Module 3 · Who You Are Actually Raising · Lesson 2 of 2
Ten minutes, and what happens inside them
Everybody tells you to spend time with your child. Nobody tells you what to do in the room.
Module 3 of 12
By the end of this lesson
- Say the three rules of following a child instead of leading them
- Fix the day, the time and where the phone goes
- Report one thing about your child you did not know before you sat down
You have heard ten minutes a hundred times and you still do not do it. That is worth being honest about.
It is not because you do not love them. It is because ten minutes with nothing to do is uncomfortable for a man who has spent his life staying busy so he does not have to feel anything.
There is also the fear of doing it wrong. You do not know what to say, so you put the television on, or you buy something, or you take them somewhere loud where nobody has to talk.
Loud is easier than close. Almost everything men do with their children is designed to avoid the quiet.
Here is the whole instruction. Put the phone in another room. Let them lead. Do not correct, do not teach, do not ask about school, do not use it to bring something up.
You follow. They pick the game, the topic, the pace. If they want to show you the same video four times, you watch it four times. If they want to tell you about somebody in their class you have never heard of, you learn that person’s name.
You are allowed to say almost nothing. Say back what they said. Tell them what you notice. That is it.
It feels like doing nothing. It is not doing nothing. A child who is followed for ten minutes learns that they are worth following, and there is no other way to teach that.
You already know money does not do it. You have watched a man buy the shoes and still be a stranger in his own child’s life.
What the ten minutes builds is the thing a child comes back to you with later. A twelve year old in trouble goes to whoever has been safe. They do not go to whoever paid.
This is also how you find out things. Children do not answer interrogation. They leak information sideways while they are playing, and only to somebody who is already in the room and not asking.
If you want to know what is happening in your child’s life at fifteen, you build the road at five. If they are already fifteen, you build it now, it takes longer, and it still works.
Some of you get a supervised hour. Some get every other weekend. Some get a phone call that she may or may not pick up.
The ten minutes still applies, and it matters more, because you have less. Do not spend a short visit trying to fit in a whole childhood. That is the mistake almost every man in your position makes.
Take the visit and give ten minutes of it to nothing but them, fully, with your phone off. Then go and do the loud thing if you want.
They will remember which ten minutes they had you. Not how many hours you were in the building.
Presence is a skill, not a feeling.
The workEight questions
Three are answered in your head and never collected. They are marked, so you know before you start which is which.
What actually stops you from doing this?
- AI am never in the room long enough
- BIt feels awkward and I do not know what to do
- CMy phone. Honestly, my phone
- DI do it, but I am somewhere else in my head
Write the last time you gave your child ten uninterrupted minutes. Date it if you can. If you cannot remember, write that instead.
What are you afraid they will say if you get quiet enough to hear it?
Write the exact ten minutes you are going to take this week. What day, what time, where you are putting the phone.
When you are with your child, where is the phone?
- AIn another room
- BIn my pocket, face down
- CIn my hand
- DI am on it and they have stopped asking me to stop
Who followed you when you were small? Anybody?
Name one thing your child is into right now that you could not explain to a stranger. Then write what you are going to do about that.
Write what you think your child will remember about being with you. Be honest, not hopeful.
DeeperThree reflections
Longer than the questions and harder. Nobody reads these but you. Write them anyway, because the ones you would not say out loud are the ones doing the damage.
- 1
Write about a time your child tried to show you something and you were not really there. What it looked like on their face.
- 2
Write about what you do with your hands and your attention when there is nothing to do. Where does your mind go, and who taught it to go there.
- 3
Write the ten minutes as if it already happened and it went well. What did they talk about. What did you find out.
Hold this
Teach them when you sit in the house, when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you get up. There is no session in that. No program, no professional. Four ordinary moments in a normal day.
Deuteronomy 6:6-7
Before you close this
Presence is a skill, not a feeling
You do not have to feel close to be close. You have to be in the room with your attention on them, on purpose, for a fixed amount of time, on days when you do not feel like it.
That is all it is. Men keep waiting to feel like a father before they act like one, and it runs the wrong direction. The acting comes first, every time, and the feeling arrives late and quietly and usually while you are doing something ordinary.
Ten minutes. Phone in another room. They choose what happens. Then write down one thing you learned that you did not know before you sat down.
Written for fathers who are still fighting.
Legacy · Module 3.2