Shaun (00:01.986)
Welcome back to Raising Men. I'm your host, Sean Dawson. Now, I started this show with kind of an uncomfortable truth. I've talked about this before, which is that our sons aren't just watching us, they're becoming who we are. Now, if you've listened to episode zero, you know that I have a core belief that raising men starts with raising ourselves.

that we need to model healthy masculinity in order to cultivate it in our sons. And in order to do that, we need to step out of the autopilot parenting mode where we're just gonna parrot what has been given to us. And we just repeat the patterns that we were given. And then we need to move into kind of a life of purpose and of strength and of kindness and of heart.

So today we're gonna do a Q &A episode. Now I've gone back through the archives to look at the collective wisdom of the guests who have joined me on this journey so far. We're gonna tackle two questions that represent the refining fire of fatherhood. One is about the balance between strength and warmth, and the other is about the secret guilt that many new fathers carry.

We often talk here about how fatherhood is a journey, and it's a journey of refinement. As Caleb Scott said in our very first episode, you are not built for fatherhood, but you are refined through it. Today, we are going to look at how that refinement happens in the moments that we feel most certain. Now our first question,

comes from a dad who's wrestling with the ghost of old school parenting. He writes, want my son to be resilient. I want him to be able to take a hit from life and keep going. But I don't want to be a cold dad like mine was. How do I provide comfort when he's hurting without making him soft? Now, this kind of gets to the heart of the lone wolf myth.

Shaun (02:30.21)
that we've been deconstructing on the show from the very beginning. We've been taught through our culture that resilience is synonymous with hardness or silence or unfeeling. But if we look at the wisdom from our guests, we see a completely different picture. So let's look at what Aaron Blaine, a retired Green Beret, shared.

in episode 15. Now, I'm having a hard time coming up with a more manly kind of profession than Green Beret. And you'd think that a Special Forces veteran would be all about toughness. But if you met Aaron, his definition of strength is rooted in calmness. He told us that kids mirror our emotions and a calm home

starts with calm parents. Aaron's take is that resilience isn't built through coldness, it's built through discipline with purpose. He argues that boundaries are love, and when you provide comfort to a hurting son, you aren't softening him. You are being the calm in the storm. You're being the village that he can return to after his foray out into the wild.

That doesn't exist and he has no village. And he doesn't have a place to restore and repair. It would be like doing bench presses and just doing them constantly where you're breaking down your muscles but the muscles never get rest. They never have time to rebuild. And you're showing him how in the world he has a place that is stable enough for him to recover. So resilience isn't the absence of pain, it is the presence.

of a safe place to process that pain so that he can get back into the fight. In episode six, Dr. Michelle Watson Canfield actually enhanced my castle metaphor into one of the most powerful metaphors that we end up using on the show. She added a drawbridge to the castle and she explained that the heart level connection is the drawbridge to your son's life.

Shaun (04:55.657)
If you are a cold dad, that drawbridge stays up and he doesn't have the ability, your son doesn't have the ability to explore outside the castle walls and come back to a safe space. You might be able to shout commands from the outside, but you have no influence over his castle, his core, his heart. Michelle's research and experience show that presence

is what transforms kids, not perfection. And this is a very, very common sentiment across all of our guests is that presence is the most important thing. And it's important that we know what presence is. Presence is the absence of distractions to me. And it's an absence of performance. It's an absence of worrying about the future.

being actually there. And this is something that I struggle mildly with, and I know a lot of other people do too. When you provide comfort to your son, you're lowering that drawbridge. You're lowering yours and you're lowering his. You are earning the right to lead him. Resilience is a team sport. A boy who knows that his dad has his back is much more likely to take risks.

he's much more likely to bounce back from failure than a boy who has to suffer in silence or who feels like he has to earn his father's respect. Damien Gomes in episode 11 talked about how we can help our sons build their operating systems. He noted that he'd rather his sons fail at home with us around to help them than discover that they don't have the skills when they need to use them.

So if you're cold when your son fails, you teach him to hide his mistakes. If you're comforting and supportive, meaning that you help him analyze what happened and how to fix it, you are teaching him the mechanics of resilience. You're giving him the tools to redo the situation and you're giving him comfort with failure. He doesn't have to perform, he doesn't have to pretend he's good at things. This is something I struggle with and I've talked about this a lot.

Shaun (07:20.909)
in the episodes of the show is I really struggle with my son playing basketball because he wants to be great at basketball. He wants to be the greatest of all time. He wants to be Michael Jordan, but he doesn't know what it takes to do that. He just wants to snap his fingers and have that magically be the case. And he's sort of learned that he could just feel like it's true even if it might not be true. And even if he doesn't have a way of knowing it's true. And so he's not motivated to put in the work.

And it's frustrating to me because I want that for him, and I want that for him for his own sake, but a lot of the reason I want that for him is because I want it for my own ego too. I want a son who's good at sports. I want a son who's good at basketball. And it's very, very difficult for me to tease those apart and to do the right healthy thing. So this is something that I really struggle with. Our second question.

is I'm a new dad. My son is six weeks old. Everyone told me I'd feel this instant life changing connection moment, the moment I saw him. But honestly, I just feel tired, overwhelmed and detached. And now I feel guilty, like I'm failing already. Is something wrong with me? Obviously this person has been listening to the show. Brother, thank you for saying out loud.

What so many men feel in the dark. This is exactly the way I felt. Part of the reason, my motivation of even starting this show is the fact that I felt that way and then felt ashamed and didn't feel like I could talk about it. And when I finally opened up about it, it was like, it was a shot in the arm. was exhilarating because I realized everybody feels this way. And the movie moment and the movie version of Fatherhood, the lighting being perfect and the...

the voice of the angels coming down, the music swelling, and suddenly you're a new man and you're madly in love with your baby. That's rare. And most of us that dude to dad transition as we discussed on the show is messy and it's a grinding process. And so, you know, let's go back to Caleb Scott in episode one. Caleb talked about navigating the challenges in parenting requiring support and community.

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He's clear, you're not born a dad and you're not. You are a find into being a dad and that is appropriate and that is good and it's hard and it gets easier over time. That detachment that you're feeling, it's not failure. It's not even a sign of failure. It's probably a sign of your nervous system being overtaxed. It's perfectly normal. From my own experience, I didn't have that connection with my boy until I started teaching him things.

As Johnny Miller taught us in episode 17, our nervous system is the upstream lens through which we see our lives. And so if you're operating on two hours of sleep and this weight of this new responsibility, you're just trying to keep this thing alive. Your lens is pretty foggy and your body is in survival mode and it's hard to feel any kind of spiritual connection when your amygdala is screaming for rest. You're in Conan brain and you're just reacting and that's fine and it's normal.

and you're gonna have to build those muscles. There's nothing wrong with that. Sean Harvey in episode eight gave us some really, really honest advice. He said that you can't quit being a dad. And this is right. You just can't stop. It never ends. And so you have to keep trying. It is an absolute marathon where there is no finish and you're not allowed to stop. But it does get easier with time. The bond isn't a flash fire for most men. It's a slow,

burn. It's built in these small, unglamorous moments. I tell the story about when it first kind of twinged for me is I was changing the boys diaper and I held my fingers out to for him and he and he reached up and he grasped him and he pulled himself up and I felt like I had imparted a capability, a skill, a wisdom to him in that moment. And that's when it clicked for me what my role in his life was, and how I would feel that connection. And I definitely do.

Simon Rinne talked about the importance of mindfulness, bringing these subconscious feelings of guilt into the conscious mind so that we can deal with them. If you're not willing to bring them into your conscious mind, you're just suppressing them, they're gonna leak out in unhealthy ways. And that guilt that you're feeling is actually a good sign. It's a sign, it's not a sign of failure, it's a sign that you actually care. If you didn't care about being a good dad, you wouldn't feel guilty.

Shaun (12:12.063)
about the lack of connection. Research into the paternal bonding, often cited by experts in the field of paternal mental health, shows that for many men, this oxytocin hit, this bonding hormone, peaks later than it does for mothers. Often, as a child becomes more interactive at the three to six month mark. This is exactly

what happened to me. You're not failing, you're just on a different biological and emotional timeline. Your wife or your partner, the mother of your child got to feel that at birth, that she was flooded with emotions or with hormones at birth, physical hormones that enabled her to bond with your child. You don't have that and there's nothing wrong with that if you're a father.

There's nothing wrong with that for the father if you're the mother. So stop comparing your behind the scenes picture to everybody else's highlight reel. Fatherhood is the ultimate redo. It's a concept that we talk about constantly here. It is a process. So if today you felt disconnected, you're gonna get another opportunity tomorrow, that's great. Come up with a mechanism, figure something out.

and do that. The fact that you're asking this question means that you're already about halfway there. Like they said in the cartoons, in the Saturday morning cartoons, when I was young, knowing is half the battle. You are facing what a lot of people avoid, this fear that you're not enough. And you're actually able to say it out loud and that is the first step towards.

That is a very, very important step, definitely part of the journey of being the man that your son needs. So as we wrap up today, I wanna leave you with a principle that connects both of these questions. It's something that has woven through a lot, maybe almost all of the conversations that we had over our episodes. that is that fatherhood is a mirror.

Shaun (14:32.513)
When we worry about being too soft or that we're not connected enough, we're usually looking at our own insecurities. We're looking using the cone in the barbarian brain, the part of us that just wants to survive, that wants to look strong, that's all about the performance. And we're comparing it to the Sherlock Holmes brain, the part of us that wants to understand and connect. But raising men means having the courage to look in the mirror and see

the flaws and the successes at the same time. Being able to say I don't have it all figured out, but I'm staying in the room. If you wanna dive deeper into the episodes we mentioned today, whether it's Aaron Blaine on Boundaries, which is episode 15, or Dr. Michelle Watson Canfield on Drawbridge, which is episode six, or Johnny Miller on The Nervous System, episode 17, you can find those links in the show notes and on the resources.

at Raising Men. You can also find links to those guests and their resources as well. We have practical guides for internal weather reports and the four-step repair process to help you navigate these exact moments. So keep it up, stay present, keep doing the work, face what you're avoiding, stay curious about your own situation so that you can communicate and you can lead his. And remember that the man that you are

The man that you're becoming is the man that he will follow. My name is Sean Dawson and this is Raising Men and you are a great parent.