My youngest daughter is 15. My girlfriend’s youngest son is also a 15 year old sophomore in high school. We are on the home stretch. Just a couple more years until we send them off into the world and start our own retirement travel adventures.
I have 3 adult children who all have kids of their own. My youngest daughter lives with her mom and her adult step brother and sister in Texas. Kelly (my girlfriend) and I still have four other teenagers (3 hers, one mine) in the house here in Arizona.
By the time all is said and done I will have had a hand in at least partially raising 10 kids. lol, it’s a wonder I have any money in my bank account.
I remember back when her mom was pregnant with my now 17 year old daughter, we were driving down the road with her son and daughter from a different marriage and she told the kids that they were going to have a sister. Her son’s response was priceless:
I thought you guys didn’t even like kids!
Ha!
I’m still deciding.
No seriously, it’s been great. I can’t imagine what life would have been like if I hadn’t gotten to be a dad. Obviously I didn’t set out to fill at least part of that roll for this many kids. But there is an upside to having 10 …
I just need one to turn out to be the kind of person who will take care of me if at some point I get too old to do it for myself anymore.
I like the odds.
I probably haven’t always been the greatest dad in the world. But all-in-all, I don’t think I’ve done bad … and I’ve certainly learned a few things along the way. Although the teens currently in the house might not 100% agree.
This isn’t an all-inclusive list, but a few things off the top of my head:
Just be there! The thing they want and need most is time and attention … also, once they’re teens, they really want to be listened to and understood.
Don’t be afraid to have rules and enforce them. But also, don’t be afraid to let them see you having fun … ideally with them!
All kids will at some point lie to you (hopefully just little white ones) and do things that you don’t want them to do. Here’s the thing, that’s okay. Making mistakes is part of learning. The goal is to raise them in such a way that their mistakes are hopefully not of the life altering variety.
If you say they get a “free pass” for telling you something hard, stick to it. One of my proudest parenting moments was when my oldest son was about 19 and had just started driving his first car. My phone rang at about 2:30am one night with him on the other end asking if I could come get him because he’d had a few drinks at a friend’s house and didn’t want to drive home buzzed. I smiled the whole way there (holy cow he listened to me!), then here’s the key: once I got there (and forever after), I didn’t say another word about it … not even about the drinking under age. If you promise them they won’t get in trouble, then spend the whole car ride lecturing them, it’s almost certain you will NEVER get that call again.
Last one for this post (I’m sure I’ll write on this topic again in the future). If don’t have kids yet, wait as long as you can to have them. I’m not sure if this is true for everybody, but for me it was significantly harder to be a “good” dad in my 20s, than it was later on in my 40s and 50s.
Well, I think that about wraps up my first post on this new Substack. I hope you found it interesting.
Do you have any good parenting stories or advice?
Til next time,
Todd
Whoa, 10 kids, that’s awesome! I’m only raising one right now, and even that feels extremely hard some days. And we’re a long way from teenagehood (my son is only two), but I’m already slightly freaking out about how I’ll handle it when we get there. I probably have a lot to learn from you. Also, “I thought you guys didn’t even like kids” was legendary. So...do you actually like them?🤣