Even a few weeks after the helicopter crash in Los Angeles that killed basketball great Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna and seven others, the shock remains. As a parent of two teenagers, what reverberates most is the multi-generational losses of three different families. Based on the supportive messages that continue to flit across social media, fellow parents agree. The most viral hashtags, however, have celebrated the father-daughter relationship: #GirlDad and #GirlsDad. They resulted from Elle Duncan’s tearful ESPN report in which she recounted Bryant’s pride as a “Girl Dad.” When I … [Read more...]
About Vincent O'Keefe
Grateful Mindset Should be Your Parental Goal for New Year
If a near-death experience goes unnoticed, did it even happen? Yes, I can confirm, and for that we should always be grateful. I can explain. Recently, as I drove around my oldest daughter’s college campus, my mind returned to one of the best — but what could have been one of the worst — days of my life. It was just over 20 years ago, a few years before my wife and I started a family and I became a stay-at-home dad. At the time, I was excited about my new job teaching English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Another comfort I enjoyed that day was our new leased car: a … [Read more...]
Parents Need to Know History to Help Children Prepare for Future
One of the pleasures of being a parent of teens is the long history you can reflect on. From time’s perch, you can finally start assessing what went right as a parent. (You can also assess what went wrong, but that’s for another post.) During my younger parenting years, I had always heard that if a parent models a behavior at home, a child is very likely to adopt that behavior, eventually. As a writer and former professor, I’ve always tried to model my love of reading history as a way to counteract our increasingly context-free culture of media soundbites and tweet-size attention … [Read more...]
Optimistic Parenting: Change ‘Oh, No! to ‘Oh, Well’ for More Upbeat Kids
Is your family generally optimistic? In today’s anxiety-inducing culture, optimism can be elusive — especially for kids. Fortunately, a new book titled Making Lemonade: Teaching Young Children to Think Optimistically can help parents nurture their children’s sense of optimism from an early age. Laura Colker and Derry Koralek are early childhood educators who begin their book with a hopeful premise: optimism is primarily a learned way of thinking, not an inborn mindset. Genes account for “about 25 percent of our optimism ... the other 75 percent is determined by environment, social … [Read more...]
Parenting Mantras I Learned from Author Toni Morrison
The words of recently deceased, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison had a huge impact on my life —first as a student, then as a parent. In graduate school, much of my research focused on her powerful novels — especially Beloved — that explored slavery and its aftermath. Later, as a stay-at-home dad, I saw her appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and once again her words hit me hard. During that appearance, Morrison captured the nature of a parent's unconditional love: “It’s interesting to see when a kid walks in a room, your child or anybody else’s child, does your face light up? That’s … [Read more...]
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