It started with a slip of paper passed from teacher to parent during pickup.
“Bodhi: Com neixen els volcans?”
A question poetic in its beauty: “How are volcanos born?” (I didn’t understand this initially—my Catalan is as bad as it gets. Google Translate to the rescue.) Other kids were asked variations on the theme: “Why do volcanos have lava?” or “Why do volcanos erupt?”
It’s clear: volcano fever has entered the group chat. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. Because when raising kids, a metaphor can be your most powerful ally. And the volcano, unpredictable and devastating as it is, offers a fantastic opportunity for a four-year-old coming to terms with his emotional eruptions.
Where do volcanos come from? What triggers them to explode? What triggers our kids to lose their shit? What triggers us to follow suit, creating an exothermic reaction of hot-headedness that leaves nothing but destruction in its wake? Whilst the explosions can seem erratic they follow a predictable pattern—an initial rumbling, a sense of the ground shifting beneath our feet. Things can linger there for a while. But under the right—or wrong—conditions, you’re quickly caught in a cascading sequence of events that feels inescapable; the lava approaches rapidly, there is nothing left to do but submit.
I talked to him about Earth’s tectonic plates, shifting deep underground at microscopic rates—just 1.5cm a year, or the same rate his toenails grow. I told him those plates mimic our own internal emotions, the same ones he feels when something bad happens to him at school—when his best friend beats him in a race, or someone takes his favourite red plastic motorbike during patio time. “We can feel those things inside us before we explode,” I tell him. “But it doesn’t mean we always need to erupt. The magma doesn’t always need to turn into lava.” I can see it going in, watching the cogs working overtime as he figures it out. “The plates are moving,” he tells me a few days later, as the red mist begins to descend.
I want to give my children the ability to both entirely feel an emotion and then be equipped with the tools to manage it. My copy of The Whole-Brain Child is well-worn, littered with neon page markers and scrawled marginalia from a decade of constant reference. Its key metaphor—that the child’s developing brain is a house under construction—has been as helpful for me as the volcano metaphor seems to be for my son. In the book, Dr. Dan Siegel and Dr. Tina Payne Bryson supplement the common “left and right brain” thinking with the idea of an “upstairs and downstairs” brain. Downstairs is where critical functions like breathing and heart rate regulation occur, alongside emotions and impulses, and essential responses like our fight-or-flight system. Upstairs is more sophisticated, and responsible for thinking, imagining, analysing, problem-solving and decision-making:
Unlike your more basic downstairs brain, the upstairs brain is more evolved and can give you a fuller perspective on your world. You might imagine it as a light-filled second-story study or library full of windows and skylights that allow you to see things more clearly. This is where more intricate mental processes take place, like thinking, imagining, and planning. Whereas the downstairs brain is primitive, the upstairs brain is highly sophisticated, controlling some of your most important higher-order and analytical thinking. Because of its sophistication and complexity, it is responsible for producing many of the characteristics we hope to see in our kids: Sound decision-making and planning, control over emotions and body, self-understanding, empathy and morality.
Siegel and Bryson argue that our role as parents is to find every opportunity we can lead our children up the staircase, aiding them in the necessary remodelling work. They provide research that shows how this will allow them to develop into emotionally resilient and fully functioning adults and avoid a life “trapped in the basement” as they grow older.
From a very early age, my son’s emotional outbursts triggered an intense physiological reaction in me in a way my daughter’s did not. It was only through therapy I got to the root of why that was, realising this was my issue to be resolved and not his. I gave up on the Sisyphean battle of trying to prevent my son from crying—a selfish attempt to shield myself. One of the gifts of Siegel and Bryson’s work is providing you with the necessary tools to help your children and unlocking the importance of the required work for yourself:
As children develop, their brains “mirror” their parent’s brain. In other words, the parent’s own growth and development, or lack of those, impact the child’s brain. As parents become more aware and emotionally healthy, their children reap the rewards and move toward health as well. That means that integrating and cultivating your own brain is one of the most loving and generous gifts you can give your children.
My relationship with anger is complicated. I was well into my thirties—and with a significant collection of hours on my therapy punch card—when I finally understood that anger and violence were, in fact, two separate elements—cause and effect; action and reaction. I was proud of being a dormant volcano for most of my life. I could count my adult eruptions on one hand. But as I’ve gotten older I’ve realised how unhealthy this was. I have learned to allow myself to get angry when the situation calls for it. To feel confident in the knowledge that doing so is a way to help my kids better understand the severity of a situation, not a precursor to violence, a jagged line on the Richter scale indicating an imminent threat. My wish for my son is that he experiences the gamut of emotions that life will send his way, that he knows it’s OK to feel angry or sad, and that he leans into his feelings rather than shuts them down—that he sees them as his superpower and not his weakness. I want him to be part of this new generation of men who aren’t afraid to feel, who don’t feel compelled to apologise when they cry in front of others, or who switch to anger on showing a modicum of vulnerability. Or, returning once again to The Whole-Brain Child:
By integrating your implicit and explicit memories and by shining the light of awareness on difficult moments from your past, you can gain insight into how your past is impacting your relationship with your children. You can remain watchful for how your issues are affecting your own mood as well as how your kids feel. When you feel incompetent, frustrated, or overly reactive, you can look at what's behind those feelings and explore whether they are connected to something in your past. Then you can bring your former experiences into the present and weave them into the larger story of your life. When you do that, you can be free to be the kind of parent you want to be. You can make sense of your own life, which will help your kids do the same with theirs.
Our emotional outbursts, just like a volcano, follow a defined path—trigger, eruption, aftermath. A friend last weekend talked about “reflex parenting” and the decisions we make when our programming takes over and the lava begins to flow. Knowing this pattern can allow us to insert a circuit breaker between trigger and reaction. (It’s at this point I can feel my daughter’s eyes rolling back in her head, groaning, “Are you going to start talking to me about meditation again?”)
We can’t always make it stop. But preventing the eruption is the only way to eliminate the inevitable feelings of shame and regret that follow—the self-flagellation and painful introspection that takes hold after a rage-fuelled comedown. One can only wonder if, on the evening of August 24, 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius looked down upon the lava-filled ruins of Pompeii, the charred remains of its inhabitants, and thought to itself: “Sorry about that, guys. I haven’t been sleeping well, have been under a lot of pressure at work, and lost control of myself for a moment there. I’ll do better next time. I promise.”
3 things to read this week
“The Lure of Divorce” by Emily Gould in The Cut. The latest instalment in the Gessen-Gould Literary Universe. Last year, Gould’s husband wrote Raising Raffi, a book about fatherhood that was well-received in the publishing world. Fast forward to 2023, and Gould has penned a 5,550+ word essay on the breakdown of their marriage. Whilst only two people know what’s going on in a marriage (and even they won’t agree on one narrative) this is a compelling read. Even though, as one dad in the community put it, “It’s a dangerous headline to leave in an open tab for later.”
“How “Co-regulation” Became the Parenting Buzzword of the Day” by Jessica Winter in The New Yorker. Whilst we’re on the topic of emotions, this piece from last month explored the idea of “co-regulation,” an idea that implores parents to understand how their emotional state impacts their child, and how we can better avoid situations that trigger “the grownup’s fight-or-flight response, and raise the odds that adult and child will enter a co-escalation cycle of doom.”
“I Swear, I'm Trying to Keep it Together …” by Lyle McKeaney in Just Enough to Get Me in Trouble. Once you get married, all anyone wants to ask is, “When will you have kids?” And when you have a baby, the question becomes, “So, when will you have another?” When no more kids are on the horizon, those questions are replaced by a third, one that has become a hot topic in our community of dads over the last year: “Is it time for me to get a vasectomy?” In this (very personal) essay, McKeaney—one of the said community dads—explores the physical and emotional impact of his operation. Come for the deep exploration, stay for the anecdote of his wife watching the whole thing—a gender-reversing yin to the yang of the childbirth experience.
One thing to watch with the kids this week
Keeping with the volcano theme—I implore you to boot up Disney+ and watch Fire of Love, one of the most incredible documentaries I’ve ever seen. It tells the extraordinary story of Katia and Maurice Krafft, two volcano-chasing French scientists who “died just as explosively as they lived.” Common Sense Media says it is suitable for ages 10+; if you’re raising a well-rounded 8-year-old I think they’ll be fine.
Previously on The New Fatherhood
Popular internet logic dictates: “Never read the comments.” For TNF, I beg to differ. If you enjoyed last week’s essay on ”Where Should I Raise My Family” I strongly recommend diving into this collection of thoughtful responses. Here’s a taste:
This is the single most important and recurring question we've been asking ourselves in our little family of four. We've been living in London for 12 years now, after we left Italy. Our kids were born here and they've lived in Bermondsey for their whole lives.
I admit I dream about moving again. Moving to another country has been the most exhilarating experience I've ever had. The prospect of endless possibilities invigorates me, and the idea (probably flawed) of New York or Tokyo energizes me.
But I'm not a single person anymore. I'm a father, and my choices will have a huge impact on my kids' lives and futures. Is New York the right choice? Is London the right choice? Definitely, Italy is not the right one anymore for us.
I don't think there's a definitive answer. As Italo Calvino wrote, “You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
What are the questions? Are these questions forever, or are they forever changing? The needs of a family with a newborn are dramatically different from those of a family with two teenagers. Should we move forever? What is home anymore? Gasta
Oof, this hits home for me. My wife is Bulgarian, and our two kids have Bulgarian citizenship through her, so we can easily move anywhere in the EU instead of living in Silicon Valley. In fact, if we moved anywhere else, we could probably get by on just my salary so she could stop working if she wanted to. And with how crazy America is getting, we are considering it far more seriously than we did a few years ago.
At the same time, we have all the advantages to make it work here. We are a two-income household, and I am self-employed so can change my schedule as necessary to accommodate family obligations. We have family and friends nearby we can call on for help. We have good health care through her job, and great schools available to us (and yet we are still considering private schools because we are falling prey to Silicon Valley insanity).
It comes down to the hardest question to answer: What do we really want for ourselves and for our children? Yes, we could go live in a village in Italy, and we would probably be happier, but would our kids be well prepared to have a future in this capitalistic world? I resonate with another comment that people in Mexico seem happier than most Americans, because their expectations are more aligned with their reality. As a high achiever, it's hard for me to accept that it's okay to "settle", even if it might make me happier. Eric
The struggle of parenting here shouldn't be surprising. America is the same country where we push children to take on mountains of debt to pursue degrees, which they may or may not need for their desired job/career, that they will likely struggle for their first decade or more of adulthood to pay off. We then expect young people to find a partner, and throw a nice wedding and settle down, but we do nothing to prepare these people for the work of marriage even given the country's staggering divorce rate. Just look away from those numbers, your marriage will be different. It just will.
There's a societal expectation for couples to become parents--because only a self-centered and heartless monster wouldn't want a kid--but little transparency into the challenges of parenting here. Traditional hospital births, even when everything goes as planned, often come with a sizable out of pocket expense, and that's even with "good health insurance". If your locale or lifestyle requires both parents to work, you better have researched, budgeted for, and reserved quality childcare months before you bring your baby home, because most places--the "right places", if you know what I mean--have long waiting lists and the zombified 12 weeks of FMLA (if you qualify for FMLA) will be over before you know it. Moms are still routinely judged for working--often by the generation that can say, "I never had to work, your father and I were able to get by just fine"--but two incomes are now simply a requirement to thrive in so many places. The first 3-4 years of a daycare-kid's life will be marked by virus after virus, requiring an untold number of pediatrician visits and days off of work (each with their own associated cost) until your child has developed the immune system of a veteran garbage truck driver by the time you need to determine if your local public school will be sufficient, or if you'll need to take on a side hustle to afford a private option (assuming one is even available/in your price range).
In true American style, we don't really talk about these things. We keep our heads down, processing the nauseating expenses (financial and otherwise) of parenting here in silence, looking up occasionally to share carefully curated photos of our shining parenting experience and to encourage naive newlyweds that "parenting is the best, you're just going to love it.” Patrick
Thanks to all the dads who contributed to this discussion.
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Today is February 29th! Explain to your kids that each year actually is 365.2425 days long. It’ll blow their tiny little minds. It’s also known as “Bachelor's Day” in Ireland and was historically a day when women were “allowed” to propose to men. It’s also a day when men are “allowed” to subscribe to their favourite newsletters. I can’t remember where I read that. Pretty sure it’s true though.
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Gosh this hits home! I have struggled with my anger issues most of my life. Thankfully, I became more mindful and my daughters have seen me evolve as they got older - they are 10 now. I think me and my daughters are on a journey together, with me being sort of the scout who brings back tools and processes for us to try together.