101 Minutes – FreeTime

March 25, 2013 By Hank Osborne 1 Comment

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Kindle FreeTime is FREE!

Let me just say right up front that this is a correction/clarification from my detailed review of the Kindle Fire (and FreeTime) parental controls in Episode 32. This correction should come as a pleasant surprise to you Amazon Kindle Fire owners.

Kindle FreeTime Unlimited is not free…and it comes at a price in more ways than one for Christian families.

Why not buy Kindle FreeTime Unlimited:

– Amazon makes content decisions for your child, not you.

SpongeBob SquarePants (Numerous)
Scooby-Doo (Numerous)
In Search of the Fog Zombie
The Avatar’s Return (The Last Airbender Movie)
Where does Love come from?
Book description from Amazon, “Where does love come from? Does it grow on a tree? Or swim in the sea? This collection of silly questions explains a complicated emotion in a fun, entertaining way that children can easily understand. Where Does Love Come From? concludes with a declaration that readers likely already know . . . that “love comes from your heart.”

Privacy

Another example of how technology is breaking down your expectation of privacy.

StormFly Nowcomputing.com

The creators of StormFly have cleverly packaged the same basic technology that many kids use to get around filters installed on home computers. The product was successfully funded through Kickstarter. The intent is to allow kids to take their computer wherever they go…on their wrists. Proceed with caution.

101 Minute Challenge

Use GOOGLE or Bing to search for “minutes in a week” and the answer you get is 10,080. Divide that by 100 and you get 100.8. So 101 minutes (100.8 rounded up) equals 1% of your week.

We revisit the Fathers Mandate part 1 of 8 which was highlighted in Daddy Life Episode #12. I challenge you to dedicate 101 minutes of your week to one of the following:

Your family together for 101 minutes outside of normal meal times (Good)
A total of 101 minute with each child throughout the week (Better)
101 minutes dedicated, uninterrupted, with each child doing what the child wants to do (Best)

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Filed Under: Parenting, Podcast, Safety, Technology Tagged With: Family Identity, GKGW, Privacy, quality time, relationships, technology

Kindle Fire FreeTime Parental Controls Review

January 4, 2013 By Hank Osborne 1 Comment

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Kindle Fire FreeTime Parental Controls

How Kindle Fire FreeTime works

FreeTime is an App that some preloaded on new Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD readers from Amazon.

What Kindle FreeTime does well

– Control amount of time kids spend on the three categories available (Apps, Video, Books)
– Restrict access to parent Kindle system apps, videos, Internet, Music*, Books
– Tracks book reading progress separately between parent and each of the kid profiles in Kindle FreeTime. My wife and my son are both reading The Roman, The Twelve, and The King by Jenny L. Cote. My son generally stays ahead of my wife so his place is saved in his FreeTime profile and does not affect the last read place saved by my wife in the main Kindle OS.

Kindle FreeTime failures with some workarounds

– Music is not accessible from within Kindle FreeTime with apps and services built in by default

Workaround: Install a music playing app. Then add the Music player app to your child’s Kindle FreeTime Apps. WARNING: The music app will burn up app time. There is no way to limit screen time per App so all apps count towards daily limit.

– Kindle opens into the last profile used in FreeTime or the main full featured profile if FreeTime was not active during last shutdown.

Workaround:

– Kindle Fire has the ability to load a screen lock pin. We share this with our oldest son who is the primary user. We (my wife and I) are diligent to log into FreeTime and enter into Riley’s profile so that the Kindle will open back into his profile when the screen lock pin is entered. He gets to protect access to his apps and books from his younger brothers and we know he is only accessing his content because the Parental Controls password must be entered to get to the root OS of the Kindle Fire.

Kindle FreeTime Feature Requests Wish List

– Five minute warning before time allocation is up
– FreeTime profiles tied to screen lock PINs
– Add a music category that works like video category where parents can choose which songs kids can listen to. Then FreeTime App time is not eaten up by listening to music with 3rd party app.

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Chronicles of a Babywise Mom
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http://www.babywisebooks.com/

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Filed Under: Parenting, Podcast, Safety, Technology Tagged With: Babywise, Ezzo, Holidays, HowTo, podcasting, quality time, technology, Video Games

Gingerbread Train and Gluten Free Train

December 15, 2012 By Hank Osborne Leave a Comment

The Christmas season brings out the creativity in the Osborne family. This year we baked gingerbread and created our 7th annual Gingerbread Train. Since we have five year little Josiah who is allergic to wheat and egg we had to get creative to come up with a train that he could decorate that would have no wheat or egg. Our Gingerbread train dough is made from wheat flour and the glue that holds everything together is made of Royal Icing which is predominately egg whites and powdered sugar. More on that train in a minute.

Here are some other pictures of Josiah’s Gluten-free train made from Rice Krispies^® treats.

Josiah had a blast with this train project and was so tempted to eat it while decorating. As a matter of fact, as of today the train actually does not exist anymore. JJ has consumed the entire train after dinner each night while we read our Advent story Bartholomew’s Passage.

JJ’s little train

As the title suggests the fun also included a 2012 Gingerbread Train. The first picture I have to share is of the entire family. Then below that I will show you some individual cars so that you can see some of the detailed decorating Riley, Caden, and their friend Noah did.

Osborne Family with the 2012 Gingerbread Train

Gingerbread Train Engine

Treasury Car – some years we make this a coal or rock car

Lumber Car – carries candy cane logs held together with fruit strips

Passenger Car – Custom Made Osborne Family Addtion

Gingerbread Coboose – Riley’s Favorite to Decorate

Riley and a friend decorating the train

This gingerbread train takes us three afternoons to make. Sherry normally mixes and chills the dough a few days before baking. Then I spend an afternoon with the boys cutting out pieces and baking. This process takes several hours. This year we made a little extra so Riley’s friend could decorate his own train engine and take it home. They are homeschool buddies and spend a good amount of time together during the school year. the picture above shows how messy the third and final day of the gingerbread train process takes. This is the assembly and decorating day. This year I packages each trains pieces in a separate container so it would be easier to figure out which pieces went with which car. It was also the first year that I did not participate in the decoration and assembly of the gingerbread train.

We hope you enjoyed this look at our 2012 Gingerbread and Gluten-free trains. You can get more details on how we make the Gingerbread Train at Grill’n Time. Also be sure to check out our previous six years of gingerbread trains.

Filed Under: Family Fun, Parenting Tagged With: Family Identity, Holidays, Home School, HowTo, quality time, relationships

Gingerbread Train – Christmas Tradition

November 26, 2012 By Hank Osborne 1 Comment

The Gingerbread Train will be pulling into the station in the Osborne household for the seventh year in a row very soon. This has become somewhat of a badge of our family identity during the Christmas season with close friends and family. We normally begin the process of making the dough and cutting out the pattern sometime in early December. We try to have the train assembled by the middle of December so we can use it as part of our Christmas decoration process. We have begun to take inventory of supplies and are talking about how we might change things up this year.

One change this year is that we are going to try a small gluten free gingerbread companion house. We are also going to try to make some type of royal icing without egg whites to use to assemble the gingerbread house. Our 5 year old Josiah is allergic to wheat, egg, and nuts so he cannot participate with hands on decoration or assembly of the gingerbread train. Any ideas you have on gluten free dough or egg-free royal icing would be greatly appreciated.

If you are a homeschool family this is a great project to work on for art and cooking. There is also plenty of room for creativity in the area of math and geometry. We designed our own gingerbread train cars for 2008 and 2009. You will notice the tanker card in the 2008 photo below and the passenger car in 2009. These were not designs offered by the original magazine article that we used to start this tradition.

Below is a picture of each Gingerbread Train from years past. You can also learn how to make your own Gingerbread Train by following the process we have used since 2006. The entire process is described with lots of picture over at Grill’n Time.

2006 Gingerbread Train

2007 Gingerbread Train

2008 Gingerbread Train

2009 Gingerbread Train

2010 Gingerbread Train

2011 Gingerbread Train

What fun family traditions do you have centered around the Christmas season?

Filed Under: Family Fun Tagged With: Family Identity, Food, Holidays, Home School, quality time

Traveling with a Medically Special Needs Child

September 19, 2012 By Hank Osborne 1 Comment

We have been home from our vacation for over a week now. This year’s road trip included six of us in a minivan for about 1600 miles of driving over a period of seven days. From a medical supply perspective, during the seven day trip Caden went through more than a dozen oxygen tanks, received nearly two dozen tube feedings, and he spent a total of almost 5 hours on The Vest^®.

Now before I go into more details, I want to give a disclaimer. I am not complaining about excitement created by missing oxygen tanks or all the gear required for Caden when traveling. I am trying to educate folks on the complexities associated with moving a medically special needs child around even though he does not “look special” to many people as seen above with the first fish he caught. One of our very dearest friends mentioned that we should not have that much to pack for this trip since Levi does not need a pack-n-play any longer. That last part is true, but most folks forget or don’t realize just how much gear goes along with being exclusively tube fed and having to be treated daily to prevent pneumonia and micro-aspiration due to the lack fo swallowing ability. Caden’s care is not as simple as grabbing a box of tissues and a suction machine like most folks see us do when we are out and about around town.

The medical equipment required for any over-night trip with Caden requires:

Tube Feeding Supplies* (Formula, feeding pump bags, a feeding pump with charger)
A spare G-Tube button
Extra feeding tube extensions
Syringes
A suction machine and charger
Oxygen Supply (1.5 liters during sleep hours)
Tissues
Bed pads
Spare linens
The Vest^{^®}
A jogging stroller (Caden does not have the stamina to walk for long, especially in the heat.)

The picture above may help put things into context. This picture includes most of the items listed above (minus three days worth of oxygen). This stuff took up the entire back storage area of our Kia Sedona van plus the floor space under Caden and Levi’s feet and the stroller when on the roof. The picture does not include any clothes or toys for Caden or anyone else in the family. The basketball was added to the picture for scale.

Now that the trip is over I realize that we might have been able to carry enough oxygen to last the full week on the road. However, it would have been a tight fit. The fear of the unknown and the thought of a possible pneumonia while on the road made me very nervous about how we might get additional oxygen for Caden while 750 miles away from our home supply (over three dozen tanks in our garage) if needed. That is where the real story of the week came in.

I went ahead called the medical supply company that we use about three weeks before our trip. They are a national company and I arranged to have enough oxygen delivered to the Twin Lakes Camp and Conference Center in Hillsboro, IN to last us through the Labor Day weekend. We arrived on the Friday before Labor Day at approximately 3:30pm. I immediately checked in with the camp director to see if the oxygen had arrived. It had not. Caden uses about two standard E bottles (one shown in picture above) of oxygen per night when a concentrator/generator is not available. I knew we did not have enough oxygen tanks to make it through until Tuesday when the medical supply offices opened back up for business. As I mentioned earlier, we could not comfortably transport enough for an entire week while traveling and so we only had a little in reserve after one night in a hotel already. I realized that it was late in the day on a Friday of a holiday weekend and I tried to contact the office in Lafayette, IN where the oxygen was supposed to come from. I got nothing but a busy signal after about seven attempts within a 30 minute period. At this point it was a few minutes before 4 PM and I was about to start driving to Lafayette to pick up the oxygen tanks myself when I decided to make one last attempt to contact the medical supply company via their toll-free service. I was transferred to a lady at the Kokomo, IN office which was about 20 miles further away than Lafayette. The lady calmed my nerves and assured me that she would get oxygen delivered even if it had to be done the next day on Saturday…which was fine with me since we had enough to make it through one more night. She even gave me her cell number in the event we had trouble getting what we needed. Come to find out the lady had a delivery truck in Crawfordsville which was only about 15 miles away from our location at Twin Lakes and they had the tanks on their truck that we needed. She diverted them to Twin Lakes on Friday evening (arriving after 5pm) and they gave us the tanks we needed. The two guys on the truck were super nice and seemed genuine in their efforts to help in getting the supplies we needed.

So the weekend started off on a positive note even though we had a little scare. We ended up having an outstanding time visiting with friends from all over the country for the weekend. In addition to a variety of planned activities coordinated by our friends Joey and Carla Link the boys fished and played Octaball.

We continued our vacation with a tour of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS) and then spent two nights in the Cincinnati area so that we could visit the Creation Museum. These two stops rate a blog post each so I will save that for another day. The boys loved kissing the Yard of Bricks at IMS and we we all enjoyed our fourth visit to the creation museum where we got to meet Dr. Georgia Purdom and Buddy Davis.

Filed Under: Family Fun, Parenting, Special Needs Tagged With: Extracurricular Activities, Ezzo, Faith, Family Identity, GKGW, Holidays, Keep It Simple, Medical, quality time, Special Needs Children, travel

Daddy Life is a Winner

July 23, 2012 By Hank Osborne Leave a Comment

The vision behind Daddy Life has won a contest. DaddyLife.net is more than a blog and a podcast. It is a business tool for me that will help fullfil my goals. I have shared my long-term goals with close friends and family, but I have not aired it all out here on DaddyLife.net. You see, even with a very healthy salary and a Cadillac health care plan form the federal government, I am still not doing full-time what I love most. What I love most is helping people while spending time with my family. Specifically I like helping parents to strengthen their marriages and raise biblically responsible and God honoring children.

Late last week I read an email from Sandi Krakowski. Sandi creates million dollar businesses. She is an Internet marking guru who has built a business around helping other people refine and execute their plans for online business. I follow a handful of successful online business people who have turned their passion into a full-time career. Sandi’s email newsletter came to me dangling a carrot last week. She offered a 12 hour window for her community members to submit answers to three questions on her Facebook Page.

1: WHY? 2: WHY now? 3: What will your business do in the world in 3 years?

Now I had no problem answering the first question right off the top of my head. I am a big fan of the elevator pitch. That is what I would say if I had to explain the what/why of my business in 15 seconds or less. The other questions were easy also, but required a little more thought to come up with just the right words. Below is how I responded and the bold portion of the response is my 15 second elevator pitch:

Hi Sandi,

Thanks for all your wisdom and encouragement. I appreciate the opportunity to win some valuable resources from you that will help me on my journey.

I am building a business as a speaker, writer, and coach for parents (Dads in particular) to rise above the level of mediocrity in marriage and parenting. I am doing this so that I can get paid to do what I love while I share more time with my family in the process.

I am building my business now because I have been inspired over the past year by people like you and Dan Miller (Author of 48 Days to the Work You Love). Why put off until tomorrow what I can do today?

There is no greater calling for a man than that of being a husband and then a father. Dad has a responsibility to love, protect, and provide for the family. I will help dads fulfill those responsibilities and more. The choices a dad makes directly affects the future of the family, the community, the nation, and the world. Over the next three years dads will be encouraged, equipped, and challenged to be the leaders of their families, lovers of their wives, and examples to their children. Parents around the world will rise above the level of mediocrity in the marriage and parenting. “Encourage one another and build each other up.” 1 Thessalonians 5:11

Thanks again for this awesome giveaway and opportunity to share my story!

Hank Osborne
http://DaddyLife.net

This response landed me in one of six winning spots out of over 500 entries. And the winners were hand picked by Sandi and her crew. I think it is important to add that I have never paid Sandi a single dime for anything. I have been a quite observer of her awesome free resources that are available through her blog, newsletter, and Facebook timeline. The loot from winning this contest gets me a 1 hr CD containing business coaching, a one month membership to Sandi’s Inner Circle Membership, and an autographed copy of her book Read Their Mind: How To Hear What The Marketplace Wants And Build A Huge Business. (Amazon affiliate link)

As for how I will execute my plan, I am already producing podcast to help encourage, equip, and challenge me to rise above mediocrity in marriage and parenting. I do plan on offering free presentations on the subject of Internet and Technology safety for parents in the Charleston, SC area over the next six months. Local audiences will be my guinea pigs and resume builders as I prepare to get into parenting and home school conferences in 2013. I am alos working on some products that I plan to make available for sale on this site, at conferences, and via other methods.

Do you like my vision? If so then click one of the “Share the Love” icons below to help spread the word to your friends on your favorite social media site.

Filed Under: Marriage, Parenting Tagged With: quality time, relationships

Date Your Children

July 19, 2012 By Hank Osborne Leave a Comment

Building relationships with your children requires an investment of time on your part as a parent. We also must be intentional about scheduling time with each child and making this time special to the child. Bethany over at The Graceful Mom tells us how she and her husband meet the relational needs of their children through dates.

Bethany’s post is part of the Babywise Networked-Blog week for July 2012. Members of this network of blogs include:

Valerie Plowman, Chronicles of a Babywise Mom
Hank Osborne, Daddy Life
Maureen Monfore, Childwise Chat
Bethany Lynch, The Graceful Mom

Filed Under: Family Fun, Parenting Tagged With: Babywise, Extracurricular Activities, Ezzo, quality time, relationships

Teaching Sons to Fire Guns

June 23, 2012 By Hank Osborne Leave a Comment

9 year old Riley firing a rifle for the first time

Firing a rifle for the first time is one of the most treasured memories that many men carry for the rest of their lives. Water cooler or camping conversations between men often revolve around the subject of first experiences with a gun. It is one of the early steps in teaching young boys how to literally kill it and drag it home. Men in the USA provide for their families today primarily by earning a direct deposit paycheck that goes into a joint account that their spouse uses to gather meat, bread, fruits, and vegetables from the local super market or grocery warehouse. Even still, many boys and men long for the hunt. And the hunt begins with learning some skills.

Today I was able to give my son that first gun shot experience as he became the fourth generation to fire this rifle. I don’t know for sure if anyone in my family fired this rifle before my Papa (i.e., grandfather). But we do know that this model of Winchester 67 Rifle began being manufactured in the early thirties so it is possible that Riley could be the fifth or sixth generation in our family to fire this same weapon. I also know that I used this rifle to kill my first wild animal (Raccoon) as a young boy when I was near Riley’s current age of nine.

Fear of Gun Sounds

While this event did plant a lasting memory in my son’s mind, and he thoroughly enjoyed it, I also had a ulterior motive. You see, Riley has a fear of loud sounds. He is not afraid of guns, but the loud noises that some guns make. I plan to take Riley to his first NASCAR race later this year as a birthday present and I want to make sure that his fear of noise does not prevent him from enjoying the race. I mentioned Riley’s fear of noises in a guest post I did on Childwise Chat about Childhood Fears. I explained how my wife and I dealt with what seemed to be an irrational fear with one of our other boys. Today allowed me to work on understanding more about Riley’s fear while also desensitizing him to loud sounds. The day was a success because on this front because Riley did not complain about the noise and he clarified that his fear is more of sudden loud noises and not so much the loud sound itself.

We went to a public firing range in the Francis Marion National Forest about an hour from our home. We joined some of my Navy co-workers and their family members. At the range there were folks firing everything from .22 rifles, to .45 caliber model 1911 mil spec handguns (my personal favorite concealable cary handgun), to shotguns, to high powered hunting rifles. As you can see Riley did pretty well on his first day at the firing range as you can see below. The green circles are his hits with a little assitance from me with the aiming on a couple of them.

Riley had fired a BB Gun before at a Cub Scout day camp, but this was a whole different deal. Riley said he liked shooting the rifle, but he would rather do it somewhere that does not have all the loud handguns and rifles next time. I am going to work on finding a friend who has a little land in the country that we can use the next time we go to target practice.

As I was completing this post I ran across a news story about a 14 year old boy who shoot an intruder during a home invasion. The 14 year old was home watching over his three younger siblings. Given the way this young man handled himself I am inclined to believe he must have had plenty of exposure to guns and training on their proper use. Some adults would have had a hard time handling that situation. I am also glad the intruder was not fatally injured. Taking the life of another human being is tough no matter how old you are and regardless of the circumstances.

What is you opinion of kids learning to use fire arms safely?

Filed Under: Boys Being Boys, Parenting, Safety Tagged With: Cub Scouts, Extracurricular Activities, Family Identity, Guns, NASCAR, quality time, relationships, safety, Training

Matt Rutherford – A Dad with Cerebral Palsy

June 18, 2012 By Hank Osborne Leave a Comment

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This podcast episode contains an interview with Matt

Due to complications at birth, Matt was afflicted with cerebral palsy, which resulted in his permanently crippled condition. Surprisingly, a disability resulting from Cerebral Palsy (CP) has never stood between him and his life goals with his career, marriage, or in his parenting. From the moment he was born, Matt demonstrated his ability to overcome the odds. During the birthing process, he was deprived of oxygen for more than 20 minutes. This lack of oxygen resulted in damage to the cerebral cortex. While the lack of oxygen did not affect Matt’s cognitive ability, it significantly impacted his muscle control and movement.

Matt’s Web Site: SOAR1.net

Father’s Impact on His Daughters

May 10, 2012 By Guest Blogger 1 Comment

by Valerie Plowman

My first-born child is a boy. Following him was a son that we lost at 20 weeks gestation. After that, I was sure I was “destined” to be a mother of all boys. I had always gotten along well with boys and figured this was my perfect role in life.

Fast forward to today when I have since had two girls and am expecting my third. As usual, the Lord had different plans for me than I had for myself.

With all of these daughters, I have been pondering how to raise wonderful women. As I have done so, I remember my mother often telling me that I was lucky because a father has a huge impact on the self-esteem of his daughters. I was lucky. I consider my dad to be one of the best men to ever walk this planet. I am fortunate to have married a man that I think is equally as wonderful as my own father.

As I was thinking of what to write for this guest post, I decided on a post encouraging and informing fathers of their great impact on their daughters. Research supports what my mother always told me–fathers have a huge influence on the self-esteem of their daughters. Of course fathers impact sons, also, but given my perspective as a female, I thought I would focus on daughters today. I also want to encourage any parent who is parenting without a father present for any reason. There are many people who grew up without fathers who are confident, capable people. Most often, this is attributed to the extreme dedication and effort by the mother. Knowing what a father does for a daughter can help you think of ways to fill in these gaps.

Dr. Margaret J. Meeker, a pediatrition with more than 20 years of experience in counseling girls, wrote a book called Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters: 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know. In it, she lists some findings from her research on the important influence of fathers. Here are some:

Toddlers securely attached to fathers are better at solving problems.
Six-month-olds scored higher on tests of mental development when their dads were involved in their lives.
With dads in the home, children managed school stress better.
Daughters whose fathers provide warmth and control achieve higher academic success. Girls involved with dad are twice as likely to stay in school.
Daughters who are close to their fathers exhibit less anxiety and withdrawn behaviors.
The likelihood that daughters engage in premarital sex, drug use, and alcohol plummets when their dads are involved in their lives.
Daughters who feel that their fathers care about them and feel connected with their dads have significantly fewer suicide attempts and fewer instances of body dissatisfaction, depression, low self-esteem, substance abuse, and unhealthy weight.
A daughter’s self-esteem is best predicted by her father’s loving affection.

Meeker says, “From the first years of a girl’s life her father is larger than life. She looks up to him, and for the rest of her life she craves his admiration, his respect and his affection.”

Her research is not alone in these findings. This paper supports these findings. A tid-bit from this paper is:

“According to research conducted by Nielsen, “fathers generally have as much or more influence than mothers on many aspects of their daughters’ lives. For example, the father has the greater impact on the daughter’s ability to trust, enjoy and relate well to the males in her life …well-fathered daughters are usually more self-confident, more self-reliant, and more successful in school and in their careers than poorly-fathered daughters …Daughters with good relationships with their father are also less likely to develop eating disorders” (2007, ¶ 12).”

So you now believe that the father is a huge impact, but what can a father do to have a positive influence on his daughters? I won’t pretend to have all of the answers. I would encourage continual prayerfulness and observance of your daughter to analyze what you can do for your daughter. Here are some ideas for you.

Be present in her life. Spend time with her, talk with her, be involved in daily things like bedtime, and invite her to help you with your own projects. My five year old daughter doesn’t have a special interest in tools, but she loves to be in the garage and help her dad simply because she wants to spend time with him.
Be supportive of her. Attend her special events. My dad made it to everything he possibly could to support me in my various activities and events. My husband recently left work for an hour so he could go to my daughter’s preschool class simply to read her favorite book to the class. He apparently reads it the very best. She was concerned at my ability to read it correctly. He surprised her by coming and reading it. She was thrilled. Our daughters have supportive grandfathers. Our daughter recently had a dance recital. Neither grandmother was able to come that night, but both grandfathers were there anyway.
Go on dates. One-on-one time is great. Take your daughter out on special dates. My husband and I shoot for one special date per child per month. We alternate who we have on our special date. The children love this. From my own childhood, I remember one particular time when my father took my sister and I to the Phantom of the Opera. In January, we saw an advertisement that it would be in our area the next July. Just one time, we told our dad how we would love to see it. We never mentioned it again. He surprised us with the best seats in the house. My dad is not a “Phantom of the Opera” type of a guy. He is more of a Pittsburgh Steelers or New York Yankees type of a guy. This special date meant a lot to us.
Compliment her. Offer sincere compliments and encouragement. Your words will mean a lot.
Offer physical affection. This isn’t usually a difficulty in the father/daughter relationship, but be sure you give your daughter the cuddles, hugs, and kisses she needs from you.

Do not make the false assumption that your presence in your daughter’s life is of minimal impact. Your daughter will look for a spouse that reminds her of you–for better or worse. You being male does not mean you will not have a huge impact on how your daughter views herself as a female–studies suggest you have even more of an impact than the mother. You are an important aspect to your daughter’s life.

Valerie is the mother of three and one on the way. She blogs at Chronicles of a Babywise Mom.

Filed Under: Guest, Parenting Tagged With: Babywise, Parenting Principles, quality time, relationships

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101 Minutes – FreeTime

Kindle FreeTime is FREE!

Privacy

StormFly Nowcomputing.com

101 Minute Challenge

Kindle Fire FreeTime Parental Controls Review

Gingerbread Train and Gluten Free Train

Gingerbread Train – Christmas Tradition

Traveling with a Medically Special Needs Child

Daddy Life is a Winner

Date Your Children

Teaching Sons to Fire Guns

Matt Rutherford – A Dad with Cerebral Palsy

Father’s Impact on His Daughters

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Daddy Life Mission

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