Almighty Dad | A stay at home dad blog

A guest post by Dennis Yu

 

 

“So what can we do about it?”

 

Use those 7 magic words whenever you hear unproductive complaining.  A little complaining here[…]

  

            

Should I talk about it?  Probably not.  But, I’m still typing so it looks like I’m going to.  We all had role models when we were kids.  Most of mine were white men – because I’m white and that’s who I identified with.  That’s how it is and I’m not unusual.  When Jeremy Wariner won the Olympic 400 meters I know there were hoards of little white kids around the country[…]

  

There’s a Romanian born Italian kid with a, surprise, gymnast father who is claiming to be the world’s strongest 5 year old.  Judging by his photo I wouldn’t doubt it; the kid is ripped. On Italian TV he did 20 air press-ups (that’s where you do a pushup with only your hands touching the ground, no feet).  That seems like a pretty niche talent.  It also seems completely stupid and, frankly, the[…]

   

    

Table manners are a social convention that change by family, by culture and by generation.  It’s been almost 100 years since Emily Post wrote her book, Etiquette, and I’m only a little ashamed I’ve never read it.  The fact is that I care enough about manners to not want to be offensive, but not enough to become an expert on it.  There’s even an […]

      

      

Small town New Hampshire was a good place to grow up (for part of my youth).  It seemed that every other family was a young couple with kids my age.  I spent lots of time playing around the neighborhood and in my friends’ homes.  It was the sort of neighborhood where, when it was dinnertime, moms would just yell at the tops of their lungs out their front doors and expect[…]

 

 

There’s no sense in arguing about it; it’s obvious, and even the experts agree it exists.  If you have a sibling you’ve experienced it, whether to your benefit or not.  If you’re a parent of more than one child, you’ve grappled with how not to show it.  It looms in the back of all our minds.  The question is not if it’s real, it is how[…]

 

  

Unfortunately so is failure.  A single memorable failure can influence the rest of our lives, giving us the impression that we’re losers.  Ever wonder why some people constantly seem to fail at whatever they’re doing?  According to Dr. Richard Ginsburg, author of Whose Game is it, Anyway?, a lifetime of success or failure can be triggered by a single event.  We learn from failures, and we[…]

 

There is a recent study, led by psychologist Sian Beilock of the University of Chicago, which has discovered that female math teachers who are anxious about math pass on that anxiety to their female students, but not their male students.  The study was published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and it followed 17 first and second-grade teachers and their classes[…]

  

At some point in my youth my parents thought it would be a good idea to start giving me an allowance.  However, not to be too straightforward about it or anything, they threw in a twist.  The deal was this: I could have 5 dollars per week in cash or I could abstain from any dollar amount up to 5 dollars, and they would match that withholding and throw it in a[…]

 

First off, I don’t generally put much weight into anything experts say.  My experience with certain types of experts is that they get a degree for the same reason a lot of insecure kids want to become cops; they just want the authority to do and say what they were thinking of doing and saying all along, not for the sake of research[…]