How Dads Can Handle Challenges In Life

As a father, your kids are going to look up to you and they’ll need you to be there to help them handle challenges in their life – it’s all part of the job. However, what about the challenges you have to handle in your own life? The thing to remember is that if you’re going to help others – including your kids – you have to help yourself first, and if you’re not sure what to do, it’s time to find out. With that in mind, keep reading to discover how dads can handle challenges in their lives. 

Talk To People 

Trying to deal with challenges all by yourself isn’t easy, and some might say it’s impossible. How can you come up with solutions when your mind is focused on the problem? How can you handle challenges when you’re worried you might fail (leading you to do nothing at all)? 

That’s why it’s so important to talk to people who can help you get a new perspective on your problems and give you the tools, advice, and guidance to help you – that help could be precisely what you need to find answers. The great thing is the people you can talk to could come from anywhere, like family and friends, colleagues, a therapist, or you might want to join a men’s group and talk to people in similar situations to yours. Whatever you do, sharing your problems makes them a lot easier to deal with. 

Focus On What You Can Control

When there’s a lot happening all around you, and it feels as though there’s too much to deal with, the best thing you can do is focus on what you can control – in that way, you’ll feel calmer, and you’ll be productive, and even if it feels as though there’s nothing you can do, there will always be something when you start to look for it.

You’ll feel so much more empowered and in control when you use this method in every situation, and you’ll be able to show your kids that even when things seem impossible, there’s always a route forward, and the key is to search for it. 

Celebrate Small Victories 

Following on from the idea above, it’s also a great idea to celebrate your small wins as you go along, even if there are losses as well. Celebrating your victories, no matter how small they might be, will be a fantastic motivator to keep going, no matter how hard or confusing things might be. 

It’s also a wonderful way to help teach your children about things like hard work, resilience, and self-care – if you’re able to see the positive in every situation and celebrate when things go right, they’ll go on to do the same as they get older, and that’s going to help them not just to do able to handle all their challenges in a good way, but to be more positive in general. Make sure your celebrations are out there for all to see if you want your kids to learn lessons as well. 

I’m Breaking-Up with Little Debbie

I did it! I made it a year without soda! It feels amazing to reach that goal and to surpass it, feels even better.

For all the life that I can remember I have always drank soda. That delicious Mountain Dew or tasty Dr. Pepper. Those were my favorites. For the longest time I have been trying to quit the sugary drink but always failed. This time around though I stuck my heels in and managed to make it a full year without soda. It feels good not wanting a soda. It’s nice not being so addicted to soda that you’re cranky when you don’t have one. It’s even better to lose all that weight from cutting out all of that sugar… wait… that didn’t happen. Which is why I am here, I am breaking-up with Little Debbie.

I regretfully did not lose any weight by cutting soda out of my diet. It’s probably because during the pandemic my relationship with Little Debbie got a little too hot and heavy, but today that all changes! If I can quit drinking soda and stay off the corn syrupy nectar, than I should be able to break up with Little Debbie as well. So that’s what I am doing today, me and Little Debbie (as well as her friends Hostess and Mrs. Freshly) are breaking up. No more snack cakes for me!!!

I will be starting a new Days Since to track my struggle with this break up. It’s a hard thing to do, but it needs to be done. Little Debbie, I’m sorry but it’s over between us!!!

Truth, Pain, and DMX

Growing up as a white kid in a predominantly white area my upbringing wasn’t as tragic as many, but through-out my teenage years the reality of life started cracking away the shell that had been built around me. Plenty of loss that left a void needing to be filled, but rather with strife, I turned to Dark Man X and many other artists just like him.

To live is to suffer. To survive, well, is to find meaning in the suffering

-DMX

My parents divorced when I was just starting my teenage years. As one of the most important developmental times in a kid’s life I was going through some deep emotional trauma with them splitting up. My father filled his void with drinking and it destroyed our family. Without guidance I turned to what I knew, and at that time in my life, that was music. Around the same time DMX was coming out of the gates swinging. There wasn’t a person that didn’t know “Y’all gonna make me lose my mind!!!”. As a teen I blasted these albums on repeat. We didn’t have iTunes, Spotify, or anything like that. It was CDs and that is exactly how I listed to X. It’s Dark and Hell is Hot and DMX’s follow up, Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood and …and Then There Was X, guided those teenage years of mine through the darkness that continued to plague my younger years.

I always felt like DMX spoke the truth no matter how harsh. He never glorified the drugs he was addicted to, just spoke to the pain and truth involved with the addiction he was faced with. While I wasn’t addicted to drugs, I was going through a pain of my parents separating, followed by my dad passing away… and as a kid, you do not exactly know how to deal with these things. DMX allowed me to let out the anguish I was facing watching my parents relationship burn to the ground. Hearing him rap with so much emotional depth, that deep voice, and the growl. I don’t why but those barks, his energy, whatever it was, it gave me the release to understand my own emotions to get me through.

DMX kept me grounded. I can only imagine what impressionable shit I could have gotten into coming out of a broken home. X allowed me to escape without hurting myself, and I can never thank him enough for that. While he isn’t the only artist that helped carry me through pain, this past week, reading and watching DMX slowly decline in health brought back a lot of these memories and made me remember how thankful I am for him and every single other artist out there, whether they know it or not, but their art is helping someone somewhere.

RIP Early Simmons aka Dark Man X

How Healthy Is Your Relationship With Your Phone?

Your smartphone is a miracle. It allows you to answer any question and settle any heated barroom debate in seconds. It allows you to turn a tedious commute into productive working time. It is your gateway to hundreds of hours of awesome online content (much of it free) so that you need never be bored or lonely again. You can even make phone calls on it (as alien a notion as that may seem to many these days, especially our kids). Yet, while we’re constantly told that we should be vigilant when keeping tabs on our kids’ use of technology, we so often neglect our own relationships with our phones. And that can be a problem. Developing young minds aren’t the only ones that can be warped by spending too much time on their phones. In fact, even the oldest and wisest of us can find ourselves getting into bad habits where our phones are concerned. 

Here are some questions all Dads should ask themselves to ensure that they have a healthy relationship with their phones. 

Are you guilty of phubbing?

Phone snubbing or “phubbing” is something that we’re very keen to clamp down on when we catch our kids doing it. But when we catch ourselves falling into the same bad habit, we need to shut it down even faster. If our kids catch us engrossed in our phones at the dinner table or in another inappropriate context, they’ll see it as a tacit sign that it’s okay, no matter what you say out loud. And this can increase their dependence on their devices and impede social development. 

How long are you spending on your phone?

Be honest now. How much time do you spend on your phone every day? Less than 5 hours? 10 hours? 15 hours? Believe it or not, the amount of time we spend on our phones isn’t that dissimilar between baby boomers, gen x, millennials and gen z with each spending around 4-6 hours a day on their phones. Still, there are many who would say that more than one or two is too many. It’s certainly worth tracking how much time you spend on your phone from one week to the next.

Do your amusements become addictions?

Our smartphones are our gateway to a treasure trove of fun games. Whether you’re playing games just for the fun of it, reconnecting with childhood classics ported over from your mobile device or even trying to make a little money through online games and casinos- take a look at this LeoVegas casino review for an example, there are all kinds of ways in which we can wile away the hours with games. But we need to be vigilant. These amusements and distractions can become addictions if we’re not careful. We need to exercise restraint and self-discipline so that they don’t impact our productivity at home and at work. 

How are you sleeping?

Finally… like tablets, laptops and TVs, smartphones emit blue light which can disrupt the brain’s production of the sleep hormone melatonin which in turn can lead to insomnia. If you’re having trouble drifting off at night, it may be a sign that you’re spending too much time with your face in a screen!