After years of post-divorce bouncing back and forth between two households, it’s very interesting to see how each of my children has adapted and learned how to cope with the inevitable disruption in different ways. None have made friends in the local neighborhood, for example, but each has their own strategy too. My oldest, who is 17 and is just a month or two away from being able to drive solo totes school books back…Read More
A friend of mine is going through the stages of a contentious divorce and sent me a copy of the draft parenting plan that he’s sent to his soon-to-be-ex-wife. I read through it and there were two hiccups that struck me, one a bit amusing and the other just a minefield if things are going to remain difficult once they’re divorced. First, the parenting plan proposal says this: Where exactly are the children between 9am…Read More
I attended a talk from the Colorado Office of Suicide Prevention at the Stay At Home Dads Conference in Denver and was shocked by the suicide stats for fathers. I wrote about it a while back – Men and Suicide –but after trying for months, finally got a chance to interview Dr. Rich Mahogany. Hold on, though: Rich is a fake therapist, the creation of the Man Therapy partners, but with its generous dose of…Read More
I’m working on an article for Parents.com about being a single father and have to admit, I’ve been doing this for so many years I kind of forget the initial panic and struggles of those first few months, realizing that I couldn’t tag-team someone else into play if I felt overwhelmed or exhausted or just had no energy. It’s a jarring transition for both parents, I think, though obviously the parent who spends less time…Read More
It’s not really something I expected to be talking about but the topic keeps coming up: what is marriage going to look like in 10, 20, 50 years? I tend to think about things both as they happen and afterwards, mulling on how events transpired, what I could have done differently to change or improve the outcome and how I could have reacted or framed things in a better, more positive or even just more…Read More
A colleague alerted me to a new survey published by Citibank entitled “Today’s Professional Woman Report“, the third time that they, in cooperation with LinkedIn, have surveyed professional women to identify trends and traits. And there are some very interesting trends… What most struck me the most is that according to their results, men are now placing more emphasis on marriage and children than women are in this survey. 79% of men equate “having it…Read More
I was optimistic a few weeks ago when I wrote about my daughter’s new found kitten Kiwi, and how I didn’t even want to meet him because I didn’t really want him to be part of my household, having just said goodbye to my cat of many years, Newton, at the beginning of this year. Yeah. I’m so tough around incredibly cute little creatures. Surprise. I finally met Kiwi and he’s just a lovely little…Read More
I’m at the At-Home Dads Convention here in Denver (darn convenient, being just 30min drive from my house, quite thoughtful of them to plan it here) and the opening speaker is Jarrod Hindman from the Colorado Department of Public Health. His talk is about the men’s suicide prevention Web site called ManTherapy.com and if you haven’t checked it out, you should. Why? Because the statistics about suicide are alarming. In 2012 alone here in the…Read More
As a father’s rights advocate and someone who has been through divorce and now is flying solo raising my kids as a single dad, I end up talking with a lot of men who are going through similar experiences, suddenly finding themselves not just being the father but without the benefit of an often more experienced mom in the picture to help. It’s daunting. We live in a culture that, like most cultures before us,…Read More
I was talking with a gal earlier this afternoon about single parenting and the involvement of both parents after a divorce. In my case, my ex and I are both quite involved in our children’s lives and regularly communicate about medical, sports, school and many other issues. For me, that’s the norm. Other single parents I know have a different arrangement, however, where one parent is the decision maker, while the other parent occasionally adds…Read More
One of the most difficult and hurtful things about the process of divorce is one adult finding out that the “family home” is no longer theirs and that they are no longer welcome. Whether they built it brick-by-brick, were in charge of remodeling it to fit the needs of the family, or painted all the art that’s hanging on the walls, when a divorce settles, 99% of the time the family home goes to one…Read More
I attended my daughter’s cello recital last week and it was delightful. It’s wonderful to see all of these children have the courage to go in front of a room and play solo pieces, whether they were 45 seconds long or complicated five minute pieces (depending on their experience level). The piano was accompanying most of them, but there was a duet and even a quartet piece for cello. Lovely, and the little ones of…Read More
I know a lot of men who have gone through divorce, and while sometimes it’s a smooth transition with little argument and hassle, other times it can be an extraordinarily difficult journey with contentious lawyers and a hostile legal system that remains biased against fathers. When I heard from Mark about their new Men’s Divorce web site, I was curious to learn more about the resource they were building, a question that spawned the following…Read More
This morning I had the privilege of being on my friend Bruce Sallan’s radio program A Dad’s Point of View, talking about tech and being a single dad, among other topics. You can listen to our ten minute segment, if you’d like: Or you can listen to the entire program (I’m the fourth ten minute segment) here: A Dad’s Point of View. Turns out that we scheduled this radio appearance to coincide with a live…Read More
I was approached by the New York Times about a week ago asking if I’d like to contribute a short essay to their Room for Debate section for Father’s Day, the topic being described as: “With all of the endless discussion about the Mommy Wars this spring, dads were pretty much left out of the discussion, which reveals that Attachment Parenting is really just Intensive Mothering. But with the approaching of Father’s Day, all the…Read More
My ex, her fiancée and I attended a meeting at school with a counselor, a check-in meeting about how my son is doing in school. He’s had a rather rough journey, as a lot of boys do in an era when school is more about cerebral activities and passive cooperation than actively running around, having lots of physical activities and just plain doing stuff. You can tell what my philosophy of raising boys is in…Read More
I seem to have opened the floodgates on letters from people, which is good. I do have to disclaim that I’m just a regular guy with no special training in family therapy, psychology or anything to do with the legal, psychological or emotional trauma of divorce. And I don’t — yet — play a divorce therapist on TV either. So here’s the latest letter I got: I’m about to become a divorced dad. I don’t…Read More
Ah jeez, I hate getting this kind of email from a reader: My wife and I are currently going through a divorce. We are committed to easing our children’s transition during this otherwise tumultuous time. At present, our children do not know that this is occurring. Do you have any recommendations on how to tell the children? Is there any books you have read that can approach this subject with the children in a story…Read More
I’m really saddened to learn that a good friend of mine is poised to go through a very similar journey that I’ve been on for the last few years and that — more importantly — my children have been on, a journey that started with all too much tension and too little effective, honest and humble communication, detoured through lawyers and endless arguments at $250/hr, and ended up with a contentious divorce. Years later it’s…Read More
This is an article I wrote for a divorce recovery book. I hope you find it useful… You already know about splitting up the checking account, figuring out what happens to the bank loans and your cars, and even have started to discuss who gets the family dog and that great bunk bed that your daughter’s loved forever but you want to keep, but in the 21st Century, a lot of us have an entire…Read More
I walked into a rarely visited cafe this afternoon, wasting 30 minutes prior to a meeting at school, and saw my 7yo sitting at a table with her Mom’s boyfriend. The two of them were sitting and doodling on a newspaper cover, eating brownies and a bagel with cream cheese while sipping on large hot chocolates (yeah, nice dinner, eh?) My initial reaction? The same as my reaction ten minutes later: completely neutral. I’m not…Read More