Family & Fatherhood

How to be sure your daughter doesn't turn out like Lindsay Lohan

Me and the Boy

In the summer of 2005, I became the closest thing to a father I will ever be, because I loved a woman with a child

A man who chases a woman with a child is like a dog that chases a car and wins. How many times since then have I stared at the boy in dumb wonder and muttered: "Son, if your momma had just been homely, think how much easier my life would have been." The idea of having a boy had always nibbled at me. I could imagine us in a boat in the deep blue, casting into lucky water, talking about life. But the idea of a boy is one thing, while the reality is you spend your last spry years at the Sonic, stabbing at a big red button, then watching him baste the interior of your truck in root beer and barbecue sauce as he squeals, whines, pouts, and punches every button on the radio till all you can get is static and satanic howls.

Speaking in Teen

8 simple rules for communicating better with your kids

If there’s a teenager in your house, you might have noticed that grown men and 15-year-olds aren’t always in sync. The problem is not just that you’ve got antipodal interests—theirs: instant-messaging friends; yours: roads not taken—but that your minds work differently. Your brain tries to subdue anarchic feelings, while their brains urge the chaos front and center. When you add in the crossing hormonal shifts—theirs surging; yours on the ebb—oddsmakers rank fathers and teens talking right up there with Villanova taking out Georgetown in ’85.

Still, those are the bets worth winning, right? After all, any dolt can dig the company of an 8-year-old who mistakes him for a god. But it takes a man in full to court a sullen 16-year-old who appears indifferent, maybe even disdainful. Once again, I’m wiser now than I was back when my teenagers were still living down the hall. Offered in keen hindsight, here are a few thoughts that might help, whether you’re trying to savor a happy child or to steady a wobbling one.

A Dad's Guide to Anger Management

To your kids, you are a giant. Here’s how to be a gentle one.

I hug. Copiously. Extravagantly. Engulfingly. As a father of two boys, I’m an unrepentant kisser and cuddler. Eugene Levy in American Pie has ­nothing on me. You know the withholding dads who can never say “I love you”? If they’re the North Pole, I’m the equator. At 4, my eldest son sometimes responds to my expressions of affection with a smile and two words: “I know.”

So it shook me to my core when, after receiving a tongue-lashing for some fleeting transgression, Mason peered up at me from femur level with the saucer eyes he got from his mother and said, “Dad, you’re really big and scary when you yell.”

The Seven Deadly Sins

Go right ahead and commit lust and sloth. Just forswear these paternal blunders.

In the early days of Christianity, the virtue boys assembled the list of trespasses known as the Seven Deadly Sins. They claimed that lust, pride, greed, gluttony, envy, sloth, and wrath were…well, bad. Very, very bad. Not only were they wrong about lust—it’s actually a good thing—but sloth can be sweet too, especially if you own a giant flat-screen and it’s March Madness in the U.S. of A. Still, I respect anybody with the initiative to make a list, and so, I offer a father-centric twist on the roster of wrongs: the Seven Dadly Sins.