When we were kids, there was a distance. In our house, there was a reserve—perhaps emotions weren’t talked about. Perhaps vulnerability was thought to be a weakness. Our parents had trouble talking to us—about anything, but especially things that were uncomfortable, especially about their own struggles.
We can understand this now that we’re older. We can understand that they were doing the best they could, in a world where this was normal, with childhoods of their own that did not equip them to do much better.
But now that we have kids of our own, we know we need to do better. We have to close some of that emotional distance, as we said recently. We have to help equip our kids with the skills for emotional intelligence and self-expression.
In a recent profile in The Atlantic, the basketball legend Dwayne Wade is shown trying to do that with his eldest son:
He bought Zaire, then about 11, a blank notebook and told him to write down his feelings. Zaire told me, “I would leave it under his door, and then, whenever he would get back from a road trip, he would see it, open it, write his own thing, leave it back under my door.” Zaire, now 23, thinks the diary was crucial in helping him through his preteen years. “It was good,” he said, “ because I never really knew how to express [myself] by talking.
Look, very few of us are born just knowing how to do this—how to express ourselves, how to process difficult feelings. It takes work! And it’s our job as parents to do that work ourselves, and to help our children get better at it too. (It’s one of the reasons The Daily Dad book came to be—grab the ebook edition for just $2.99 in honor of the New Year.) We have to show them that it’s okay to struggle with this…it’s not okay to simply stuff feelings down or to close ourselves off.
So show them. Practice being more vulnerable yourself. Practice modeling what openness looks like. Practice something together—journaling back and forth like Wade and his son or simply finding time each day to talk and really listen to each other. There are so many ways to do this. You can show them. And in doing so, you’ll nurture growth in both their emotional lives and your own.
If you’d like to start a journaling practice of your own, we’ve recently released The Daily Dad Five Year Reflection Journal. It makes starting this practice easy, offering not only a way to reflect on the parent you aspire to be, but a way to create something extraordinary and meaningful for your children.
Each day in the journal presents a single question about parenthood or family. You’ll write a brief response in the first of five entry slots. Next year on the same date, you’ll answer the same question in the second slot. By year five, you’ll have a remarkable record of growth, change, and continuity.
The questions won’t change, but you will. Your children will. And five years from now, you’ll hold in your hands not just a journal, but a map of the journey—proof that during these overwhelming, exhausting, extraordinary years, you were present. You paid attention. You did the work.
Learn more and reserve your copy of the Daily Dad Five Year Reflection Journal today!
