My eyes were opened to the remarkable impact that man had on my daughter’s life. I began to understand the depth of this stepfather’s love …
Stepdads: Be a Friend & Assistant
You married your spouse, not her kids. Your job is to help her, not take over her role or responsibilities with her children.
Ways to Stay Positive Through Discouragement
If you’re like many men, you love being a dad. It speaks to something deep within you. But sometimes it gets hard, and you get discouraged. Nothing seems to work with your kids, and the payoffs are few and far between.
Get Out of Your Comfort Zone and Connect with Your Kids
That word “engage” has transformed who I am as a father. I keep fighting off selfishness and the desire to go back to the Comfort Zone.
9 Ways for a Stepdad to Engage With His Family
by Ron L. Deal “How tall is it?” I ignorantly asked a Kenyan missionary. “Mount Kilimanjaro is over 19,000 feet tall,” he smiled. “It’s big!” No kidding, I thought. I could see the outline of the tallest mountain in Africa from my third-floor Nairobi apartment 130...
4 Ways Dads Can Help Hurting Kids
Sometimes life leaves emotional scars on children. How can we dads help them most effectively? A stepdad named Eric wrote to us about this. He said that the greatest difficulty he has faced with his children has been dealing with the hurt they brought with them from...
What We All Can Learn from Stepdads
Do teen stepchildren behave worse, or are stepdads more critical and less encouraging of their stepchildren? Here are three suggestions …
The Effective Stepfather: A Checklist to Live By
by Ron Deal – Stepfathering can be challenging — and perhaps that’s why many stepfathers disconnect from their stepchildren. But stepfathers can have profound and important leadership roles.
Someone Who Loves You
Children in eleven U.S. cities are giving moving tributes to their fathers as they read their prize-winning essays during Father of the Year celebration events. Each essay has a story behind it, and Haley Hubbard, a 12th grader from Tulsa, brought the entire audience to tears as she stood with her stepfather and read this essay:
Stepfathering Adolescents: It Takes Patience, Flexibility and Humor
Pre-teen and teenage kids can pose a tremendous challenge for stepfathers. As they develop their identity and self-esteem, they are very sensitive to dramatic changes in their family structure and living situations.
How to Cook a Stepfamily
Whether you realize it or not, your stepfamily has likely assumed a specific integration style. By that, I mean a set of assumptions about how your stepfamily 'ought' to come together. I like to use cooking as an analogy to identify some integration styles that stepfamilies attempt to utilize. Let’s start with the ones that generally don't work.
Stepdads: Don’t Compete With the Child’s Father
Orville is about to become a stepfather, and he wrote to me with a question: the 8-year-old son of his fiancée minds his father very well, but wreaks havoc at home. "What should I do?" Orville writes.
Categories
Welcome to the fathers.com fathering library.
On the left you will see how our blogs and articles are categorized. Choose your stage in the fathering journey under Your Kids, click on a specific situation that applies to you, or browse through the items in our hot topics and fathering fundamentals. Also, check out Tools for the Journey – short downloadable pieces with tips for specific challenges.
Fathering is a Marathon: Embrace the Journey
by Ken Canfield, Ph.D. Dad, while you’re in the middle of dashing around as a busy dad, I want to provide some perspective and an important reminder: Fathering is a marathon. Being a good dad is a distance run. It’s a long, trying journey and we must be disciplined if...
Beyond Conditional Love: Rethinking Expectations
When it comes to your kids, dad, What do you expect? We’ve often heard comments like these from grown sons and daughters: “My brother was an all-state quarterback, but I played tennis, and I never quite measured up for my dad.” “I made a B average in school, but Daddy...
Valentine’s Day Tips for Dads of Daughters – and Sons
Your Valentine’s Day shopping and planning for your wife is surely well under way, if not complete—and that’s good! Some may view this "holiday" as just another excuse for greeting card and flower companies to make money—as well as jewelry, candy and clothing...
Entering Your Child’s World: 5 Areas for Dads to Stay Connected
Dad, are you really plugged into what’s going on in your children’s lives? Do you have a good handle on what happens in their typical day, who is influencing them, and how they are processing the things they see and hear? In today’s world these can be unsettling...
Self-Disciplined Kids & the Power of Saying “No”
by Dr. Ken Canfield Dad, are you instilling in your children a strong “internal locus of control”? You’re probably thinking, What does that mean? And I get it. It’s a term that I’ve come across as a researcher from time to time through the years. Some years ago, one...
Everyday Heroes: Dads Have Superpowers!
by Donald Calkins That’s right, dad. Your children believe the world revolves around you; they see you as holding the universe in your hands. While that may be exaggerated, the truth is that most dads have extraordinary influence over their children. I remember going...
Make Every Day Count: A New Year of Fathering
Dad, what will it take to make this year the best ever for you and your kids? The media has a New Year tradition of remembering well-known people who died during the past year. A few years back, one of those people was a man who really seemed to “get it” as a father,...
16 Ideas for Father-Child Holiday Traditions
by Michelle Watson Canfield, PhD, LPC One December back in the late 60s, a father-daughter tradition began. One afternoon, my father drove my younger sister and me—seven and five at the time—two hours away in our turquoise station wagon to cut down our family...
Single Dads: Will it Really be OK this Holiday Season?
by Matt Haviland If the holiday season ushers in an assortment of emotions to most people, that’s even more true for single dads this time of year. Joy, laughter, and anticipation may be at the forefront. What about dread, anxiety, or doubt? “Yes” to all of the above,...
Ways to Give Meaningful Gifts to Your Kids
How do you decide what gifts to give your children this time of year? Maybe your family has settled into an annual routine that seems to work pretty well. Maybe the kids create lists to help you know what they want. Maybe most of the gifts have already been bought...
From Duty to Delight: Transforming Your Fatherhood
What’s the secret ingredient of good fathering? And maybe more importantly for many dads: What can you do if you never saw that kind of father as you grew up? Jeff is a committed dad who has a great perspective on fathering. He’s passionate about being the dad his two...
Time: Are You Spending or Investing?
by Ron Nichols There’s a common expression that we use all the time. It’s pretty harmless in itself, but as fathers we need to think differently with it. It’s the simple concept of spending time. We always say, “I spent a lot of time on that project,” or, “I spent 20...