No I’m not remarried. Based upon my past history I may never get married again. That is not a knock on my Judy who is the most wonderful, beautiful, understanding and compassionate woman I have ever been with. Both of us have children who we love like there is no tomorrow. She has two boys and a girl, I have two girls. Judy’s daughter Randi is married and is pregnant and working on a family of her own. Her other two boys are 22 and 19. Danny still lives at home, and Ben is a freshman at Dartmouth. Yeah, Ivy league. I have two daughters, Sarah and Grace who both live with their mother. Sarah is almost 17 and Grace is 11. Christmas has become a wonderful time for me. It wasn’t always that way, but it is now. I love spending Christmas day with my kids, exchanging gifts and enjoying a wonderful Christmas meal that Judy always prepares. By the way Judy is Jewish so before she met me Christmas day meant a trip to the movies and a Chinese restaurant. Because she loves me and my children so much she makes Christmas at my house festive, joyful and a lot of fun for everybody.

The problems comes in when I have to wrangle with my ex wife during the holiday season. I usually have the kids on Christmas, but because she really wants them she can have a tendency to make life less festive. She does have the kids on Christmas Eve, when they have dinner at their aunts’ house. My kids love coming to my house on Christmas because they are the center of attention and receive their presents. It is an absolute blast for me to give them their gifts and see their eyes light up. The tension though of dealing with my ex wife can dampen their spirit and sometime mine, if I let it.

Now, some dads may be remarried, have kids from a previous marriage, have kids from their present marriage and have something called a blended family. Managing that crowd of people during the holidays may be something that you have to start preparing for right after the New Year. But, maybe not if you just make a few adjustments in your thinking as you deal with this complicated mess.

The thing I want most during the holiday season is peace. I don’t want arguments during the year and I sure don’t want them now. I can’t control my ex wife’s thought process, my God that would require a slide rule, but I can develop my own perspective on the situation. During the Thanksgiving holiday I had my Thanksgiving dinner on the Friday after Thanksgiving. My kids were with their mother on Thanksgiving day and it made it easier to manage everyone’s schedule by having dinner the day after Thanksgiving. If Christmas is going to become the same type of problem for you, try to understand that you may have to break from tradition and celebrate Christmas the day before or the day after. Believe me you will have a better time and there will be far less tension, and running around.

The world is not a perfect place. The Christmas season can make us more aware of that then any other time. Small things can become big things if we let them. Let negative comments go and focus on the kids and what you can do for them. Try to avoid financial arguments that seem to always come up during the holidays. Do your best to discuss things in a calm manner and let go of the small stuff. Money always seems to be a problem for my ex wife, not because of my lack of giving, but because of her distaste for working. Gift giving has always been my self imposed responsibility. Having different expectations of her during the holidays will only make me angry and destroy the joy that I have in giving to my kids.

Lastly, no matter how small your holiday celebration might be don’t make it a downer for your kids. Kids by their nature love the holidays, whether it be Christmas or Chanukah. Try to keep your spirits up because you love them, and want them to enjoy the season. When your kids are with you the biggest gift that you can give them is a loving dad who has tried to do whatever was necessary to make their holiday a peaceful one.

As I have looked back over my life, I have come to the realization that I learned more from dad than any other person in my life. His influence impacted me and helped develop me as a student, but mostly as a person. There is no doubt that a person’s personality is formed because of all of the things that people have said to us and have done to us and for us. My dad always had plenty of things to say to me, and did many things with me as a young child that helped me develop my interests, and many of the unique talents that I have today. He was a dad who was much older than the father’s of most of my friends. I was born when he was forty six years old. By the time I was 12 he had already had one stroke and didn’t have the physical strength to do many of the activities with me that fathers can do with their sons. He might not have had the strength to play baseball, football, or basketball with me, but anytime I wanted to participate in these activities he took me to the events and watched and supported me. He enjoyed watching me, and I loved knowing that he was there for me. I really loved when he would critique my performance and offer me advice. He became a student of the activities I was involved with and my best teacher.

As a father (and divorced dad) of two daughters myself I have learned that I have to take on the role as a primary educator for my children. Because my children live with their mother, it has been a challenge to involve myself in my children’s education because of the fact that I don’t see my kids on a daily basis. I do however call everyday and I am very aware of their academic progress and their day to day activities. I am a participant, a student, a supporter, and a teacher in their academic program. It has helped that I have been an educator for 30 years and have taught more students, teachers, and parents than I care to mention. But I have come to believe that my success in life will not be based on how well I educated someone else’s children, but how well I educated my own children. Stephen Covey explained in is book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People that a person has to achieve private victory in his life before he can have any form of public victory. In very simple terms I have to see to it that I successfully educate my own children, before I can have a part in the education of someone else’s children. As dads you can initiate or participate in activities that help your children succeed academically. Helping your children learn can increase their success in school. It is extremely important for your children to be independent learners. You want them to develop a hunger for knowledge, and become lifetime learners. The frequency with which you interact in positive ways with your children during the course of your education will reflect your interest in your child’s education and communicate to them the importance of doing well in school.

When your children are young, read to them every single day, even if it is for only 10 or 15 minutes. This will create a love of reading in your children which will help them become good readers. Continue to encourage your children to read as they get older. The key to this though, is that you have to put the time in when they are young reading to them and with them. Your children should also see you reading something everyday, and that can include the newspaper or even the Bible. You cannot just tell your children to read, and never pick up something to read yourself. Children learn by example first. Take your children to the library, and encourage them to take out books. When they have reports, take them to the library to find books they can use for research material rather than letting them find everything they need on the internet.

Establish daily routines with your kids that establish specific times for homework. When your children come home from school, you or your wife should make sure that they sit down at the kitchen or dining room table where you or she can see them so that they can be closely monitored while they are doing their homework. They cannot come home and go right up to their rooms supposedly to do their homework until you have the trust and knowledge that they will actually do this. They also cannot sit down at the TV, or have playdates before their homework is completed. Do not be so concerned about whether or not your children are having fun every second. They need to develop good study habits first, and I’m talking about establishing these when they are in first grade. Once they develop the good habits, you will not have to do much. If they are older at this point, and you haven’t worked on any of this before, then lay down the law now and establish this new routine. If they are older, it’s going to take much more effort on your part to do this. But if you just continue allowing them to do their thing, then I promise you that their success as students will be extremely limited.

Be sure to establish some time to spend with your children where you’re talking and having some fun. As a divorced dad I have to be sure to schedule specific time for my kids to visit my home on school nights. I have not been as successful with this with my oldest daughter Sarah as I would have liked. I think the problem was that I did not insist that she come. If she said she had something else to do, then I went along with that. Now, she’s pretty much in a habit of not coming over. She is almost 17 years old and has a very independent spirit. She is doing very well in high school and chooses to visit my home on a very limited basis. See, I think that’s the problem. I allowed her to choose, starting about when she was about 12 or 13, and parents shouldn’t be allowing their 12 or 13 year olds to choose those types of things. In certain areas, you (or I) should be the boss, and that’s just the way it is. Hopefully, my involvement is going to grow exponentially as she begins to prepare to go to college. But that will come only if I put the pressure on her to spend that time with me. I know she’ll be better off (and so will I) if we spend that time together. We dads just have to be strong and assert ourselves with our kids, which sometimes is really hard to do, if our kids are more assertive than we are. I know one thing for sure, and that is that if I don’t guide her through through her growing pains, then someone else will. This someone else is probably her friends, and I don’t think they have as much wisdom as I do.

My younger daughter Grace is in the 5^th grade and visits me 2-3 days a week. We do homework together. We have dinner and talk about her day, as well as my day. I enjoy sharing stories with her about what I did during the day. She also enjoys hearing stories about my childhood and what my father was like when I was a little boy. We have a great time laughing together, that’s for sure. But I make sure that I sit with Grace at the dining room table basically the whole time she is doing her homework. Neither her mother nor I really helped Grace establish the good study habits she needed when she was in first or second grade (which I spoke about earlier in this article), so now I’m faced with the reality that I have to make sure she establishes good study habits now. My window of opportunity is quickly closing, because once students are 12 or 13 years old, they almost become too old to sit at the table with their parents. But luckily, Grace is still young enough, and I can mold her in this area. As I attempt to take on a greater role as I help Grace with her with any difficulties she has with homework, I have to be sure to be consistent, and do this every single time that Grace is with me. I want Grace to see me as someone who may not always know every answer, but as a person who knows how to discover an answer through diligence and hard work. I know that I am not perfect. I do know this though, every moment that I spend with her while she is acquiring knowledge, and every positive word that I say to her will help her in terms of her feeling good about learning. It will also help me build a stronger relationship with her. Being divorced may not have been the very best thing for my kids, but it has forced me to look at my role as a father and use the time that I spend with them as an opportunity for them to view me as her first and most important teacher.

As a divorced dad with two daughters I can get resentful when my teenage daughter Sarah spends limited amounts of time with me. She comes over to my house and does what I call a cameo appearance. What usually happens is she arrives at my house and spends a few short hours with me. Just as we are starting to enjoy our time and settle in she says to me, “When are you going to take me home?” It seems as if she needs to rush home because she is afraid of missing one minute with her friends because they might suddenly find new friends to hang around with. This just happened yesterday. I celebrate Thanksgiving on the Friday after the holiday. It makes it far easier to have my kids with me the entire day. On Thanksgiving Sarah and Grace were at their aunt’s house with their mother. I picked them both up at 12:00 on Friday and brought them back to my house. I had twenty people at my house including my sister and her husband who were very excited to see my kids. My sister left at about 8:00, and things were starting to wind down. My daughter Sarah came to me and said to me, “When are you going to take me home?” I replied “Take you home, I thought you were going to stay over night and I would take you home in the morning.” That was the plan until her cell phone started ringing. I must say I felt unimportant and somewhat displaced. I have never been one to express any displeasure with my daughter’s requests, even though some of the things that she has wanted to do at times did not make me happy. I guess I’ve always been afraid of voicing any disapproval at all because I was concerned about driving her away from me. This time I had the feeling that I had to say something, and I did. We ended up in a discussion and I expressed my disappointment that she was leaving, and made a few other comments, that communicated my unhappiness. I did take her home, and things were fine on the ride. We spoke like nothing happened.

Let me let you in on a little secret. A divorced dad will never get anything from his children including respect if he doesn’t request it and sometimes demand it. The guilt, the pain and the thoughts about being a failure are all too real for me as a divorced dad. I suffered through these emotions and feelings for many years after my divorce. They don’t change one very important piece of this puzzle, and that is that I am my daughter’s father. I am her father, and I can place demands on her, make requests, and tell her how I feel regardless of any negative reaction that she may have. Sarah may continue to make cameo appearances at my house but I will continue to tell her that I don’t like it.

Our children will grow up fast. They will always look back on their childhood and wonder if we cared, or if we were apathetic. They will want to know why we let them get away with certain things and draw conclusions in their minds about our strengths or weaknesses as a father. Avoiding a confrontation because we are afraid that we are going to alienate them now may only lead to a relationship later that only involves a cameo appearance.