Parenting styles, muscular feelings, unintentional meditations

• Fatherhood: Your primary and auxiliary parenting styles

• Exercise: Putting your feelings in your muscles

• Focus: Unintentional meditations

• A book, a quote, a dad joke

Fatherhood: Your primary and auxiliary parenting styles

On our last Dad Strength call, we started from the idea that most of us want to provide our kids with love, clear boundaries, ability-appropriate challenges. This is what the literature would call an authoritative parenting style: nurturing but with clear boundaries and plenty of two-way communication. In essence, high expectations matched with high support.

My question wasn’t whether our dads preferred the authoritative style, it was the circumstances around when the other styles tend to show up.

• Authoritative: described above

• Authoritarian: 1-way communication with strict rules, high expectations, and swift punishments

• Permissive: warm and nurturing; minimal expectations; highly flexible

• Uninvolved: minimal nurturing and communication; high independence
  

Exercise: Putting your feelings in your muscles

Big, strong men should be able to deal with big, strong feelings. It seems so straightforward yet this doesn’t happen by accident. It’s got to be an intentional act honed by repetition. It is, I would argue, one of the highest uses of a barbell or kettlebell. Train your body, yes. But train your mind and emotions at the same time.

The online environment that exists for young men asking questions about masculinity is… Well, you know. So, I wanted to get ahead of things. I pitched AskMen – a publication directed at younger men – and was, quite frankly, surprised when they said yes.

Here’s the piece on the emotional benefits of working out. Written from the heart.

https://www.askmen.com/fitness/workout/the-emotional-benefits-of-working-out.html

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Focus: Unintentional meditations

Jeff Warren lectures and presents on meditation. He recently shared an experience from a retreat where, in moving toward healthy intentions, he had to dig through all of his neuroses and worries and weird brain stuff along the way. That’s when he had a jarring realization:

“Oh, my stories are concentration objects. I’m actually meditating all the time in life; I’m just meditating on things that make me miserable! These stories keep coming around and around, and I keep reinforcing them by paying more attention to them. Welcome to the world’s worst meditation strategy — one we all do, all the time.”

The mind is messy. The idea of objectively true memories is an illusion. So, while part of you may not feel like your highest aspirations are true, they aren’t less true than any negativity kicking around in there. Warren’s advice was – much like the act of meditating – to bring your focus back. This means back to the kinds of stories you want to tell. Caring. Resilience. Belonging.

If you’ve got to focus on something, it may as well be something you choose.

What I'm reading/listening to

Types of Parenting Styles: effects on children

Big Crypto Spending

I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong

Check out our book list

Submit your own recommendations here

Quote

“When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man…"

– Bertrand Russell

Dad joke

I like waiters. They bring a lot to the table.