Almighty Dad | A stay at home dad blog

     
Getting engaged is nothing more than a resolution between two people to get married.  You can’t very well show up at the church one day without agreeing with your partner on a date and time, right?  So that’s what an engagement is – you agree that marriage is something you both want to do, and you set a date and time to get it done.  It’s in everybody’s best interest, at the time of engagement, to be as clear as possible.  Don’t obfuscate the point with trivialities like[…]

“Men seek retreats for themselves – in the country, by the sea, in the hills – and you yourself are particularly prone to this yearning.  But all this is quite unphilosophic, when it is open to you, at any time you want, to retreat into yourself.  No retreat offers someone more quiet and relaxation than that into his own mind, especially if he can dip into thoughts there which put him at immediate and complete ease:  and by ease I simply mean a well-ordered life.  So[…]

 
What’s the matter with in-laws?  Mine like me, and my mom, mom, and dad really like Mely, too (mom, mom isn’t a typo.  Read about that here).   The only whiff of a problem I ever had with an in-law was 6 years ago when my father in-law called me a girl.  He’s a great guy, and things have since been smoothed over, but he suffers from the typical Mexican affliction of machismo and couldn’t come to terms with the fact that Mely was out working and I[…]

  
Non conformity is one reason some kids get picked on.  Like I talked about yesterday, peer pressure causes school kids to try their best to act and look the same as one another.  The kids spend so much time worrying about looking like their neighbor that education takes a back seat.  But, the question today is, why do some kids get picked on more than others?  I might have found a partial answer.  Two psychologists, one from Cornell University and the other from Ohio State University[…]

    
Peer pressure is part of growing up and it’s hard to avoid.  While writing yesterday’s article about school supplies and excessive branding I reflected on some of the things peer pressure demanded of me as a kid.  What was cool when you were a kid?  What things, if seen with (or without), would make you either cool or a laughing stock?  In my third grade class it was all about what lunch box we carried.  I was cool because I had a Dukes of Hazzard box.  But[…]

    
A lot of people think the 7 Deadly Sins are written indelibly in the Bible.  Well they aren’t; they came from the mind of a 4th century Greek monk named Evagrius of Pontus.  Evagrius even came up with the notion of ranking the sins in order of seriousness: gluttony, fornication avarice, sadness, anger, listlessness, vainglory, and pride.  But that’s 8 sins, not 7.  The list we know today, and which is a retooling of Evagrius’ list, was helpfully whittled down to 7 and clarified by Pope Gregory I in[…]

 
Speculation abounds about what could cause ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).  New research is helping to put the pieces together.  A recent study done on 8,000 Finnish kids showed that those who are ambidextrous were at a higher risk for linguistic and attention deficit problems.  The research found that, at age 8, the ambidextrous kids in the group were twice as likely to have academic problems as their peers.  Later, by age 16, they were also “… twice as likely to have symptoms of ADHD.”  Of[…]

       
My impression about marriage is, or was, that men are the ones who ruin marriages by cheating.  That’s what the movies tell us.  So do Dr. Phill and other pop Psychology gurus.  The assumption is that women are the victims.  While men run around wrecking their marriages by being uncontrollable horn dogs.  Men are lecherous and can’t be trusted – right?  Actually it’s true.  Men do cheat a lot.  Women, however, cheat just as much, according to a report by Psychology Today magazine from February.  In an[…]

 
The familiar scene goes something like this:  “Honey!  I need to go to the store for tooth paste!  I’ll be back in a few minutes!”  I then drive a mile down the road and get our much needed toothpaste.  But, then, because I never want to go home to the kids empty handed, I buy a small toy for each of them.  Not expensive mind you.  Just a Hot Wheels car.  I arrive home with toothpaste, two Hot Wheels cars and a couple of candy bars[…]

 
Don’t get me wrong.  Friendly competition is an educational experience.  We pass our abilities to our kids by pushing them, defeating them and motivating them.  Competition, in that sense, is helpful and necessary.  There are, however, parents who compete with their kids as rivals.  They fail to recognize their role as educators, continuing, like immature monkeys, their pursuit of social promotion by knocking off rivals.  Those kinds of parents are the ones who unwittingly (or consciously) do real emotional damage to their kids.  Beating your kids with sticks is obviously[…]