Intentionality and Parenting

Dads out there, if I’ve learned nothing else in my time, I’ve learned the following…

You can let life happen to you. You can let life happen to your kids. You can let events control your family, determine your actions, shape your thinking, take their own course and carry you or your kids with them.

Or ….

You can wrestle with life, negotiate with it, make a dent in your obstacles. You can shape events, you can surf them! You can determine your own actions and responses. You can set the wheels in motion. You can be creative and adapt. You can find another way forward. You can be engaged with your kids. You can be involved. You can grow. You can learn. You can be intentional, purposeful…

And you can teach your children to do the same.

Intention.

You can build a closer relationship with your kids.

Intention.

You can change the status quo if you don’t like it.

Intention.

You can create outcomes that fill you with pride, or at the very least make an effort that you can be proud of!

Intention.

Intention determines your results far more than the forces over which you have no control. Far more than your own demons or flaws.

What are your hopes for your children? What is your goal for your family? Who do you want to be, as a Father, as a Man?

Intentionality, creativity, purpose, perserverence. Man. These are your birthright … and they can be your legacy.

Dads Influence Their Daughters’ Interest In Math

ScienceDaily (Jun. 25, 2007) — It figures: Dads have a major impact on the degree of interest their daughters develop in math. That’s one of the findings of a long-term University of Michigan study that has traced the sources of the continuing gender gap in math and science performance.

“We’ve known for a while now that females do as well as males on tests that measure ability in math and science,” said Pamela Davis-Kean, a psychologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). “But women are still underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math graduate programs and in careers based on those disciplines.”

It’s as if women are saying, “I can, but I don’t want to,” according to Davis-Kean.

In a study she presented recently at a campus meeting, Davis-Kean and colleagues analyzed how parents’ values and attitudes affect children’s math performance and later interest, and how these attitudes vary by the child’s gender. They used data from a longitudinal study of more than 800 children and a large group of their parents that began in 1987 and continued through 2000.

They found that parents provided more math-supportive environments for their sons than for their daughters, including buying more math and science toys for the boys. They also spent more time on math and science activities with their sons than with their daughters…

“Fathers’ gender stereotypes are very important in supporting—or in undermining—daughters’ choices to pursue training in math and science,” Davis-Kean said…

Some great reads

A quick roundup of some worthwhile reads out there in Blogland.

1.How I Won the War on Consumerism -”Everywhere you turn, someone is trying to get you to buy stuff. Every medium is about selling advertising. Even the baseball stadium is named after the sponsoring company!

My family is not rich, but we are far from having to beg on the street. I have everything I need, so I should be quite content. But the messages I see and hear, everywhere I look, are telling me that I need more stuff…”

2. Sibling Fighting – Teach Our Kids to Resolve Conflict Peacefully : “Kids have L plates on when it comes to resolving conflict with their siblings. They can learn better ways of resolving conflict than resorting to reflexive means such as hitting, shouting and generally playing the person rather than the “ball”…”

3. Earth Hour – Shmirth Hour. Agent Tully eloquently exposes the flaws in what was essentially a nice idea with no practical impact.

4. Thinking of Having Kids? 11 Lessons to prepare you for parenthood. Very funny. here’s a taste:

“Lesson 6
Forget the BMW and buy a mini-van. And don’t think that you can leave it out in the driveway spotless and shining. Family cars don’t look like that.
1. Buy a chocolate ice cream cone and put it in the glove compartment. Leave it there.
2. Get a dime. Stick it in the CD player.
3. Take a family size package of chocolate cookies. Mash them into the back seat. Sprinkle cheerios all over the floor, then smash them with your foot.
4. Run a garden rake along both sides of the car.”

My Favourite Five Movie Glitches…

Ya gotta love stuff-ups in movies. The Hollywood production companies spend zillions of dollars and have hundreds of people working on a movie and they still come up with some easily-edited or -avoided mistakes. These are my favourite five:

1. Star Wars Episode 4. There is a scene in the middle where 4 stormtroopers march into a control room where the two droids have been hiding. These are the crack troops of the empire, measured, malevolent. The door has just slid into the ceiling as they march in … well, actually, it’s not quite made it all the way up … and one of the Emperor’s best troopers cracks his head on the door on the way in, almost knocking his helmet off. (He’s the one to the right of screen). I can watch this one over and over.
2. Independence Day. I love the scene where Will Smith is hanging out in the desert after his dogfight with an alien starfigher and this intense moment is spoiled as at least 6 inches of the boom microphone descends into the shot. You would think that when they spent over $100 million on this movie, they could have got one of their CGI boffins to paste some “sky” over it, at least… Well, finally they did, at least for the DVD release. When I went looking for the glitch over the weekend, watching this with Oldest Son, there was no boom mic to be seen. But it was there in the cinema release, seriously. (And let’s not even start on the continuity problems in the movie like the 15-mile-wide UFO exploding immediately over the Americans’ base but actually crashing a few miles to the left, or the faulty timer on the nuke delivered to the mothership which seems to take a lot longer to count down than the actual seconds on the clock).
3. Star Wars Episode 4 (again). Speaking of starfighters, in the penultimate scene where the Rebel Alliance’s space fleet attack’s the Death Star, we have occasional glimpses into the cockpit of various starfighter craft. There is one section of the footage where the film cuts to a pilot codenamed Red Leader, cuts away to the action, cuts back to Red Leader, away to the action, back to Red Leader, back to the action and back again to Red Leader. Interesting thing is – originally, each time we cut back to Red Leader, his helmet mike is on a different side of his head – right, left, right, left! I don’t know whether the film editors kept putting the next sequence in backwards or something, but there it was. Now don’t go looking for this one, kids, because George Lucas fixed it when he brought out the original trilogy on DVD. But it was fun while it lasted.
4. Die Hard. Hans Gruber orders his men to fire on the Feds’ RV with a rocket, they do and shatter the window between them and the RV. Gruber tells them to “hit it again”, and they do, breaking the same window again. Duh…
5. Back to the Future 2. The glitch is in the scriptingwriting this time. The Doc, Marty and Jennifer go forward in time. Old Biff steals time machine and takes the almanac to Young Biff in 1955. Then Old Biff goes forward in time thus returning the time machine to the Doc. Yet this is impossible since he would have returned to a future radically different to the one in which the Doc is waiting. Ironically, Doc discusses this very paradox when they goe backwards in time to “Biff’s 1985.”

I’m sure there are more out there, but these are my faves.