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Stereophonic Parent-o-Vision
Plus: The rules of the hero game for men
Geoff Girvitz
March 20, 2025
Today on Dad Strength
Stereophonic Parent-o-Vision
I don’t want to blow your mind or anything but my wife and I don’t agree on every single thing when it comes to parenting. In many scenarios, one of us is stricter, one of us is more laid back. Or one of us is more risk-averse and the other one is more laissez faire. Higher standards, lower standards, and so on, and yada yada.
Although I am 100% right 100% of the time (please do not fact-check this with anyone I have ever met), I have come to view these divergences as a feature, not a bug.
What creates the magic of stereo? Two different but synchronized waves hitting your ears or eyes (stereoscopically, in this case). They’re not the same and that’s what make things feel three-dimensional. It’s through these differences that our kids get a much richer view of the world.
The rules of the hero game for men
Many kids around the age of six can’t play a game without endlessly drafting and redrafting rules as they play—rules that lead to their victory or your loss. For this reason, it will never stop being hilarious to me that guys (and by guys, I mean adult men) will meet some kind of physical goal, like running a mile in X minutes and doing Y number of pull-ups, and then declare THAT to be the standard that all men must meet. Congratulations on taking first place in the contest that you made up.
Here’s a more charitable view: These guys are just asking for compliments but don’t know how to do it very well. And maybe that’s the heart of the problem.
I recently came across this article about how men need to be heroes and I did not like it at all. Let me tell you why:
Most guys just want to do a good job. As dads, as husbands, and as men in general. They’re looking for rules and ways of being… standards to meet. Boxes to tick. This isn’t a problem; it’s the most natural thing in the world. However, there’s a bottleneck.
Like most models, Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development is a good conversation starter more than it is a universal truth. I would also not assume that people just ascend to the top of the pyramid because they are adults. We all have some remedial emotional, moral, and philosophical work to do in one way or another. Well, not you but those other guys, am I right?
The questions are where our principles come from and how we pressure-test them. Most of us will never have to run into a burning building or land a rogue airplane. That leaves us to exercise those principles in quiet ways. Here, they become recognizable for their consistency over a long period, not their intensity in a given moment. Yes, they should hold up if a hero moment should happen to arrive but they should also exist in mundane moments like… You know, regular life.
While these principles are being developed, we naturally look for guides, inspiration and influence. The question is who we can trust. Who we can listen to. That’s a big question. An important one. In the meantime, I'm going to suggest that it's not the ones who are making up the rules as they go along—and to their own advantage.
A simple rule for deadlifts
Good deadlifts begin and end with this simple rule: keep the bar as close to your centre of mass as possible. This is good general advice for any very heavy thing.
When beginning a deadlift, this means coming as close to scraping the skin off of your shins as your personal standards allow for. That’s why there’s always a bottle of baby powder lying around at powerlifting meets.
This also means bringing the bar to your hips just as aggressively as you bring your hips to the bar.
The tricky bit is preventing the bar from drifting away when you begin to lower it. Your hips move back but your knees do not bend until the bar is lowered past them. Ignore this instruction and you will find the bar riding down your quads like a ramp. Down, that is, and away from your centre of mass.
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What I’m reading/watching:
Disposable by Sarah Jones Explores How the Healthcare System Prioritizes Profit Over Human Life (Teen Vogue is absolutely killing it in the journalism department)
And I’m re-watching Andor in anticipation of the second season. It is, for my money, the best thing in the entire Star Wars franchise
A quote
“I get a sense of movement and discovery whenever I find a flaw in my thinking.”
Twin fillies born to horse mama, Kona Kai
A dad joke
“I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn’t park anywhere near the place.”
Steven Wright
Take care of yourself, man!
Geoff Girvitz
Father, founder, physical culturist
dadstrength.com