring this important value to their daughter’s life even though they are living separately.

I make sure I involve my family with my daughter and her mom does the same with hers. Having the support of the women in each of our families and each other’s close female friends is definitely great to have when raising your little girl. Having a role model outside of the parents is not a bad thing.

If either parent chooses to move into another serious relationship, then practicing good family morals is just as important. This new person has to care for your child the way you would. The other parent should not interfere with this relationship because that will affect your child, often negatively. As long as no parent puts their child in harm’s way, there’s no reason for the other to interfere.

Her knight in shining armor

We fathers want to be the man in our daughters’ life. It’s important to be involved, to listen, and have open communication while at the same time, letting go and letting her be independent. My daughter is 7 years old and I’m not completely letting go completely any time soon, but it’s probably a good idea to start. Giving her that trust and responsibility will help our relationship grow stronger over time. I want her to learn that she needs to be respected and deserves nothing but the best. To be honest, that’s all I really want. At the end of the day, I want her to know I will be there for her no matter what. When the conversation of “boys” comes up, she will know how she should be treated.

My journey of raising a daughter has been very eventful so far. There have been some extreme challenges, some great lessons, and some most memorable moments. What I want to say to other single dads is: keep your head held high, learn as much as you can, make time for your little ones and teach them what you learn. But most importantly, show them love in everything you do. You are the GREATEST DAD EVER! Don’t let anyone take that away from you.

Raising a daughter photo: © OscarStock / Adobe Stock.

I see what I want for my own children: always to have love in their lives … whether that be in a monogamous, lifelong relationship or whether their evolutions take them on journeys with multiple partners — or other forms I can’t even imagine.
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I have been to a couple of weddings in the past few months. As one who has been married and divorced twice, I have felt myself wince each time when the couples pledged to be together for life.

The wince registers on many levels. An abiding sense of failure on my part, particularly with my second marriage. I have two sons, now ages 10 and 12, from that marriage, and I share custody with their mother. As I watch the boys go back and forth, with their own adaptive grace and resilience, I still think this is not the life I wanted for them.  I experience a sense of failure in not giving them the family life I wanted for them and I worry, and sense, that they miss this. And yet the wince is also that kind of knee-jerk reaction one has when witnessing something painful, like a car crash, that makes them turn away cringingly.

I am not writing a piece here about the impracticality of monogamy. Rather, I am thinking about what I want to model for my sons in terms of how they seek and enjoy love throughout their lives.

I have gained much from each of my marriages. I can’t call them mistakes; and if I think rationally about them, I’m not sure it is fair to see myself or the marriages as failures.

I entered my first marriage at the age of 22 as I headed off for graduate school. It lasted eight years and ended, in my view, because as my first ex-wife and I embarked on our post-graduate lives we discovered we wanted very different things. People can change quite a bit between the ages of 22 and 30. My second marriage, which lasted 12 years, ended more messily and its end took longer. Some time ago I behaved badly. We stayed together and worked things out for several years after that, and then she decided she wanted something else. While the end was painful and difficult, I have since come to realize I wasn’t getting what I needed in the marriage either. But I can’t really call it a failure or a mistake. The two sons I had with my second wife are the loves of my life, and fatherhood brings me much joy.

Endurance race or growth experience

My point is that each of these marriages gave me much, and I am happy to have had them both as moments in my evolution. They both helped me learn and evolve, and made my life better.

A good deal of the pain and difficulty of ending these marriages, I believe, is a product of the expectations set by the institution of marriage. The ceremonial ritual of marriage asks us to make a pledge to stay together for better or worse and till death do us part, even though statistics tell us more than half of marriages these days end in divorce. I know with each marriage I came out of, my self-esteem took a big hit. I felt bad about myself on some level because I was breaking a promise. To leave a marriage was an erosion of one’s integrity, a breaking of a promise, a welching on a commitment. The judgment from others, from society at large, is clearly felt.

But what if we didn’t have all of the expectations around marriage being for life — not to mention all the legal entanglements? We might be able to weave narratives of lives of loving that more flexibly and faithfully accounted for who we are and what we need as human beings. With that evolution of ourselves anticipated, we might engage in different relationships with people as we grow, change, and seek transformative experiences and be content in our lives.

The current love of my life, who also recently divorced after 27 years of marriage, likes to quote a friend who says, “What? Is marriage supposed to be an endurance race?”

More to the point, perhaps, are the words of a friend of mine. In counseling me through my second divorce, she suggested I think about how lucky I am that I had the experience of falling in love with great intensity — and fairly good longevity — twice in my life.

These words really struck me, and they came from someone who is now in her third marriage and has a great relationship with her now adult daughter from a previous marriage. Far from judging her, I admire the heck out of her.

And when I think about her words and watch her live her own life with grace, brilliance, self-confidence, and love, I see what I want for my own children. I want them always to have love in their lives, to be in a position to give and express it and to receive and be nourished by it. I want the love they experience to fuel them in all they do, to carry them to a greater sense of fulfillment of who they are and want to be. I want for them to be, in Neil Young’s words, miners for a heart of gold. As they live out the narratives of their lives of loving, I want them to have available to them forms through which to evolve as they love, whether that be in a monogamous, life-long relationship or whether their evolutions take them on journeys with multiple partners — or other forms I can’t even imagine.

Divorced or married: They are watching, learning, evaluating

While I have gone through personal struggles in my marriages and divorces, I try to model for them how to move on and find love. I am now in a relationship in which I am experiencing a love I never thought I could know. I find myself saying to myself and to her, “So this is love? This is what love is supposed to be. I have never felt this before.”

Her children are adults and have been having, seemingly, a harder time adjusting to her after getting divorced. My children, who were 8 and 10 when I divorced their mother, have adapted rather resiliently and almost seamlessly. Perhaps, at the younger age, their sense of reality and understanding of the social forms through which we live our lives are more malleable and fluid, in the process of being formed. They do not yet have a clear sense of a “norm,” or they are getting it from me.

I know they watch me. I know they learn from me and even critically evaluate how I live. So I want to show them how to love and be loved as I try to figure it out for myself. They are part of the process of forming a new and different kind of family. We are inventing our own environment of love.

The wedding I went to the past October I attended with my current love, who is once divorced, and a friend who is once divorced and now re-married to a woman in her third marriage. The friend also had a reaction like mine to the couple’s pledge to be wed for life, which I found validating.

And yet here we were, three people finding happiness and more love as we evolve and grow through life.

It would be hard to imagine not having the experience I am having with the woman I am with now and with whom I want to spend the rest of my life (if that’s not too ironic to say in this context).

Luckily, I don’t have to imagine that scenario. Instead, I would like to leave a legacy for my sons that allows them, gives them permission, to re-imagine themselves endlessly and to move through life lovingly and with love, recognizing that giving love and being loved, in whatever form, is the way to live life with most integrity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Editor’s Note: City Dads Group is proud to occasionally feature writing from members of The Handsome Father, a support community that helps connect, prepare and inspire gay fathers. In this piece, Patrick Roth writes about letting his new husband into his daughter’s life.

I was a single parent during my daughter’s preschool years. It was a period of transition for us. We moved from the West Coast to the Midwest, contracted to build our first house and learned to live with the new dynamic of single dad and his little girl. I can remember tucking her in, reading bedtime stories and kissing her goodnight, only to wake the next morning to find a head of curly blonde hair on the pillow next to me. She would sneak in, ninja-like, in the middle of the night to crawl in bed with Daddy.

During that time, I was so focused on being a father that I didn’t give much thought to having a partner. I had learned to be content being single, was thrilled being a dad and totally absorbed in our daily routine. As these things tend to happen, I found THE guy when I wasn’t looking. He wasn’t looking for a partner either, and certainly not for an instant family, so naturally we fell for each other.

He knew I had a daughter from the beginning, but he didn’t meet her until he and I started to get close. I was very careful who I allowed in my child’s life. When they did meet, he was introduced as “Daddy’s friend.” She actually called him “Friend” for the first year or so. I knew he had potential because of how much they adored each other right away. Still, he didn’t spend the night until she asked if he wanted to come for a sleepover.

When we met, I had my own home and he had his. We were each established, stable and content with our lives. Neither of us wanted a “let’s live together” relationship and I wasn’t about to move someone in and let my daughter get attached to them unless I thought it was forever. We agreed that if we were to live together, it would only be if we decided to get married and commit our lives to each other. This was around the time that Canada legalized same-sex marriage. We married in a park in Vancouver with our adorable little flower girl at our side.

Pops enters the picture

Still, for the first few years together, she was MY daughter. While he was a fully committed and involved stepfather, all major decisions about her where mine to make. Even after she began calling him Pops, I had her long-term happiness and stability to think about. In my will, she would go and live with my mother if anything happened to me. At the time, she had known Grandma all her life, but Pops for only a couple of years. We knew that eventually it would be better for her to stay with him, but there were no set guidelines for when that would be.

After several years as a family, Pops asked to adopt her and officially be her parent. Coincidentally, the court date was set for the same day as our wedding anniversary. I remember him looking at me and saying “you realize this means you’ll have to start letting me make decisions for her too, right?” He’d tell you I still struggle with that.

We are 12 years into Pops being in our daughter’s life, more than twice as long she was alive before they met. We are completely and legally a family. He has all the same rights and responsibilities of a father as I do, but if I’m being completely honest, I will always think of her as my daughter. The time spent when it was just the two of us left a permanent and particular mark on my heart. I can never fully let go of that.

Now our family is even bigger. Pops and I jointly adopted a son last year. Even though I look back at my time as a single parent with warm memories of special times spent with Daddy’s little girl, I can’t imagine how I could have made it through the last 12 years without her Pops. I would certainly not have a son if not for him. His strength, compassion and commitment have been lifesavers for me and our daughter in so many ways.

That’s a funny thing about the human heart. No matter how full of love it is, there is always room for more. Me and my daughter became us and our daughter. Then it became us and our children.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Patrick Roth became a father in 1998. He lives in Austin with his family — husband Wade, daughter Julia and son Cephren.

I have always been struck funny by how we tend to automatically give women credit for having maternal instincts. We grant it regardless; it’s just a part of our culture.

With men, however, it’s been almost the complete opposite. We rarely credit men with paternal instinct, and it’s only after we’ve witnessed a super-human effort from the guy that we acknowledge his ability to care for his kids.

I beg to differ, and thankfully we’ve seen our cultural sentiment around paternal instincts start to change.

Dads are amazing parents. We are finally seeing our society embrace that fact … whether we are single, whether there’s also a mother, or whether we are part of a same-sex couple. The gender roles of men in the household (and our acceptance of them) have been changing dramatically over the last few years. Paternal instincts exist, too, and parenting is now less about our sexuality and more about our caregiving.

But it wasn’t always that way, and I was there back in the day.

Paternal instinct was baked into my DNA. It’s not that I longed to have kids from the day I was born, I just always saw myself as a dad. For me, it was a natural extension of who I am.

It was that paternal instinct that guided so many of my decisions as a young adult, which looking back now totally clouded other aspects of who I am.

By the time I was ready to have children, it was the early 1990s. I’d spent years following a traditional path dictated by societal expectations and driven by peer pressure. All my friends around me were getting married and having kids pretty quickly. Because I also wanted to have kids, I also got married … to a woman … because I was supposed to. That’s what men did back then, especially if they wanted to have kids at some point.

There were no other role models.

My desire to succeed and my paternal instinct were both so strong that I was willing to do anything and everything to make a traditional family work, completely ignoring any other options to the contrary.

I tried to will it to work and I tried to work it to work. But ultimately, it didn’t work. I finally had to figure out who I am and make the necessary changes to live a happy life with my family.

Years later, with two adult children, I look back upon my journey as a father and don’t know how I did it. We lived such an unconventional life, and we were very much alone in our existence. I was often the only truly active father, and I was almost always the only gay one. I was an anomaly, by far. And my kids were the only ones with a gay dad.

I don’t know how they did it.

Now, of course, times have changed so dramatically. Men of every size, shape and flavor can embrace their parental instinct to have children. We’ve accepted that men can be caregivers, and good ones at that. And dare I say that, yes, even gay men can make exceptional fathers, right alongside their other male counterparts.

We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go. There’s still prejudice and it’s still very hard to lead a life that’s labeled as “different.”

So we have to continue to talk about these issues and share our stories if we want to change the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jim Joseph has amassed many accolades through his long career in marketing. Not one is more important than the daily badge he wears with the most pride – dad. This New York father of two has written a trilogy of marketing books, and has been a regular contributor to Entrepreneur and Huffington Post. In 2015 he published the memoir Out and About Dad about his journey as a gay man and a single father at a time when neither was common or all that accepted in society.

A version of this article first appeared on The Handsome Father.

Being a long-distance parent takes the parenting difficulty level up to 11. I only recently discovered this.

My wife and I didn’t get a divorce, but I did take a job halfway across the country. My family is living back in California while I get life ready for all of us here in Oklahoma. This distance is only temporary, but I am smack in the middle of being separated from my family for five weeks.

For some of you that might not be a big deal, but for me it is heart wrenching.

I feel like half of me is still in California with them. Some of these feelings might come from my parents’ divorce when I was 12. My dad moved out and suddenly my world turned upside down. But that taught me some lessons, and I have learned others on my own these past few weeks, about what it means to be a long-distance parent.

Drop everything when your kids call

This might seem like a no-brainer but I sometimes have an internal struggle with this. If I am not diligent about this I find myself typing on my keyboard while also trying to pay attention to them. It’s easy to rationalize, but your children deserve all your attention. Every single bit of it. They love you, they miss you, and it’s not their fault you aren’t there. Unless it’s an emergency or vitally important meeting just drop everything else. Your kids are worth it.

Don’t complain or take things personally

Your partner, spouse, ex, or whoever is shouldering the lion’s share of the load with the kids has way more to deal with than you. As a long-distance parent, you don’t get to complain when your kids have had a bad day and don’t want to talk to you. You don’t get to whine when your day seems stressful. You don’t get to take it personally when your children spend the night at a friend’s house and don’t Skype you on your schedule. Whatever you are feeling, the person who is full-time with your kids has had to deal with school, sports, throw up, diapers, explaining why their dad isn’t there and little sleep with zero break. You man-up, deal with it, and do whatever you can to help the situation. Never add to the problems.

If you are divorced, never complain about your ex to the kids

I don’t care whether he or she are the worst human being alive. You are an adult. Hold your tongue and smile. If you need someone to vent to, find a friend. Any complaints in the presence of your children will always drive them away. Trust me, I know because 20 years ago I was the kid in that situation.

Do everything asked of you without question

So your spouse wants you to fill out a load of paperwork? Do it with a smile. They need you to spend your day off running errands? You ask what else you can do. If you are wondering why, see the second point above.

Work longer hours when your kids aren’t there so you can take more time away when they are

Putting in longer hours when you don’t have to sucks. Sometimes you’re tired and you can’t look at another spreadsheet, go to any more meetings, or deal with your co-worker for one minute more. However, extra time with your kids is worth every single minute of overtime you put in. Parents rarely look back at their life and say, “I wish I would have worked more and spent less time with my family.” Usually the opposite is true. Get to the office early, stay late, and when you and your children finally reunite, enjoy every second you get to spend together.

Hopefully this helps if you have to be a long-distance parent. Give it your all, make mistakes, learn from them, and lastly never end a conversation without telling each and every child that you love them like crazy and miss them with all that you are. Being a dad is a privilege. Live up to the incredible calling you have been given no matter how many miles come between you and your family.

A version of this first appeared on Lunchbox Dad.

Photo credit: Vanishing Point via photopin (license)