I take my 3-year old daughter out on dates every couple of weeks. She picks the sort of restaurant we would visit, the activities we engage in, what we have for dessert, and what kind of music we listen to while driving. She dresses up and we spent the evening together. My daughter and I go on dates regularly. We watch movies together, we go for walks, we have tea parties, we talk, and spend time together doing all sorts of other father-daughter activities. She asks me often to take her out and spend time with her because she enjoys it. I enjoy it, but I have another objective. I am teaching her about what a relationship with men ought to look like. I touched on this previously in the first Raising a Real World Superhero article, but it’s important enough that it merits deeper consideration. For starters, it’s scriptural. Proverbs 22:6 offers the best principle for this practice:
Train up a child in the way he should go, Even when he is old he will not depart from it.
By teaching my daughter what she ought to look for in a male relationship, she will learn how a man ought to treat her. Spending time modeling relationship is far more effective than simply telling her how a man ought to treat her, because it is training her. The time a father spends with his daughter trains her in the first lessons she will learn about men and what male relationships ought to look like. I want to do the best I can to teach her what loving, attentive, and supportive relationships with a Christlike man ought to look like. I want her to learn that a man ought to cherish her and treat her like a princess, who is a child of God.
In the last 3 years, I have learned, through effort and focus, how to make my daughter feel like the treasure that God sees her as. I am writing to share some of the basic “dates” I go on with my little girl, with the hopes that they will inspire other dads to engage their little girls and teach them how a man of God ought to treat them.
1. Dinner and a day together: 
When Abbey and I go on dates, she gets to pick everything we do. This usually begins with her picking what dinner will be. For some reason, she has decided that Chinese food and eating with sticks is the best thing in the world. A year ago, she loved eating at McDonalds and playing in the play land. I don’t like McDonalds, but I eat where she wants because I want her to know it’s special. We eat and talk. She tells me stories. I ask her questions. She gets my full attention. When given a choice as to what she wants to do after eating out, sometimes she wants to go to the comic book store, or to the book store, or to buy bows at the girl stuff store. She picks and she gets my attention the whole time. Please note that I don’t buy her everything she wants, but she does get my full attention.
2. Tea parties: I am not a fan of tea parties, but we do them regularly. Stuffed toys usually attend. There is usually cookies and snacks. We drink tea, eat cookies, pretend, play, and talk. Usually setting up the tea party is as fun for her as having the party. Sometimes I read her stories. Most tea parties last about an hour, and she loves them.
3. Camping: Camping is a bigger production, but is a huge deal to her. She is only 3, so camping isn’t usually as much an outdoor adventure, as it is an opportunity to stay up too late, eat junk food, watch cartoons, look at stars, and sleep in a tent. We sometimes just camp in the yard, while other times we camp in the mountains or parks. It doesn’t matter to her. Camping with dad is an adventure. When her little brother gets older, she won’t get to do this alone anymore. For now, it’s a favorite of hers.
4. Movie Night: This week, my wife had an evening out with
some gals from church. This left me home alone with the kids. We rented a cartoon movie and I let her pick dinner. She decided we would eat popcorn for dinner, drink soda, and eat cookie dough for dessert. We talked about the cartoon, she hid under the blanket at scary parts, and she told me she loved the whole evening.
5. The Park: An afternoon at the park is one of her favorite things to do. I push her on the swings, I talk to her, we chase each other around, and she gets my full attention for the duration of our time there. Sometimes we go for ice cream or get fruit snacks at the grocery store. Sometimes we go for walks. The important thing is spending time.
After 16 years of marriage, my wife and I have noticed that it has become easy to fall into a rut with the time we spend together. For example, since the kids came along we have had begun doing the “grocery store date”, which involved going out for dinner, then going grocery shopping. This date pattern came about for fairly obvious reasons. It’s easier to go to the grocery store without the kids. If we already have a babysitter, why not have an easy night of buying groceries? On the plus side, it meets the basic requirement of spending time alone together. The problem is that this outing isn’t particularly exciting and is really just doing home maintenance without the kids along. Dating your spouse should be about enjoying each other’s company and spending quality time together, unfortunately its easy for it to devolve into an obligation or routine.Because of this, we have put effort into coming up with new and novel activities to engage in on date nights that shift us out of our rut. Here are a few of our favorites:
reflect something that you think your spouse might find interesting, something that is a sort of project or activity work on together, or anything else that might spark conversation. Afterward we spend time talking about why we picked the book we picked and our reactions to the book we received. The important part of this game is spending time talking about it afterward and sharing reasons for picking the book. It can be adapted to other settings if you aren’t a reader. The game can be played in a mall or almost anywhere else.
Discipline is best when it instructs. One of the clearest memories I have of being disciplined as a child was that it was always followed by my parents sitting with me and explaining the purpose for the correction and basic instruction on how to behave.
Consistency is key. Children are keenly aware of how you are going to respond. They know if they can get away with things because you aren’t going to respond. Further, sending mixed messages will only confuse them. There is a degree to which discipline is classical conditioning. Inconsistency will undermine the conditioning component. If you make a threat of punishment and don’t follow through, you will have more trouble in the future. If parents are openly divided on discipline issues, the child will recognize it and figure out how to work the division to their advantage. It’s necessary to figure out your approach and stick with it.
It’s Sunday afternoon. My wife and daughter are at a baby shower. My son is taking his standard, extremely long, post-church nap. My standard Sunday afternoon counseling appointments all cancelled for the day. No family, no work, no honey-do projects. I don’t have anything I HAVE to do. I am in the strange position of having no seriously pressing obligations, apart from some writing I’d like to get done, which I could reasonably do tomorrow. Because of the odd demands of being a small town, small church pastor I work most days. When I am not working, I am being a dad or a husband. I am not complaining about these things. I love them. The real trick is that I don’t often take time to rest because I am so busy being busy.
Rest is more than shutting off: Rest isn’t just napping in the hammock, though that’s one of my favorite leisure activities. Rest includes, among other things, mindless detached time, investment in relationship for the purpose of refilling personally, time spent with God for the purpose of maintaining spiritual health and peace, and times of reflection and quiet. Each of these components has a place in rest, though for many the detachment of TV time has become the sole focus or rest.
We didn’t live near family, weren’t comfortable with leaving our baby with anyone, were constantly tired from late night feedings, and were so busy with family and work obligations that we just didn’t go out. We didn’t have time, lacked opportunities, and really lacked the energy necessary to go anywhere. As time went by, we began to go out together again, until our second baby came along. This time, as our time together began to wane, we both noticed the trend and agreed to make changes. Spending time together -and alone- is important to the health of our relationship in the long term. It’s a basic maintenance practice for a healthy relationship. Without time spent focusing on each other, the relationship can eventually grow stale and cold.
The need for intentional planning: The big key to ongoing, active dating life after kids is intentionality. When we don’t have a pattern to follow, we tend to let it fall to the wayside, behind parenting, work, or church obligations. Our solution was to agree that we needed dedicated one-on-one time at least once a week. We also agreed that this time should not consist primarily of engaging in life maintenance activities, though it is tempting to go grocery shopping without the kids along. We agreed that we would take turns planning the weekly date night. I plan one week, she plans the next. This way we are given a little time between having to put a bunch of effort into organizing and plan an evening together. In addition, planning the date is a simple way of serving each other.
The Spirit, Rather than the Letter: I wish I could say we are consistent, or that every date night is the stuff of fairy tales. In reality, we are doing our best for each other. It’s difficult to invest in your marriage when there is so much other stuff that is demanding time, energy, and money. The dividends paid out on this investment is worth the effort. In the end, we try to approach the whole thing with grace and commitment. Sometimes, I plan more than one week in a row. Sometimes I’m too busy or tired to do much of anything. We don’t judge, we work together as a team to improve our relationship. Marriage is a team effort.
Comments ranged from dismay over the loss of family to frustration over newfound awkwardness in parental relationships to consternation at their parents’ inability to just stop being so cruel to each other. It was seldom the case that a class went without a child breaking down and crying. Interestingly, I never once saw any of the children tease each other over tears shed in that setting. Except in instances of an absent, addicted, or exceptionally abusive parent, I never heard a child say that the divorce was a welcome change.
his is just one of several mantras she recites when facing difficult situations. Another one that is fairly common is: “Daddy will keep me safe.” I typically hear this comment when she has bad dreams or is afraid of the dark. She believes, with a kind of faith that children are amazingly capable of, that her dad can do anything. This is not unusual. Most children grow to believe that their dads are a sort of superhero. As they grow older and wiser, they come to recognize that dad isn’t a sort of superman, but for now we are both enjoying this phase of her relational development. She feels comfort at the reassurance that I can take care of her. I love having my child look at me as a hero of sorts, and hope to live up to that perception as much as possible. Even more so, I hope to raise kids who my grandkids can look at with awe as children. Raising children who can be superheroes to their own children is a product of intentional effort and an awareness of a basic reality regarding God’s design for the family.
while the second deals with interacting with men. The first law in each table is important and offers a glimpse into God’s design for the world. The first law is: Do not have any other gods. Basically, the command is to honor God. The first law in the second table is somewhat similar: Honor your mother and father. The two laws strongly parallel in concept because parents have a special role in the lives of their children. Specifically, parents stand in the place of God in the lives of their children for the first several years until children reach the point of being able to understand God. Perhaps the English novelist, William Thackeray, put it best when he wrote: “Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of little children.” Parents shoulder an enormous responsibility by standing in the position they stand in, because they stand as representatives of God. This is a bit of a double-edged sword. A strong, loving parent can provide their child with an amazing first impression of God’s identity. The downside is that an absent, abusive, or deeply flawed parent can give children an inaccurate perspective on who God is. This is most easily seen with abusive or absent fathers, whose children often grow up with a sense of God being distant or perpetually angry and out to get them. Mind you, this is not a hard and fast rule for all people. Rather, it is an observable trend.
I pray that they become people of integrity – who courageously live their lives based on their beliefs. I want my son and daughter to do great things and live their lives in ways that inspire others to greatness. Truth be told, I doubt my kids will ever fight villains, but as we grow up and put more simplified versions of the world away, we come to recognize that real heroes often do far more ordinary things – everyday – for the duration of their lives.
Patching Cracks 