Foundation Father: Recent Episodes
Matt
Become a better father. A podcast about fatherhood, leadership at home, ancient wisdom, educating our children, and masculinity. Build a foundation for your great-great-grandchildren https://foundationfather.com
Fatherhood always looks to the future. You have a goal in mind for your children, and as they grow and mature and differentiate themselves, your role changes with them. Once they leave the house, you can no longer ground them. You can’t control their movie choices.
You must train them to live on their own. But you still have an important role.
Scott Beyer has eight children, ranging in age from one to twenty-one. His oldest daughter is now married. He has children at almost every stage of life, and he has a lot of them. We focus a lot of time on the teenage years because that’s what people seem to have the most anxiety about.
We cover:
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The different stages of individuation. When they are born, they don’t think they are a different person from their mother. Of course, that changes.
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Cultivating gratitude.
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How a parent’s power shifts to influence, but only if you lay the proper foundation. Will they even want to listen to you when they are older?
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The most important attributes to instill in your children before they are teenagers.
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Being at peace when your children make different decisions than you would have. If you want them to be better people than you, you hope they make some better decisions anyway.
You can find Scott on his Love Better podcast, which releases once per week. He also runs the website BibleGrad, a free website to learn the basics about the Bible.
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This is a recorded X (formerly Twitter) Space with Harrison from Save Your Sons. Harrison has started to create wholesome entertainment for his own children, and we talked about his motivations and process.
We also talked about the new streaming service preparing to launch called Sherwood Entertainment. Right now, you can get lifetime access for a one-time price of $299. However, you can get $100 off by using the code “Franklin” during checkout. (I personally know the people involved and have an affiliate relationship with them.)
Lifetime access to wholesome content, which will include classic cartoons like Mighty Mouse and Superman, along with a huge library of audiobooks.
Some of the highlights from the episode:
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We discount the role media plays in our reality. This is especially true for kids when their brains and personalities are malleable. What they watch, what they listen to, what they read will shape them for the rest of their lives. Media can give you a warped sense of what is healthy and what is good. Fathers are the first line of defense.
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Media has always been bad in some way, but it’s gotten worse. Over-stimulation, quick cuts, no time to breath. A lot of times, it seems like its a drug meant to induce ADD. And that’s before we even get to the content. Hidden messaging. Propaganda. Nowadays, it’s not even subtext. They want to beat us over the head with their vision of the world.
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The good things that media and entertainment can provide. The power of imagination. You have to be able to imagine a future and reverse engineer that future to start building it. Stories play an important role in this. You can’t just eliminate the bad. You have to provide something that is good.
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When you start creating stories, focus on creating them for one person. C.S. Lewis did this with Chronicles of Narnia. He started writing the first one for his goddaughter. Create what your children will like and what you want them to consume. You’ll naturally fill a need for others as well. It will also come across as more personal and emotionally resonant.
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It’s impossible to insulate kids from all entertainment. They will be exposed to something by friends or by grandparents or by a TV at a restaurant. Better to teach them discernment and train their filter. You can’t avoid the water. They have to be able to swim. Actively consume things with your kids and talk with them about it, especially at the end, but also in the middle. Pause it and ask questions.
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Imitation is becoming. Kids need pictures of heroes to which they can aspire. They are begging for examples. They will latch on to good examples or bad examples. There is no neutrality. Parents are the main influence and example, but there has to be some standard outside of themselves that everyone is striving for.
You can find Save Your Sons on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram.
His podcast for children, Froggy the Gator, can be found wherever you normally listen to podcasts. The most popular episodes are:
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Froggy the Gator and the Lego Firetruck Rocket Ship Rescue
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Froggy the Gator and the Superhero Surf Contest
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Froggy the Gator and the Superhero Showdown
Foundation Father is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to Foundation Father at www.foundationfather.com/subscribe
This is a recorded Twitter Space with Jim Clair. Jim blogs at jimclair.com/ and has one of those rare newsletters that I look forward to and read all the way to the end. In this episode, we talk about:
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Why do you want to improve your reading taste? Just like you don’t want to have a diet that consists mostly of candy, you want a better diet for your mind. Nothing wrong with candy, and we don’t want to look down on it, but if you want to improve your thinking, you must improve your reading habits. You are also forming the ceiling for your children’s reading habits. Books are almost magic. You can read the thoughts of someone 1000 years ago and dive into the
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What is a good book that requires a better palette? Something that has shaped how generations have thought, that has had an impact, that has stood the test of time. We speak against the relativism of the modern day. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s bad. Don’t let your terrible taste deprive you of something wonderful. There is some objectivity that we must submit to. Some books may be a slog, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. It just means you have to develop your own cognitive endurance.
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You don’t have to be intimidated by better books. A lot of the better books are accessible and readable. They didn’t have such a wide-ranging effect because they were obscure. Many were accessible to the common man. Some of Plato’s dialogues, for example, are easy to read and follow (though thinking through them is another matter). A good translation of The Odyssey is a page-turner.
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How do you improve your taste? Like training a muscle, you want to ease into it. Don’t try squatting 500 lbs when you’ve never been inside a gym. It’s ok to do a few bodyweight squats. “Read what you love until you love to read.” We talk about some of the books that gradually led us to better tastes. Both of us read Calvin and Hobbes. One of our best pieces of advice when reading fiction: enjoy it. That should go without saying, but many people read only to glean lessons and treat the story as a husk to be discarded. C.S. Lewis recommends you read one old book for every two new books you read. Which old books do you read? Swim upstream. Who do you already like reading? What are their influences? What are you personally curious about? Don’t drink from the firehose too soon. Be patient. And be prepared to spend some money.
Recommended reading from the podcast:
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An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis
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Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
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Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
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Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell
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Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
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Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
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Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
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Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
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Washington by Ron Chernow
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Some plays of Euripides
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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
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Classical English Style by Ward Farnsworth
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The Landmark Herodotus
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The Landmark Thucydides
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Rubicon by Tom Holland
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Persian Fire by Tom Holland
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Coolidge by Amity Schlaes
Foundation Father is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to Foundation Father at www.foundationfather.com/subscribe
If you are serious about finding a wife, you need to get serious about vetting the women you date. Don’t string women along with indecision. It wastes your time, and it wastes her time.
This information is worth thousands of dollars and can save you from years of heartache. Men used to get this information from their fathers and grandfathers. No more. And so our broken culture gets worse and worse.
Vetting is not just about choosing the best woman; it is about knowing what you are getting yourself into. Are you ok with the tradeoffs? Because once you marry a woman, you have made your choice, and you are responsible.
In this episode, Noah covers what you need to look for.
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Is the woman attractive? This means attractive to you. This may seem shallow at first, but it’s a deep need and is the first item for a reason. But this also means you need to work on your taste for beauty. Most men know within 10 seconds.
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Do you get along with her? If, after you the first few dates, you haven’t had any fun, there’s your answer. Stop wasting time. Beyond that, create situations that simulate real life. You can dig deeper by doing tasks together. If you get along with her while painting a house, and she doesn’t complain, that’s a huge signal. Related questions: does she follow your lead, and does she try to manipulate you?
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Does she have the domestic skills necessary to be a wife? Most women today don’t have these skills, but is she willing to learn? Does she have a teachable spirit? Buy her a cookbook and see if she’ll cook something for her family.
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Is she a conscientious woman? This is the desire to be excellent in everything you do. You can tell this by the state of her home, but if she lives with her parents, it’s harder to find this out. The Proverbs 31 woman is a high conscientious woman.
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What is her attitude towards marriage and adultery? Many will come from divorced homes, so ask her, “Why do you think your parents got divorced?” You can’t assume their attitude toward this just because they go to church.
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What is her family like? Are they going to make her a better woman? Do you want to deal with a terrible mother-in-law? The woman might be fantastic enough to do this.
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Will she make a good mother? How soft and feminine is she, because the softer she is, the better mother she will be. Is she interested in holding babies? Does she want children? If a woman says she doesn’t want children, what that really means is that she doesn’t want children with you. This question is last because to get to the truth, you must already have a trusting relationship with her.
How young should you get married? The better your family is supporting you, the earlier you should get married.
We also answer the time you need from the first date to popping the question. It’s probably shorter than you think.
You can find Noah at noahrevoy.com. Buy his book Become Immune to Manipulation.
Foundation Father is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to Foundation Father at www.foundationfather.com/subscribe
I talked with Jake Mentzel about what young men should look for in a local church. Because you should be part of a local church. Jake is a pastor at Church of the King in Evansville, IN, a father of 7, and helps run Warhorn Media.
We had some technical difficulties, so there was some awkwardness, but it was still a good discussion. We go over some of Jake’s history and how that ties into the topic. Are there strong families in the church? Does the preacher/pastor refuse to be embarrassed over the word of God?
Leave any questions you have below.
This was recorded from a Twitter Space.
Get full access to Foundation Father at www.foundationfather.com/subscribe
Your children approach you over and over to show you something. They are proud. They are excited. They want to share these emotions with you.
So get excited for them.
We have to help our kids face their fears while they are in the controlled environment of our home. We do them no favors if we let them wallow in timidity.
Evil rises and good is defeated. Epics are written in a moment, acted out with vitality, and then forgotten every single day.
You can’t let your kids live in a bubble. Eventually, it will be popped by something beyond your control and they will have to deal with the outside world. If your children need to walk around with a fainting couch, just in case they hear someone use a bad word, you have failed as a parent.
Better to introduce the outside world to them on your own terms.This takes discipline, wisdom, and patience. Not easy, but doable, as long as you don’t mind doing it imperfectly.
Being a man means doing the right thing even when you don’t feel like it. Even when you know you will suffer.
And not complaining about it.
You should be able to have a conversation with anybody. If you think you are high above a certain class of people, or that you think thoughts too grave and mighty for the peasants, you’ll come off as an insufferable boor.
“Yes” should be your default answer whenever your children ask you to do something.
As I look back on the times I have said “yes,”I realize I have never regretted saying “yes.”
Children learn to speak to themselves based on how their parents speak to them. They are mimickers.
Their thoughts will be echoes of your own words.
There is no better environment than homeschooling to tailor the education of your children to their specific needs.
But...
There might be a reason to send your boys to public school. Eventually. This has to do with the differences in how you treat boys and girls.
We are so busy doing things for our children that we risk never stopping to recognize what they are doing for us.
They are a gift.
If you are getting angry at your children, it’s your fault. Every time.
All of the time.
Based on Anthony Esolen's great book, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child.
This is part 2, going over items 6-10.
Based on Anthony Esolen's great book, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child.
This is part 1, going over items 1-5.
This is the most important thing we can learn from Solomon: his humility. Without that, we will never be able to do justice.
Every boy needs a “do or die” moment to consider himself a man. His confidence depends upon it. It doesn’t have to be drastic. It doesn’t have to be literally life or death.
But there needs to be some risk. Some serious consequences for failure.
Many fathers don’t tend to the garden of their family and then get mad when it doesn’t bear any fruit. Years of neglect, and they are surprised at the thorns and thistles that greet them.
Whenever we ask our kids a question, whenever we try to get them to open up, there are two dreaded responses:
- Silence
- “I don’t know.”
When this keeps happening, we should first check that we aren’t asking boring questions. Or that we are asking questions that deserve to be asked. They need to be worth the effort and breath we are expending.
But sometimes, kids just need a primer.
You can tell when a little boy has had no masculine influence in his life. When I take my kids to parks that contain lots of other children, these emasculated boys stick out like a tone-deaf singer in a choir.
They might as well be orphans. They are desperate for a father. They’ll take a fake one. Anything.
And this is what childhood is all about. Learning to make the right decisions when the stakes are small, the risks are minimal, and the consequences minor.
When we teach them something, we are coming from a position of experience and knowledge. It’s hard to go back to the beginner’s mind and speak from foundational principles. What words do we need to define? What concepts do we need to elaborate on?
As your children grow and you begin to give them jobs, you will quickly find yourself in several predicaments.
And you must require excellence. This episode goes over several reasons why a child might be do something with excellence and the different responses a father should have.
Never reward the first one to come yelling to you for help without having a firm understanding of the situation.
There are no easy answers here. But if both sides feel they have been listened to, things usually go better, no matter what your decision.
The book has been launched. This is a free preview.
Buy it at https://foundationfather.gumroad.com/l/hSKHP
While there are many attributes that a “good friend” will have, there is one that is critical.
A lack of envy.
Agamemnon gives a clarifying speech about so-called friends.
Gravitas means you have weight. People tend to conflate it with somberness and over-seriousness, but the men who have the most gravitas usually have an equal amount of charisma.
But true fathers have gravitas. They have a weight that attracts and influences. If you want to have influence on your children, and on others around you (including young men who are looking for good models of fatherhood), then you need to cultivate and promote your own gravitas.
Good fathers are good husbands.
How you treat your wife will be mimicked by your boys and expected by your girls.
At a minimum, this means you should stay married. It is one of the most important things you can do as a father.
Nate Dean is the co-founder of Unlimited Life Concepts. He does financial coaching and mentoring, helping people build up wealth while they start to erase their bad debt.
I consider myself pretty good with finances, but Nate has taught me some things that completely blew my mind.
- How to be your own bank
- Leveraging loans that you make to yourself
- Making every dollar that comes in earn you more money
- Grow your wealth tax-free, without an IRA
You don't want to miss this one.
*None of the info in this podcast should be considered financial advice.
You aren’t owed respect. You have to earn it.
If you want to be treated like a man, you have to act like a man. This means taking on responsibility without grumbling or complaining.
If not kept in check, envy will destroy relationships.
It can also twist a person’s affections beyond recognition, making them chase things they don’t even care about.
Here are 4 ways to kill envy.
If you have sons but only one daughter, you can inadvertently cause her to beg for your attention. Even if it is an accident, you are responsible.
Don’t start relating to your daughter as if she is one of your sons. This can lead to resentment and insecurity. Be intentional about relating to her as your daughter.
Here's how.
We get a lot of things backward. With children, we must move from strict to permissive. Not permissive to strict.
When your child becomes a teenager, you want to start giving them more freedom and more responsibility. You want them to start exercising more self-control.
A girl craves male attention and validation. She seeks it out. She desires it most from her father, and a good father will provide that attention and validation.
Let’s walk through a common scenario that plays out day after day, time and again, in homes across the world, and how it leads to broken, insecure women.
It is not enough to think about the future of your children. If you are not at least thinking about what you will leave your grandchildren, you are not thinking long-term enough.
It is a poor legacy indeed that only lasts a single generation.
Prepare your daughters to respect the strength of your sons. She should treat their potential strength as actual strength.
Don’t put your daughters in a position where they are naive about the strength of men and the respect it deserves.
Reading to your kids every night is one of the best habits to have.
Start immediately after they are born, before they can hold their head up, before they can crawl, before they can read. The earlier the better.
Tips to get started and some book recommendations.
Marriage is not choosing your wife. It's choosing your wife every day.
What your wife wants is for you to have lots of other options…and then choose her, no matter what. To choose her every day. To come home every day.
She chose you when you were still a boy.
Choose her after you have become a man.
Interview with King David - The Quit Porn Strategist.
Porn is poison. It will cause you to rot from the inside and prevent you from enjoying life to the fullest.
David has made it his mission to help people quit porn for good. He shares why porn is so addicting, why treating it like drug addiction is useful, why real-time accountability is important, and some tips on what NOT to do if you find out your sons are looking at porn.
Check out his master class on how to quit watching porn: https://gumroad.com/a/459347059/WinfK
Find him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KingDavidTKA
It’s hard to create a legacy without wealth. And by wealth, I mean valuable assets: real estate, investments, intellectual property, etc.
I wish I had discovered this secret 15 years ago.
- Grow your cash, tax-free, at a guaranteed rate
- Help pay off your bad debt while growing your pool of money
- Bypass banks to fund your big purchases (cars, mortgage down payments, etc)
- Provide emergency cash when needed
- Help fund your other investments
- Reclaim opportunity cost
- Take care of your family in the case of your untimely death
I’m pretty good with money. No credit card debt and I save up for big purchases.
Learn more about the solution here.
If you could instantly make your wife more beautiful overnight, would you do it?
It's in your power.
Love creates boundaries. It sets up exclusionary relationships.
Those you love have a claim on your time. They have a claim on your attention. They have a claim on your strength and treasure.
Are you having problems connecting with your children?
Ask them to teach you something.
If you ask them to teach you about something they love, they will not shut up about it. You will be drinking from the firehose.
You will be forced to say “no” to your children for various reasons.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t give them something else.
A family is about a shared identity. It runs on something more important than money: shared obligations and responsibilities.
Your children should learn to fulfill their obligations without expecting any kind of monetary reward. Just like their father. Just like their mother.
You can start the financial education of your children early. And the earlier the better. It doesn’t have to be elaborate.
How far our households have fallen. The word “economics” now needs the qualifier of “home” to have any semblance of its original source, despite having the meaning of “home” in the word itself!
Modern households have become places of personal fulfillment and entertainment. They used to be the core productive unit of society.
Boys should not learn how to attract women from their mother.
It’s like asking for a recipe and getting all of the measurements but with no ingredient names. Meaningless.
Fathers should take the lead on this. Which means they need to know what to teach and how to teach it.
You are a husband and a father. You have been invested with real authority and you don’t want to squander it anymore.
You want to change.
You want to lead. Like you are supposed to.
How do you do that?
Start small.
Universal rules never change. House rules can vary from house to house, from town to town.
House rules are important. They will be part of what makes your family different, what defines its culture, and what helps form a legacy.
But remember to never conflate house rules with universal rules. Equating them does not elevate your house rules. It only lessens the universal rules in the eyes of your children. It drags them down.
As the father, you are responsible for your children’s education. As you attempt to manage this responsibility, you may decide to delegate part of it to others. Teachers would fall under this umbrella. And yes, this also means public school teachers.
As much as it is in your power, do not associate anything that is Good, Beautiful, and True with negative experiences. That association can last a lifetime. Maybe for generations.
Take care of the negative associations you create. You are cultivating their affections.
Our children are forgetting the past, and so they will be susceptible to manipulation by nefarious actors who seek to rewrite the past.
One thing you should do, starting from an early age, is to saturate them in a timeline of the history of the world.
Death is an inevitable part of life.
Our children should grow up saturated in this truth.
"It is better to go to the house of mourning..."
Masculine men do not have the privilege of showing their emotions whenever it feels convenient. That is the realm of children and immature adults. Your life is not about your own personal emotional fulfillment.
Morale matters, in armies and in families. How and when you choose to show emotion will affect those under your care, whether you want it to or not.
You provide them a safe space for them to fail, so they come to no real harm and the consequences are minor…but fail they must. And there should be consequences.
Good leaders lay out their expectations clearly. In order to be a good father, you must do the same.
Don’t waffle. Don’t interject a bunch of “maybes.” Don’t qualify. Be a man and state your expectations clearly.
Having a house to clean, and that needs to be cleaned, is a blessing. A house that is always clean is just an elaborate tomb. It might look nice, but even tombstones can have a nice wreath of flowers hanging on them.
Where there are no children, the house is clean, but a legacy is passed on in the heart of a child.
There is a way to pursue masculinity that is the opposite of masculinity.
Doing the hard work of leading your wife and children is the ultimate in masculine responsibility. If you fail to do it, it doesn’t matter what you can bench or squat.
The goal was to have a wife so capable that he could put his entire trust in her. If she became industrious and diligent, and she said something in relation to her domain, he would not hesitate to obey that word.
There can be no neutrality. There is no “secular” education that refuses to impose a standard of right and wrong on its students. In order to qualify as “education”, some standard of righteousness will always be promoted.
If you send your kids to be educated by Romans, don’t be surprised when they pledge their allegiance to Caesar.
Discipline is a muscle and laziness is a drug. A good, time-boxed challenge works as both an exercise for your discipline and detox for your laziness.
It doesn't matter what type of challenge you do. Anything works. The gains you get from doing the work will bleed into other areas of your life.
If you break down the fences of patriarchy, which enclosed a wide-open space where good things could run free, you instead get chains and shackles bound to the center. Everyone is huddled together, scared to move, a hunted expression on their faces.
Nothing is free. Nothing is wild. All are in subjection to fear.
Do not trust Netflix. In fact, you shouldn’t put your trust in any of the media-entertainment complex.
Companies are beginning to get bolder in their attempts to corrupt. Parents are getting lazier in their defenses. A dangerous combination.
Learn the type of soil that makes up your children's hearts. Each is unique.
Parenting is a creative endeavor that cannot be put on auto-pilot.
Jane Austen offers some wisdom to fathers in her novel Mansfield Park.
Value virtue over the appearance of virtue.
I cover my system of writing things down on index cards and what it has to do with fatherhood.
Ryan Holiday's system: https://ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/
Men need spaces away from the feminine, and boys need that space early.
Spend time alone with your sons away from their mother and sisters.
Empathy has been weaponized by the immature.
It has become a power tool in the hands of those who want to be seen as helping victims.
But you must refuse to be tyrannized by their sensibilities.
Four tips for playing with kids and getting swept up in their imagination.
A lesson from The Story of the Treasure Seekers.
Fathers should be fluent in the language of masculinity, and boys must be able to express their masculinity in healthy ways.
What does it mean to be a man? And how does a boy know when he has become a man?
He needs a rite of passage to overcome. Masculinity must be sought out, hunted, and captured.
Have your children memorize things that are good, beautiful, and true. It doesn't matter if they understand it or not. Just get it in there. Understanding comes later. Creativity comes later.
Don't deflate the zeal of your sons as they set out to complete a task. Don't nitpick. Set the parameters and let them run wild and free.
Read anything and everything to your kids, especially poetry, and you'll find that you have improved in public speaking.
Your words should have weight to them. Treat them as if they mean something, and your children will follow that example. Do your best to keep every promise you make to them.
Men want to be used up and spend. They want to be respected for doing something useful, no matter their age. Do not let the older men in your life waste away.
Complaining and casting blame on something else is a failure of nerve. You are the captain. You are responsible.
Do something about it.
Even if your kids lie and give you a reason not to trust them...you should trust first. Love covers a multitude of sins.
When you are dealing with your children, you should encourage them to obey the spirit of the law. If you know they have tried to do that, then the letter of the law doesn’t matter so much. Give them credit.
Do not rob your children of your time, resources, and attention. They have a claim on you unique to anyone else in the universe.
Are 13% of boys really mentally dysfunctional? When it comes to boys, we are using the wrong measuring stick. Our societal OCD demands everyone fit into a single mold, but that way lies madness.
What can you do if your own boy is hard to teach?
Male friendship is one of the tragic casualties of the sexual revolution. What can we do about this?
Anthony Esolen's article: https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=18-07-021-f&__s=pdbs8icngri8ke5fgpmn
Define your own position. Lead your family. Do not cower in fear from your wife's disapproval.
And don't keep secrets.
Many would like to nitpick Samson's methods rather than fight their enemies.
Don't be like that.
A church full of eunuchs is easier to manage. This is why we have made the Bible boring and castrated.
But the Bible contains the greatest epic of all time, and it is meant to help create dangerous men.
How do we fight back against the tide of father-ridicule? What is the one thing you can do to show respect for other fathers around you?
What does it actually mean to have a quiver of arrows? What is the key blessing of adult sons?
Will the bonds they have with each other outlast your own influence? You better hope so.
A lack of playfulness in any institution almost always means systemic anxiety and emotional regression.
Why so serious?
Your children have a fragile frame. They are but dust. We should have patience and compassion, much like our Heavenly Father has for us.
Your laziness and lack of discipline should not be the reason your kids become fatherless. Fitness is important.
Just remember to lift your kids up more than you life weights.
Households were meant to be productive and children should work to help build the legacy you want to leave them.
The task of teaching our children should not be consigned to the feminine. Both boys and girls need men to look up to.