Dad of Divas

One Dad's Quest to Regain Control of his Kingdom

A Change In Our Format

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Hey everyone, I wanted to take a few minutes to share a little change that’s coming to The Dad & Daughter Connection.

For the past several years, I’ve been bringing you a new episode every single week, and I am incredibly grateful for everyone who listens, shares an episode, recommends the podcast to a friend, or simply takes the time to tune in. This podcast means a lot to me, and getting to have conversations with amazing dads, daughters, authors, experts, and people who have something meaningful to teach us about fatherhood has been an incredible journey.

But I’ve also been reminded of something that I talk about on this podcast all the time: being present matters.

As much as I love doing this podcast, I’m also a dad, a husband, and someone with a lot of other responsibilities and commitments. And I’ve realized that trying to maintain a weekly schedule can sometimes mean I’m stretching myself a little too thin.

So, beginning today, The Dad & Daughter Connection will be moving from a weekly podcast to an every-other-week schedule.

Now, I want to be very clear: this isn’t about slowing down or giving you less. In fact, it’s about making sure I can continue giving you the kind of conversations and content you’ve come to expect from this podcast.

I want to have the time to find great guests, ask thoughtful questions, have meaningful conversations, and produce episodes that are worth your time. And just as importantly, I want to make sure I’m protecting time for the people who matter most to me—my family.

Because if I’m going to spend my time talking about the importance of being present for our daughters, I need to make sure I’m practicing what I preach.

So, you’re still going to hear the stories, the conversations, the laughs, and hopefully a few things that make you think differently about being a dad and raising strong, confident, independent daughters. You’ll just hear them every other week instead of every week.

I hope you’ll stick with me for the journey. And if you’ve been listening all along, thank you. I truly appreciate you being part of The Dad & Daughter Connection community.

Until next time, keep connecting with your daughters, keep having those important conversations, and most importantly, keep showing up.

The Power of Being Present: Fatherhood Lessons with Mitesh Khatri

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What does it really mean to be a great dad to a daughter? The latest episode of The Dad and Daughter Connection digs deep into this all-important question. Host Dr. Christopher Lewis, joined by guest Mitesh Khatri—Melbourne father, writer, and corporate strategist—explores the daily challenges, triumphs, and small yet powerful moments that shape our relationships with our daughters.

A central theme of the conversation is the importance of being truly present. As Mitesh Khatri candidly shares, simply being in the room is not enough; it’s about showing up emotionally and giving your attention, especially during routines like bedtime or unstructured play. One meaningful moment he describes is when his young daughter told him to “stop rushing me.” This wake-up call led him to rethink how often stress and distraction rob us of precious connection—and how even “routine” moments can become the foundation of trust and closeness.

The episode also explores the challenge of balancing professional ambitions with family life. Mitesh Khatri discusses how corporate careers often offer clear metrics of success—promotions, projects, and accolades—whereas fatherhood can feel less measurable. The takeaway? We must create our own scorecards within our families: counting moments of connection, presence, and patience as real victories.

Perhaps most powerfully, the episode underscores the need for vulnerability. Mitesh Khatri opens up about his struggles with stress, his journey to calm his nervous system, and his realization that anger often masks deeper feelings like disappointment or sadness. He introduces practical strategies—like pausing before reacting and honest journaling—to help break generational cycles and model healthier emotional regulation for our daughters.

For dads who worry about not getting it right, Mitesh Khatri says it’s not about perfection, but about trying. He advocates for intentionality, ongoing learning, and talking openly with other dads. As host Dr. Christopher Lewis reminds listeners, “being an engaged dad isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being present.”

If you’re searching for practical insight and heartfelt stories on building meaningful father-daughter relationships, this is one episode you shouldn’t miss. Tune in to The Dad and Daughter Connection for real conversations that will leave you inspired to show up, connect, and be the dad she needs.

Listen now and start building your own toolkit for intentional, loving fatherhood.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:02]:
Welcome to the dad and Daughter Connection, the podcast for dads who want to build stronger bonds and raise confident, independent daughters.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:12]:
If you’re looking to build a stronger bond with your daughter and help her grow into a confident, independent woman, you’re in the right place. I’m Dr. Christopher Lewis and the dad and Daughter Connection is the podcast where we dive into real stories, expert advice, and practical tips to help you navigate the incredible journey of fatherhood. In every episode, we’ll bring you conversations that inspire, challenge, and equip you to show up as the dad your daughter needs. So let’s get started, because being a great dad isn’t just about being there, it’s about truly connecting. Welcome back to the dad and Daughter Connection, where every week we have a great opportunity to be able to delve a little bit deeper and into the relationships that you want to build with your kids. And I love that you’re here. Every week you’re here, you’ve rolled up your sleeves.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:08]:
You are doing what you can to be able to show up for your daughters in so many different ways. And that’s why this show exists. This show exists to help you to be that dad that you want to be. And I try to bring you different people, different people with different experiences every week to allow for you to be able to learn something new, to gain some tools for your toolbox that can help you to be able to be that dad. Today we’ve got another great guest. Mitesh Khatri is with us today. And Mitesh is a father from Melbourne, Australia. He’s got two kids himself and we’re going to focus on his daughter, but he also has a son and we’re going to learn a little bit more about him and I’m really excited to have him here.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:51]:
Mitesh, thanks so much for being here today.

Mitesh Khatri [00:01:53]:
Thank you so much, Christopher. And really appreciate all the work you do for fatherhood and dads and daughter in this connection. This podcast is fantastic.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:01]:
Well, I really appreciate that you’re here today and we’re going to talk about a new book that you have out to help fathers in many different ways as well. But. But we always start our interviews talking a little bit about you as a dad and especially as a dad to a daughter. And I know you’ve got a six year old daughter and I am really excited to be able to delve a little bit deeper. And I guess as you’re thinking about your relationship with your daughter, what’s one of the most meaningful mom that you’ve been able to share with your daughter, what made it so special?

Mitesh Khatri [00:02:28]:
Yeah, I think one of my most meaningful moments has definitely been the bedtime routine. I think it’s been really. Because it’s come from a moment where it wasn’t the best moment for me. So, you know, there was a time when I was completely stressed out. Two young kids, and my daughter was four. My son was five and a half. And I remember my son is quite direct. But my daughter, she is more subtle in her ways of expressing her emotions.

Mitesh Khatri [00:02:54]:
And she said to me one night, and as I was putting her to bed, four years old, looked up to me and said, you know, stop rushing me. Those three words, I just froze. And she wasn’t being difficult. I was trying to get through the routine. Please put on your pajamas, brush your teeth, go to the bathroom, read a book or two, or cut it short. I was stressed, I was depleted, and I didn’t want to be there in the room mentally, even though, you know, my beautiful daughter was just asking me to be there and to actually be present with her. And we talk about present all the time. I hear it on your podcast.

Mitesh Khatri [00:03:23]:
It’s all be present. It’s so difficult to do. You can’t think yourself to be present in the moment. You physically can sometimes not be able to be present, and your mind is rushing and your body is not allowing you to do that. So it was quite a low moment. But today, when I look at it, it’s one of the most beautiful times I have, is to put her to sleep every day, read her books, that routine, the cuddle she gives. And I look at her now, she’s six years old, just turned in April. We take time with that routine, and I really cherish that time.

Mitesh Khatri [00:03:51]:
Is she’s so sweet and she has the cutest smile and the cuddles and kisses you get at that time, you think, well, you know, I’m never going to get this back. And she’s only going to be this age, like this, this moment. So we have to make the most of it, because they do fade. I hear it from people with older children. You have clearly girls that have grown up. You have to appreciate that. And so I think my best moments, they’re around the bedtime routine because you get to talk about the day. You get to talk about what they really enjoyed, what they liked in the day, what they didn’t and might do differently.

Mitesh Khatri [00:04:21]:
And it’s really sort of deep, meaningful connections which you might not get it. Sort of school pickup. How was your day?

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:04:26]:
So talk to me a little bit about that transition that you had to go through because just hearing those three words, you can’t switch on a dime. You definitely have to go through a process for yourself to, I’m going to say, reinvent yourself in many different ways to be able to change that paradigm for yourself. So talk to me a little bit about that and what you had to do to be able to make that shift. I’m guessing failing a few times along the way and then getting to the point where you are now.

Mitesh Khatri [00:04:55]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, what I found was I thought I could think myself to be present and calm. And actually I found at that point my, my body was tense. It was stressed out from work, stressed out from home work, life management, all things that new dads or sort of dads at least, I mean all dads, but especially with the young children, you have a lot of competing priorities. And I didn’t think to look there, but actually looked to my body and I was tense in the shoulders, my back was hurting, I felt I was short of breath. Deadlines and emails and what’s next for the kids in terms of what we need to take care of. And I had to go through a bit of journey to really understand how to relax my nervous system. Right.

Mitesh Khatri [00:05:38]:
Ultimately our. If we think back to sort of hunter gatherer times and we think about the threats we had, right? We always talk about the lion and we sort of have to run away from the lion, the threat, and then our sort of nervous system can calm down. In today’s day and age, we all know with technology and the pace of life, there’s almost this ambient stress and therefore our automatic nervous system actually never sort of calms down. So we need to be sort of this safe and secure place. Polyvagal theory sort of talks about this where you need to be safe and secure. The next stage is survival mode and then complete shutdown. And I think many of us, at least me at the time, I was at least in survival mode every day, if not shut down on every other day. And I had to get my body back and I had to sort of calm my body.

Mitesh Khatri [00:06:25]:
And I have a sort of framework in the book around how we can discharge that stress. And there’s techniques and things you can learn to do. And I sort of had to learn how to do that and how to bring my body back to its irregular state.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:06:38]:
And that’s never easy. And I guess one thing that comes to mind is you and I talked at the very beginning that you’re a busy guy, you have Your professional work, you’re balancing that. You’re balancing being a dad, you’re balancing other things in your life. So talk to me about balance and how you’ve been able to find that optimal balance for yourself to be able to be the professional you want to be, the person you want to be, the father you want to be as you are today.

Mitesh Khatri [00:07:04]:
Yeah, I think balance is a very interesting word. Right. I think you have to really dig deep. If I sort of bring a parallel to corporate life, and I’ve been in corporate Life for like 20 years, helping organizations with complex jobs, blue chip organizations. I’m a sort of marketing corporate strategist, working in research and consulting. And, you know, we’re helping brands launch new products and services and ensure they meet consumer needs and doing some complex work around that. And I was sort of succeeding in that sort of arena because I had the metrics to sort of measure and perhaps in the most important area of my life, my family and my children, I didn’t have the metrics, I didn’t have the measure, and I felt like I was failing. It always came sort of second.

Mitesh Khatri [00:07:44]:
And I think myself, and when I talk to other dads in the community and friends and colleagues, I find it’s an easier thing to measure. So men sort of go towards things we can measure and we get that affirmation we’re seeking from work. We get praised with it. And it’s this scoreboard, I think, that we can easily track and see. When I think fatherhood’s not so easy, it’s in feelings, it’s in moments, it’s in those relationships where you can feel them. But you sort of. No one sort of celebrates the dad that comes home at 5pm on time to put his kids to sleep. But you do get the accolades and success at work when you succeed in your career.

Mitesh Khatri [00:08:19]:
And I’m not saying that we should sort of give up and forego our careers. I think it’s. It’s finding ways to measure things that matter. Those moments at home. So it might be the time that you don’t actually have your phone on you and just. Just have unstructured play with your children. You’re just getting on the floor. You’re not in any structured piece of work or structured time is taking them to dance, taking to music, taking him to soccer practice.

Mitesh Khatri [00:08:42]:
You know, that’s very structured. And kids need. Kids need that structure. But I think almost equally important or more important, they need that unstructured time. So I think when you can have those moments, you can say I’ve had 1, 2, 3, 4 moments this week where I’ve had really had unstructured time and play with my daughter. Whether we’re doing teacups or playing with Barbie dolls or kicking the ball outside. Those are the measures of success that I just didn’t have. I had all the traditional stuff, the KPIs that you get in your corporate life.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:09:10]:
And there’s always this push and pull when it comes to raising daughters. And as you are trying to raise your daughters, you’re balancing, trying to guide your daughter while also giving her the independence to become the person that she’s becoming. And I know she’s still young, but I guess as she has been growing up. How do you balance that? How do you balance guiding your daughter while still giving her that independence?

Mitesh Khatri [00:09:32]:
Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting one. I think kids in general, but daughters especially you are the model they’re looking to when it comes to men right from a very young age age. So there’s, there’s that scanning they do of the environment to see how do you react to situations, how do you carry yourself when things get tough, how do you treat your partner, her mum, you know, how are you treating different women, how do you sort of interact, how do you talk to friends that are female, how do you just treat people in general? So I think they’re modeling and learning of what a man should be. So I think you want to sort of help them with that. And in terms of independence, I think it really comes down to having honest, open conversations as much as you can for that age where you can really help them distinguish between right and wrong. What is the right kind thing to do and what is not so kind, what are the sort of right behaviors to be following? I guess. And one of the things I’m always mindful of is no one’s a perfect father, but not moving straight from a stimulus like some sort of stressor, straight to anger. And I think we as men tend to do that, perhaps more when especially I was doing that quite a bit where I’d find myself, kids are running late to school, we need to go.

Mitesh Khatri [00:10:41]:
And I actually get really angry. It’d come out in the force in my voice. And then you sort of how it is, you tell your kids not to shout at the other one and that’s what you’re doing and that’s the behavior and modeling. So I think modeling the right behavior is pretty critical. And that sort of journey of really understanding myself, modeling the right behaviors was pretty critical for Me for the last sort of two years. And, you know, recognizing that actually underneath that anger, it’s actually not anger that we’re feeling often. Maybe we’re hurt because actually we really wanted to spend that hour playing with our daughters before they go to school. Maybe we’re sad because.

Mitesh Khatri [00:11:14]:
Or disappointed because we wanted the morning to go a particular way and on time and not be late for something else. And we sort of go straight. We almost skip that emotion in between. Sadness, disappointment, hurt. Because I think we just weren’t taught that. And therefore our daughters are learning that. They’re modeling that as well. You know, when I get angry, I’ll just.

Mitesh Khatri [00:11:33]:
I’ll just go straight to voice, you know, raise my voice and actually not express my emotions. So I’m trying to say I’m hurt. I’m sorry I didn’t do the right thing there. And I apologize. I felt really sad that we couldn’t be on time because of these reasons. So it’s trying to label the emotion and model that. But I think the independence thing is hard. I think you’re always scanning the environment to go, how much do I let her go? How much do I pull her back in? Whether it’s at parties, whether it’s devices, whether it’s certain foods she might be eating or whatever it is.

Mitesh Khatri [00:12:02]:
That’s a tricky one.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:12:03]:
Completely understand. And we never have all the right answers. I mean, we definitely do our best and we try our best to be the best people we can be, but we’re flawed. Everybody is flawed in talking about that, I guess. What’s the mistake that you’ve made as a father, and what did you learn about it, about fostering a positive connection with your daughter?

Mitesh Khatri [00:12:22]:
I think I’ve made lots of mistakes. Probably like many dads, we all make lots of mistakes. I think one potential mistake I’ve made my daughter, and it probably comes from being that almost pushy parent when it comes to activities in sports. So sports or music or whatever it is really pushing them, maybe pushing them too much as well. We’re often projecting our own childhoods onto our kids. And they can lose the fun, you know, in what they’re doing, whether it’s dance or they’re playing some sport or whatever it is, and I think you want them to do well. But I think it’s also recognizing that they’re just kids, you know, we’re not sort of in the professional leagues. So I think I’ve really learned from that.

Mitesh Khatri [00:13:02]:
To not be the parent on the sideline shouting. I think it’s encouraging your kids, but not in a way that’s perhaps disrupting their sort of natural way to enjoy what they’re doing, whether it’s. Yeah. Dance or sport or whatever it is.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:13:16]:
Now, as I mentioned, you’ve got a new book that’s out there called the Fight or Father Using Calm to Stop Reacting and Start Connecting. As a author myself, I know that many times when you’ve got this idea in your head and you got this passion to be able to get these words out and trying to connect with your people that, that you go all in. But you definitely have to have a passion for it to get to that finish line. So give me the story of the book and tell. Talk to me about why. Why you decided to write it, why you decided to put the time, the effort and the passion into it to get it out into the world.

Mitesh Khatri [00:13:52]:
I never thought I’d be a writer myself, but I’ve always sort of been research and really, as I was saying to you earlier before we started, always very interested in why people do what they do and what drives our behavior, what motivates us. Right. So I mean, I’m the sort of tragic in the self help section looking at the next book and going, how can I learn from this? I wrote this book because I think modern fatherhood is really breaking men and the expectations have changed and you’re supposed to be a provider and present with your kids. You’re meant to be the breadwinner and also emotionally available. And no one really taught us. If we think about our father’s generation, they didn’t really teach us how to do that. Our fathers really had a role which was sacrifice, commit yourself and be the breadwinner and be respected at home and very traditional household. I guess I’m talking to.

Mitesh Khatri [00:14:40]:
And I think I see a lot of modern parents for really my sort of discoveries on this journey started about five years ago. Kids very young. I see a lot of dads just grinding through it, myself included, exhausted, distracted. We’re snapping at our kids. We sort of promise ourselves we’re going to do better tomorrow and. But deep down we know something’s wrong, something’s not working. We need better tools, we need better ways to parent and we know that it’s a learning process at all. So I wrote this in almost a way to sort of say we can choose to fight and react and be in that sort of survival mode or shutdown mode when stresses hit with our kids, or we can choose a almost new way to father modern fatherhood.

Mitesh Khatri [00:15:19]:
I think it takes the best of what our fathers taught us. And it builds on that. And I think it builds on, you know, a lot of what you talk about, Christopher, is, is showing vulnerability. We need to show vulnerability to our children. We need to show not just the masculine side, but actually it’s okay to get things wrong. And this is what you do to repair that. And I think, I’m sure there’s lots of books that sort of talk to various things around that out there. I didn’t see something targeted specifically at that aspect.

Mitesh Khatri [00:15:45]:
And therefore, yeah, really focused in my own journey of switching from a dad that was reacting all the time at his kids, didn’t have the patience. As I said, my body was chronically stressed at the time. I put on weight and wasn’t eating well. I was numbing pain through alcohol, etc. And it’s not enough to just think yourself to a better version of yourself. You need tools, you need techniques. So I wrote the book and have got some practical techniques on what dads can do. You know, simple things like just having clear boundaries between work and home.

Mitesh Khatri [00:16:18]:
It’s so difficult, particularly post Covid. Many of us are working home in hybrid sort of environments and it blurs. You have your kids next to you in the school holidays. We’ve got school holidays going on now. My son or daughter will work almost in the same room in a work mode. I might close the laptop, but still mentally be processing the emails that I haven’t sent, the tasks I haven’t done. So I think it’s having those practices to say, you know, simple things, five seconds, where you might go, I’m home now, I’ve closed the laptop, let me show up. Or you might go wash your face or you might go change your clothes.

Mitesh Khatri [00:16:48]:
It’s just physically doing something. You might do 20 star jumps. But you need that transition process and just one example from work to home. So that calm framework is really around that. So you clear your body of the stress. Firstly, you anchor yourself between work and home. So have a ritual around that. You lead with calm because kids follow your regulations.

Mitesh Khatri [00:17:09]:
You need to be calm and have techniques for that and model and repair is probably the most important part where when you get it wrong and you will like myself every day, there’ll be something I do wrong, I need to admit to it and I need to label what that emotion is, which is then going into my vulnerable side, you know, it’s going into really understanding what that emotion is, not just anger and then coming up with a repair, you know. So yeah, I just remember I Actually had an argument with my daughter. I was stressed this A couple of days ago. She wanted to play. She can we play. She likes doing tea parties and cafes in her room. And I didn’t have the patient. And I just said to her, I’m really tired.

Mitesh Khatri [00:17:47]:
I’m stressed. I’ve had a long day and a hard day. And I shouted at you, is it okay if we start again? And she just looked at me and she said, okay, dad. And I think previously I would have just shouted and said, I’m not doing this, and it’s time for bed. So I think. I think it’s having those skills. It’s. Firstly, I’ve been quite vulnerable in the book myself.

Mitesh Khatri [00:18:04]:
So, you know, I’ve had sort of beta readers say it’s been quite difficult to read at times because they’ve seen themselves in it as well. So I think it’ll. It’ll definitely make you turn the mirror on yourself and analyze your own life, your own behaviors, and perhaps you’ll pick a couple of techniques and tools that you can use to just be that modern father and not fight all the time.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:18:23]:
And one of the things you write about in the book is being there, but not there. And many dads believe simply being physically present is enough. What helped you recognize the difference between proximity and true presence? And how can dads begin to see that difference in their own lives?

Mitesh Khatri [00:18:42]:
I like the bedtime routine with my daughter. It was actually that really broke me when she said, stop rushing me. And you really, you know, reflect on those things and try to make a change. And you don’t always get it right. But my son said to me one day, he was on the, I think, kitchen table, dining table. I was scrolling on Instagram, you know, usual blur posts that we would normally go, just mindless, scrolling, doom scrolling. And Taj was nearby and he. I don’t know what he was doing exactly.

Mitesh Khatri [00:19:08]:
And that was part of the problem. And without looking up, he said, you’re always on your phone, dad. Not angry. He wasn’t whining, just like matter of the fact. Like, he was describing the weather. And I looked at him and, you know, his face was soft. He was disappointed. He wasn’t trying to start a fight with me about it, that he was just telling me the facts for what he saw.

Mitesh Khatri [00:19:26]:
And I said automatically, almost automatically, I’m not quite defensive. I just need to do this one thing. And clearly I was lying to him, right? I wasn’t being honest. I was lying to him. I wasn’t being honest to myself. I put the phone down in that moment and I felt my chest get tight and I had a little shake in my hands and I felt enormous guilt that he had just seen me more clearly than I had seen myself. And I think we’ve all been there and I think researchers, you know, we’ve heard this all the time, we hear about phones all the time. But technically interference.

Mitesh Khatri [00:19:57]:
Dr. Brandon Michael actually coined the term where seemingly sort of normal amounts of phone use during parent child time. It’s actually linked to increased behavioral problems in children. So the screen time, not because of the screen time itself, but what it communicates like. You’re not important to me. Right. Right now, in this moment, this is most important to me. We’ve all heard that before.

Mitesh Khatri [00:20:18]:
So that’s what I mean by you’re there, but you’re not really there. You’re in the room physically, but in your mind you’re somewhere else. You’re in another place, you’re thinking about something else. You’re not actually aware of your surroundings. You’re not actually picking up the cues or the people in the room. So I think that in itself because it increases the behavioral problems and we see how much time we spend on our phones and screens. It’s something which I’ve been much more conscious with. Now the phone goes on the charger.

Mitesh Khatri [00:20:44]:
Leave it there at 6pm in the evening. Sometimes I’ll throw it upstairs in the bedroom in a drawer. Because when it’s there we’re just so automatic. We’re so addicted to these devices that are in our pockets that are so powerful. So I think that’s really what I mean. We’re not there. And that can be a physical device, but it can also be actually we haven’t decompressed from the day and we’ve got all the stress from work or so we’re thinking about something else. We’re actually not there with our family.

Mitesh Khatri [00:21:08]:
We’re just unavailable and we’re not in tuned with not engaging with them.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:21:12]:
Now one of the other things that I read in the book was you talk about how many fathers suddenly hear their own dad’s voice coming out of their mouths during those stressful moments that you kind of talked about. When that realization happens, what practical steps help a father pause long enough to break that generational pat?

Mitesh Khatri [00:21:32]:
Yeah, that is a real difficult one. I think. I think what I’ve done is pause for five seconds. So when you see your voice coming, and you might even hear, you might even see in your children yourself, then your father talking to you In a particular way, that is really difficult. And I think we have to appreciate everything they did for us in terms of sacrificing, building a life and opportunities for us, and appreciate all those things. But at the same time, they maybe didn’t know how to deal with that stress or anxiety, anger. And when I say anger, it could be hurt, it could be disappointment, it could be sadness around something. So I think, you know, pausing, reflecting.

Mitesh Khatri [00:22:10]:
It’s a lot of journaling. So the last five years, on and off, journaling, I haven’t been as regular. But journaling on those moments where you know that you’ve almost automatically reacted in a way, and you can hear your father’s voice, whether it’s the harshness, whether it’s the criticism, whether it was the absence of. Of a father. I think we tend to overcompensate from what we had or didn’t have. And I think it’s a lot of deep reflection that needs to be done. But I just encourage everyone to just pause, pause. You don’t have to respond straight away to your kids.

Mitesh Khatri [00:22:41]:
You can pause for a couple of seconds, reflect, and actually sit with those thoughts. I think you got to do quite a bit of deep work and journal and plenty of services out there where you can talk to psychiatrists and psychologists and so forth to really understand the relationships with our parents. I think I’d also encourage if. If you can and your father’s around, have a conversation with him, Talk to him about things that you really have a lot of gratitude for and the things you wish that he could have done better. I think those things, and it’s not sort of pointing the finger or blaming anyone, it’s just having those honest conversations. And I think you’d be surprised where that might take you as well.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:23:17]:
It definitely is a journey. And a lot of times we’re constantly trying to find new ways to be able to measure up as a dad. And we look around us and we think, oh, all these dads are doing better than we are. And there’s almost that. As you talk in the book about that scorecard that we have in our book, about how we are grading ourself, how we’re scoring ourselves, and you talk about rethinking that internal scorecard that we use to measure success. What are the most common invisible scorecards that you’re seeing that fathers are running, and how do they quietly pull dads away from connection with their kids? But also, how can we change the script on those scorecards and allow for us to be able to look at that in a different way.

Mitesh Khatri [00:24:03]:
Yeah, I think that there’s a powerful primary story here. We almost have this deep obligation we have to build, we have to secure, we have to work long hours. We have to sacrifice. Sacrifice is love. And love looks like a mortgage paid off, a fridge that’s full, a future that’s funded for the kids. And that is important, you know, and elements of that are really important. And it’s a powerful story, and it has deep roots in human history, and male identity has been shaped by that. And I sort of talked about this a little bit earlier, earlier in the sense that fathers of men that do that, you know, they keep reinforcing that scorecard that exists.

Mitesh Khatri [00:24:37]:
So, you know, status follows the achievement. Respect comes with that success. The man is getting the promotion or close the deal or starting a new business and is an entrepreneur. They get admired. But we’re not throwing the awards and accolades for the dad who’s performing really well at home with his kids and actually teaching them about vulnerability, teaching them about how to regulate themselves, teaching them about how to show kindness and how to introduce themselves and respect others and be part of the community and. And, you know, have strong values and those sort of things. So I think men chase the thing that’s being rewarded, and we pour ourselves into that, you know, into our careers and into our work, and then we don’t have much left for the family. So.

Mitesh Khatri [00:25:16]:
And I think what fathers can do is have that sort of scorecard for themselves. So I have read sort of James Clear Atomic Habits, and, you know, we’re all sort of creatures of habits. So in my diary that I physically write, I write time with my wife, specific things I want to do, time with my kids, specific activities, time for my exercise. And I tick those things off, right? So I’m not just my career ticks and successes, but actually, what are my goals for my relationship with my son, my relationship with my daughter, my wife? What are my goals? How am I working towards that and am I sharing those goals, what I’m trying to do? So I think almost like we have KPIs for work, if you have a team and you have some employees and you sort of evaluate them, you can’t evaluate them on something you haven’t actually given clear KPIs on. And I think it’s hard to evaluate yourself on your family life if you’re not clear on those KPIs as well, and your children as well. If you want them to respect other people and talk with kindness, then you need to Teach them that. So you need to sit down, maybe it’s 10 minutes, maybe it’s a couple of hours where you need to show them what kindness looks like. How do you actually talk to someone? How do you greet someone? You know, how do you leave a social situation in a respectful way? I think those things we don’t measure and therefore we just think they just happen and get done.

Mitesh Khatri [00:26:34]:
I think, you know, the adult, the age old sort of saying what gets measured gets done in corporate life also matters in our personal life. And so we need to create those measures at home. And I don’t really know what the perfect measures are. It might just be that I had a beautiful moment with my kid today, you know, have a box for that and it’s a tick. So there were three nice things that my child said to somebody else as a measure around that. I think we need to create our own measures of success and have some KPI guys similar to what we would do in our career, because that’s how you get to the next level. You sort of can’t do that in your relationships if you don’t know what those measures of success are. So I think we all need to sort of create those.

Mitesh Khatri [00:27:12]:
And they’re going to be different for different, you know, whether it’s a girl or a boy or different ages, you sort of need to come up with those and your kids can be part of it, your wife can be part of it.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:27:20]:
The one thing I really liked about your book, and I think we could spend the next few hours talking about different aspects of your book, but one of the things that I really liked was the fact that your book, as you said, wasn’t written from the perspective of someone that’s figured everything out. You talk about where you are now, what you’ve learned along the way, but at the same time that you’re still failing, that you’re still flawed, and that there’s still things to learn. So as you are continuing your journey, what are you still learning about fatherhood that is surprising you?

Mitesh Khatri [00:27:52]:
So there’s just everyday surprises, I guess, with kids. You know, they sort of surprise you in different ways. But I’m just trying to think of more sort of themes that surprise you. Me, I think their maturity surprises me. You sort of sometimes underestimate how much your kids are learning as they grow up and where they’re at. They’re 7 and 6 and my daughter’s 6 years old, but you know, she knows a lot about the world and she is very mature when she needs to be And I sort of sometimes don’t want that to go away. Like her being very young, that small little girl, that beautiful girl that I put to bed at bedtime, I don’t want her to grow up to too quick. So, I mean, coming back to your question, what, what am I still learning is I think our kids are becoming independent and learning more than sometimes we appreciate or sort of take notice of.

Mitesh Khatri [00:28:38]:
And I mean, that’s come back, comes back to your independence. You know how, you know, you want them to have that independence and learn and grow and not slow them down in those settings. But I think my natural instincts is maybe to slow them down at the age they’re at and make sure they don’t grow up too quickly. So I think that’s a tough sort of battle I’m sort of facing. That’s what sort of comes to mind.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:28:58]:
And I guess finally, as I think about your book and for you, as you think about the legacy that you’re leaving behind in the book, you ask fathers to consider what their children are going to remember about them. If your kids were adults today, in reflecting on your parenting journey, what do you hope that they would say, say most about you?

Mitesh Khatri [00:29:21]:
I hope my children at the start of my book, this book is for every that that’s trying and I hope they see that I really tried. I, I got it right a lot of the time and probably got it wrong a lot of the time as well. So I think if I can have them growing up seeing a man that really tried to improve themselves, really tried to improve himself around his relationship with them and worked hard at the that and didn’t take my situation and where I was, as you know, that’s how it is. And I improved on who I was and knowing that those I was never going to be perfect and that I tried, that I love them, that I wanted the best for them and wanted to support them in everything that they did. So particularly with Alia, if I think about her, she has a lot of strength and it’s through sensitivity. She feels our feelings much more than my son will. She’ll notice things in others. She’ll carry emotions that’s probably bigger than a small little body.

Mitesh Khatri [00:30:18]:
I want her to know that she really has a superpower there in terms of that emotional intelligence and she can sort of really sense the situation. I hope that I give them the foundations of what being a good person is, what a kind person is, that vulnerability is strength. Whether you’re, whether it’s my daughter or my son being vulnerable, being Self aware, being calm when things get tough, showing emotional strength. They’re going to be the backbone of everything that sort of helps you in your life, whether it’s career or family or social. I want them to get rid of emotional sort of just thinking about it, but I just want them to remember myself and my wife really loved and cared and, and did everything for them to ensure that they got the right values in life, that they got all the opportunities they wanted to have, and that we really tried, that we always loved them.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:31:06]:
Now we always finish our interviews with what I like to call our dad Connection six, where I ask you six more questions to delve a little bit deeper into you as a dad. Are you ready?

Mitesh Khatri [00:31:16]:
All right, let’s try it.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:31:17]:
What’s one word that describes your relationship with your daughter?

Mitesh Khatri [00:31:20]:
Beautiful.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:31:21]:
What’s the best piece of dad advice that you’ve ever received?

Mitesh Khatri [00:31:26]:
Work on you first. Start with yourself. Then you can serve the people you love.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:31:31]:
What’s one activity that you and your daughter love doing together?

Mitesh Khatri [00:31:35]:
There’s many, but. Bedtimes, tea parties, playing with her dolls. I’m definitely a dad that has not done that until my daughter came along. So really getting down on the floor and playing those games. Games. Originally I felt quite ridiculous doing it, but then I thought I found joy in it because I’ve just never done it before. Just freeing into my sports and, you know, all the manly activities.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:31:55]:
If you could give your daughter one life lesson in a single sentence, what would it be?

Mitesh Khatri [00:32:00]:
You know, always, always speak your mind and stand up for yourself. You have a lot of potential.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:32:06]:
Now, you’ve mentioned a number of these, but what’s one thing you’ve learned about yourself since becoming a dad?

Mitesh Khatri [00:32:12]:
So much. Yeah. Um, that you really need a lot of patience. We hear it all the time. But I think more importantly, everything you do has to be quite intentional and intentional. And I’ve heard you talk about it. Chris. Christopher as well.

Mitesh Khatri [00:32:23]:
Intentionality is probably one of those cornerstones of everything you’re doing in fatherhood, especially with your daughters. You’ve got to be quite intentional, but not, obviously, taking away from unstructured play time. But by being intentional, you can be present, you can be there, not outside the room.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:32:39]:
And finally, what advice would you give to other dads who want to build a lasting and meaningful, meaningful relationship with their daughters?

Mitesh Khatri [00:32:46]:
Treat vulnerability as strength. And I think if you were to journal or you talk to some close mates and dads and actually really get into the deep and meaningful and get vulnerable. And in my book, I have A lot of stories from other dads I run with and friends and we start to realize that we’re living parallel lives and when we get vulnerable, something unlocks, we learn something. And I think men don’t talk enough. So I’m a big advocate of dads talking about talking. And podcasts like this bring different topics and things dads are going through to, to life because we tend to bottle everything up right. We’re not very good at that. So I just encourage everyone to talk to someone and around things you’re going through and it might surprise you that actually somebody else might be going through very something very similar and can you can relate and you can bond over that.

Mitesh Khatri [00:33:35]:
So make sure you join these sort of podcasts or some sort of dad group or have a set of friends you can can have those conversations with.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:33:45]:
Well, Mitesh, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for being here, for putting this book out into the world, for sharing your journey with us today. And it’s not over, but I know that it’ll keep continuing and you’ll keep learning. But I truly want to say thank you and I wish you all the best.

Mitesh Khatri [00:33:59]:
Thank you so much, Christopher. Really appreciate it. And yeah, the book comes out on 28th of July, so it’ll be available Amazon, all sort of good book stores.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:34:07]:
We’ll definitely put a link in the notes today and I congratulate you on getting this out into the world and look forward to others reading it and learning from what you’ve learned along the way.

Mitesh Khatri [00:34:17]:
Thank you so much, Christopho.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:34:18]:
That’s a wrap for this episode of the dad and Daughter Connection. Thanks for joining us on this journey to build stronger bonds and raise confident, independent daughters. Remember, being an engaged dad isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being present. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and share it with a fellow dad. And don’t forget, you can find all our episodes at the end dad and daughterconnection.com until next time. Keep showing up, keep connecting and keep being the dad she needs.

Musical Outro Performer [00:34:49]:
We’re all in the same boat and it’s full of tiny screaming passengers we spend the time, we give the lessons we make the miracle we buy them presents and bring your A game Cause those kids are growing fast the time goes by just like a dynamite blast Calling astronauts and firemen carpenters and muscle men get out and be the world to now Be the best dad you can be the best that you can be.

Empathy, Trust, and Conversation: Raising Confident, Kind Daughters

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If you’re a dad looking to build a stronger bond with your daughter, the latest episode of the Dad and Daughter Connection podcast is a can’t-miss listen. Hosted by Dr. Christopher Lewis, this episode features a heartfelt conversation with Alex Greenwood, father of an almost 17-year-old daughter, who opens up about the everyday realities, challenges, and rewards of being a present and engaged dad.

The Power of “Hey, Dad” Moments

One of the episode’s core themes is the importance of creating and treasuring meaningful moments—sometimes in the simplest ways. Alex shares about his “hey dad” moments, where his daughter pops downstairs to sit and talk, checking in on him and sharing her world. These moments, whether brief or lasting for hours, have become the heartbeat of their connection. As Alex says, “these conversations can last anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours… and we talk about everything.” These authentic check-ins remind us that genuine connection isn’t built in grand gestures—it’s nurtured in consistency and willingness to simply be available.

Balancing Guidance and Independence

Another central theme is the delicate balance between guiding and giving independence. Alex describes the challenge of working demanding hours, yet prioritizing availability for his daughter, whether it’s teaching her to change windshield wiper fluid or sending a supportive text on a long workday. He emphasizes that, especially with teens, “availability” is key—not forcing connection, but being there when she seeks it.

Intentional Parenting: Preparing for Life’s Realities

Alex and his wife have been intentional about preparing their daughter not for control, but for independence. They’ve communicated their evolving roles—from “bosses” when she was young, to “supervisors” during college, and eventually “consultants” and “friends.” Through practical life lessons—whether teaching financial literacy through a make-your-own business project or discussing the realities of loss—they empower her with resilience, critical thinking, and empathy.

Conversations that Matter

The episode doesn’t shy away from tough topics: discussing impermanence and loss, embracing vulnerability, and fostering trust through honest communication. Alex reminds fellow dads to “give yourself permission to be human” and always talk to your kids with respect.

Listen to Grow as a Dad

If you’re seeking real-life stories, practical tips, and inspiration for meaningful father-daughter connections, tune in to this episode of the Dad and Daughter Connection podcast. Be reminded that being the dad your daughter needs is about showing up, growing together, and cherishing the journey—bumps, laughs, and all.

Listen now at dadanddaughterconnection.com, and start building those memorable moments today.

If you enjoyed this episode we ask you to take a moment to take our Dad and Daughter Connection Survey to let us know more about you as a dad. You can also sign up to get our newsletter to stay connected to our community and we will send items of interest to you to help you to be the dad that you want to be. Feel free to follow me on the following social media platforms: Facebook, Facebook Group, Instagram, LinkedIn, X.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:02]:
Welcome to the dad and Daughter Connection, the podcast for dads who want to build stronger bonds and raise confident, independent daughters.

Alex Greenwood [00:00:12]:
If you’re looking to build a stronger bond with your daughter and help her grow into a confident, independent woman, you’re in the right place. I’m Dr. Christopher Lewis, and the dad and Daughter Connection is the podcast where we dive into real stories, expert advice, and practical tips to help you navigate the incredible journey of fatherhood. In every episode, we’ll bring you conversations that inspire, challenge, and equip you to show up as the dad your daughter needs. So let’s get started, because being a great dad isn’t just about being there. It’s about truly connecting. Welcome back to the dad and Daughter Connection. Really excited to have you back again this week.

Alex Greenwood [00:00:56]:
As always, every week, you and I are on a journey together. We are working our tail off trying to build these amazing relationships that we want to have with our daughters one step at a time. And I’ll tell you, it’s not always going to be easy. There’s going to be bumps in the roads and you have to be able to sometimes be humble and know if you make mistakes, you’re going to pick yourself back up and keep going. And it’s so important that not only that you know that, but it’s so important that you’re willing to learn, to grow and to listen, because there are so many individuals around us that are fathering in different ways, and there is no one right way to father. That’s why this podcast exists, because every week I love being able to bring you different people with different experiences that are fathering their children in different ways and they can bring some perspective for you to consider for yourself. Doesn’t mean you’re going to take everything that you’re going to hear on every episode and turn it into something that you’re going to use today. But it provides you with some tools for your toolbox to allow for you to be able to consider different things and maybe make some adjustments along the way that’ll help you to be the dad that you want to be.

Alex Greenwood [00:02:12]:
This week we got another great guest. Alex Greenwood is with us, and Alex is the father of an almost 17 year old. He’s. And I’m really excited to be able to have him here for him to share some of his own experiences as a father. Alex, thanks so much for being here today.

Alex Greenwood [00:02:26]:
Chris, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Alex Greenwood [00:02:28]:
It is my pleasure. Really excited to be able to talk with you today and to. And to Delve a little bit deeper into your relationship with your daughter. And this podcast is all about connection. So I guess first and foremost, one of the things that I’d love to ask you is all of us are on are in a journey of trying to do what we can to be able to build meaningful moments. Meaningful moments that you and I can create with our, with our kids, that they can take with them. Think back to one of those meaningful moments. What is one of the most meaningful moments that you’ve shared with your daughter thus far and what made it so special?

Alex Greenwood [00:03:04]:
I am always just surprised is the wrong word. Amaze is too strong a word. But I’m always so energized by and I feel so wonderful. And it’s a very simple thing, Chris. It’s not some life changing, earth shattering thing, but I have a little. It’s not really a man cave. It’s just a place where I go, it’s downstairs and I got a TV and I got a place to read and that kind of thing. And I go down there just because I have a job.

Alex Greenwood [00:03:28]:
I work in communications at a university. I have 12 hour days, I talk to people all day and I have a long commute. So I get to a point where when I finally get home, sometimes I just want to go down there and just recharge a little on my own. I’m one of those ambiverts. I mean, I’m not an introvert by any means, but I do have to charge the batteries a little bit. And sometimes I, I just go down and contemplate and all that. And my daughter, who, her name’s Caroline and she’s going to be 17 next year, but she’s done this thing for a long time. And you know teenagers, I know you have kids that are a little older than that and you know how it is with them, especially in the teenage years, they just get to a point where it’s not that they don’t love you anymore or don’t want to be around you, but they’re doing what they’re supposed to do.

Alex Greenwood [00:04:05]:
They’re starting to kind of break away and become more independent. So sometimes I find myself missing her quite a bit, but I don’t burden her with that. Right? I don’t do, do that. That’s not fair to her. Don’t make her feel guilty for doing what she’s supposed to do. So it’s just interesting. She has this wonderful habit of every now and then popping downstairs, sitting in a chair across from me and saying, hey, dad. And I’m like, well, hey, kid, what’s up? I call her kid.

Alex Greenwood [00:04:29]:
I’ve always called her kid. She’s my only child. And she just asks me about how I’m doing. She’s like, I just want to check in with you. How you doing? And what I realized, and I call these hey dads now, by the way, but I realize the hey dads are not really just her wanting to hear how I’m doing and. But it’s also her way of saying a couple of things. One, I miss you, dad. And two, I want to tell you what’s going on in my life.

Alex Greenwood [00:04:53]:
And that’s what we do. These conversations can last anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours. And we talk about everything. And I mean everything. Books she’s reading, the TV shows she likes music she loves. Taylor Swift, of course, The Mighty Chiefs, our football team here. You know, speaking of Taylor Swift, we’ll talk about relationship. We’ll talk about her grandparents.

Alex Greenwood [00:05:14]:
Chris it’s how I feel like I might have actually been doing a pretty decent job as a dad, is that she enjoys speaking with me. And I’m not saying she happens. It doesn’t happen every day, but it happens more than enough for me to feel very blessed. And I don’t know if that sounds like anything all that interesting to folks, but for me, it’s just about everything.

Alex Greenwood [00:05:32]:
No, it’s so important, especially as they get older and if they’re still checking in with you, still willing to talk to you, and especially as they get into those upper teen years. I’m not saying that to scare people, because it’s not the same with every kid. And with some kids, teenage years can be easygoing, and then other kids could be harder. But if you have put the time and effort in. In raising your child through the years and built that solid relationship with them along the way, them coming back to you and being willing to continue talking to you, being willing, engage with you, and keeping you as a part of their world is so important. Now, you talked about the fact that you work a ways away from home, so you’re balancing a lot. You’re balancing going to work and coming home and trying to still maintain that connection with her and keeping that balance. So talk to me about balance.

Alex Greenwood [00:06:30]:
And how do you balance not only all of the things that you’re trying to do, but how do you also balance guiding your daughter while also giving her that independence that you want her to have to be able to grow into the person that she’s become becoming?

Alex Greenwood [00:06:42]:
It’s a Real balancing act. And first of all, I’m an older Dad. I was 40 when she was born and so I’m not as spry as I used to. I take care of myself. I work out. My days are averaging 12 hours because I drive about 82 miles each way four days a week to work. I get one work from home day which I can usually take if you put in a 10 hour workday, that’s about a 12, 12 and a half hour workday. And when I, by the time I get home I’m pretty tired.

Alex Greenwood [00:07:06]:
Yet I still manage to. I run a couple of my own podcasts, I write a substack column, I’m working on another book. I find time to do a lot of stuff. But the main thing is though is to develop that availability to my daughter when she, so that she can come talk to me anytime or she can text me or sometimes just, just a connection on texting. She started her first job this summer and she’s, she’s just loving it. She’s loving to be able to raise her own money and buy the things she wants to buy and, and I’ve been so proud of her about that. And what’s interesting is like yesterday, you know, today’s as we record this Chris, today’s their first day of school for junior year in high school and she’s got a hand me down car I gave her. It’s 11 year old car and she loves it and she takes care of it.

Alex Greenwood [00:07:50]:
And I showed her how to. Yesterday I showed her how to change the wall, the windshield wiper fluid. It’s finding moments like that where it may not be all day, it may just be touches like that. A good text and I’ll text her. I’m not gonna lie. I text her sometimes and I just say, hey kid, I love you. I hope you hope you’re having a great day. Or if I have to work, particularly Thursday, it’s going to be about a 15, 16 hour day.

Alex Greenwood [00:08:11]:
I am not going to see her Thursday night. I will text her at some point, maybe a goofy picture of me at work and just say thinking about you. Hope everything’s going great. So for me it’s about being available and understanding that particularly at this age where my kid is at least I have to be available to her when she feels that need to connect with me. And that’s okay. That really is okay. Because when you think back to when your kids were so little, I still remember my kid coming up to me and saying she’s four, will you play with me. And I was running my own business back then.

Alex Greenwood [00:08:43]:
I was working a lot of hours then too. But I did have the wherewithal to know because I had a. My dad didn’t necessarily play with us all that much. But I realized this is important to this kid. She doesn’t have any siblings. I’m here. Let’s do that. So that’s how it evolves, I think for me, I don’t know if I answered your question very effectively, but it’s availability.

Alex Greenwood [00:09:01]:
It’s those touches. No matter how busy you get, remember the one reason you are working so hard is to provide for her. And that’s what I’m doing. And she plans on attending the university where I work. And she’s going to get a nice break on her tuition. So it’s worth it for me when I’m driving all that way. And I miss her a little bit more than I’d like to, knowing that one, I’ll see her a lot more when she comes to university here. I’ll go to lunch with her at least once a week.

Alex Greenwood [00:09:25]:
I told her that. And two, it’ll save her the burden of worrying about student loans too much.

Alex Greenwood [00:09:30]:
You’re lucky because I work in higher ed as well and neither of my daughters want to come to the university where I go to where I work. So. So they’re not getting the tuition benefit that your daughter’s getting. So I say that in jest, but it’s great to be able to have her be. To take that advantage of that. Not only for her, but really for you too, because it again, allows for you to keep that connection.

Alex Greenwood [00:09:51]:
I know she’s an extraordinarily pragmatic person and she’s so different from her mother and I, which is. I’m so glad she’s a jock. She’s a talented athlete. She’s also makes like a 3.8 on average. She’s been accepted into an accelerated medical professionals program. She wants to be a nurse. She knows who she is and she’s a kind person and pragmatic and also understands that money doesn’t grow on trees. She’s an only child being raised by her mother, who’s an only child.

Alex Greenwood [00:10:17]:
I was one of four, but I was kind of the middle. And I think that one reason our daughter’s like that is she was raised by two adults and we never talked baby talk to her. We never talked down to her. We talked to her like a little human. We didn’t talk to her like an adult, but we talked to her like a little human, you know what I mean? And she’s always been extraordinarily verbal and had good verbal skills, which has impressed people. And I think another thing she learned, too, her old man was an old politician. So I taught her, like when she was about 8, how to shake hands with people. And I said, you extend your hand, you look them in the eye, and you use their name and you say, chris, it is lovely to meet you.

Alex Greenwood [00:10:51]:
I’m Caroline, and I’ve seen her do this. Speaking of my dad, we lost my dad in January and we had to go to Oklahoma for the funeral. And she met all these extended family she didn’t really know. Second cousins, third cousins, uncles, aunts, great aunts, you know, all those folks that. You know what I mean? You’re a kid, you have no idea who they are. And she did that without fail. And I can’t tell you how many of my cousins came up and said, good Lord, that young lady, she just walks right up and shakes your hand, looks you in the eye. And I’m so proud of something like that, that.

Alex Greenwood [00:11:20]:
Because that’s a skill she can use. When I say it’s a skill, it’s a skill, though, that is indicative of somebody who is a young person who is confident and wants to engage. And I just couldn’t be happier with that.

Alex Greenwood [00:11:32]:
It’s such a great skill to be able to have, especially going into a helping profession where you’re going to be having to interact with so many different people. And it’s definitely a skill that all of us should work to help our kids to be able to is making those connections with others and building those intentional connections with others. Speaking of intentionality, talk to me about what you do to intentionally let your daughter know that she is being valued and heard.

Alex Greenwood [00:12:01]:
Well, if I could, I’ll take a step back and tell you a little bit about how my wife and I have been parenting Caroline. And one of the things my wife, Stephanie and I decided early on was that parenting isn’t about control. It’s about preparing your child to stand on her own. And again, I’m an older parent. I am not going to be around, likely for 60 more years, for sure. 50, doubt it. 40, maybe. But the point being, a lot of folks whose parents are younger, they’re going to have more time with, God willing.

Alex Greenwood [00:12:27]:
So I decided early on we decided that parenting isn’t about control. It’s about repairing your child to stand on her own. And so we told Caroline from the time she was very little that for the first part of her life. Your mom and I are your boss now. When you get a little older and you get into college, we’re not necessarily your boss. We’re more like your supervisor. We’re here if you need us, but we still control the purse strings. You know, we have your paycheck, so to speak, and all that, and we expect you to do certain things, but we’re not watching you every minute of the day, telling you what you can, can’t do, what to eat and all that kind of thing like you do with a baby or a little, little kid.

Alex Greenwood [00:12:57]:
So college, we hope to be like her supervisors, still keeping an eye on her, but letting her take the lead. So then when she graduates and gets a job, we want to become her consultants. And hopefully, as life goes on, we’ll be blessed to be her friends from that point. So along that way, we’ve tried to her with some core values. Respect for herself and others. Curiosity and critical thinking are huge with us. Kindness and resilience. She’s a very talented, very strong athlete.

Alex Greenwood [00:13:24]:
But she’s also realizing as she gets older, she probably isn’t going to walk onto the university volleyball team. She’s good, but she’s probably not going to do that. And she’s fine with it. She knows how the world works in that regard, and she doesn’t take it too hard. And it seems to be working so far, pretty well, this way of raising her and watching her grow into what I believe is a thoughtful, capable young adult who lives those values in her own way. And that’s just been one of the greatest privileges of my life, is to realize that. So that’s some of the things we’ve done to get her ready for life and for her to understand what we expect of her. I’ll just tell you one more little quick anecdote that makes me very proud of her.

Alex Greenwood [00:14:02]:
She’d be so embarrassed if she knew I was talking about her and telling everybody this stuff, but I’m proud of her. And she had a friend in elementary school, a little boy, and he had an arm that didn’t quite work right, and he was a little awkward. And she would tell us about him and how he. Nobody would sit with him at lunch, so she would sit with him at lunch, and then some other kids started pushing him around, tried to beat him up, and she just jumped right in the middle of it all and said, back off, you’re not doing this. And I’m just. That, that right there, that kind of empathy and that kind of kindness look at the world we live in. I mean, we need people like that. We need generations of people who will step up and say, that’s not right.

Alex Greenwood [00:14:37]:
And so that’s, that’s the instruction we’ve given. Because again, I hark back to this. Again, I don’t like to sound morbid, like I’m going to die tomorrow, God forbid, but I’m not going to be there to protect her forever. And so I like the idea that she’s confident and hopefully she’ll find a mate who will be supportive of her and accent that and accentuate that and have family of her own where she can pass those values on. That’s the most important thing to me.

Alex Greenwood [00:15:03]:
All of us have to have those type of conversations, whether your child’s an only child or they have siblings that are going to be there, because you never know. You never know what will happen. And you need to have those kind of meaningful conversations. So talk to me about how you and your wife have been preparing her. And if a father is hearing this and says, you know, we haven’t had any of these conversations, but I feel like we should start some of these conversations and start preparing our own child for that. Where should someone start?

Alex Greenwood [00:15:32]:
Well, I could give you a practical thing. Would that work for you? One thing during the pandemic. So that would have put her. What was that about three or four years ago, she wanted to start her own mail order era earring business. She was going to make her own earrings and sell them. And long story short, we thought, this is a teachable moment here. Let’s teach her about how commerce works, about how that is. And she’s like, mom, Dad, I know how to make these.

Alex Greenwood [00:15:54]:
And she’s made some stuff. They’re kind of nice earrings. And we said, look, you need capital, though, to, to buy more stuff, to make more earrings and to market these earrings on your website and all that. She goes, yeah. And she said, well, you give me the money. I said, well, no, I won’t give you the money, but your mother and I will invest in you. So we set this whole thing up and we, we even had her draw up a stock certificate for us that we had stock in her company. Forgive me, I forget the name of the company, but, and get this, she got really excited.

Alex Greenwood [00:16:21]:
We taught her what that meant, what investing meant. And then when the pandemic started to let up, there’s a local farmer’s market and we, we applied to get her a booth at the local farm. So every Saturday, she’d go down there and sell these things. And she would pay us back out of what she earned for the materials she bought. Of course, we put that money in her college fund, but she doesn’t know that. Don’t tell her. But anyway, we taught her how to do that. And so that was a lesson we taught her.

Alex Greenwood [00:16:45]:
So now she has a kind of understanding how investing works and how. Kind of an understanding how stocks and bonds kind of work. We try to explain that to her, but also what we’re teaching her are other financial lessons. Okay, I need her to understand how money works. And having a job, by the way, has been very instructive of that. She’s had her first job and she gets it. And she understands taxes and the anguish of taxes. But I try to explain to her that taxes are kind of the price you pay to live in a civilized country.

Alex Greenwood [00:17:10]:
You’re not going to always want to pay them. You’re not going to love them. Sometimes they’re going to be too high, sometimes they’re going to be whatever. But they’re important part of making the country what it is. And so she understands that. So we try to teach her about that and let her understand a credit card, what those are and how dangerous and treacherous those can be. We try to let her know, too, that just, you know, she. You know the old joke about, you know, you hear this all the time, oh, well, I must have more money.

Alex Greenwood [00:17:32]:
I still have checks, but they don’t even use checks anymore, so that’s not even useful. But we teach her those kinds of practices, practical lessons, how to change a tire, what to do if you feel like if you’re out in the car and you feel threatened by somebody, use your phone, find the nearest police station or the nearest public place. Just little things like that. But before anybody thinks I’m some kind of weirdo who just constantly tells her everything’s awful in the world, I don’t. But I want to prepare her for the fact that not everybody is always going to have your best interests at heart, that you got to pay attention, keep, as I’ve said to her many times, keep your head on a swivel, pay attention to your surroundings. Those kind of little lessons, I think, have helped to make her as confident as she is and is helping to make her resilient and confident. And I think she doesn’t fear the world. I think she’s excited to get out there and see the world.

Alex Greenwood [00:18:18]:
And I think a lot of that is that we didn’t baby her. She understood that she had to work to move forward in the world. And that doesn’t mean we don’t spoil her a little bit. Of course we do. We adore her. She’s our child. But we try to make sure she understands those basic things. It’s really not some kind of magic formula.

Alex Greenwood [00:18:32]:
It’s just something that seems to be working for us to do these kinds of practical.

Alex Greenwood [00:18:37]:
I love that because I think, you know, those practical things and getting her to be able to understand it in that way is something that she’s going to always remember and it’s something that she will take with her no matter where she goes. So it is definitely something that I think others can also put into action and try for themselves. Now, you talked about not being morose, and you talked about the fact that you may be here for 30, 40 more years, but then at some point you are going to pass on. And that’s not always an easy conversation to have with a child is to talk about the fact that all of us are mortal. We’re not all going to be here forever. And there’s always that first time where they impact death for the first time. So talk to me about beyond the practical nature of preparing her to stand on her own, having those conversations that are hard. And give me some examples of how you’ve had those type of conversations with your daughter and how you started those and how you continue those.

Alex Greenwood [00:19:34]:
Well, as I mentioned, I lost my dad unexpectedly. He was a distracted driver of injuries from that event eventually killed him. And so we knew he wasn’t doing great for a few weeks. And my daughter and her mother, I couldn’t get away from work. I’d seen him on my own, but they went down to Oklahoma to see him. And he was alert and talking to her and. And she came back and I. She was quiet about it.

Alex Greenwood [00:19:57]:
And she said, dad, I. I don’t know how pop’s doing. I said, he’s not doing great, kid, but it’s important to him that you came down there to see him. And I didn’t broach. I didn’t have to. I think she intuited that he was not doing so great. And then he got Covid. That was the end.

Alex Greenwood [00:20:12]:
He couldn’t fight Covid after that. The point being, when we lost him, I found out I was at work and I had to drive 85 miles before I could get home and tell her. And I came home and tell her and she just. She fell apart. But it was not the first death she had experienced. One of her best friends was killed in A car wreck when she was about 8 years old, 9 years old. So she understands the impermanence of life. She understood it unfortunately, pretty early, but.

Alex Greenwood [00:20:34]:
And she cared about her friend, don’t get me wrong, but to lose your papa, your grandfather. I think that I could see a change in her. And I hope this doesn’t sound strange, Chris, but, you know, I mentioned going to the funeral and being very mature, and I was. I’m not gonna lie, I wasn’t. I was a wreck. And I’ve been the eulogist at several family things, as you could probably tell. I don’t have a problem talking, but I couldn’t do it with my dad. And I wrote up a little essay and I asked her, would it be okay if you read it? And I said, you can feel free to say no, it’s a lot of pressure to put on you, but if you could get up in front of everybody and read it.

Alex Greenwood [00:21:06]:
She didn’t blink. She says, I’ll do it, dad. And she got it and read it and she did a beautiful job. She held it together. And when she was walking to sit down, some weird was like. It was like at a concert, somebody said something like, bravo, young lady, or really well done or something, you know, just called that out to her. And I realized that she really had. In just those few short weeks since he was injured, I saw her grow up a little bit and realized the.

Alex Greenwood [00:21:30]:
About that impermanence. And so we’ve had regular discussions about when her mother and I are gone. She asked me the other day, she said, dad, it’s occurred to me that, you know, I’m getting ready to go to college in a couple of years. And I know it’s not my business to know all about the family finances at this point, but how are we going to pay for that? I know that I’ll get your tuition break and all that, but what about extras? Will we be able to afford for me to have a dorm room? And, you know, she’s starting to ask these questions and she doesn’t ask them out of any kind of other thing than she’s starting to realize I’m not a kid anymore. I’m going to be making a transition into a different part of my life soonish. And I think the fact that we’ve never sugarcoated stuff because she’d asked me when she was a kid, what happens when we die. I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. She says, what about religion? I said, if religion helps you, absolutely.

Alex Greenwood [00:22:17]:
I went through a phase where the family. We went to church and I was an elder in my church. I don’t go anymore. It’s not something I’m all that interested in anymore. But I told her, go anytime or I’ll take you. And she would go with her friends. I don’t know if it made much of an impression on her either. And I could hear religious people out there groaning.

Alex Greenwood [00:22:32]:
But it’s like, you know, I can’t force her. When I was a kid, I was kind of forced to go to church and I hated it. And I just told her, I’m not going to force you to do that, but I’m going to definitely expose you to it. I want you to see it, I want you to feel it. So I guess what I’m trying to say here, Chris, and again, pardon me for just going on, but is just that we tried to offer her the opportunity to experience things. We rarely say no to something unless it could be dangerous. We let her meet people, we let her go do things. We try to answer her questions.

Alex Greenwood [00:22:59]:
But you remember what I said earlier, We’ve always just kind of talked to her a lot, like a little person. Well, we just feel like we’re paying her the compliment of her intellect and her personhood to just tell it straight the way we know it. I don’t get, you know, brusque about it or anything like that. And I, I don’t get all worked up about it. And it seems to work for us. It’s just, it’s just honesty and being candid. If I were to grow up again, I would appreciate straight talk to my folks.

Alex Greenwood [00:23:20]:
And so many of our folks didn’t have those type of conversations with us. So I think our generation are definitely doing a lot better than our own parents did or their parents did before them. And that’s a broad generalization because some of our parents did a great job and continue to do a great job if they’re still in our lives, in preparing for the inevitability of life and. But what I’m hearing you say, Alex, is we can do even better. And that the more that we can prepare our kids in a non morose way, the better they’re going to be able to prepare for it themselves and stand alone or stand together in that time. That is challenging.

Alex Greenwood [00:24:02]:
Chris, I really do believe that this has also made her appreciate the moments that she has with her mother and I and her grandparents, her living grandparents. She has said to me that all the time we’ve done certain things, gone on trips or some Things have happened. And she said, I’m going to. Basically said, I’m going to try to hold on to this. I want to remember this. So I think we’ve managed accidentally through all of this to set a stage for her to say, this is your journey on this earth, we’re here to help, or your consultants, et cetera. We’re going to be here for a while and then it’s on you to do this. But I appreciate that she has picked up on the fact that the impermanence is a factor.

Alex Greenwood [00:24:35]:
And I’ve always told her I’ve done a lot of stuff in my life. Her mother’s very successful in what she’s done. I failed more than I succeeded. I have. I could bore you with all these things I’ve tried in my life that I completely failed at. But she knows about most of it and she’s told me before. She says, I just love dad. That you tried, that you’re out there.

Alex Greenwood [00:24:51]:
I said, I was never picked for the ball team. If I got to play, I was on the C team. I was the Bad News Bears team and I wasn’t even any good. But the point was I tried. Did you play T ball and Little League at all? I always got money. Ghost spirited player at the end of every season, which is not mvp, folks. And I told her, you gotta try, kid. I always tell her that you gotta get out there.

Alex Greenwood [00:25:11]:
And throughout her life I’ve just said, what’s it gonna hurt you to try?

Alex Greenwood [00:25:15]:
Now we always finish our interviews with what I like to call our dad Connection six, where I ask you six more questions that delve a little bit deeper into you as a dad. Are you ready?

Alex Greenwood [00:25:23]:
Sure.

Alex Greenwood [00:25:24]:
What’s one word that describes your relationship with your daughter?

Alex Greenwood [00:25:28]:
Trust.

Alex Greenwood [00:25:29]:
What’s the best piece of dad advice you’ve ever received?

Alex Greenwood [00:25:33]:
Oh, wow, that’s a tough one, Chris. I think the best dad advice I ever got was with my uncle. And he just, he was like a kindly favorite uncle type. He was just like. He basically said, don’t talk down to your kid. Basically because he was my, one of my uncles who I adored and, and he, he never talked down to me. And I always remembered when Uncle Robert talked to me, I always felt special. And I was one of 22 grandchildren.

Alex Greenwood [00:25:55]:
But I always felt like Uncle Robert thought I was the only person in the room when he talked to me. So that’s the best advice was don’t talk down to your kid. Make them feel good. Look them in the eye, talk to them.

Alex Greenwood [00:26:03]:
What’s one Activity that you and your daughter love doing together.

Alex Greenwood [00:26:06]:
We used to love, when she was little, we’d go to, like, Starbucks. I’d get her a chocolate milk and a cake pop. And now that’s moved up to, like, going to get a cheeseburger. I love just going to lunch with her, just she and I, and just doing more of that. Hey, dad, more of that talking. I just love doing that with her. Just, just love it.

Alex Greenwood [00:26:21]:
If you could give your daughter one life lesson in a single sentence, what would it be?

Alex Greenwood [00:26:26]:
In the great casino of life, don’t put all your chips in the center of the table and go all in in your twenties, you’ll regret it.

Alex Greenwood [00:26:32]:
What’s one thing you’ve learned about yourself since becoming a dad?

Alex Greenwood [00:26:36]:
You know that movie Jack Nicholson did years ago, and there’s that great line, and he says, you make me want to be a better man. Something like that. Before I met her mother. Her mother and I’ve been together, all told, about 20 years. And I had a lot of, of relationships that didn’t work real well. Not until then, anyway. The point being, I don’t think I knew how to be. Don’t get me wrong, I was a good person, but I don’t think I met my capacity or my potential for kindness.

Alex Greenwood [00:27:04]:
I think I got into a bit where I felt like every time I was kind to somebody that took advantage of me. So I kind of decided, well, maybe that’s not what to do. And my wife was the first person to kind of start to peel away that veneer. And then, man, the moment I’m standing behind my wife while they did the C section, I lifted my baby out of there. It all. I changed. I know that’s so cliche. Everybody says that, but I, Chris, I did.

Alex Greenwood [00:27:25]:
I changed so, so much when I was the first one to hold her. And she has made me a better man. Caroline, my daughter has. She has absolutely done that. I don’t want to do anything that she would be disappointed in me in.

Alex Greenwood [00:27:38]:
And finally, what advice would you give to other dads who want to build a lasting and meaningful relationship with their daughters?

Alex Greenwood [00:27:46]:
Guys, don’t be too hard on yourself. Chris said this early on, we’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to say dumb things. We’re going to be tired and cranky. But here’s the thing. You’re not going to believe this, but I, I, well, I don’t believe in corporal punishment first, but that’s, that’s not a big deal these days. I hope I’ve Never really even raised my voice at my daughter. I don’t yell at her when I’m disappointed in her, I tell her.

Alex Greenwood [00:28:05]:
But there’s been moments when I’ve been sharp with her here and there. So few moments, by the way, that I still remember each one of them, like, just a handful. And I think you’ve got to give yourself permission to be human to your daughter and to your kid to apologize when you’re sharp with them and say, hey, I just had a bad day. I was tired. I. And without fail, every time I’ve done that, those few times in my life where I’ve been cross with her or sharp with her, she’s like, dad, it’s all right, man. You were having a bad day. It’s okay.

Alex Greenwood [00:28:30]:
By the way, if you want, I could tell you my kid can annoy me just like yours can. I mean, just so you know, she’s not perfect, but she spends too much money on clothes. But I don’t care that much about that. But I just. So I. I feel, like, bad. Like I’m just sitting here telling you every positive, wonderful thing, you know, it’s. Trust me.

Alex Greenwood [00:28:48]:
She also really needs to clean her room. She just. She needs to.

Alex Greenwood [00:28:52]:
I think all of us have those little things that get under our nerve, but in the end, we love them for who they are, even though they can irk us along the way.

Alex Greenwood [00:29:02]:
Definitely, sir. Definitely.

Alex Greenwood [00:29:05]:
Now, Alex, I just want to say thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your own journey today. And it is not over. It is just beginning and will continue into the future because being a dad never ends. And I just want to say thank you for your time today, for sharing your own journey, and I wish you all the best.

Alex Greenwood [00:29:21]:
Chris, it’s been my privilege to be here. And thank you to listeners for letting me go on and on about my daughter. Just. I hope everybody can find that wonderfulness in their own kid and just hopefully eventually go from being their boss to being their friend.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:29:34]:
That’s a wrap for this episode of the dad and Daughter Connection. Thanks for joining us on this journey to build stronger bonds and raise confidence. Independent daughters. Remember, being an engaged dad isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being present. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and share it with a fellow dad. And don’t forget, you can find all our dadanddaughterconnection.com until next time, keep showing up, keep connecting, and keep being the dad she needs.

Musical Outro Performer [00:30:05]:
We’re all in the same boat, and it’s full of tiny screaming passengers we spend the time, we give the lessons we make the meals we buy them presents and bring your A game. Cause those kids are growing fast the time goes by just like a dynamite blast Calling astronauts and firemen Carpenters and musclemen get out and be the world to them Be the best dad you can be Be the best dad you can.

Harmony at Home: Dustin Lolli on Fatherhood, Faith, and Family

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On the latest episode of the Dad and Daughter Connection podcast, Dr. Christopher Lewis sits down with Dustin Lolli, lead singer of the band Sanctus Real, for a candid conversation about what it really means to be a present, engaged dad—especially to daughters at two very different life stages. Throughout the episode, listeners are treated to heartfelt stories, honest admissions of “mistakes,” and practical wisdom on raising confident, independent daughters.

Fatherhood Across Generations

Dustin shares the unique experience of being a father to both a 21-year-old and a 5-year-old daughter. He reflects on the surprises and joys of meeting each child exactly where they are—from encouraging an early love of art and animals in his oldest, to discovering what makes his youngest “tick.” The message is clear: there’s no manual, and every child truly is unique. What matters most is the willingness to stay curious, adaptable, and humble.

Fostering Independence & Stability

One powerful theme is the delicate balance between guidance and independence. As Dustin describes, the journey is a “push and pull”—supporting his daughters as they take chances, make mistakes, and hone their passions, while also providing a secure foundation they can always come home to. He espouses the importance of loving consistency over quick fixes, and of letting kids know that stability and support are always present, even as they navigate their own paths.

Music, Family, and Finding Passion

Music runs deep in the Lolli family, but Dustin is quick to note that he and his wife encourage their children to find their own unique passions, not simply follow in their footsteps. An especially touching moment is Dustin’s retelling of recording “Confidence” as a duet with his daughter Arden—not because she wanted the spotlight, but because it was a special moment to connect and create together.

Faith, Hope, and Real-World Parenting

With faith at the center of his message, Dustin brings a sense of hopefulness to the challenges of raising kids today, especially when it comes to social media and comparison culture. He emphasizes leading with love, authenticity, and an understanding that parenting is about the child’s needs, not the parent’s expectations.

Why You Should Listen

This episode isn’t just for dads; it’s for anyone who values deep family connections, honest conversations, and real-life stories about learning, loving, and growing together. Tune in to hear Dustin’s thoughtful insights and be inspired to show up as the parent your children need—flaws, questions, and all.

Ready to be inspired? Listen to the full episode of the Dad and Daughter Connection—you’ll come away with wisdom to last a lifetime.

If you enjoyed this episode we ask you to take a moment to take our Dad and Daughter Connection Survey to let us know more about you as a dad. You can also sign up to get our newsletter to stay connected to our community and we will send items of interest to you to help you to be the dad that you want to be. Feel free to follow me on the following social media platforms: Facebook, Facebook Group, Instagram, LinkedIn, X.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:02]:
Welcome to the dad and Daughter Connection, the podcast for dads who want to build stronger bonds and raise confident, independent daughters.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:12]:
If you’re looking to build a stronger bond with your daughter and help her grow into a confident, independent woman, you’re in the right place. I’m Dr. Christopher Lewis and the dad and Daughter Connection is the podcast where we dive into real stories, expert advice, and practical tips to help you navigate the incredible journey of fatherhood. In every episode, we’ll bring you conversations that inspire, challenge, and equip you to show up as the dad your daughter needs. So let’s get started. Because being a great dad isn’t just about being there. It’s about truly connecting. Welcome back to the dad and Daughter Connection.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:54]:
I am so excited that you’re back with us again this week. As always, every week, I love being on this journey with you and I call it a journey because the connections that we want to build with our daughters happen daily. But we have to do what we can to learn, to grow, to build stronger connections. And it’s not always going to be easy. There’s going to be some bumps in the road. You got to be willing to go for the long run, go in for the long haul and make sure that you know that you can ask for help, you can learn from others, and that’s what this podcast is all about. Every week I love being able to bring you different people with different experiences that are fathering in different ways, are building those connections in different ways, but they are learning along with their daughters as well, and that is so important. This week we got another great guest.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:50]:
Dustin Lally is with us and Dustin is the lead singer of Sanctus Real, a band. If you’ve never heard of it, I’m going to say Google it, but I’ll have a link in the notes today. But definitely it is a band that’s been around for over 30 years. Amazing music. We’re going to talk a little bit about his music as well, but he’s a father of four and he’s got two daughters. He’s got a 21 year old daughter and a five year old daughter. So we got both ends of the spectrum and we’re going to talk about that journey that he’s been on to be able to build those strong connections with his own daughter. And I’m really excited to have him here today.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:23]:
Dustin, thanks so much for being here.

Dustin Lolli [00:02:24]:
Well, thanks for having me. This is great.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:27]:
Well, I’m really excited to have you here. And as I said, building those relationships takes time. It takes effort. And you know, I think as you think about both your daughters and as I said, they’re at two ends of the spectrum in regards to where they are in life. What’s one of the most meaningful moments that you’ve been able to share with your daughters and what made it so special?

Dustin Lolli [00:02:51]:
I think I’ve always had, you know, our oldest daughter is a firstborn. So the first four years she was just with us. And so there’s, there was a lot of connecting time there, right? Like, and I was young, I mean, I was 21 when we got married. My wife got pregnant three months after we got married. So her birthday is two days from our first year anniversary. So I was a kid, right? Like having a child and not only having a child, having a girl child for a 21 year old boy, you know that you have these, these moments and I, I just, I just fell in love immediately. But you have so much, Obviously when you’re 21, you really have so much to learn. And I think what I noticed first off, like one of the first meaningful moments where I was like, okay, this is a unique child, like a unique person, right? This isn’t, I don’t know what it is.

Dustin Lolli [00:03:40]:
When you’re young, you’re like, everything is going to fit into almost like a movie. You’re right, like you, you’re making the steps of your life and then the first plot twist happens and it’s like, oh, I gotta deal with this. But my daughter, from an early age, she loved to go out and draw. And it was like amazing at an early age. And she had a great vocabulary. She’d be talking early and one day she’s drawing and she drew a shark and a seal and the shark was eating the seal and she drew blood everywhere. This is a girl, a little baby girl. She’s like 4 years old and I’m 5 years old maybe and, and I’m like, what is that? And she said she was watching the Discovery Channel and saw Shark Week, right? I remember this feeling of like, this is a sweet baby girl, but she also loves, loves this other nature and animals and art.

Dustin Lolli [00:04:31]:
And it was, I know it doesn’t sound like much, but for me I was sitting there going, I’ve got a lot to learn about this and helping her see these things. And I loved it. But you’re looking at it from a perspective of, I thought it was going to be this sweet, dainty little thing. And here she’s drawing blood coming out of a seal, right? Like, oh. And she still Works with animals, right? This is. She’s had this love for animals, and she was like, just real little, and she. Now she works with dogs, and she works and she draws, and it’s amazing. So that little moment with just me and we’re looking at this thing, I was like, okay, this.

Dustin Lolli [00:05:04]:
I got a lot to learn about my own daughter. And so we started doing things more with animals. And, like, she started learning about animals, and we took her to. She has a really great picture where they had a live wolf. She got to take pictures, like, actual pictures with the wolf. And so just those moments to start with her were just. I found her loves, right? Her interests and her mom. We just found what she loved, and we really are.

Dustin Lolli [00:05:29]:
What we really wanted to do from the beginning was. Was encourage her to do the things that she loved. And part of our. Even our schooling that we gave her was art, and we wanted her to learn with passion. That moment, though, stands out because it was like a turning point for me, right? Like, I was like, okay, I gotta change my thinking to, this is a real human being. This isn’t. This isn’t just out of a movie. This is a girl who’ to develop and develop her own passions and develop her own things.

Dustin Lolli [00:05:55]:
And I’m a guy, and I have no idea what any of that looks like.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:05:58]:
So now you also have a daughter that’s five and two other kids along with your other daughter. So I guess now with having a daughter at the other end of the spectrum, and you have an adult daughter now, how are you taking what you learned from your firstborn in building that relationship with your youngest as well?

Dustin Lolli [00:06:23]:
It’s funny because I think it’s two things psychologically. It’s not just, hey, I get to learn from her. It’s that I’m older anyway. Like, I see the world differently. There’s a lot of experience with having four, and they’re all very distinct personalities and different people. And so I think for me, it’s. It’s not just, hey, thinking back to how my oldest name is Arden. It’s not just thinking back to that.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:06:45]:
It’s.

Dustin Lolli [00:06:45]:
It’s kind of taking the sum of all of this experience and going, what this girl? And of course, she’s in a different place again because my youngest, her next closest sibling, is 14, so she’s kind of an only child at this age, too. So we’re looking at it from a perspective again of we want her to be healthy emotionally, we want her to be healthy mentally. And there are so many things now in Life that will from screens and to all of this stuff that are going to try to take some of that away from her that we’re learning and we’re doing our best to have a balanced, balanced life. And we learned that with Arden. The problem with Arden was, you know, you have these kids who are easy. And I thought I was a great parent with her because she was intelligent early on, she was emotionally very chill. And of course there was always something she wasn’t perfect. But I always thought, man, I must be a good parent.

Dustin Lolli [00:07:39]:
And then the next ones come along and it’s, you know, they’re boys, so they’re different. But even so, you’re like, okay, maybe every kid is unique and different. And I think that kind of experience or now it’s like we’re looking at our, our youngest and she is full of life, the baby to a T. She is loud and fun and dramatic and all of these things. And I think for us, in a lot of ways it’s like every child of ours has been different and unique and our job is to love them the best way that we know how. And we’ve learned that with our other kids. There’s no formula to it. There’s no point A to point B.

Dustin Lolli [00:08:14]:
If you do this, this, this and this, it’s going to be perfect. Because all our kids have different genetic makeup. And I don’t mean like mother, dad, I just mean like they were born different, they think differently, they feel differently. And so as a parent, especially with this one, we’re just trying to find, okay, what makes her tick and what makes her thrive. And she is the most fun little five year old you’ll ever come across. It’s incredible.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:08:37]:
You mentioned the fact that some of the things that you did with Arden to help her to real of the passions that she had. And I guess as you think about in raising her to where she is today, how did you balance guiding her while also giving her the independence to becoming her own person?

Dustin Lolli [00:08:58]:
I think probably a lot of mistakes, you know. No, it’s a great question. I think it’s still a question that’s in process for us. I mean, she’s 21. Even now you’re like, you still want to protect, but then you also know you can’t, you have to let go in a lot of ways. She just came to us and she wants to go to Ireland with a group and she’d have to fly by herself. And the dad and me is like, oh, I don’t know. And then you go, but she’s 21, and we’ve never really tried to keep her from anything.

Dustin Lolli [00:09:27]:
But as a dad, there’s this safety thing, which there’s all of these things that you’re like, I’m supposed to protect her. I’m supposed to do all this. So as they get older, that with a girl is so much harder to let go of. Like my boys, I’m like, whatever, just go, man up, do the thing. Which good or not, it’s just a natural process. I don’t even think of it other than it’s a natural thing. I would have wanted my dad to do that when I was 18, like, go mess up a few times. But the girl, that’s hard because however, genetically we’re inclined to be this way.

Dustin Lolli [00:09:56]:
So my wife helps a lot with that. You know, we have a very balanced relationship. She is a girl, and I know this is dad. Daughter is hard because you don’t understand, like, what they feel, what she’s going through. And so I rely on her a lot for a lot of the emotional things. And I hope we’ve always tried to make a good team with it, but I think you have to over. Over the. From the time she’s been 16 and on, it has been a tug of war and a push and pull of Arden, you have to prepare for the future.

Dustin Lolli [00:10:25]:
You have to do the things it takes to be a successful person without mom and dad, while at the same time saying, arden, we are your safety net right now. You can make mistakes. You have a stable home, you have a stable place. And if you go out there and fail, even now, we tell her this all the time. This is your time to take chances. This is your time to go seek out this art, go do this thing and build your future. But just know that if it doesn’t work out, you have a stable landing ground right now. And so it is.

Dustin Lolli [00:10:56]:
It’s a push and pull of like, we’re here, stability’s here. But because you have a foundation, you can go take risks, you can go do those things, and we’re all for it, and we’ll support you in anything. Obviously, I’m in music. My daughter has a great voice. She’s beautiful voice, but she doesn’t want to sing. And so it’s like those balancing moments where you’re like, I can offer you these opportunities because of what I do. And she’s saying, but that’s not my heart. Those are the things we work through, and those are the things, okay, so what is your passion? What do you want to do.

Dustin Lolli [00:11:24]:
And it’s a tug of war always inside of me now.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:11:26]:
You talked about, and you kind of joked about it, that you probably made some mistakes. And all of us make mistakes. I mean, we are not perfect. There’s no manual to how you raise a kid. And I guess as you think about those mistakes, what’s a mistake that you made as a father and what did it. What did you learn from it about fostering positive communication?

Dustin Lolli [00:11:49]:
I use the word mistake. I kind of did say it as a joke. I think sometimes I look at people and say, you only know when you made a mistake because we know what the right thing was. And so it’s our weight, it’s our judge. So the truth is, I don’t know how many mistakes I’ve made because I don’t know always what the right thing was. So you’re just doing your best. And so you look back and go, maybe if I had done it this way, it would have gone better. But hindsight’s 20 20.

Dustin Lolli [00:12:13]:
It’s hard to deal with that. You just learn to grow from it. With my daughter, you think of girls and you think of emotions. You think of it. My daughter is a very stable, quiet, emotional person. She feels things strongly, but she doesn’t always show them. And as a guy, you have these stereotypical wrong things. This is part of.

Dustin Lolli [00:12:31]:
As a young man, you have a daughter and you realize, okay, she’s not a stereotype. She’s a person. And she has her feelings, but she also has strong here. And I think without taking the time and having the humility to learn what it is that makes her tick, you can just jump the gun on stuff, and you can just plow right into things and go, oh, well, honey, let me tell you how to do this. And I think there were a lot of times where I thought I knew what was right for her, and I thought I knew if I gave her this advice and she did it, but. But after the fact, I go, if she were me, that might have worked, but she’s not me. And so in a lot of ways, parenting to me is. There’s a checklist for parenting, and I think it’s good, but for me, it doesn’t work.

Dustin Lolli [00:13:11]:
Parenting to me is loving your kids the best way possible. And that might be being tough on one at some point and being less tough on another at some point, but it’s knowing them, and if you know them well enough, you know how to love them well. And I think the biggest mistakes that I made, I think, were a lot of Times where I was more interested in giving them advice based on my opinion than based on where they were or what her needs were in the time I, like, wanted to be right rather than I wanted to help her. And so I don’t think my motive early on as a dad, sometimes I was just doing the best I could. If I had a chance to talk to me, then I would say, you’re doing the best you can, but you’re doing the best you can for yourself instead of the best you can for your family or for your daughter. There’s a lot in there. I could nuance that all day long. I could unpack that all day long.

Dustin Lolli [00:13:56]:
But I don’t always love the word mistakes because I think we create the baseline to judge on now, obviously, for breaking the law or something, but we’re creating this baseline of like, well, this is the right thing and if we didn’t do it, then you’re a failure or it’s a mistake. And parenting, I mean, everything might be a mistake because you could probably do everything better at some point.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:14:14]:
You hit the nail on the head there. I think that everybody will second guess, and we are innately programmed to second guess and say, have I done that right? And as men, I’ve talked about this before, so many men are programmed to be fixers. We walk into a situation, we don’t always listen, we don’t always hear what our daughters are telling us, but we come in and think, oh, I can fix this. And that’s not always what they need. And so one of the best things that someone ever told me, and it was kind of too late for me at the time, but was when you go into a conversation with your daughters, you should let them have the ability to say whether the conversation is a listening or a fixing conversation. Because if it is a listening conversation, you need to turn that part of your brain off that says, I’m trying to fix this for you, and you need to let them struggle with it and just talk through it. But if they say, no, this is a fixing conversation, then you can turn that right back on and truly give them the advice that you’re prone to give for your daughters. What’s one way that you show your daughters that they can always count on you?

Dustin Lolli [00:15:21]:
I think that’s an earned thing over time. I don’t know if there’s one action. I think being there over the years, you know, I would say my 21 year old, it’s just consistency. I think there’s no one action when she’s been through hard times, you just, you’re there. When she’s having her great times, you’re there. I love to be able to just tell people, hey, if you do this, it’s going to be great. The thing is, your listeners don’t even know my family life. I could be the worst dad in the world, pretending here.

Dustin Lolli [00:15:48]:
And that’s okay. To me, life in and of itself is this flow thing where a lot of people love to have step by step things. And I think trust is earned over time, even with your kids. I think love is a daily thing where you’re choosing somebody above yourself, especially your kids. And I think you can’t be a good parent unless you go into parenting thinking, I’m going to give something up for my children. And I’ve learned that over the years. And I think I do have a wonderful family life and I do have great kids and. But I think they would even tell you that there’s never been a moment.

Dustin Lolli [00:16:21]:
It’s just, it’s earned. Over the years, from when she was little, she learned that mom and dad were going to be there and they were going to be our priority. Now, I will say this. One of our early things we decided as a couple was we weren’t going to change our lives for our kids. We were going to include our kids in our lives. And so our kids have always had a semblance of this is what mom and dad do and we’re a part of it. I’ve seen a lot of families, they have a child and suddenly their entire life changes. They don’t see friends anym, they don’t go out anymore.

Dustin Lolli [00:16:52]:
The kids on a 7pm bedtime. And that can’t be deviated from. We didn’t do any of that. Now whether that’s psychologically right or wrong, we didn’t do any of that. We said, okay, we’re going to include our baby girl in everything that we do. And so she would come out to eat with us and we were involved in a lot of ministry stuff. So she would go to all of this stuff and sometimes she’d stay up late. And so.

Dustin Lolli [00:17:14]:
And the reason why I say that is because in a lot of ways our kids, instead of just being the center of attention, they were a part of a family. Arden wasn’t a only child. And when she thought, oh, I get everything, she knew she was going to go with mom and dad to everything. She was a part of it. And that was a healthy thing. So answering your question, I think the lifestyle choices and the day to Day. Consistency, love, consistency is what really for, I think, developed our relationship. So it kept it strong when she went to teenage years.

Dustin Lolli [00:17:46]:
And here’s the other thing. My daughter was such a good child. I would have these people say to me all the time, I mean, this became a just wait till she’s a teenage. You think you got it good now, but just wait till she’s a teenager. They all fall off the road. She’s a girl. And you know what? I. My wife and I used to look at each other and be like, that doesn’t mean that’s going to happen to Arda.

Dustin Lolli [00:18:05]:
And you know what? It never did. She’s always been a consistent. I mean, it’s been amazing. She’s been the easiest child and, you know, a lot of that’s her own thing. But I like to think some of that’s just the stability and the fact that she’s gone every day knowing how loved she really is. So one moment I couldn’t tell you. I think it’s a collection and an earning of trust over the years and just the stability and a consistency that it takes unselfish love to get there.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:18:32]:
Now, I mentioned at the beginning that you are the lead singer with Sanctus Real. And one of the questions that I had for you because I know that a little while back you. There is a song called Confidence, and it’s a powerful song that definitely resonated with many of your fans. More recently, you released an acoustic version of it with your daughter Arden. And what inspired you to create that rendition? And how did involving Arden deepen your connection to the song and the message?

Dustin Lolli [00:19:03]:
Well, it’s crazy because my daughter was 14 years old when we first had her sing on it. And it went something like this. We were doing a radio event and we were making a video and we wanted kids to sing originally instead of me on this video that we were making for this radio event. And the only kid in the room was arden. She was 14. We said, hey, Arden, can you come sing? I had never heard her sing for real. She did not sing out loud. I didn’t know if she could sing.

Dustin Lolli [00:19:29]:
It’s kind of crazy. My wife will tell you, like, she just would shy away from singing. But my baby boy, Ian, who was little at the time, he would have been. He would have been like five, would tell us that he wanted Arden to sing him to sleep at night because she had a voice like an angel, which we never heard. So I said, arden, can you sing this? She so didn’t want to sing it. We have this video of her singing it. She’s got a hoodie on and her, she’s like slouched over, over. But when she’s saying this sound came out.

Dustin Lolli [00:19:58]:
And I remember our guitar player Chris looking at me like, whoa, what is happening? So instead of having kids, we just had her voice on it. 14 year old Arden, and we play this radio event, and there’s 70 of the biggest radio stations in the country for Christian music in this room. And this video comes on, right? And this voice. And after it was over, I get people coming to us asking who the girl was that sang our song. And they’re handing me business cards. And she got record offers at 14, like, hey, when she’s ready, let me know. And I’m like, she doesn’t even sing. Like, she’s never sang in front of people or anything.

Dustin Lolli [00:20:36]:
And so that’s where it started at this thing. That’s not what you heard. That was like the first time she’s saying this in front of people. But she doesn’t love the stage. She doesn’t love what she sees as. I don’t think that’s what I want to do. But there was always this connection to this song through that. And then when we were deciding to do this acoustic version and I was like, baby girl, people love that.

Dustin Lolli [00:20:57]:
And I would love to do a duet. Like, so could this just be the one time you do it right? And she agreed to it and we did a video of it and it, you know, it’s funny because we put that out and we still get people in comments who are like, who’s this Arden artist? Where do I find her music? How do I listen to her? I’m like, that’s it? That’s all you got? But I love, you know, she still sings around the. I mean, her voice is special. And this is one of those things as a dad where you’re like, I’m hoping that at some point she goes, I love to sing. I want to do this. And then I could bring her into so much more. But until then, I just got this one special moment with her, and it is special. And I, you know, again, I’m always like, your first time singing on video and you might have a half a million views, it’s your only video you’ve ever done, you’re pretty successful, you should probably do it again.

Dustin Lolli [00:21:48]:
So we’re still working on it. I’m gonna get her back on there. My other daughter, by the way, you won’t have a problem. She’ll probably want to sing on. So she’s five and she has no fear and no, she wants the stage. So that should be fun.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:22:00]:
I know that you as being the lead singer of this band, your band is definitely touring. You’re spending a lot of time on the road. How do you navigate the balance between touring with Sanctus Real and being present in your children’s daily lives?

Dustin Lolli [00:22:17]:
I have four our guitar players for there’s three of us that, that are the band and we have 11 kids between us and we’ve all been married a good amount of time. Healthy, healthy marriages, healthy relationships. You don’t do this, you don’t do what we do in a healthy way unless your family are your partners in it. And one of the things about being around for as long as we are, we can control our touring. And so there are seasons where we’re gone quite a bit. But I always tell people this, I always say we’re actually home more than most people. Most people have have nine to five jobs, they’re gone or more. They’re gone eight, 10 hours a day and then they come home and they’re tired and they’re worn out and you know, it’s hard.

Dustin Lolli [00:22:57]:
That’s hard. And I don’t ever want anyone ever. People ask us how we do it and I’m always like, I watch my dad get up at 4 in the morning for 30 years and work and be exhausted. I have a great life and a great job. And yes, it’s, it’s challenging sometimes it is, but every job is. So when I come home, here’s why I say that is when we’re home or home, I write songs for people. So I might go for a couple hours a day here and there. But when I come home, unlike most jobs, I’m home.

Dustin Lolli [00:23:23]:
I don’t have anything else to do, I’m home. And what we normally try to do is play three days a week and be home for. And some seasons we’ll have a bigger tour and we’ll be gone more but then we have a lot of time off so I might be home for a month straight. So it’s really just navigating these seasons and, and my wife gets used to it, she has a rhythm. When I’m gone, my older kids, it’s normal life. But dad’s here all the time. Time dad’s home, it gets to do stuff like I’ve helped coach my kids baseball team. It’s a little harder on the five year old and sometimes being home a lot is even harder for her because I’ll be home for a month and then I’m gone for two weeks.

Dustin Lolli [00:24:00]:
And she doesn’t know what to do with that because she got into a routine. But we work through all of that and she’s, you know, she’s actually been on the road now that we’re older too. My wife will come on the road sometimes and take her with like she’s been on the road with us a few times. So we try to include. We’re such a family based band now, now that our goal is to include our family. My son works for us, our drummer son works for us. So we do our best and our families are partners in what we do. They get it.

Dustin Lolli [00:24:27]:
It’s our jobs too. So dad has to have a job and we just try to include him as much as we can, like we did with Arden in that video. I mean, that’s part of that. We’re going to include our families. I think one of the coolest parts about what I do for a living is not just what I do, but talking about this thing is it’s actually had open doors for my kids in the future too. Like my one son plays guitar, loves it. I get to offer my kids something that I never had. And that’s an avenue in music if they want to.

Dustin Lolli [00:24:54]:
It’s connections in music if they want to. And so far they, they have, they want to jump in and so it’s great. So it works well for us because we’re very, very aware of it. Like our families are our number one priorities and we all know that. And so if you know that, then you’re going to build your tour around it, you’re going to build your career around it. And so we maintain that balance. We work really hard to keep that balance.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:25:17]:
You know, I know that a lot of your music touches on themes of faith and perseverance. How do you incorporate those themes into your parenting? And do your kids influence the messages you choose to convey through your songs?

Dustin Lolli [00:25:32]:
I think so. I think I am a big believer in hope. We are a Christian band in the sense of like, that’s our message of hope. And I look at the world today and just see a lot of people lacking, honestly, just hope. Regardless of what the situations, regardless of all the other stuff. It’s just we travel and we talk to people and you’re talking about our songs. And we hear so many stories about how our songs impact people because we try to put these messages of hope into them. But we also hear over and over again just the hopelessness that People deal with on a day to day basis.

Dustin Lolli [00:26:04]:
And that’s the world that we’re raising our kids in. Social media, this is comparison. And it’s all of these things that your kids are dealing with that I never had. This generation is dealing with things that even I never had to deal with, which is really, it’s like the first time that we are going to have to study something that’s never really been done, like kids and their screens and their social media. The influence of all of this information coming at us all the time. I tell my kids all the time, just turn your screens off for a week and you won’t even know what’s happening. And your world is so good and it feels so bad because you are being inundated with information constantly. And we need to know what’s going on out there.

Dustin Lolli [00:26:43]:
Again, this, this balance, but it does, it impacts a lot of what I write about, a lot of what I’m passionate about. I believe in doing the right thing in every situation as best as we can. I believe in love. I believe that, you know, I don’t think anybody’s a robot. And so therefore we come into situations with people and we prescribe methods of healing, but we’re also different. And so for me, even with my kids, it’s. I don’t ever want to get into the know it all way of saying, hey, this is how you fix it. Right? I think we’re all created differently.

Dustin Lolli [00:27:20]:
Different likes, different tastes, different intelligences, different things. And until we know what those things look like, it’s hard to even give advice to people to say, hey, do this thing. Because that advice could be dangerous for somebody who doesn’t think or feel the same way that you do. And so I take all that into account, you know, with my kids. And then even with our message, like how do we give a message to people that is, is hopeful and a blessing rather than painful and a curse, basically, right? And I think it’s my worldview. Like my worldview doesn’t change whether it’s looking at my kids or whether it’s looking at my career or whether it’s looking at our music, right? It’s, it’s my worldview. And for me, I’m a Christian, so my worldview comes from that. So it impacts every part of what I do and what I think.

Dustin Lolli [00:28:05]:
And if it didn’t, then I, it’d be hard to say this is who I am or this is what I believe. So I don’t separate those things. I don’t separate family from music or music from career. All of those things are made up from the worldview of that I believe love and loving people. Well, and you win. I think I’m a good dad, not because I know what I’m doing, but because I love my kids enough to try to steer them to what is healthy and whole and balanced and find that. And I think that that’s always worked for me through my whole life. I’ve always felt like the best things that have ever happened in my life are because I chose to do the right thing in the hardest moments.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:28:40]:
Now, I know you just mentioned a few minutes ago that your BO are interested in the music industry and they’ve shown interest in music and kind of the business side and playing as well. Sometimes, you know, with artists and families, sometimes people would say, stay away from it. I’ve dealt with this. I’ve been this don’t do what I’ve done. You kind of said, you know, I’m going to help them. I’m going to do what I can to be able to do that. So how do you nurture their creativity while guiding them through the challenges that you’ve had in your own life in the industry?

Dustin Lolli [00:29:10]:
Industry awareness. I always say there’s two types of people in the music business. There’s the artist and there’s the people who make money from the artist. And you have to understand that. And I’m not even saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, that’s why it’s a music business. But when you are healthy and aware that this is what’s happening around you, you can create and do things and love what you do. But you also aren’t going to get heartbroken because somebody betrayed you. Even though what they really did was they chased the money.

Dustin Lolli [00:29:37]:
Money. Artists are just creative and ethereal and raw that we tend to take everything. Now, I’m not really that way, as you probably tell, but they tend to take everything personally or it just is a blow to their self esteem. But the reality is they’re not turning their back on you. They’re turning their face toward money. That’s usually what it is. If you can’t make them money, they’re going to go somewhere that can because that’s the business. Which is funny because I say that it sounds so bad, but I actually don’t think it’s that bad.

Dustin Lolli [00:30:04]:
I just think it’s the reality that we have to to deal with. And most people aren’t aware enough of it to do it in a healthy way. But my kids, that’s one of the beauties is that they’ve got somebody who’s going before them that can help them see and walk through that, because it is about staying in a healthy place. All we do is put sounds in the air and hope people like them. There’s nothing too artsy fartsy about me, and you probably never had anybody say that on your podcast, but to me, it’s like, this is what I do. This is what I’ve been blessed with, the gift to do, to be able to sing. And I try to instill that with my kids. Don’t get too, too arrogant about anything.

Dustin Lolli [00:30:35]:
This just happens to be the thing that you’re good at. And if you’re good enough at it, people will pay you to do it. And if you’re good enough to have people pay you to do it, then you’re good enough to have people try to take money from you to do it. And so you have to understand the way the world works around you and be healthy and whole. And just knowing that I’m there to help guide them through that is why I’m like, hey, if you love music and you want to do this for a living, it’s a great job. You just have to be aware of the pitfalls, that’s all.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:30:58]:
Now, I know that, that you and your wife Sarah perform together as a folk duo as well, and the group name is this Way Home. How has collaborating musically with Sarah impacted your family dynamics and your approach to parenting?

Dustin Lolli [00:31:12]:
It’s the best. It’s awesome. If you listen to those songs, those songs probably reflect our family life. These songs, let’s Get Old Together, they’re cute. Not trying to be cheesy, they’re just cute. These are how we treat each other and how we love each other and all that kind of stuff. And our kids have seen that, and they know our family life. And my daughter says, I love it because it’s real, it’s you, and it’s our way of kind of expressing.

Dustin Lolli [00:31:33]:
And Sarah’s great singer. We did it before the band, and we’re just now starting it back up again. And our kids love it because I think they see mom and dad at their most happy. But it is us. It’s how we are at home, our banter. And I think in a lot of ways, when people see that, they get an actual view of how we are at home, which everyone wonders. How people are at home. Well, that’s kind of how we are at home.

Dustin Lolli [00:31:55]:
I mean, our kids are. And, you know, our son played with us the last time we went out. So it’s again, more family based thing. So it’s my favorite thing. It’s folk music, it’s easy to write. It’s my side project that’s just my release. And it reflects, I mean, you hear the songs, it reflects our worldview, it reflects kind of our family and what our core is. So yeah, go check that out.

Dustin Lolli [00:32:16]:
I’d actually love when people check that out.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:32:18]:
We’ll definitely put a link over to it. And reflecting on your journey, what lessons from your own upbringing did you. You strive to pass on to your kids, both in life and through your music?

Dustin Lolli [00:32:31]:
A lot. My parents divorced when I was 3. My mom remarried, so I’ve had a stepdad and then my dad remarried. So my family is very scattered. It was hard, but it was probably the most healthy thing it could be in an unhealthy situation. But there was a lot of other things, so it wasn’t optimal. And I think part of that for me has always been I would never want my kids to go through that. So I wanted to break those chains of consistent.

Dustin Lolli [00:32:52]:
And so my kids, kids see even now in talking to me, they see, wow, Dad’s life was a lot different. They talked to me about my family life growing up. I love it. I have so many good memories, but it was very different. There was a lot of times where I’d be waiting, hoping my dad showed up to pick me up and whether or he just couldn’t do it. And I still remember the sadness. I had stepbrothers who went through a lot of hard stuff. And I watched it all and.

Dustin Lolli [00:33:16]:
And I think for me it was like. More than anything else in my life, I want to know that I gave my kids a chance, a stable chance. I want them to know that they can try to do crazy things. If they want to be musicians or they want to be artists, they can do it because they know that there’s a baseline of foundation that they can fall back into, take risks, do crazy things. That’s okay because you have a mom and dad who care enough and we’re there to support you through it all. And they’ve been healthy. I mean, it’s been good. But I think more than anything for me, I wanted my kids to have a stability that I never really had, that I never felt a dad, honestly.

Dustin Lolli [00:33:50]:
And I have a great dad. If he hears this, he’s great dad. But it’s different, right? It’s different. I didn’t ever want my kids to go through that kind of separation and that kind of fear that we went through when we were little. And even now, like I said, they see the difference. They see the dynamics. They see stories that I tell. And they’re old enough now to understand that it’s meaningful to have a mom and dad who have stayed together for 22 years and who show that they love each other every day.

Dustin Lolli [00:34:14]:
I mean, that’s meaningful. That’s something that is driven with my family life a lot. I just want my kids to see stability.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:34:20]:
We always finish our interviews with what I like to call the dad connect section. 6. So six more questions that delve a little bit more into you as a dad. Are you ready?

Dustin Lolli [00:34:28]:
Okay. Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:34:29]:
What’s one word that describes your relationship with your daughters?

Dustin Lolli [00:34:34]:
Eclectic. I wanted to say something easy, like healthy or stable, but I think my daughters love that we do creative things a lot and our conversations are eclectic on purpose and just. I think my oldest daughter would love that. I think she’d love that I just said the word eclectic.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:34:49]:
What’s the best piece of dad advice that you’ve ever received?

Dustin Lolli [00:34:54]:
Love your wife. Well, you’ll be a good dad if you love your wife. I think that was something that you don’t correlate when you’re young and getting, you know, you’re about to enter dadhood. But the stronger your relationship with your wife is, the stronger your relationship with your daughters is. That’s what I feel like. And I love that advice. And that may not work for everybody. You might have hard hardships, but that was for me.

Dustin Lolli [00:35:15]:
That was a big thing for me.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:35:16]:
What’s one activity that you and your daughters like doing together?

Dustin Lolli [00:35:20]:
My oldest one’s watching movies. Movies. We both love kung fu and we love just action movies, which is interesting. Again, she’s great, and so that’s something she always wants. If there’s a new martial arts movie out, she’ll just be like, dad, we got a new one. And we’ll sit down and watch and make jokes about it the whole movie. We talk all the time about various things. She loves video, and so she’s always.

Dustin Lolli [00:35:42]:
She wants to be a voice actor, which is great. She’s a cool voice. And so she’s always talking about arts. And since I’m in music, you know, I have some unique perspectives on what she loves the little one right now. I get to be the male doll in whatever game she’s formulating. Come, dad, let’s play. Here. I’ve got a boy doll here.

Dustin Lolli [00:35:59]:
It’s yours. Okay, thanks, baby. Then I just Watch her play. Basically, it’s great.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:36:03]:
If you could give your daughters one life lesson in a single sentence, what would it be?

Dustin Lolli [00:36:08]:
Oh, man. I would say take chances. Not security chances. As a dad, like, I don’t, but don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t be afraid to fail. And don’t. That’s always been the one thing I’ve said to my oldest daughter. A lot is just, just life is meant to be lived.

Dustin Lolli [00:36:22]:
So if you, the more balanced you are, the less fearful you are of taking a chance. So do that.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:36:27]:
What’s one thing you’ve learned about yourself since becoming a dad?

Dustin Lolli [00:36:31]:
That I don’t know anything. And if I did, it’s not for the right reasons. And I think just as I’m getting older, motivation’s everything. Our motives and what, why we do what we do is more important than what we do in the first place. And I think early on it was like everything was I was doing was trying to prove that I was a good dad instead of actually trying to be a good dad dad. And so I, I think for that it’s just open. Have an open mind with your kids. They’re all different and they all respond differently.

Dustin Lolli [00:36:59]:
And as I’ve gotten older, I just realized the less I know, sometimes the better off I am.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:37:03]:
Finally, what advice would you give to other dads who want to build the lasting and meaningful relationship with their daughters?

Dustin Lolli [00:37:10]:
Love them. Well, I could come up with something like, real deep and be like, hey, do this checklist. But I just don’t think that works. Your daughters are your daughters and they are their own own unique people and personalities. And you have to know what makes. You have to know that. You have to get to know them well enough to know how to love them well. There has to be a connecting point on a human level.

Dustin Lolli [00:37:30]:
And it’s not just a dad daughter relationship. It’s you showing that you’re going to be there forever regardless. And that’s earned again, I think that’s earned over the course of years where you love them well, you treat them well, you support them well, you learn about them, you show interest in their interest, interests, and ultimately you just be the stable force that they need. And because ultimately it’s not about us. It’s not about us dads. I think the healthiest thing we can think about is it’s not about us in the relationship. It’s they’re the child. It’s about us supporting them.

Dustin Lolli [00:38:04]:
And so I think there has to be an unselfishness to it that A lot of us don’t want to give up. We don’t want to give up us. And you don’t have to give up all of you. But trust me when I say day, you’ll be happier when you start making it about your kid rather than about you. And you’ll find freedom in that. And so I would say to them, if you find yourself doing it because you want something, you need to change that. That’s. That’s where it needs a change.

Dustin Lolli [00:38:27]:
It can’t be about you. It has to be about her and has to be about her future and her relationship and her stability. And I promise you, when you do that, you’ll be rewarded as well. Like, not all sacrifice, you’ll be rewarded as well. Well, it’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:38:42]:
Well, Dustin, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for your time today, for sharing your own journey. If people want to find out more about you, about the band, where should they go?

Dustin Lolli [00:38:51]:
They can go to sanctusreal.com any of the social media things. We’re kind of everywhere. If you Google it, you’ll see all the links. Music’s on YouTube. It’s kind of everywhere. All you gotta do is look it up. This way home. Same thing.

Dustin Lolli [00:39:02]:
I mean, we’re on Spotify primarily. We don’t treat that as like this big thing that we’re promoting and all that kind of stuff. That’s kind of our own little thing. Thing. So, yeah, I just google it this way home and sanct this real well.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:39:14]:
Dustin, I truly appreciate your time today. Thank you for sharing everything that you’ve shared and I wish you all the best.

Dustin Lolli [00:39:20]:
I thank you. Appreciate it. You guys are great.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:39:22]:
That’s a wrap for this episode of the dad and daughter connection. Thanks for joining us on this journey to build stronger bonds and raise confident, independent daughters. Remember, being an engaged dad isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being present. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and share it with a fellow dad. And don’t forget, you can find all our episodes@dadanddaughterconnection.com until next time, keep showing up, keep connecting and keep being the dad she needs.

Musical Outro Performer [00:39:53]:
We’re all in the same boat and it’s full of tiny, screaming past messengers. We spend the time, we give the lessons, we make the meals, we buy them presents and bring your A game. Cause those kids are growing fast the time goes by just like a dynamite blast Calling astronauts and firemen carpenters and muscle men get out and be the world you down Be the best dad you can be Be the best dad you can.

Slices of Connection: How a Pizza Business Built an Unbreakable Father-Daughter Bond

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What does it mean to truly connect with your daughter? In this heartfelt episode of The Dad and Daughter Connection, Dr. Christopher Lewis sits down with Joe Carlucci and his daughter, Valentina, to explore the depth of father-daughter relationships, the power of perseverance, and the joys (and trials) of building a business—and a life—side by side.

The Carlucci story is more than just a tale of pizza and world records; it’s a masterclass in showing up, learning together, and making family the center of everything you do. Joe, the owner of Valentina’s Pizzeria in Huntsville, Alabama, shares how having his daughter involved in the restaurant has changed everything about how he leads, listens, and loves.

“I want her to have a life, to experience everything,” Joe shares, emphasizing that legacy isn’t about business success but about the kind of father he is. Valentina, already a Guinness World Record holder for pizza tossing at just 12, brings her own flair and opinions to the family business, reminding listeners that kids don’t just follow in parents’ footsteps—they blaze their own trails.

Parenting, of course, isn’t without challenges. Joe’s candid stories of failure, resilience, and growth highlight the value of letting your kids see you struggle and rise again. The episode dives deep into co-parenting, stepfamily dynamics, and the importance of putting pride aside so kids can feel fully supported, no matter what.

What makes this episode truly special is the genuine banter and obvious affection between Joe and Valentina. Their shared laughter, friendly teasing, and mutual admiration are a testament to what’s possible when dads choose presence over perfection.

If you’re a dad looking to build a stronger relationship with your daughter—or anyone inspired by stories of resilience, family, and food—this episode is an absolute must-listen. You’ll walk away with practical advice, heartfelt wisdom (“If you fall down ten times, get up eleven”), and maybe even a craving for a slice of the world’s best pizza.

Ready to be inspired? Tune in to this episode of The Dad and Daughter Connection and discover how showing up, listening deeply, and making your child your priority can change everything—for both of you. Find all episodes and more at dadanddaughterconnection.com.

If you enjoyed this episode we ask you to take a moment to take our Dad and Daughter Connection Survey to let us know more about you as a dad. You can also sign up to get our newsletter to stay connected to our community and we will send items of interest to you to help you to be the dad that you want to be. Feel free to follow me on the following social media platforms: Facebook, Facebook Group, Instagram, LinkedIn, X.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:02]:
Welcome to the dad and daughter connection, the podcast for dads who want to build stronger bonds and raise confident independent daughters.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:12]:
If you’re looking to build a stronger bond with your daughter and help her grow into a confident, independent woman, you’re in the right place. I’m doctor Christopher Lewis, and the dad and daughter connection is the podcast where we dive into real stories, expert advice, and practical tips to help you navigate the incredible journey of fatherhood. In every episode, we’ll bring you conversations that inspire, challenge, and equip you to show up as the dad your daughter needs. So let’s get started. Because being a great dad isn’t just about being there, it’s about truly connecting. Welcome back to the Dad and Daughter Connection, where every week we have a great opportunity to be able to meet and work together, to be able to build those bonds that we want to have with our daughters, one day at a time. And I love that you come back every week to be able for us to be able to work together and to be able to find new ways to be able to engage with our daughters and find ways to be able to build those stronger bonds. So I thank you for coming back every week.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:20]:
That’s why this podcast exists. It exists to help you and to be able to give you some tools for your toolbox that you can walk away from every episode with some different things to think about in regards to the relationship that you have with your daughter and that relationship that you want to have with your daughter. Every week, I love being able to bring you different guests with different experiences that are having these great relationships together, but also that you can grow from the relationships that you are hearing from them. Sometimes we have dads on, sometimes we have daughters on, Sometimes we have dads and daughters on. And today, we have just that. I’m really excited to be able to have Joe, Carlucci and his daughter, Valentina, on. And we’re gonna be talking to them about the journey that they’ve been on in regards to some food, some world records, and a little bit more to be able to talk about the bond that they have in correlation to all of this. And I am really just really excited to have them here today.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:19]:
Joe, Valentina, thanks so much for being here today.

Valentina Carlucci [00:02:21]:
Thank you.

Joe Carlucci [00:02:22]:
Thank you very much. It’s an honor. We appreciate the opportunity.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:25]:
Well, I am really excited to be able to have you here. We’ve been trying to make this work for a while, so I’m I’m really excited that we were able to find a time to be able to do this. I guess first and foremost, what I would love to do is talk to me about your relationship and what makes your bond so special.

Joe Carlucci [00:02:42]:
Because she’s my air, my breath, my world. Like, she’s my everything. She’s a smart ass, but she’s amazing and, she’s my heartbeat. She’s the reason, I get up to be a better person, father, boss, son, and friend every day, every week, every month, every minute, every second of my life.

Joe Carlucci [00:02:58]:
And, Valentina, what’s the best part? I know that you work alongside your dad at the restaurant. And I guess as you think about that and the and the opportunity that you have to work with your dad, what’s the best part about working alongside your dad in the pizza business?

Valentina Carlucci [00:03:13]:
Getting to correct Tim because he makes a lot of mistakes, and I have to end up being the boss and taking care of everyone because he doesn’t always know what to do when he’s working. He can be a little. So

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:03:27]:
So for you that are listening, Valentina just kind of twirled her finger around her around her ear saying that he’s a little crazy. So I don’t know, Joe. I mean, you said she’s opinionated, but she definitely has her opinions here. And where does she get that from? Definitely not you. Right?

Joe Carlucci [00:03:45]:
No. I’m not very opinionated. I keep my comments to myself. I’m very low key. I’m low spoken. I don’t ever put gas on the fire. I usually put water. She likes to, which is okay sometimes, make make dinner for the staff, make desserts, give everybody a break, give them raises.

Joe Carlucci [00:04:01]:
She’s, all for the inmates and and not for the 40 sometimes. But when she has to throw the hammer down, she’ll throw it down to anybody. So I give her that.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:04:11]:
I guess, Joe, seeing it, like you said, that, you know, Valentina is your heir. You said that, you know, she is following in your footsteps here. When did you first notice that Valentina shared your passion for pizza?

Joe Carlucci [00:04:22]:
Man, she’s been every step of the way at every restaurant I’ve had, food truck. I mean, since she was in diapers and strollers, she’s always been inside the pizzeria restaurant business. When she got old enough to stand up, to wash dishes, to wipe tables down and sweep, like, I never thought anything of it. And when I launched Valentina’s four and a half years ago, I had called her mother and said, hey. I’m gonna open a pizzeria again, and, I wanna name it after Valentina. She’s like, let me ask her because, you know, she’s kind of quiet sometimes. And I’m like, yeah. I don’t know how she feel.

Joe Carlucci [00:04:51]:
And she asked her, and she was like, absolutely. One thing only is no pineapple on pizza. And we end up having And we end up putting pineapple on pizza. And then when she came to work a lot more with me, she asked me about my records and did she get one? And I just thought it was a kid wanting to do what her dad does or not every day. And then as she got older, I mean, she’s 12. She’s got a long way to go, and then she it’s in her blood, and she loves it. And I told her it’s not the easiest, but today’s age, we have changed the way we do things in the industry. You know, we’re only open twenty seven hours. I like to say we like the Chick fil A pizza. We’re closed Sunday and Mondays.

Joe Carlucci [00:05:26]:
We don’t open for lunch. We only open for dinner. It is where the area we are, but, I want her to have a life too, and I don’t want the the life to be inside this restaurant. I don’t she gotta put the time in, but at the same time, I want her to experience other things as well. And she’s right now adamant about taking it over.

Joe Carlucci [00:05:42]:
So I guess for those that are listening that don’t know you, Joe, and don’t know your your your background and don’t know the restaurant, give me a little bit of the history which led you to some world records so that someone that doesn’t know you gets a better feel for not only what led you to starting Valentina’s, but what led you to moving from New York to Alabama?

Joe Carlucci [00:06:05]:
Sure. I’m a consultant. I used to be a consultant. Excuse me. And I came down to Alabama fifteen years to go to open a pizzeria, and I just fell in love with Huntsville, Alabama, where we are now at Valentina’s. And I decided to come down and help the gentleman and move the consultant down here. The consulting thing was kinda hard in the South, and I ended up working for him. Along the way, I’ve had a couple restaurants and I failed at them, and they she was my passion to keep driving.

Joe Carlucci [00:06:29]:
And when you get knocked down, you gotta get up 10 times harder and faster, and no one’s gonna worry about you or cry about you, and you have to take care of yourself. And I taught her that. Like, one thing I could teach is you never give up. I did not, by the wildest dreams, think this restaurant, Valentina’s Pizzeria, would ever blow up to what it is. We went from having 10 employees to having 47 employees. We have a full time life coach, a GM that, has a law background that runs the whole entire restaurant. She loves her. I have a manager that’s, been with me ten years, and we’re growing every day.

Joe Carlucci [00:07:01]:
We just bought a food truck again to go do double dip, and I love the area of Huntsville, Alabama. I mean, people think Alabama. I think my cousin Vinny, and I probably look like my cousin Vinny. But it’s just been a great experience. We went from a 1,500 square foot to buying our own land and having a 5,000 square foot with 190 seats. I was actually kidding around with her the other day and I said, you know, someone offered me millions of dollars to sell. She’s like, you can’t sell. To my restaurant.

Joe Carlucci [00:07:25]:
I said, what about 10,000,000? I said, no. 20. She said, no. We’re not selling. I said, what do you mean we can’t sell? She goes, the restaurant’s for me. I said, yeah. But that’s a lot of money. We can go to Disney.

Joe Carlucci [00:07:35]:
We can have some I’m a system. The reason why we have this restaurant and all this money is because of me, because we wouldn’t have this amazing place without me. So you have to put that factor into. You can go on that.

Joe Carlucci [00:07:50]:
So I need them. I said, well, I was just kidding, but she goes, good. You can get all you want, but it’s mine. So it is everything that we’re doing is for her to build the brand, and she’s gonna have to, put the hair back, put the apron on, and firstly in those pizzas.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:08:03]:
Now, Joe, you mentioned that you strive to be a strong role model for Valentina. What are the most important qualities that you try to demonstrate for her?

Joe Carlucci [00:08:11]:
Have a backbone, have a voice, have empathy for people, care, but believe in yourself and love yourself more than anybody loves you. And don’t listen to the critics or the keyboard warriors or the haters. Like you can do anything you put your mind to. Listen. I’m probably the dumbest guy you ever speak to on your podcast. I can’t screw a light bulb in. Okay? And I put my head down and described. Hard work beats talent every day and twice on Sundays.

Joe Carlucci [00:08:35]:
And you can outwork anybody any day, any week, any month. And that’s the hardest lesson to teach her because sometimes she can be a little lazy, but I still love her. Yeah. You know? But it’s the youth, but we’re getting we’re getting it out of you. We’re we’re kicking it out of you. But I would, like, teach her that. Never give up on yourself and believe in others. Don’t give up on others either.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:08:52]:
Now, Valentina, based on what your dad just said and what he’s taught you, what have you learned from your dad about hard work and dedication?

Valentina Carlucci [00:09:00]:
Well, so for one, if you do a job, do it correctly and try to do it good. It’s okay to make a mistake, but don’t make the same mistake a million times. And then, of course, like, if you fall down 10 times, get up 11 times. So, like, overall, like, never give up and always try your hardest no matter what the job is.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:09:24]:
I love that.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:09:24]:
Now, Joe, parenting comes with challenges. It’s not always easy. And I know that in the past you’ve spoken about letting your kids see you fail and grow. And you just mentioned that you have failed and you’ve had to pull yourself up and keep going. Can you share a moment where you learned an important lesson in front of Valentina that she had that you wanted her to learn even though it may have been hard for you?

Valentina Carlucci [00:09:46]:
At one time, the quarantine family.

Joe Carlucci [00:09:50]:
Chris, when we had the food truck during COVID, we’d go out in the beginning because it was a lockdown and sell, like, 200 pizzas. And as time got on and they lifted the the lockdown, she’d come out with me in a 20 degree weather. She’d be sweating on the food truck. She was, like, 78 years old. We sell four pizzas, literally. I had to throw all the dough away, all the ingredients. It was, like, week after week until I finally decided that the money I’d save from COVID during with the food truck is to make the transition to a brick and mortar again. But got life lesson just, why are we doing this? Can we go home? Like, no.

Joe Carlucci [00:10:23]:
We’re gonna stick it out, and we’d sell pizzas in five hours. It was just teaching her how to not give up. I did this political box over the course of last four months with the president on there, and we got a lot of backlash from it. And I’m not very political. I’m just controversial. I don’t know a lot of it. I’m saying it’s not controversial in my mouth. You can ask anybody my rep, but I’ve never brought up politics once before this election.

Joe Carlucci [00:10:45]:
Never. Oh, never. I don’t talk about it, but college football, as you know, where you are too is king, and I just had to think of a marketing scheme. Well, long story short, it has developed into an animal of its own. And it took on a whole new world here for the last two months. It’s been insane. And we had a customer or a stalker not even a stalker, keyboard warrior come in on last Saturday who was already trashing us. And it was a little incident, and I had to be a little bit more professional around her and just put the water on the fire that time with her and her younger sister, who’s always over at my house, her stepsister.

Joe Carlucci [00:11:21]:
Didn’t teach her, like, sometimes you have to control yourself because I had my staff. I had people there, and I had my daughter there. And I don’t wanna, like, do what my what I really wanna do, but, you know, it’s not professional and it’s not teaching her anything. So I had to handle that situation a little different. Not saying I wouldn’t if she wasn’t there, but it would’ve been a lot easier to not handle the right way. But when my dog when you turn around and your daughter’s looking at you, it’s the older man that you don’t wanna be fighting or screaming at people. So sometimes, like I told her, dads are not perfect. I never had a 12 year old.

Joe Carlucci [00:11:50]:
I’ve never had a 13 year old. So guess what? I’m gonna mess up because I’ve never had a kid before. So I’m learning as she’s learning. So I just let her know that I’m not perfect in any way, shape, or form and that no matter what, I’m always gonna love her even if she’s burns pizza sometime.

Valentina Carlucci [00:12:05]:
So I correct you when you burn pizzas, but I don’t burn pizzas, and that’s why my pizzas are better.

Joe Carlucci [00:12:11]:
Well, maybe we’ll ship them one if you tell us.

Valentina Carlucci [00:12:13]:
Yeah. Well, no. It’ll be bad. So we we freeze it. We can? Yeah. Okay.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:12:19]:
That would be great. So, Valentina, you just heard your dad talk about some challenges that he’s had and some struggles that he’s gone through. And I guess as you think about that and you’ve seen your dad struggle with different things, how did that affect you and affect the way that you think about making mistakes?

Valentina Carlucci [00:12:39]:
It made me wanna try harder. It made me wanna do the business more. It made me wanna make my dad proud. And it also, like, taught me some lessons on, like, whenever anyone comes into your electronic complaining, he didn’t escalate it at all. But whatever you do, do not escalate it and make it worse because that’s the one bad thing you could do. And then you could be in the wrong if, like, you do anything to them because the customer is always right.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:13:10]:
And Valentina did put up her quotes because, you know

Joe Carlucci [00:13:13]:
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:13:14]:
I get it. Now, Joe, I know that you mentioned the fact that Valentina’s got step siblings, and you’ve talked in the past, I know about co parenting and co parenting can bring its own challenges. So you’ve talked about that in the past with step kids and half siblings. What has helped you to maintain a strong unified family dynamic?

Joe Carlucci [00:13:35]:
Well, my pride, it’s hard enough to be a kid in 02/2025. Her mother and I didn’t have the best, and we didn’t have the worst relationship. We didn’t do anything to hurt each other. We just weren’t the right fit. So why make your kids suffer for twenty, thirty years because you made a decision in thirty seconds when you went to bed. Right? So it wasn’t always like this. I I had a a lot of, looking in the mirror like, who’s the problem? Is the world the problem, or is Joe the problem? And I decided that I was the problem. And her stepdad is she’s so lucky to have a dad like that.

Joe Carlucci [00:14:08]:
I mean, I think he’s one of the most amazing people. She has one of the best mothers that god has ever created in a very weird, people say, relationship. Her past sister is over my house. It’s always my always my my Christmas. My my girlfriend gets her gifts, sends the gifts. She’s over my house three weeks, four weeks out of summer. She sleeps over during the week. I mean, she’s like my second kid, and we we’re actually all a family, and it and it works.

Joe Carlucci [00:14:31]:
I think it’s sometimes under those situations, not every situation is like mine. You have to look in the mirror. And I just made a pact that I know it’s gonna be a tough life for any kid growing up, and I’m not gonna make my daughter’s life harder. And we’re we’re all friends. Like, her stepdad does pest control. He does my house. He does my restaurant. I have a problem.

Joe Carlucci [00:14:48]:
He comes here. Her mom and I co parent very, very well together, respect each other. My girlfriend knows my situation, and she’s open to it. And she loves Cadence just like she loves Valentina. So it worked. Everybody at the restaurant, my GM, my managers, like, they take Valentina. They sleep over her house. She sleeps over there.

Joe Carlucci [00:15:08]:
I mean, it’s a big family. It’s one big family, and it all starts with knowing what to do, when to do it. And it’s not always about me. Like, if it’s better than my daughter’s life to co parent and put our differences aside from fifteen years ago, then let’s do it. I mean, if you saw her step sister here, do you think she’s my daughter? She just bring drags her stuff in. We had a pizza named after her on the menu. So it works. You just had to do a lot of soul searching.

Joe Carlucci [00:15:33]:
I think that’s the hardest thing for people today is, like, look in the mirror. I’m not talking about situations where someone’s died or cheated. My situation was nothing like that. We were just oil and water. She’s an engineer. I’m a pizza guy with ADHD, but we’re better off we are now because I told her she’s got two dads instead of one. Right? So it worked on both hands.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:15:50]:
And, Valentina, what’s one thing your dad does that makes your whole family feel connected and supported?

Valentina Carlucci [00:15:55]:
Well, he’s always open for Cadence to come over here. He treats her like how he treats me. He’s, like, best friends with my stepdad and my mom. He always invites him over to the restaurant. Whenever my mom drops Cadence off sometimes at the house, she’ll even stay for a little longer and just talk to my dad. So it’s not like how it would be for normal parents that are not together anymore. They’re fine in a room together. They could talk normally like friends.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:16:26]:
Joe, with the situation and the kind of the family dynamic that you have right now, what advice do you have for dads that are navigating co parenting challenges while keeping their child’s best interests at heart?

Joe Carlucci [00:16:37]:
Put your pride aside. Look through the lens as your child would. Put yourself in your child’s shoes. Even if you can’t get along, don’t you know what I’m saying? If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything. Not every situation is gonna be like mine. So the less said is the better. So it no matter what, that’s gonna be your mother and that’s you’re gonna be the father for the rest of her life. So you have to figure out some way to at least respect each other as a parent, everything else, you know, under your situations, but say less.

Joe Carlucci [00:17:02]:
I know because kids today don’t wanna go back and forth and hear about the kids fighting or the parents saying this. This parent said death and step you know what I mean? It it’s just hard enough for these kids. It’s hard enough. So if if you can’t get along, which is understandable in certain situations, don’t say anything. Just don’t comment on it, and then they don’t have to feel that they have to stick up for that, parent. They don’t have to defend that parent. It also makes you look worse, I think, as a parent because kids are not stupid. They’re smart.

Joe Carlucci [00:17:27]:
The older they get, they’ll see. They’ll feel it out, Whether their dad’s absent, their mom’s absent, or just whatever the situation is, they they’ll they’ll figure it out. You don’t have to lead them to order. They’re they’re smarter than us.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:17:38]:
Now I know, Joe, you’ve had a number of businesses that you’ve started that may have been successful, may have failed. What’s the biggest lesson though that you’ve learned in business that has also helped you as a father?

Joe Carlucci [00:17:49]:
Open minded. Take advice from people that have been there. Maybe people that are in their seventies. You know, as a father that had multiple kids or been in my situation and in the industry, I have, been blessed and lucky and honored to be, taught under Tony Geminiani. He has over 200 locations in the number of pizza in The US, and he’s been, like, a mentor to me in every way. And looking up to other people that have kids or in my situation and that are good role models for their kids that I could take advice from moving forward.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:18:20]:
And Valentina, I know you help your dad at the restaurant and you work hard. What’s your ultimate dream in the pizza industry? I know you said you already cook and you’re you’re better than your dad. So how do you want to follow in your dad’s footsteps or go beyond your dad in this industry?

Valentina Carlucci [00:18:35]:
Well, I wanna be exactly like him or maybe even better when I grow up. I wanna have over a thousand stores.

Joe Carlucci [00:18:43]:
Okay.

Valentina Carlucci [00:18:43]:
No. I’m being for real. Like, I do wanna have over a thousand stores, and I want my pizza place to be number one in the whole world to where all these influencers are trying to come here saying how good our pizza is. And so, like, one day when my dad dies, I can just look up, no, I made him proud.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:19:00]:
Joe, talk to me about what is having Valentina involved in the restaurant done or changed in the way that you run your business?

Joe Carlucci [00:19:10]:
Oh, everything. Since she was born. My whole way I look at people and I treat people and I act when she’s not here because I I always think, like, it’s great you you do it when she’s not when when she’s here, but in anything you do when she’s not here. It’s just changed the way my perspective on life is on people and having empathy for my staff and caring for them and just I used to be a Gordon Ramsay of pizza that’s yelling, screaming, throwing things in. They say you get more flies with honey. So I’m still working on that, but, you know, I hired a full time life coach to help navigate where I wanna go and help people understand my vision. My standard is extremely high the way I carry the restaurant, and I expect everybody to meet that standard, always there, but I wanna be better than yesterday. I don’t care about today.

Joe Carlucci [00:19:56]:
I don’t care about tomorrow. So she has a big influence in that because if I could build the standard for Valentina’s and the standard I wanna be as a man, then she’ll know what kind of man she needs. And I don’t care if she she’ll always be open to telling me, hopefully, that she has a boyfriend because, like, since she was, like, six, I would open the door for her and tell her, if they don’t open the door, they don’t open the door, don’t get in. So now when we go home tonight or we go to Korean barbecue or for pizza, I’m I’m in the car, and she’s sitting outside standing outside. I’m like, what are you doing? She’s like, I’m not getting until you open this door. And I’m like, oh my god. This is a little too much. And I said, what are you gonna do if you’re on a date? She said, I’m gonna Uber.

Joe Carlucci [00:20:35]:
I’m gonna call you. I said, okay. Good. I’ve been, I’m literally at six in the morning. I’m gonna take her to the school. She’ll just stand outside. It’d be 30 degrees. She’s like, I’m not getting in.

Joe Carlucci [00:20:43]:
I’d get out of the car. I gotta go around. I gotta open the door. So she knows what she’s doing on that end.

Joe Carlucci [00:20:49]:
Now earlier, Valentina, I talked about the Guinness world record for pizza tossing. Congratulations.

Valentina Carlucci [00:20:55]:
Thank you.

Joe Carlucci [00:20:56]:
What was that experience like, and what did your dad teach you to help you get there?

Valentina Carlucci [00:21:01]:
Well, so how my dad taught me was when I was at his house, at the time, I was only there Sunday, Monday, and then I left Tuesday morning. So both days, we practiced for, like, four hours. And then he gave me, like, this rubber dough, and I bring it to my mom’s house with me and I practice every day. And so before I tried to get the, record, I, like, practiced a lot. And there was some tears because I, like, really wanted to win, and I did. But the process of it was really fun. My mom got to come, and we had this whole, like, little celebration.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:21:38]:
And, Joe, seeing Valentina break a world record at such a young age must have been an incredible moment. How did that feel as a father?

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:21:45]:
It was one of the greatest moments of my life to see her do it. And, actually, she was the one with the idea. It wasn’t me throwing this on her. Like, I never want her to get in this industry. It’s a tough industry, but, like, she keeps pushing that idea away. So when she wanted to do this, she was eight or nine.

Valentina Carlucci [00:22:00]:
Four. No. You want four? When I wanna do

Joe Carlucci [00:22:03]:
No. When you did the Guinness record.

Joe Carlucci [00:22:05]:
Oh. She was eight or nine. She can’t count. She’s really bad at math.

Valentina Carlucci [00:22:07]:
No. I’m good at math.

Joe Carlucci [00:22:08]:
But just having her want to do it and then her actually accomplishing it, it was a goosebump feeling, kind of like one of those moments that were surreal.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:22:16]:
Now, Joe, earlier in the conversation, you talked about that you invested in a life coach to help you grow as both a father and a business owner. What’s been the biggest shift for you and your mindset since starting that journey?

Joe Carlucci [00:22:29]:
The biggest shift has to be my attitude because as hard as it is and it’s many layers I have on my back, whether it’s the loans, the mortgage, like, everything starts and ends with me. And even the box, I put a bull’s eye on my staff. Like, I knew that politics and religion, you don’t bring into the restaurant, and I did both. And I did both. And learning how to understand and deal with that, but also 47 people do not work for me. I work for 47 people. I work for my staff. They don’t work for me.

Joe Carlucci [00:22:57]:
And he has taught me that and helped me with that. And understanding what that means is hearing people, letting them have a voice, understanding them, understanding, like, no one’s perfect. No one has perfect life inside and outside of here. And it’s just shifted my attitude of the perspective I I have on people.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:23:16]:
And, Valentina, have you noticed any changes in your dad since he started working with a coach?

Valentina Carlucci [00:23:20]:
Yes. So I will say before, he wasn’t the best when with when people would start crying. Of course, he would, like, try to hug them and ask them what’s wrong, but he wasn’t the best with it. And now if you notice because we have a ton of girls that work for us, and girls can be emotional. And he’s just gotten a lot better with it, like, with emotions, understanding, and dealing with them. And I think the life coach really helped with that.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:23:46]:
Joe, I guess as we finish up, what legacy do you hope to leave for Valentina both as a father and as a businessman?

Joe Carlucci [00:23:53]:
Well, it’s just one. I don’t care about the business. That was the best that I could make to her. That’s my legacy. Like, I love pizza, some of my blood, but my legacy is is as a father. There’s nothing second or close to it. I I can care less if she did this. Whatever she wants to do in life, she’s gonna be super successful.

Joe Carlucci [00:24:10]:
But my legacy is as a father, not as anything to do in this industry at all. There are so many more talented people in this industry than me. I’ve just been blessed to be around some great mentors like Tony. And at moments, I’ve captured those winning championships at that minute, that second, that hour, but nothing comes close to being a dad. That legacy is number one and the most important to me.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:24:36]:
And, Valentina, if you had to give your dad a best dad award, what would it be for?

Valentina Carlucci [00:24:40]:
Being the best dad, everything he does is amazing. Of course, he’ll make mistakes on the way of being the best dad, but to me, he’s the best dad that there can ever be.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:24:49]:
And we always finish our interviews with what I call the dad connection six. And a lot of times I have these just for dads, but with both of you here, I’m gonna ask both of you these questions and see see what you have to say. So, Valentina, I’m gonna start with you. What’s one word that describes your relationship with your dad?

Valentina Carlucci [00:25:06]:
Amazing.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:25:07]:
And let’s flip it. Joe, what’s one word that describes your relationship with Valentina?

Joe Carlucci [00:25:11]:
Princess.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:25:12]:
Valentina, what’s the best piece of advice your dad’s ever given you?

Valentina Carlucci [00:25:15]:
If it’s all Valentine times, get up eleven.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:25:18]:
And, Joe, what’s the best piece of dad advice that you’ve ever received?

Joe Carlucci [00:25:22]:
Listen to them, don’t hear them. Or hear them, don’t listen. You know when they say you you you’re listening, but you’re not hearing me? Hear them. A lot of parents don’t hear their kids. They listen to their kids, but they don’t hear what they’re saying. It’s a big difference. My employees do the same thing sometimes.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:25:34]:
Valentina, what’s one activity that you and your dad love to do together?

Valentina Carlucci [00:25:38]:
Anything that includes having fun.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:25:40]:
And Joe?

Joe Carlucci [00:25:41]:
Cooking. She we’ve been going out for Korean barbecue on Sundays and, Italian on Mondays. And she said to me about six months ago, like, these meatballs are horrible. Just and she knows how to make our meatballs in the sauce. She’s like, can you just can we just cook at home? Can you just teach me? I was like, yeah. So we stopped going out to eat. Then we started doing the Korean cooking at home and the Italian the next day. And that’s probably the best way to describe the connection was cooking.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:26:06]:
Now, Joe, I’m gonna follow-up with that. And if you could give Valentina one life lesson in a single sentence, what would it be?

Joe Carlucci [00:26:12]:
It’s not how hard you hit. It’s how hard you hit back. Kinda like getting knocked down, get up, but, like, every life’s gonna throw you a lot of curve balls. You gotta be able to swing them all over.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:26:20]:
Valentina, what’s one thing that your dad has taught you that you’ll never forget?

Valentina Carlucci [00:26:25]:
I’ll say if you try anything, always try your best at it. Or again, like, no matter what you go through, no matter what happens, never have an excuse for it. Always do it.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:26:39]:
And Joe, what’s one thing you’ve learned about yourself since becoming a dad?

Joe Carlucci [00:26:43]:
That I can’t do this because I didn’t think I could. Scary. As long as I’m on this earth, I have to lead by example and I didn’t think I could do it. It’s not an easy job for any of us. And just trust me, dealing with this one. I have Corrine in there. Let me tell you, you know where Draly is to all the girls. So

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:27:00]:
Valentina, what advice would you give to other dads who want to build a lasting and meaningful relationship with their daughters? What would you say to them?

Valentina Carlucci [00:27:08]:
Don’t always nag your kids around. Meaning, like, say if you correct them once, that’s okay, or a couple of times. But if all you do when you’re with them is, oh, why does your hair look so bad? Or your room’s a mess, or you’ve been a slob lately. And if you just keep on correcting them, they’ll never come out of their room and they won’t wanna talk to you because every time they talk to you, it’s just them insulting you instead of saying, hey. Would you like some help or would you like want me to clean your room if you are do a deep clean or something? There’s always a necessary way to say something.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:27:43]:
And Joe, what would you say?

Joe Carlucci [00:27:44]:
But you sell second time. You can’t make up time in life, so make them your world because you don’t have them for a long time. The older they get, the less they are. So make them your priority. Don’t make other things your priority. My priorities are if I’m not working, I’m with her. If I’m not and if sometimes she’s working with me and I’m with her outside of the year. But make them your priority.

Joe Carlucci [00:28:06]:
Not a priority where it’s it’s a business and, you know, in the sense of, like, oh, I gotta take them to sports. I gotta spend quality time with them, whether it’s with homework, watching a movie, listening to them, hearing them.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:28:17]:
Well, Joe, Valentina, I just wanna say thank you. Thank you for your time tonight and for sharing this journey that you’re on. It’s not over. It’s definitely just the starting point and we’ll continue throughout your lives together. And I know that I have loved to being able to see this dynamic play out in front of me, but I know that others will learn from this as well. And I truly wish you both the best.

Joe Carlucci [00:28:42]:
Thank you.

Valentina Carlucci [00:28:43]:
Thank you.

Joe Carlucci [00:28:44]:
It was an honor to have a be with you today.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:28:45]:
That’s a wrap for this episode of the dad and daughter connection. Thanks for joining us on this journey to build stronger bonds and raise confident, independent daughters. Remember, being an engaged dad isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being present. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and share it with a fellow dad. And don’t forget, you can find all our episodes at dadanddaughterconnection.com. Until next time, keep showing up, keep connecting, and keep being the dad she needs.

Musical Performer [00:29:16]:
We’re all in the same boat, and it’s full of tiny screaming passengers. We spend the time. We give the lessons. We make the meals. We buy them presents and bring your AK. Because those kids are growing fast. The time goes by just like a dynamite blast. Calling astronauts and firemen, carpenters and muscle men.

Musical Performer [00:29:56]:
Get out and be the world to them. Be the best dad you can be. Be the best dad you can be.

Strengthening Father-Daughter Bonds: Lessons from Broadcaster David Andrews

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Building a strong, meaningful connection with your daughter doesn’t come with a manual—a truth at the heart of every episode of the Dad and Daughter Connection podcast. In a recent interview, Dr. Christopher Lewis sits down with David Andrews, Lansing’s beloved news anchor and a proud father of three daughters, to dive into the joys and challenges of being a dad.

This heartwarming episode is packed with both relatable moments and insightful advice for dads at any stage of their parenting journey. David openly shares that fatherhood, especially to three daughters with very different personalities, has been “a crash course” in love, patience, and adaptability. Yet, through each unique relationship, a single lesson rings true: being present and intentional is what builds lasting bonds.

Intentional Connection

A recurring theme of the conversation is the power of simply being there. David recounts the choice he and his wife made to adjust their work schedules, ensuring one parent was always home. By prioritizing presence, not perfection, David built trust and closeness with each daughter. From doing Austin’s hair in the mornings to spontaneous fishing trips with Carson as an adult, these moments weren’t just about activities—they were about making memories and fostering meaningful conversations.

Guidance and Independence

David is honest about the tricky balance between guiding your kids and letting them carve their own paths. He emphasizes the importance of supporting unique dreams—even when they take unexpected turns, like his daughter transitioning from tattoo artist to hair colorist, or another working to eradicate mosquito-borne diseases. His approach? Offer guidance, but let them discover their true passions, leaning on your own life experiences for wisdom without controlling their choices.

Listening and Traditions

The essence of feeling ‘valued and heard’ is simple: listen more, lecture less. David’s philosophy on fatherhood centers on being a reliable sounding board—letting his daughters express themselves openly, knowing he’ll respond with empathy (not a sermon). He also highlights the value of family traditions, from regular birthday dinners to playful social media photoshoots, which have evolved into cherished rituals that unite his family.

Taking Life Lightly

With humor as a family glue, David reminds dads: don’t take life too seriously. Whether through social media antics or cheering for the Green Bay Packers together, laughter keeps relationships strong and reminds everyone that joy is found in the journey, not just the destination.

Ready for More?

If you’re eager for practical wisdom and real-world stories about raising strong, independent daughters, this episode with David Andrews is a must-listen. Tune in to the Dad and Daughter Connection podcast—because every dad deserves to feel seen, supported, and inspired.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:02]:
Welcome to the dad and Daughter Connection, the podcast for dads who want to build stronger bonds and raise confident, independent daughters.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:12]:
If you’re looking to build a stronger bond with your daughter and help her grow into a confident, independent woman, you’re in the right place. I’m Dr. Christopher Lewis, and the dad and Daughter Connection is the podcast where we dive into real stories, expert advice, and practical tips to help you navigate the incredible journey of fatherhood. In every episode, we’ll bring you conversations that inspire, challenge, and equip you to show up as the dad your daughter needs. So let’s get started, because being a great dad isn’t just about being there. It’s about truly connecting. Welcome back to the dad and Daughter Connection. I am so excited that you’re here today as we are delving back into that relationship that you’re trying to build with your daughter.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:02]:
It is such an important relationship, and every week I love that you are here to be able to talk about that, but also to learn and to grow from that. Because none of us walk into fatherhood with a manual about how to be the dad that we want to be. We learned it along the way. We trip, we fall, we make mistakes as well. And that’s why every week, I love being able to bring you different people with different experiences and be able to offer you some sneak peeks into their experiences in raising daughters so that you can learn from them. Today we got another great guest with us. David Andrews is with us today. And David is a news reporter, a anchor, someone that’s been in the Lansing news market for many years.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:49]:
He’s been at WIOX since the late 90s and even before that was at Channel 6 in Lansing. So he’s been in the news agency for a long time. Very well known in the Lansing community, but he’s got three daughters himself. So I’m always excited to be able to talk to other dads with daughters, to be able to gain some knowledge from them. David, thanks so much for being here today.

David Andrews [00:02:12]:
Yeah, Chris, it’s wonderful being with you. I know you’ve been asking me to be on this podcast for some time, and finally I’m glad to be able to sit down with you and talk about daughters. Like you said, I have three of them and it’s been a wonderful experience.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:27]:
So to start off today, why don’t you tell me a little bit about all three of your daughters?

David Andrews [00:02:30]:
Yeah. Oldest daughter is Austin, born in 1991, and she’s now 34 years old and she is a hair colorist. With a place in Lansing, Holiday Hair House in Lansing. So she’s been doing that for a number of years. She started out actually as a tattoo artist, so it was a neat transition for her to go from that to being a hair colorist. Middle daughter is Carson. She is four years younger, so she just turned 30 years old. And she works in the Chicago area as a scientist.

David Andrews [00:03:04]:
She graduated from Michigan State University and she’s now working with a company trying to eradicate mosquitoes. They come up with different chemical formulas for not just residential use by municipalities, but also third world countries where malaria is a problem, that people can die from diseases that mosquitoes carry. And so that’s what she does. She works with mosquitoes on a daily basis. And then our youngest daughter is Peyton and she’s 25 years old and she is a barber and she runs the Ram Barber shop in Holt, which was established more than 60 years ago. Same guy ran it for that many years. He retired and she was able to get into there. And now she is the barber at the main, I guess, barber shop in Holt.

David Andrews [00:04:00]:
So we’re very proud of her and she just started that about a year ago.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:04:03]:
So as you think about your three daughters, very different people, very different experiences, I’m sure, with them. As you think back to the moments that you’ve been able to share with them thus far, what’s one of the most meaningful moments that you’ve shared with each of them and what about it made it special?

David Andrews [00:04:20]:
Well, I think each one of them, because they, like you say, they are so absolutely different in many ways, yet they’re the same in a lot of ways too. But I think each one of them growing up, we had a unique dynamic. We never had to have daycare in our house because my wife Monica was in radio for many years and she worked the morning shows. And I, at the time when our daughters were growing up, I always worked the evening news, 6 and 11 o’ clock. And so there was always one of us in the house parenting. So we never had to have any kind of daycare for the daughters, which I thought was an important thing, plan it that way, it’s kind of how it worked out. But with each one of them and being, you know, four years apart and then five years apart, I was able to experience like with my first daughter, Austin, being the first and being a new parent and a dad of a daughter, I had no idea what to do yet I was thrust into getting her ready every morning and being the sole parent there and not being able to rely on anybody. So it was really a crash course in not just parenting a child, but parenting a daughter.

David Andrews [00:05:36]:
And so dealing with the hair. I think that was a big connection with her. And it’s funny because now she’s in the hair business, styling people’s hair. I was the one had to style her hair. So we have that unique connection with Carson being the middle child. Now she’s the middle child, but at the time she was the second child. I seem to have a better grasp maybe on now here’s another daughter. I know how to do daughters.

David Andrews [00:06:03]:
And so when she came along, I think it seemed I’ve got a better grasp on this. And she’s kind of the one that is a very steady kind of demeanor. So my connection with her is probably a little more straightforward. She’s not as emotional as I am or as my oldest daughter Austin is. She’s a little more of the calm demeanor. And so our relationship is one of more kind of a matter of fact, but very comfortable. And. And then our third daughter, you know, then came five years later, kind of by surprise.

David Andrews [00:06:41]:
And so when we knew we were having a third child and when we found out that it was going to be another daughter, I kind of was relieved because again, I know how to do daughters, so it seemed like a no brainer for me. So. And of all the three daughters, she’s probably most like me. So we have a great connection, yet a very much an adversarial connection because you’re competing with the same person sometimes with what you like and what you don’t like. I see things in her that I see in me that I don’t like. And so it’s a yin and the yang with her. We have a great relationship, but yet she’s the one who’s most like me. And it’s kind of scary now, you.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:07:26]:
Know, I know that with your kids there’s this balance that you play and trying to guide them while still giving them independence. And I guess as you think about that, how did you balance guiding your daughters while also giving them the independence to become the people that they were becoming?

David Andrews [00:07:45]:
And that’s probably to me, the hardest thing because you want to make the decisions for them. And I found myself having to step back and saying, no, they’ve got to make their own path. I can’t decide their path for them. All I can do is guide them. And if they want suggestions of how to do it, I will give them suggestions and help them with whatever path they take. And for example, Austin, when she wanted to Be a tattoo artist. That was such an unconventional thing that it was like, okay, if that’s what you want, we will support you. And we did.

David Andrews [00:08:26]:
I mean, we helped, you know, her go to classes and finance that so that she could experience that. And then when she said, I don’t want to do that anymore and I want to do this, it’s. Then it’s like, okay, then it’s. You’ve got to support it. Because I was the same way when I was in college. I mean, I was a park ranger for the National Park Service. And then all of a sudden, in the middle of my degree, I up and said, I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to do something else.

David Andrews [00:08:54]:
And then eventually got into tv. And I know my parents at the time were like, what are you throwing away four years of college? And so I always look back on that, what I did in shifting my life. So I always remind myself, you know what dramatic change is not bad because they’ll fall into whatever is right for them. And so that’s. I think I relied on my own experience to then guide them, to help them find out what they eventually want to do.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:09:25]:
Now, this show is all about developing connections, and you’ve talked about some of the ways that you have created connections, and as a father of daughters, you have. Have to make those intentional connections to build those bonds with your kids. What are some intentional ways that you’ve been able to strengthen the bonds that you’ve had through those intentional connections that you’ve had with your daughters?

David Andrews [00:09:46]:
I think just like you say, being there and doing things with them, I mean, when they were younger, I always tried to, well, be at their sporting events. But now, in later years was, you know, let’s go canoeing. Let’s. Even as adults, you know, hey, you want to go? Go fishing? I remember with my middle daughter, Carson, I mean, it was just a couple years ago. She was in her late 20s. I didn’t realize I’d never taken her fishing. And so we, like, 27 years old, we got fishing boats, went fishing, and so it’s that kind of thing. And my youngest daughter, I.

David Andrews [00:10:19]:
Sporting events are big for us, so we love going to sporting events together. So it’s doing things together that help strengthen that bond and conversation at the same time.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:10:31]:
What do you intentionally do to be able to help your daughters to feel both valued and heard?

David Andrews [00:10:38]:
Definitely listening. Listening to them and not lecturing to them so that they know that they can come to me and they’re not going to get a speech about what they should be doing, but more of a sounding board of, you tell me what’s going on in your life. And if you want me to interject, that’s fine. But if you just wanted me to be a sounding board, that’s fine too. I think listening is probably the most intentional thing that I could do.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:11:06]:
What’s a tradition or a routine that you’ve created together with your daughters that has been able to strengthen your bond?

David Andrews [00:11:13]:
I think just getting together as a family, holidays, special occasions, we still make very much a point, like on birthdays, that we’re going to go out to dinner somewhere, we’re going to get together on certain occasions, it’s going to be the family unit if everybody can get there. But we haven’t let that, that pass, that we’re just big into traditional things that families do that all families do, and we don’t want to let go of those no matter where we are in life, in proximity. So that’s been important to us.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:11:48]:
Now, anybody that’s followed your social media knows that you have a sense of humor and you put that sense of humor out into the world through your, the posts that you put out there and even some of the pies that you bake and things like that, and cakes, I should say as well, talk to me about how you were able to infuse your own humor with your daughters and how that helped you to be the father that you wanted to be.

David Andrews [00:12:14]:
Well, it’s funny because social media, I was much more outgoing with it than my family initially wanted to be because every time I would invite them over to come over, they would go, do we have to be camera ready or do we not have to be camera ready? And sometimes if I really wanted them to come over, I would tell, I’m not going to take any pictures, just come over. You don’t have the, the pressure of taking pictures. But now it’s evolved into they know that pictures are going to be taken and they come prepared and now they come prepared with ideas of what picture we should take. So it really has evolved into something fun that now they enjoy and they enjoy being in the pictures and then to seeing how many likes and shares that we get. So it’s almost competition between them now to see who can get the most. But it actually has turned into a bonding experience what we post, you know, and every time we, when we’re doing a birthday, they know, come over, we’re going to take a birthday picture with you. And they just know that’s part of the routine, and it’s been a fun bonding experience.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:13:27]:
Now, I know that you and your wife Monica, both personalities, people that people in the community, at least in the Lansing area community, know, and people feel like they know, know you very well. But you have your personal life, you have a professional life. When you have kids, there’s that balance of playing for anybody that is in the, we’ll call it the limelight, per se, of being able to live the personality versus the home Persona. How did you either safeguard your kids from that as they were growing up or include them as a part of that? And what did you have to do to be able to have that optimal balance in that regard?

David Andrews [00:14:06]:
I think that probably has been one of the most challenging parts of parenting for the both of us is because of the notoriety we have, we can’t hide. There’s no hiding from anything. So everything we do is kind of has a public perspective to it. And to try and shield the kids from it, I think would be impossible. I think what we tried to do is to incorporate them into it and to never hide anything from them, to share with them that this is who we are and this is what comes with this territory to help soften that blow to them, that when you’re going out in public, people are going to come up to us that we don’t know and may come up to you as well. And so that’s been a balancing act that I think they’ve totally adapted amazingly well to over the years. There’s never been a time when any of them have thought it was a burden.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:15:07]:
We always finish our interviews with what we like to call our dad Connection six, where I ask you six more questions to delve deeper into you as a dad. What’s one word that describes your relationship with your daughters?

David Andrews [00:15:20]:
Positive.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:15:21]:
What’s the best piece of dad advice that you’ve ever received? Listen, what’s one activity that you and your daughters love doing together?

David Andrews [00:15:31]:
Watching football.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:15:33]:
And favorite team.

David Andrews [00:15:34]:
All of ours, in fact, are the Green Bay packers. And much to my wife’s chagrin, who is a Detroit Lions fan who thinks all these three were born and raised in Michigan. Why aren’t they? I was born and raised in Wisconsin and somehow they all took my allegiance when it came to football.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:15:55]:
They all became Packerbackers.

David Andrews [00:15:56]:
Yes, they did.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:15:57]:
Yes. I lived in Wisconsin for three years. And when you live in Wisconsin, you better be a Packer, otherwise you’re really going to be ostracized.

Musical Outro Performer [00:16:04]:
Right?

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:16:05]:
Right. I completely understand that. Now, if you could give your daughter one life lesson. And this could be all for all three daughters. I should say in a single sentence, what would it be?

David Andrews [00:16:14]:
Don’t take life too seriously.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:16:16]:
And what’s one thing you’ve learned about yourself since becoming a father?

David Andrews [00:16:20]:
That I shouldn’t take life too seriously. Yeah. The same thing. Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:16:26]:
And to finish up today, what advice would you give to other dads who want to build a lasting and meaningful relationship with their daughters?

David Andrews [00:16:35]:
I think being there in all capacities is the most important thing to any loving relationship. Being there and being a positive force in their lives.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:16:49]:
Well, David, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for sharing your journey today. I know it’s not ended in any sense. You always are a father of daughters and you’re always going to be that person that they come back to and that they are going to rely on to be able to help them in different ways. It just changes and adapts as they get older. But I truly thank you for your time today. If people want to find out more about you, where should they go?

David Andrews [00:17:12]:
They can go to David Andrews.com or my Facebook page @DavidAndrews wilx.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:17:24]:
Well, David, thank you again for being here today, for sharing your own journey. And I truly wish you, you all the best.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:17:31]:
That’s a wrap for this episode of the Dad and Daughter Connection. Thanks for joining us on this journey to build stronger bonds and raise confident, independent daughters. Remember, being an engaged dad isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being present. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and share it with a fellow dad. And don’t forget, you can find all our episodes until next time, keep showing up, keep connecting, and keep being the dad she needs.

Musical Outro Performer [00:18:01]:
We’re all in the same boat and it’s full of tiny screaming passengers. We spend the time we give the lessons we make the meals we buy them presents and bring your AK cause those kids are growing fast the time goes by just like a dynamite blast Calling astronauts and firemen carpenters and muscle men get out and be the world to them Be the best dad you can be Be the best dad you can.

From Latvia to Leadership: A Daughter’s Journey and Her Father’s Lasting Influence

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How can fathers truly empower their daughters to become confident, independent women? The latest episode of the Dad and Daughter Connection, featuring trailblazer Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis, author of The Wall Falls, A Woman Rises, A Memoir: How a U.S. Tech Entrepreneur Broke the Glass Ceiling and Helped Modernize Latvia. She is an inspiring masterclass in building meaningful, lasting relationships between dads and daughters.

In this moving conversation with host Dr. Christopher Lewis, Daggie Lacis shares her extraordinary life story, beginning with her family’s flight from Latvia during WWII, their years in a displaced persons camp, and starting anew in Indiana. Through every challenge, her father played a quietly powerful role—showing love and support, setting high standards, and most importantly, taking an active interest in her life.

One of the core themes of the episode is the profound impact a father’s involvement has on a daughter’s confidence and success. Daggie credits her father with instilling the self-assurance and resilience that would carry her from those early challenges to becoming the first woman programmer at Burroughs Corporation, and later a pioneering vice president. She recounts personal stories—like her dad taking her fishing at dawn and helping her tackle impossible math problems in high school—that illustrate how everyday moments foster trust, self-belief, and in Daggie’s own words, the courage to “never give up.”

The episode also explores how fathers can nurture independence and ambition in their daughters without dictating their paths. Daggie’s father supported her interests, provided guidance without pressure, and above all, made himself present—qualities she urges today’s dads to embrace despite the distractions of modern life. As Daggie suggests, “be interested, be involved, be her best friend”—a simple recipe with profound results.

Listeners will also find valuable advice on overcoming adversity, breaking barriers in male-dominated spaces, and why it’s crucial for girls to see themselves as capable of greatness. Daggie’s journey, detailed in her new book The Wall Falls, A Woman Rises, is a testament to both paternal support and personal determination.

If you’re a dad who wants to build a stronger bond with your daughter—or if you simply want to hear an uplifting story of family, resilience, and achievement—this episode is a must-listen. Tune in and discover how the seeds of confidence, sown early, can help daughters rise to meet any challenge the world sets before them.

Ready to be inspired? Listen to this episode and more at dadanddaughterconnection.com.

If you enjoyed this episode we ask you to take a moment to take our Dad and Daughter Connection Survey to let us know more about you as a dad. You can also sign up to get our newsletter to stay connected to our community and we will send items of interest to you to help you to be the dad that you want to be. Feel free to follow me on the following social media platforms: Facebook, Facebook Group, Instagram, LinkedIn, X.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:02]:
Welcome to the dad and daughter connection, the podcast for dads who want to build stronger bonds and raise confident independent daughters.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:12]:
Welcome back to the dad and daughter connection. I love being able to be here with you every week where we have an opportunity to be able to talk about the bonds that you are creating with your own daughter. And it is so important for us to have these conversations because every day we have an opportunity to be able to build stronger connections with our daughters, to help them to become the strong, independent women that we hope that they will become as they get older. And none of us have all the answers. So it’s so important for you and I to be able to learn from other people, other individuals that have had different experiences, that could share those experiences with us. And we can hear them and internalize what they’re saying. Gain some tools for our toolbox and allow for us to be able to then be better fathers in the end. That’s why every week I love being able to bring you different people with different experiences, different guests that can share that journey with you.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:22]:
And today we’ve got another great guest. Dagie Laces is with us today. And Dagie was born in Latvia in 1943 and forced to flee in 1944. After five years in a displaced persons camp in Germany, she immigrated with her family to Indianapolis. Dagie graduated from Butler University and her career includes being the first woman programmer at Burroughs Corporation, then the second largest worldwide IT company, and later becoming the first female line VP. When the Berlin Wall fell, the newly elected Latvian prime minister and foreign minister asked Lacis to install modern technology in the foreign ministry. And that began her work to modernize Latvia and connect it to the West. In 1991, Lace is founded and continues to participate in running the Baltic Technology Group with locations both in The US and Latvia.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:22]:
And today she’s here to talk about her own journey as a daughter herself that we’re gonna talk a little bit about her own experience with her own father. But beyond that, she has a brand new book that honors those trailblazers in technology. And I am really excited to be able to have her here to talk about her book entitled The Wall Falls, A Woman Rises. And we’re gonna be talking about that as well. Daggy, thanks so much for being here today.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:02:50]:
Thank you very much for having me.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:52]:
Well, I’m really excited to have you here and to learn from your experiences. And whenever I have a guest who is a daughter herself, come on. I love being able to learn a little bit more about their father. And I guess first and foremost, tell me

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:03:08]:
more about your dad. Well, my dad basically was born in Latvia. And in Latvia, his profession was he was a lawyer. He was a public prosecutor. So he and my mom were having a happy life there when the communists took over Latvia, and we had to flee. We actually kind of my mom said and dad said they did laid this decision as long as they could. But when they thought they were just the last boat taking refugees from Latvia to Germany, we were on that boat. And in Germany, we were displaced persons in the American zone luckily because there was a British zone, but there was also a Soviet zone.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:03:52]:
We were in the American zone, and and my dad then worked for the US government in the aid department for the displaced persons. We were given after five years, we were given the choice of immigrating to The US, to Indiana, to California, or to Australia. And my mom told me later that she thought that that California would fall off into the ocean and that Australia was too far and Indiana was right in the middle of The US. So that’s where we ended up. In Indiana, my dad obviously couldn’t use his legal skills because he just didn’t have the language nor did he know the official laws. So he ended up working in a factory, which he had never done before. So for him, after really enjoying a very pleasant lifestyle in in Latvia, he became a factory worker for the rest of his life. My dad and I had a great relationship.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:04:55]:
My memories of him in Germany, of course, I was very young, but I do remember a couple of moments. My dad was always taking walks with me. We were walking through the the villages and surrounding the camp. And I remember the one time, actually, we went to this building and right outside, there were these string of snakes. I remember starting to scream. And my dad said, oh, don’t worry. Those are eels. They’re just they’re dead.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:05:22]:
They’re not gonna hurt you. So, anyway, that was a memory. Then in in Indiana, dad, I would say, he was responsible for all of my successes, which included becoming a vice president because he instilled in me high standards of always doing the best I can in every class and always asking me how how it went. And this continued through college. And I was really amazed. He was such a smart person. An incident I’ll always remember that I think was very important in shaping my my thinking, my attitude, my confidence was this that one time, I think this I was in high school in Indianapolis, and I was in a hurry. We were taking off for vacation the next day, and I had to submit a some homework.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:06:14]:
And there was a trigonometry problem that I just couldn’t get. And I was in a hurry, and I had somewhere to go, and I was really flustered. And my dad said, hey. Hold on. Go ahead. You go. Give me the book. And I thought, oh, I gave him the book.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:06:28]:
I thought, well, hey. Go on. You know? How can he he hasn’t looked at mathematics in such a long time. And what happened was when I came back, dad had solved the problem, and he showed me how he did it. At that point, I realized this is probably not the procedure that my math teacher in high school would have recommended, but he solved it his way. So at that point, I realized in life, if there’s a goal, there are many ways to achieve it. So if you start at in a path that takes you down, that you think this is the way I’m gonna get there, and it doesn’t work. Hey.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:07:04]:
Don’t worry. There’s always another way. Think out of the box. So those are the that’s how I’ve handled my life after, in the business world. And I think that goes back to that one incident that my dad and I had, which is which involved solving that trick problem. So that but he my dad, of course, his life as a factory worker was totally different. And somehow, I really felt sorry for him, and no one told me, but I never wanted ever to disappoint him. Whenever he asked, how did you do? I had to get that a, and that’s the way it went.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:07:41]:
It went all the way through college, and I think it made him happy. He came back from the factory, and I he he knew I had a a calculus test or something. How did it go? And I had to say, hey. I got an a. So the inspiration to do the best I can in all of my studies was really our relationship, and that was the foundation for my work in business onwards. So, yeah, I had a great relationship with my dad.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:08:09]:
I can tell that you had a great relationship. And as you think back to that relationship with your father, is there one thing that your dad specifically did that truly allowed you to feel seen, heard, and valued as a daughter?

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:08:23]:
You know, I I can’t really say that he did anything in particular. He always, was interested in everything I did, and and I think he was proud to tell his colleagues of my advancements in school. And, well, I remember another thing that he he was really interested in doing. In in high school, the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company offered a scholar an essay scholarship to a university of $1,000. And so we were all there were volunteers to write an essay. And my dad said, hey. Do it. Go ahead and and do it.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:09:00]:
I thought, well, you know, I mean, I was reluctant to do it. But he said, well, look. Why don’t you do an essay about the communist takeover of Latvia, and I will give you some facts. And so I know he researched it, gave you the facts, and I wrote the essay. And he was so proud that we got in the top three, and then the top three had to present and read it to the audience. And he was in the audience, and I remember, I remember reading it. And, basically, we won. And so my dad was so proud, and I was so happy.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:09:32]:
So, yeah, my so my dad and I just knew I had to do well. My dad was always interested in my work and helped me and volunteered to help me any way he could. So so that was my life with my dad.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:09:46]:
Now as you grew up and went into your career, as you think about your relationship with your father, how did your relationship influence the way that you navigate life, relationships, or challenges that you either have had in your life or that you experience today?

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:10:05]:
Well, I think because of the foundation I had with my dad, I was not afraid of challenges of doing something that I was not familiar with. I was not afraid. For example, in my job, when they promoted me, as actually a mathematical programmer, then they promoted me into management. And then all of a sudden, they promoted me to something that was very unfamiliar, and this was, sales. They said they were establishing the vice president. Oh, by the way, the company that I worked for was Burrows Corporation, and they merged with another company called Sperry in 1986. Then we had a new name called Unisys. So when I say boroughs or Unisys, it just depends on what time what year it was.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:10:52]:
But, anyway, in the sales situation, they asked me to create a branch for education, and that meant selling to public schools and universities in the state of Michigan. Obviously, more Unisys Burrow’s equipment. So I thought sales. I never really liked salesman, and I thought, oh, this is, not for me. But my husband said, hey. You know, why not try it? And I remembered my dad always saying, hey. Don’t be afraid to try new things. So yeah.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:11:27]:
So I went for it, and I enjoyed it. That was the best job I I had, and we had several successes. We got an $8,000,000 order from Detroit Public Schools replacing IBM. And, yeah, that was just wonderful. But everything I did, the decisions I made, my dad had instilled in me in growing up self confidence, which I used all my life. So to me, my dad was an inspiration. And I think that because he was involved in everything I was doing through college, giving me advice, following my education, and being interested, which I think is really the key. And yeah.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:12:08]:
So I was very proud of my dad.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:12:11]:
If you could go back in time and you could spend one more day with your dad doing anything, what would it look like?

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:12:18]:
We would go fishing. My dad, loved for recreation to go fishing, and I I guess a great moment for me was in the summertime. When I was growing up, we would take our vacations on a lake in, in northern, Indiana, and we would rent a cabin and for the family. And the thing my dad liked to do is get up early in the morning at 04:00 or something like that and go fishing. And he always asked me to go with him. So the two of us would go out in the morning in this little rowboat and quietly sit waiting for the light to come up. Those moments are very memorable because he talked then about his experiences as a boy in Latvia. And he was taught he talked to me about how he went fishing there and the pranks he used to play with his little buddies.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:13:16]:
And it was just really a wonderful time to be together with my dad. So, yeah, if I had one thing to do and stay to spend with him, I would go fishing. We actually live here in West Bloomfield on a lake. And before my dad passed, he had mom would visit, of course, often. And he loved to take a boat out here in the lake. And I remember one time, he was so happy because he actually caught a northern pike, which are kinda rare here in Michigan, but they used he used to catch them all the time in Latvia. So he was really happy. Fishing is what I would do with him.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:13:54]:
Now what advice would you give to other dads who wanna build a lasting and meaningful relationship with their daughters?

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:14:00]:
Well, I think dad should get involved early on with their daughters, be it sports, but particularly education, and set a high level standard for the daughter. In other words, keep asking how she’s doing and help where possible, but follow it. Just follow the the daughter’s thoughts and let the daughter choose whatever career she wants. And it may not be technical. It could be acting. It could be being a musician. But whatever her interests are, follow it with her. Give her advice.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:14:33]:
And I would say maybe be her best friend going forward, but stay involved. These dates, it’s harder because of all the iPhones that we have and all everything going on. Everybody is on their cell phones, But it needs to be done, I think, as opposed to letting the child, the daughter, just do her own thing. No. Ask every day how things went, and can I help you? Be be interested. I guess that’s what I’m saying.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:15:00]:
Now I mentioned the fact that you have a book called The Wall Falls, A Woman Rises. And I really appreciated this book because there were definitely quite a few things in being a father to a daughter that I there’s a lot of lessons that were shared and definitely things that I think that a lot of young women would value and gain insight from. And your story is one of overcoming incredible obstacles. As you mentioned earlier, from fleeing Latvia at an early age to breaking barriers in the corporate world, what lessons did you learn from your father about resilience and how can today’s fathers instill the same perseverance in their daughters?

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:15:48]:
Well, the main message is never give up. Never give up. There are always obstacles in life, but there’s always a way to get around that obstacle. An example is, when I started my company in Latvia, my game plan to play these were Latvians that we trained in the western ways, the the western technology, and the plan was for them to do the programming to solve problems in Latvia. We continually presented Western ways, the way the West works in the banking and the transportation area, etcetera. Everyone was listening, but we weren’t getting the orders, the business. Our people, my staff, the programmers were programming prototypes of the operation. Everybody liked it.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:16:36]:
They were ready to they ordered it, but the order never came through. It was stopped. So things like these were obstacles. I had 60 people that needed to be paid, and I was paying personally. And so I had decided another way. How are we gonna do this? So, basically, we decided to look at our US clients, Unisys clients, and offer our Latvian staff on short term projects using the technology that they had learned, which they were very good at. And so that’s how we went from even though our programmers showed how Latvia how things are should be done, Latvia was not quite ready to implement all that in order to pay their salaries. It took them a while to do that.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:17:21]:
But so yeah. So I had to to think out of the box, not give up, choose another path, which was really to go offshore, to go to The States. And everybody, of course, was happy. It solved my problem of paying the people. They were happy to see America and so forth. So in the book, I The Wall Falls, The Woman Rises, I I describe obstacles. It was nonstop things that I and I just kept going. And this all was basically instilled by my dad who basically lived his life and told me never to give up.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:17:57]:
And that’s basically what I did. And I really, I owe everything to my dad.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:18:02]:
Now your book also highlights your journey through vastly different cultures and personal transformations. How did your relationship with your father or other male mentors shape your view of leadership and independence? And what can dads do to support their daughters in times of change?

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:18:22]:
Well, you know, no one really mentored me to speak of. It was just instinctive. I just every project, every assignment I had, I did the very best I could. And I didn’t in business, there’s such a thing as playing politics. I didn’t do it. I did what was best for the company and I they basically, I guess, appreciated. For example, I did some unique things when I was vice president here in terms of, buying a company, a software company, which Unis has had never done before. But it it was interesting that I had to make the presentation to the chairman.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:19:02]:
My boss wanted to listen because you see this was a risk, and anyone that actually presented it would be the one who would be at risk if it doesn’t work. But luckily, everything worked out. I presented it, and I was really happy because we got new users as was the plan with the software company. So, yeah, I guess it would say instinctive because of the way I was raised. It all goes back to my childhood.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:19:29]:
You talk about the fact that you were a trailblazer in a male dominated industry. What role did your family, especially your father play in giving you the confidence to step into leadership and how can fathers today encourage their daughters to pursue ambitious careers without fear?

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:19:48]:
Well, I mean, I after graduation, I didn’t realize it. But when I applied for a job being a mathematician, my professor at Butler University suggested I try the computers at companies, either IBM or Burroughs, which were in Indianapolis, or an insurance company. And, basically, my parents said, what do whatever you think. My dad said, well, whatever you’re comfortable with. Well, the way it happened actually here was something that was quite strange, so to speak. At that time, I was engaged, and my husband had taken a job on the East Coast. And we agreed to work one year and save some money. So Burroughs offered me $25 a month more, which is a silly reason, but that’s how my career started.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:20:37]:
And the reason I learned I was the first programmer is that a couple weeks after starting at Burroughs, my boss called me in to tell me he apologized. He said, Dagie, I’m very sorry to have given you all these tests. He said, but you see, no woman has ever applied, and we didn’t know whether we could hire a woman as a programmer. So we had to call Detroit, which is the headquarters, to see, can we hire a a woman? And their human resources people said, well, there are no rules against it, so go ahead. Just give her a test. So that’s how I started. That’s how I know I was the first female programmer at Burroughs. And my parents, they saw how my dad, I think in particular, saw how in the evenings, in the very beginning when I started the programming, I brought back huge books about how a computer works.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:21:29]:
Because you see, at Butler at the time, there were no computer courses. And I had theoretical math only, so I had to figure out how to do assembler programming on the Burrows machine. And he saw me try. He just said, you’re doing a good job. Just keep going. And so, yeah, they told me to do the best I can, and I did and I picked it up. And Burroughs gave me a offer to come to Detroit, to use my math skills, which is what I did. So, yeah, and then, of course, I left home and, you know, my dad stayed in Indiana.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:22:03]:
So but my dad encouraged me all the way. He saw me. He knew I didn’t have a computer background and he saw how I I told myself I have to do this. I’ve gotta learn this because the first girl programmer is not gonna fail. And this goes back to my dad instilling the value of don’t give up. So, yeah, he it they were my dad was very supportive.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:22:25]:
Now your journey required strength, courage, and adaptability, and sometimes fathers struggle to balance pushing their daughters and to be strong while also being emotionally supportive. What advice do you have for dads who want to encourage their daughters to be fearless without making them feel like they always have to be tough?

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:22:50]:
Well, I think it just goes back to, I guess, how you raise them. For me, Understanding that we came from total poverty to The US, and my dad had to go to a life of working in a factory. I always felt like I needed to help out, and I never really I mean, I always knew I had to do everything to help my parents and his and also myself, and my dad supported me. So I think if dads get involved early on expressing an interest in the daughter, not necessarily telling her she has to do this, this, and this and get an a class. Just asking and following her interests. And then the child should automatically come to the dad, and the dad can be a friend. And hopefully, things get closer from that point on. But no.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:23:43]:
I think to answer your question, the thing is interest. Now, obviously, if there are discipline problems, things like that, I never experienced that with my children or my grandson now. But, I guess in the very beginning, dads have to instill interest and a confidence in the fact that they’re interested in the daughter. How are you doing? What are you interested in? And they keep following. I mean, they make suggestions, but I don’t think she dad should ever dictate. So be the being strong business, I guess, would be if, if you you have to discipline someone. Right? I hopefully not. If your father is your friend, and I think that’s really the kind of the goal of all dads, to make the daughter their friend.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:24:30]:
Now you were a pioneering woman in the tech industry and later played a key role in Latvia’s modernization. Looking back, what do you think fathers can do to ensure their daughters see themselves as capable of achieving greatness? And how important is it for girls to see strong female role models in their lives?

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:24:51]:
Well, I never had anything like I didn’t choose to succeed. In my story, I just wanted to do my job. And I guess at Unisys, I did wanna become vice president. That was my personal goal. And I think, you know, my dad instinctively made everything I was, I did. And I wouldn’t say I did it because my dad I became what I am because of my dad. And he didn’t, you know, particularly tell me, daddy, I want you to be a vice president at Unisys. But he always said, do the best you can in any job and make sure that you’re happy doing it.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:25:25]:
And I really was. I had a great career at Burroughs Unisys. I enjoyed every job, and some were more difficult than others, but I did my job best as I could. And all goes back, you know, I didn’t really have a role model that looked up to. I just wanted to be vice president. I grew up in a world with gentlemen. There were always guys because that was before women were really into programming days. This was a little bit before that.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:25:51]:
And so that’s why I was basically the only woman in meetings and so forth. I was treated just fine and and my bosses were great and gave me great opportunities. And I didn’t look to myself as a I didn’t look to myself as a woman in a guy’s world. I just looked at myself as a person doing a job. And I had great colleagues and they supported me. And the reason I became vice president goes back to the what my dad instilled in me growing up, and that remained with me all my life. So I just think dads should tell the daughters, hey. You can do and be anything you wanna do.

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:26:27]:
You just have to have the will, the desire to do it.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:26:30]:
Great points and a great message for all fathers of daughters. Now, Dagny, if people wanna find out more about you, about the book, where should they go?

Dagnija “Daggie” Lacis [00:26:39]:
Well, my website is, my full name, just Dagnia, d a g n I j a l a c I s, all one word, dot com. And my email is daggie, that’s d a g g I e, at, and then dagneyelaces dot com.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:26:57]:
And we will put links in the notes today so that you can actually find this for yourself. Dagie, I just wanna say thank you. Thank you for sharing your journey today, for sharing your relationship with your own father and how what he did over the years helped you to become who you are today. And I know that your book and what you are putting out into the world is definitely going to help other women and others to be able to better help young women to find success in their own journey, and I wish you all the best. Thank you very much.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:27:32]:
That’s a wrap for this episode of the dad and daughter connection. Thanks for joining us on this journey to build stronger bonds and raise confident, independent daughters. Remember, being an engaged dad isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being present. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and share it with a fellow dad. And don’t forget, you can find all our episodes at dadanddaughterconnection.com. Until next time, keep showing up, keep connecting, and keep being the dad she needs.

Musical Outro Performer [00:28:02]:
We’re all in the same boat. And it’s full of tiny screaming passengers. We spend the time. We give the lessons. We make the meals. We buy them presents and bring your AK. Because those kids are growing fast. The time goes by just like a dynamite blast, calling astronauts and firemen, carpenters, and musclemen.

Musical Outro Performer [00:28:43]:
Get out and be be the world to them. Be the best dad you can be. Be the best dad you can be.

Navigating Early Parenthood: Evan Silberman’s Advice and Reflections

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In the latest episode of the Dad & Daughter Connection podcast, Dr. Christopher Lewis dives deep into the experiences of Dr. Evan Silberman, a father to a 2.5-year-old daughter and the Chief Academic Technology Officer at the City University of New York. This episode paints an extraordinary picture of the highs and lows of fathering a daughter in today’s world.

From Shock to Love: The Arrival of Parenthood

Dr. Evan Silberman shared his emotional journey of discovering he would soon be a father. The mix of excitement and disbelief he felt set the stage for a profound transformation that parenthood brings. Despite the fears and uncertainties about understanding his daughter’s perspective and ensuring her safety, Evan’s mindset shifted as he focused on one core element: love. Defining fatherhood in a single word, Evan chose “Love,” capturing the essence of his parenting philosophy.

Early Challenges and the Need for Support

The initial days in the hospital were particularly challenging for Evan. Juggling his newborn’s needs, offering support to his wife, and seeking assistance was overwhelming. He highlighted the glaring absence of resources for new fathers, emphasizing the significant difference even basic information could have made. This lack of support pushed Evan to connect with various networks like the At Home Dad Network and religious group WhatsApp, providing him a community to share and learn from other fathers.

Navigating Boundaries and Consent

As a parent, Evan faced specific concerns about teaching his daughter essential values like boundaries and consent. He recalled worried moments involving neighbors and overly affectionate waiters, which sparked important conversations on these topics with his partner. Dr. Christopher Lewis underscored the significance of such discussions, encouraging all parents to address these issues proactively to ensure their children’s safety and well-being.

Building a Meaningful Work-Life Balance

Transitioning from work to home life is a balancing act many fathers struggle with. Evan’s conscious efforts to prioritize time with his daughter while managing work responsibilities reflect this challenge. Adopting a flexible work environment, he adjusts his schedule to ensure meaningful interactions with his daughter, from morning routines to evening rituals. These consistent efforts fostered a strong bond, with Evan humorously noting that his daughter would describe him as “stilly.”

The Power of Community and Communication

Reflecting on his fatherhood journey, Evan emphasized the importance of community and communication. Connecting with other fathers and seeking professional support through therapeutic and career coaching helped him navigate the complexities of parenting and career management. He stressed that while initial support for new fathers might be lacking, proactive efforts to build support networks can significantly impact one’s parenting journey.

Love as the Guiding Principle

Dr. Evan Silberman’s narrative is a heartwarming and practical guide for fathers navigating the incredible journey of raising daughters. His insights on balancing professional responsibilities with family time, the importance of teaching boundaries, and leveraging community support highlight that the core of effective fatherhood is rooted in love and proactive communication. 

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TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:16]: Welcome back to The Dad & Daughter Connection podcast where we bring you guests to be active participants in your daughters’ lives, raising them to be strong independent women. Really excited to have you back again this week. And as always every week, I love being on this journey with you. I know I say it every week, but it’s so true. I am learning from you and from our guests, and I love being able to take what I am learning every week and sharing it with you because it is so important that each of us are willing to take those steps to learn, to grow. Because the more that we are willing to learn and grow, the better fathers that we’re going to be. And that’s why this podcast exists. It is here to walk alongside you, to help you, to let you see different types of fatherhood, different types of resources that are available to you.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:04]: And it’s there because none of us have to father alone. So often society makes you think that you have to man up and you have to do this fatherhood thing by yourself. There’s no one right way to father. There’s a ton of ways in which you can be that father that you want to be. In the end, all of the shows that we’ve had in this podcast are all about helping you to better engage with your daughters, helping you to be able to build those strong relationships and help you to be able to be that dad that you want to be for your daughter as they are growing up. How do we do it? Well, every week I bring you different guests, different people with different experiences to give you an opportunity to be able to learn from them. Whether it’s other fathers or other people with experience with resources that can help you along the way. All of them are here to help you in this journey.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:58]: Today, we’ve got another great guest. Dr. Evan Silberman is with us today. And Evan is a father of a 2 and a half year old daughter. We’re gonna talk about his own journey in being a father thus far, and definitely am excited to be able to learn from him. In his day job, he is the chief academic technology officer at the City University of New York. And, busy job, but definitely he is an engaged father and I’m really excited to be able to share his journey with you. Evan, thanks so much for being here today.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:02:31]: Yeah. You’re welcome, Chris. And it’s great to be here with you too. So much of what you said in the opening really resonated with me. And I’m looking forward to our conversation and connecting on this topic.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:41]: Well, I’m really excited to be able to talk to you. And one of the questions that I love being able to start every episode with is having the power to turn the clock back in time. And I wanna go back. And I said your daughter is 2a half right now, but I’d love to be able to go back to that first moment. That first moment when you found out that you were going to be a dad to a daughter, what was going through your head?

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:02:59]: I remember that moment very clearly. I was in New York City on my way to a meeting, and I was walking down First Avenue. And my wife called me and told me that I was gonna be a dad. And I think I just had the widest smile on my face. I was in complete disbelief that this was a very was a reality. It’s something that I didn’t realize was so important to me until that moment, and I was very late for my meeting because I remember standing on the street corner talking to my wife about all the excitement and joy and how wonderful this was. We were just both elated by it, and it was hard to sort of pull myself away from that good news. But I think in that moment, it was just pure excitement.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:03:42]: Now I’ve talked to a lot of dads and so many dads talk to me about the fact that there is some fear that goes into not only being a father, but fear in being a father to a daughter. As you’ve gone through life with your daughter thus far, what’s your biggest fear in raising a daughter?

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:04:00]: I would say my biggest fear let me start by answering that by saying that as a father of a daughter coming from a perspective of being a boy in a household with 2 other brothers. Right? Seeing everything from the vantage point of being a male, of being a young boy. I think one of the greatest challenges I have is beginning to understand what the world looks like from my daughter’s perspective. And as she grows up, what it means in each stage or phase of her life. And so my biggest fear is really my inability to to empathize and understand with with the world that she’s in enough to be able to guide her and protect her in the ways that are necessary at the time of her life that it’s necessary. And so my biggest fear is not being able to connect with really who she is in a way that I get it so that I can be her dad. And I think being her dad means ensuring that she’s able to make the right choices or the choices that are right for her later in life, and now making sure that I’m protecting her from situations where it just not might be safe as a young daughter in that as a young woman in that situation. She’s 2a half, so it’s very easy right now to do that.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:05:14]: But I’m already seeing moments where that my concern is is coming out, which I think most dads of young daughters probably have once, 1st and foremost, is her physical safety and well-being and then her mental well-being, protecting her from hearing things that she shouldn’t be hearing, from being interacted with by people in inappropriate ways. And there’s lots of stories I could probably share if, you know, about that. And I’ll just choose one for now, which is that she has another father in our neighborhood who’s a 3 year old boy. And he from the day he met her, he’s been calling her princess, and he’s been very affectionate and adamant towards her, which I think on one hand is wonderful. On the other hand, I’m not sure that it’s really something that makes me comfortable in that sort of affectionate manner. It’s not his child that’s really reserved for for, I believe, the father. And another example, is we were at a restaurant, and my daughter wanted to jump off the bench, which is a typical 2 and a half year old behavior that many of your listeners may relate to. And the waiter, who was a male, started to try to help her.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:06:22]: He was sort of grabbing her hand without asking us for permission. He was commenting on her how beautiful her hair was and trying to give us tips on treating her hair without any context, without any asking for permission. Is that okay? Those sorts of things are examples right now where I’m learning how to sort of create safe boundaries for her.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:06:45]: And those boundaries are interesting because going into fatherhood, and it’s so contextual based on your own experiences and walking through life, but also your significant other’s experiences. And you have to have those conversations together to be able to baseline and be able to say, well, where do we stand on this? How do we feel about this? And how far do we want to go to be able to step in and stop this, allow it to continue or not? Because those examples that you gave, the people may have had no ill intent. But based on their own societal upbringing, that may have been what their experience is. And so they are just continuing the process. So that’s a challenge because walking into those type of situations or having those situations happen, if you say something and try to educate them, it could go positively and it could go negatively. And you don’t know in those type of situations. But you’re right, you have to safeguard your child to be able to allow for your child to understand there are boundaries, and that there needs to be consent that has to happen and that she has to understand the under understand what consent means as she gets older as well.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:08:05]: Yeah. Very true. And you’re right. There are cultural contexts that exist, and there are different ways that others view the world and interactions with our children. And it is really important in a household where you’re co parenting to have conversations about how to respond and how to manage and also bringing your own self awareness into it to evaluate, is this something that we need to be concerned about and take action on, or is it something to be aware of and mindful of? And then when and if the time comes to take action on it. Right? You know, the 2a half year old, she’s too young to understand those nuances at this point, but it it’s how we would respond as well to other people. And and so in in some cases, it might be creating a distance and space and better boundaries with another family, or it may just be saying, hey. There’s nothing we can do here, but it’s something just to be mindful of.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:08:59]: And at the right time, teach our daughter about boundaries and how to create boundaries, safe boundaries. It’s really something you said earlier, which is learning and growing.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:09:09]: Parenting is never easy and you have to learn as you go along. And sometimes you’re going to trip and stumble and sometimes you’re gonna fall, but then you have to pick yourself up, learn from that, continue on, and basically figure out for yourself what works best for your own familial context. Because just like I said at the very beginning, every father’s experience is going to be different and we can learn from other fathers. But the way that you father may not work in my familial context, but I can still grab things, learn things, and be able to put some things into place that may help me along the way. Now, as you think about your experience with your daughter thus far, and you think about, let’s say, the positive points that maybe the points that have been a little bit more challenging, what’s been the hardest part of being a father to a daughter?

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:10:02]: What you said about being a father and somebody else’s experiences, my experiences may not be applicable in somebody else’s family environment, I think it is really resonates with me. And I remember before my daughter was born, thinking about how am I gonna learn to be a dad. And when she was born and she was this little tiny thing, I was just it was at the forefront of my mind in between those in those moments of clarity when I got enough sleep. What what am I gonna you know, what does it mean to be a dad? How am I gonna do this thing? What’s the what’s the right thing to be doing? And I remember kind of expressing that anxiety in some way to a colleague of my wife, let’s say a family friend. And she said to to me, she said to my wife and me, all you have to do right now is love that child. And I can’t tell you how powerful that moment was for me because it distilled all the noise and it brought through this incredible clarity. The only thing I needed to do was to love my daughter, and I interpreted that very literally. And that is where my focus has been.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:11:09]: As she’s grown older, the challenges have come along with, how do I talk to her so she listens? Because how do I communicate with her in a way that she listens and and understands? How do I maintain my own presence in our relationship? And how do I be patient when she’s doing something for the first time or trying something that’s really difficult or she’s not able to express herself because she’s she’s frustrated or angry or upset, but she can’t verbalize that and tell me. And I’m getting frustrated because I’m in my own moment trying to get her to do something. So those challenges really have been my challenges with her right now. And then and I think even a larger more global challenge is creating stability for her is really important to me, and and just creating stable environment for her. She started to refer to our house or where we live as home, and that just word has really impacted me. The first few times I’ve heard her say that, I’ve been like, wow. And so that has just really I’ve internalized that as my responsibility to create stability for her in whatever way that means because she now understands what home is, and, that’s really profound. So those are some of the challenges in in parenting right now and very exciting challenges, by the way.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:12:31]: Not the kind of challenges where my energy has drained, but where I feel really positive. And I look forward to working through those challenges because I know there’s so much in doing so.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:12:41]: Now I know that there are definitely things that connect you to your daughter. What would you say is the what would you say is the favorite thing that you and your daughter like to share together?

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:12:53]: That’s a really interesting question because a couple weeks ago, she said I think my wife was putting her to bed. And as part of her bedtime routine, we talked to her and talked about the day and she said, I like daddy. He’s silly. And I was taken aback and aside. And as you asked that question, the thing that I think really bonds us is really like, she’s a silly kid. I like to be silly with her. And I think that sort of silliness and like fun we have, it’s special. And I think that bonds us.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:13:25]: The other thing I think that bonds us is that I I think to some extent for my daughter, I am safety, and I’m we go to family gatherings to other people’s houses to new places. She’s she’s very attached to me until she warms up and gets comfortable, and then she’s the most social child you’ve ever seen. And I think that really bonds us, and so those would be the 2 things that I think really bond us right now. And then the third would just be, you know, our routine. She understands her routine very well. So sitting down and watching one of her favorite shows on TV on YouTube, which is miss miss Rachel. She loves doing that together. That’s a bonding experience.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:14:04]: Whenever we eat, she’s sitting on my lap. That’s a bonding experience. Although messy messy for me, fun for her. Right? And so those little moments that are unique that and I realized with my daughter, there are certain things she does with me and certain things she does with my wife. And so, you know, that’s that’s kind of my take on on how we bond.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:14:24]: Now one of the things that I said at the very beginning was that you’re busy. You work in higher education. You’re in a higher up administrative role. There’s a lot of expectation in the work that you do and the students that you’re serving and others that you’re serving. So when you’re on, you’re on and you have to be locked in and be able to connect with the people at your institution. So there’s this balance that you have to have in regard to home and work and being able to then be be dad when you can be dad and and be, you know, Evan, the employee. So how do you balance work and raising your daughter?

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:15:05]: It’s something that I’m working on. One of the things I’m really trying to do is be more present so that when I’m home, I’m not engaged with my device and that I try to keep that device out of line, out of sight. I’ve worked really hard to manage my professional schedule so that I can if I have to commute, I can be back home in time to see my daughter, spend time with her, have dinner with her. My wife and I are very communicative every week about our different schedules and which days I’ll be working at home and which days I’ll be going to the office so that we can create a balance in who takes her to day care, who picks her up. I would say that it’s also a mindset of prioritization. And I’ve actually found it very helpful professionally in that I’m prioritizing time with my family and time with my daughter. And I’ve created rules for myself where I want to be home for dinner and bedtime routine with my daughter every night. I want to, in some ways, identify what’s really important to me and I’ve established those as priorities and why they’ve been helpful in my professional life is because it’s helped me be clear about where I need to spend time at work so that I’m not detracting from that by trying to get everything done when I come home that I haven’t finished during the day.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:16:22]: So I have a clear transition routine when I leave the office that gives me some comfort of knowing what I need to address next. And look, if there’s something that I have to do for work that’s really important, I’ll do it when she goes to bed, but it happens when she goes to bed. And I always try to make a point in the morning to be there when she wakes up and the days I can’t because I have to leave early, earlier than she gets up because she’s not on my schedule. She’s on her schedule. I will make sure to call and talk to her, you know, before she, you know, before she goes to daycare. So really being there and being able to connect with her is important to me. But I think one of the foundational pieces of that is that I have is that I have a very understanding work environment where it’s about getting the work done. And, you know, yes, I have to be in the office and be available and have meetings during the workday, but I also set my schedule up to enable me to, again, be able to, you know, leave so I have time with my daughter in the morning and get home so I have time with her at night.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:17:19]: And then it’s how I think about structuring the work after I get home. It it she is my priority. And then the work, it it will always be there. And so it’s it’s also a mindset. Again, I’m working on it. I’m evolving. And I have something that that I continue to think of different ways to think about and approach.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:17:37]: It’s definitely an evolving thing and and something that is going to be different. If I ask you this question in 5 years, 10 years, your answer is probably going to be very different in regards to how you’re engaging with your daughter and how you continue to try to be present. And even that word present is going to mean something different as your daughter gets older as well.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:18:01]: I really believe that. But, also, what’s interesting at this age is that she’s starting to really she’s starting to observe and understand the things that we’re doing in a way that she didn’t just a year ago or half a year ago. So she understands if I’m in the home office, daddy’s at work. She understands if I’m not at home when she wakes up, daddy’s on a choo choo train to work. And so it’s also her reflection of what I’m doing, which has led me to be more aware of how I need to manage myself and my time to be with her because she understands the difference between me being at work and somewhere else and me being at home and, you know, being with her. And that’s really motivating for me because I want to create memories to one of your earlier questions about bonding. I wanna create memories that she’ll look back on and think, well, daddy and I used to do this, and daddy and I did this, And and think back to those experiences as part of, you know, as part of her childhood and what she loved about our relationship. And so it’s that’s really motivating for me, and her awareness is part of what what helps me.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:19:09]: Now I know as a young dad, many times you have to figure out for yourself how things are going to move along. You have to find resources. You have to find community around you, or at least try to find the resources and community to help you to be the dad that you want to be. And sometimes it’s not easy. Talk to me about the journey that you’ve been on and being able to find the resources that will help you to be that dad that you wanna be.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:19:39]: Well, well before my daughter was born, I remember hearing about some some groups like city city dads. I think I saw it on the Today Show, and I wasn’t a dad yet. I don’t think I’d conceived the the idea I was gonna be a father. And I thought, well, that’s really interesting. That’s a good idea. And my daughter was born. I was living in Oregon in a town that was really small and far from Portland, which is really the major city in Oregon. And one of the things I really I I observed right off the bat in being a new dad was a lot of the resources in the area we were living in, a lot of the support that was available was for moms.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:20:21]: And a lot of the even conversation and interaction with some of the established places like hospitals and our day care were really centered on mom, and there wasn’t support for dad. And I felt a bit isolated in those early days. And so I started looking around for resources, and I couldn’t find much locally because a lot of these major organizations like City Dads didn’t have chapters where I was. So then I found something called the At Home Dad Network and tapped into that, got connected with their Facebook group and and Discord channel. Eventually, I found your group and and your Facebook group and sort of got connected there. I found some very specific groups at the time that dealt with very unique issues like single fathers or postpartum depression for dads. And I signed up. I signed up for things where there were webinars and virtual opportunities to engage.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:21:18]: And then I did find through a religious affiliation, a very small, like, WhatsApp group, and there were, like, 6 dads in the group. And I just it it was good to be part of the group as community because they were supportive of me and my wife and responsive to my questions and requests. But writ large, it was mostly these virtual sort of organizations and groups such I’m I know you’ve talked about before on on the podcast. And so and then I sensibly just sort of started thinking of people in my life who were role models and sort of picked from how I saw them parent to just incorporate that into to my process. But it it continues to this day to be something that I seek. It’s is those resources. It’s how you and I connected. Right? Because I reached out to you and to find out more about what you were doing.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:22:06]: So I I still I still seek that. There was a moment in time where I had thought about setting up a local chapter myself, and I reached out to someone who connected me with someone, another father in New Jersey. We didn’t get very far in doing setting up the local chapter because life intervened for both of us, but I did explore that as well. And now I tend to, as I’ve had a few friends who have had kids and as I’ve met parents who live in our area, who we’ve befriended, I tend to sort of lean on them to talk about parenting. And I step away from the moms and I talk to the dad and we just share our experiences. And and that’s been helpful. It’s been really nice to have that outlet. I’d like to find more, but I think that’s just something that I’ll continue to probably need and want.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:22:52]: And and then lastly, I’ll say, you know, you know, at the times where it’s it’s been really have been really unclear or being a father has been challenging, just personally, I’ve reached out for therapeutic conversations or I have a career coach who I work with as well very frequently. So I’ve reached out to my coach as well more in regards to career, but that’s been helpful because being part of a being a father is also about your work and, you know, as we talked about earlier, balancing it. So lots of different ways, and I’m still very much looking for these support networks, but I feel like I’m in a better position now to contribute and give to the spaces that I am I’m part of where where I’m in the early days. It’s just been questions, questions, questions. I’ll always have those.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:23:37]: As you look back at the experience you’ve had thus far as a young dad, are there things that you wish had been available beyond what you just said that would have helped you along the way that maybe need to be developed or that maybe that you wish had been developed that would have helped you in that way?

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:23:55]: I think I would say my experience would be have been enhanced, if you will, if the hospital had provided some support or resources. I mean, that’s where your first connect with your child is in the hospital. In our experience, that’s where the hospital provided us a place to stay for the 1st few nights so that we could adjust. And there was a lot of education and very appropriately so for my wife. There was continuing support for her in terms of very specific needs that she had around being a mom. And I think that that similar support for a dad would have been really helpful even if it was as simple as someone who’s available for a conversation, to ask questions, to to talk about. And so we we had again, we had to go out and find those things. We we ended up finding a doula service to help us with some help us because nights were tough, and we both were working.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:24:48]: And I ended up leaning on them for some advice. It would have I think that I would have liked something at that point at which my daughter was born. I’m in a hospital. I’m really doing this for the very first time. I not only have the support of the hospital, ensuring the health and safety of our daughter in those very first days, but I’m also able to connect with a resource that is available to me, not only then, but as I leave the hospital. And that really treats and positions fatherhood as something that’s truly legitimate and recognized. So that’s what I would I would say I would love to see as different. And I don’t know what that looks I mean, it did suggest one particular method for that, but I’m sure there are other ways that could be realized.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:25:31]: I think that would be very, very profound. Even a sheet of paper with a list of resources that would have been incredibly helpful. Who’s gotten mental capacity and the energy when you’re you’ve got a newborn in your house, right, to start to look for those things and then to feel comfortable taking time away from our daughter, taking time away from supporting my wife to pursue that felt really, really hard. And that’s when you need it the most. So that’s what I would love to see.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:25:59]: Now we always finish our interviews with what I like to call our fatherhood 5, where I ask you 5 more questions to delve deeper into you as a dad. Are you ready?

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:26:07]: Alright. Let’s do it.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:26:08]: In one word, what is fatherhood?

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:26:10]: Love.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:26:11]: When was the time that you felt like you finally succeeded at being a father to a daughter?

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:26:16]: First time I was able to take my daughter outside of the house for a walk without being afraid I was gonna drop her on the concrete. I felt like I accomplished something.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:26:27]: Now your daughter’s young, so she might not have a lot of words to explain this, and you kind of gave a couple of things earlier. But if I was to talk to your daughter, how would she describe you as a dad?

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:26:38]: Silly.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:26:39]: Now let’s forward this conversation, let’s say, 15 years, 20 years. What do you want her to say then?

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:26:44]: I would love her to say that I am one of the most impactful people in her life.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:26:50]: Now who inspires you to be a better dad?

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:26:52]: I would say my father-in-law. I’ve learned a lot from him him about being a dad since I came into his family.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:26:58]: Now you’ve given a lot of piece of advice today, things that people can definitely use and think about to be able to incorporate into their own life. As you’re thinking about every father out there, what’s one piece of advice you’d wanna give to every dad?

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:27:12]: Trust yourself. You know what’s best for your daughter.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:27:15]: Now, Evan, I just wanna say thank you. Thank you for your time today, for sharing your own journey thus far with your daughter, and I truly wish you all the best.

Dr. Evan Silberman [00:27:25]: Thanks very much. I appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation and chat, and here’s to being a dad.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:28:30]: We’re all in the same boat, And it’s full of tiny screaming passengers. We spend the time. We give the lessons. We make the meals. We buy them presents and bring your a game. Because those kids are growing fast. The time goes by just like a dynamite blast, calling astronauts and firemen, carpenters, and musclemen. Get out and be the world.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:29:13]: Choose them. Be the best dad you can be. Be the best dad you can be.

Fatherhood, Beards, and Balance: Dan Command’s Journey

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This week on the Dad & Daughter Connection podcast, we delved deep into the challenges and joys of fatherhood with Dan Command, also known as Dan c Bearded. Join us as we explore parenting, passion, and finding balance in life.

The Journey to Fatherhood

In raising a daughter, Dan Command, a father of three, has embraced an adventure filled with both challenges and unforgettable moments. Reflecting on the initial excitement and trepidation he felt upon learning he would have a daughter, Dan shared how this milestone marked a pivotal moment in his life. With two older boys, he was already familiar with the obstacles and joys of raising sons. However, welcoming a daughter sensitized him to the unique dynamics and the responsibility to raise her as a strong, independent woman.

Managing Fears and Challenges

It’s natural for many fathers to experience a mix of excitement and fear when thinking about raising a daughter. Dan acknowledges these anxieties but views them through the lens of his upbringing alongside his strong and driven sisters. Drawing from this experience, he shared, helped alleviate his fears and instill a sense of confidence in his parenting approach. His discussion highlighted the importance of nurturing both strength and sensitivity in his daughter, instilling values that will prepare her for life’s challenges.

Balancing Work and Family Life

Switching gears from a traditional teaching career to becoming an influencer has significantly impacted Dan’s life. He transitioned from being a recognizable educator and coach to cultivating an online persona through his Dan c Bearded platform. This transformation demanded that he maintain a work-life balance like never before. Dan’s transparency about his journey underlines the importance of active participation in the lives of his children amid professional demands. By including his children in his work and sharing his experiences with them, he creates a familial atmosphere that encourages understanding and connectivity.

Learning Through Coaching

Dan’s rich history as a coach introduced another layer of depth to his parenting philosophy. He recounted the essential lessons from coaching, such as fostering passion without exerting undue pressure, which have guided him in his parenting journey. His children’s involvement in soccer, though not his sport of choice, emphasized his commitment to supporting their interests. It is through these shared experiences that Dan strengthens his bond with his kids, fostering an environment where they feel supported, loved, and encouraged to pursue their passions.

Final Thoughts

Through his journey, Dan exemplifies the fulfillment and joy found in the role of a father. His story underscores the essence of embracing each parenting moment, cherishing the long days, and recognizing that the years are indeed short. His advice to prioritize and actively engage with children serves as a powerful reminder to all parents. Dan Command’s narrative on the Dad & Daughter Connection is a tribute to the dedication and love that shapes a father’s journey, inspiring others to be the best dads they can be. Parenting is a continuous learning process filled with highs and lows. As fathers, embracing the journey with open hearts and minds while fostering a nurturing environment is crucial. Leveraging lessons from our experiences, just as Dan Command has shared, can immensely impact our relationships with our children. Tune into more episodes of Dad & Daughter Connection and join our community to keep enriching your fatherhood journey. If you enjoyed this episode we ask you to take a moment to take our Dad and Daughter Connection Survey to let us know more about you as a dad. You can also sign up to get our newsletter to stay connected to our community and we will send items of interest to you to help you to be the dad that you want to be. Feel free to follow me on the following social media platforms: Facebook, Facebook Group, Instagram, LinkedIn, X.   TRANSCRIPT Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:16]: Welcome back to The Dad & Daughter Connection podcast where we bring you guests to be active participants in your daughters’ lives, raising them to be strong, independent women. Really excited to have you back again this week. As always, every week, you and I get a great opportunity to be able to talk about raising our daughters and the things that we’re doing to be able to help them to become those strong, independent women that we want them to be. And it’s not always gonna be easy. There’s going to be bumps in the road. There’s going to be things that you’re going to be challenged by. But all of that helps you helps you to be able to become better if you let it. And it’s so important to be able to be open to learning, listening, and hearing from other dads that are going through the same experiences that you may be going through, but also maybe going through some different experiences. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:08]: Because through the conversations that we have here on this podcast, through the opportunities that you have to be able to hear them and learn from them, you can add some tools to your own toolbox and help you to be able to create ways to help you to be more engaged and more and more active in your children’s lives. So that’s why this week, I am really excited to be able to have another new guest on the show. Dan Command is with us today, and Dan is also known as Dan c Bearded, and that’s his influencer name. And if you look him up, you’re gonna see when we talk about bearded, he has a great beard. I know we we don’t have the video going on this, but you’ll see in the picture on our podcast today that he does have a very commanding beard, we’ll say. And he works with people around the world to be able to foster beard health and to be able to help them to do things to help their beard to be the best that they want it to be as well. But he is a father of 3, 2 boys and a girl, so we’re gonna be talking about that today. We’ll focus a little bit on being a father to a daughter, of course, but I’m really excited to be able to have him here and to welcome him to the show. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:25]: Dan, thanks so much for being here today. Dan Command [00:02:27]: Oh, thank you so much. I am very excited. Everything you kinda led up with are conversations that mainly me and my wife have every single day about raising a strong girl, but the challenges that comes with that. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:39]: Well, I’m really excited to be able to talk to you today. As I said, you have 3 kids, and your 2 oldest are boys, and then you had your daughter. And I know she’s 4. So I wanna take this back. It might be 5 years. It could be 4 years. But let’s go back to that first moment. That first moment that you found out that you were going to be a dad to a daughter. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:58]: What was going through your head? Dan Command [00:02:59]: Oh, man. A lot. So my wife, Sam, she’s unbelievable superwoman. She is an only child. She had a challenging kinda decorated upbringing where she went from different parent, biological dad walked out at a young age. Mom had a bunch of challenges, lived with different people. Essentially, when she got in high school, her stepdad and mom got divorced. He tried to adopt her and was not able to, and she ended up living with him. Dan Command [00:03:26]: And so had this very decorated parenting past and essentially her whole life, she wanted to be a mom and wanted to be a mom to a girl. And she wanted to do it in the way that she felt she deserved as a kid. And so that was kind of, like, her calling. And so we got pregnant. We had a boy. We got pregnant again. We had a boy. And then we were absolutely, like, dedicated to having a daughter. Dan Command [00:03:51]: So we were gonna try to get pregnant one more time. And, essentially, it was either gonna be we were gonna have a daughter and that was it, or we were gonna have a child and then we’re gonna adopt a daughter. We even had an adoption agency lined up. It was that serious to us and something that meant so much to my wife. And we got the news that she was pregnant. And then, of course, when we went in and got the gender reveal and it was a girl, very emotional time, very just excited, very, like, relief for my wife. And so my head was kind of just focused on that, just how happy I was for her and how I was excited for this next chapter. My sons at that time, because they were 3 and 5, So we had 2 young sons at the time. Dan Command [00:04:31]: And so just kind of a whirlwind, but massive excitement. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:04:34]: It definitely is an exciting time and especially probably throwing you into a little bit of a loop in regard to the fact of you’re in this groove and you you know what it’s like to grow up as a boy, but you’ve got 2 boys already. 35, you have had them in your life for a while. You’ve gotten you’ve gotten into that groove of what it takes to be a dad to a son, and now you’re going back and you’re having to learn some new things to be able to be that father to a daughter. When I talk to dads, one of the things that I hear a lot is that there’s some fear that goes along with that, and there’s a lot of different reasons for that. But as you think about raising your daughter, what’s been your biggest fear in raising your daughter? Dan Command [00:05:19]: Yeah. That’s a great question. Not something I’ve really thought about, to be fully honest. I’m kind of a a one foot in front of the other guy. I don’t have a ton of anxiety or fear. I think one thing that helped me with having the concept of a daughter, other than my wife being so passionate about wanna raise a daughter, is I had I have 2 siblings and I was the oldest and both of my siblings are my sisters. So I had 2 girls that I grew up with close in age, a year and a half, and then a couple of years apart. And they were very intelligent, still are obviously, very intelligent, very strong girls that I grew up with. Dan Command [00:05:51]: Both of them are U of M Ann Arbor graduates, by the way. And my youngest sister went to U of M Ann Arbor and then went to the hospital management graduate school. And so she runs on the business side and marketing side of Northwestern Hospital in Chicago. And so I grew up with her, one of the kindest, one of the most athletic, like, genuine people you would ever meet. And then my middle sister, who’s a year and a half younger than me, she went to U of M undergrad and then Cornell Law School. And so she is an Ivy League lawyer, and she was born an Ivy League lawyer. And so growing up with a a younger sister that was very strong willed, very stubborn, very intelligent, very argumentative, I know firsthand for essentially my entire life what it’s like to have a strong, stubborn, will powered, filled girl, essentially in every room that I’ve ever been in in my life. And so it wasn’t something that was really fearful for me. Dan Command [00:06:45]: And it was actually reassuring knowing that I was gonna bring a daughter into this world that had such strong role models around her, whether it’s her aunts, whether it’s her mom, or anybody we surround ourselves with. And so for me, it was just the matter of, like, okay. How do I make sure she is safe? How do I set the example as a man by my actions on how men should treat women and show her rather than try to tell her? And then also love the fact that she had 2 older brothers kinda guiding her along the way. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:07:13]: Now you’ve had your daughter in your life now for 4 years, and there’s high points, there’s low points, there’s everything in between. What’s been the hardest part in being a father to a daughter? Dan Command [00:07:24]: Man, high points, low points, everything in between. That’s and you’re talking on a daily basis. That’s not even zooming out. It is unbelievably challenging, unbelievably rewarding. All 3 of my kids, as anybody would say, are vastly different, but my boys are just so simple. My oldest son, Maddox, has, pretty strong ADHD, but we treat it like a superpower. He is a an unbelievable athlete. He can do 17 things at once, and he has a motor that just doesn’t stop. Dan Command [00:07:50]: And then my 7 year old son, Jax, is does not have ADHD. He’s mister Chill. He takes everything in. He processes it. He just, like, if he speaks, it’s something that’s gonna be profound, And is they’re just amazing. We can rationalize with them. We can talk them through things, and they’re really amazing to each other. And then my 4 year old, Violet, best timing of all time. Dan Command [00:08:11]: We actually had a doctor’s appointment yesterday because we do believe that she has ADHD. And with that, the biggest challenges would be that she has a motor that does not stop. And I hear a lot of parents talk about that. Her extremeness on her intensity with every aspect of her life is off the charts. When she is the cutest, she’s the cutest thing on the planet. When she is the most challenging, it is an unbelievable tsunami of attitude and sass and stubbornness. And that’s been kind of the biggest challenge is how vastly different she is from raising my boys, but then also trying to not control, but rein in the attitude, the sass, the spunk, the stubbornness because I don’t want her to lose that. You know? I want her to be a strong female. Dan Command [00:08:58]: I want any boy in the future that wants to take advantage of her to feel the wrath of of her stubbornness, but I also need to make it day in and day out my wife’s mental health. And so the the biggest challenge has been how do you foster a strong young lady, but also make it to the finish line? Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:09:15]: And you have to take it day by day because it definitely is going to as she gets older, you’re gonna have to pivot. You’re gonna have to adjust, and she will continue to adjust herself. And you may not know exactly where you stand sometimes. So you just have to always know that that’s going to be the case. And as long as you’ve set her up to be able to be, as you’ve kind of said, strong and independent, and you’ve given her the tools along the way, things will work out in the end. Dan Command [00:09:43]: Absolutely. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:09:44]: Now, one of the things that I mentioned at the very beginning is that you are an influencer. You you made a transition. You had been an educator for a number of years and then started to share some of the things that you had learned about treating your own beard and helping others. And you made this pivot and this change in your life and your family’s life to go full in on your Dan c bearded persona to help others in that journey that they’re on. So you’re a busy guy and you have to balance all of that. So how do you balance work and raising your kids? Dan Command [00:10:20]: Oh, great question again. My daughter Violet’s actually home today. She went to school, wasn’t feeling well, So I was able to go get her which is one of the advantages of of kind of being my own boss. And so the balance is every single day trying to figure out. So for example, I had some work on the computer that I had to do, and then I had some work on my phone that I could do. And so I kind of tried to balance this morning by bouncing back and forth. She was on the couch just watching one of her shows that’s on on the other side of my studio. And so I would do some work on the computer, and then I would tell her, like, hey. Dan Command [00:10:51]: Just give me a few minutes over here. And then when I know I got to a point where I could work on my phone, I would just go sit by her. And even just that proximity makes a huge difference for her just having her dad close to her. And so I also try to, with all of my kids, include them in on what we do for a business, what we do for a career. It’s not something that’s this, like, big secret. I actually try to go, like, above and beyond because it’s not exactly your your typical job or your typical career. And so it was always a fear of me when I was switching from education to doing this that my kids wouldn’t get it. Where when I was teaching, they can we live across the street from my former building. Dan Command [00:11:30]: Like, from our front porch, you can see my old school. And so they used to be able to rationalize dad’s going to work. And it was a really kind of worry for me to not have them understand what work was because all kids watch and consume YouTube, at least in in some fashion or format. I didn’t want them to just be like, oh, that’s what my dad does. I wanted them to really understand it, and so we talk about all these things. And my daughter had a funny kinda line today. She said when I was getting her from school, she said, is mom home? And I said, yeah. She’s actually working. Dan Command [00:11:58]: She’s making a lot of shirts. And we have our own merch shop. And right now, we have a campaign called GrowVember, and we sell a certain shirt. And every every single penny made from the shirts are donated to the Genesee County Humane Society, which is really important to us and where we get all our pets. And so I explained that to Violet and I said, this is where what mom is doing right now. And she said, oh, so people buy shirts with dancy bearded on it. And it was just so cute for her to be able to kinda speak that language and understand it. And she gets a big part of what we do is we travel the country and we have meetups whether I’m at, like, an expo. Dan Command [00:12:32]: And so we’ll go to a place that has 30, 40, a 100 people that are there from the beard community that want to meet and hang out. And so she has had, probably in 4 years, one of the most diverse upbringings of seeing just every type of person you could ever imagine. And meeting people with different skin colors, different beard shapes, different ages, different accents all around the country and kind of just getting that exposure that no matter what people look like, no matter where they’re from, there’s amazing people all over. And it’s been kind of interesting because she is 4. She was firmly a COVID baby. She was born in January 2020. And so that work and home life balance was already from the beginning was as an educator, I was home teaching remotely, essentially her whole life. And so we’ve had kind of a unique first four years of her life, and I’m actually interested to look back on this in, let’s say, 10, 20 years, not just Violet, but all kids of that age and with the parents and the different kind of life just to see if there’s any differences and changes because Violet, as a 4 year old, can speak YouTube language and business language and beard language like many adults wouldn’t even understand. Dan Command [00:13:43]: It’s pretty amazing. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:13:43]: So also talk to me a little bit about that transition for yourself of being the teacher that people know to being an influencer that everyone thinks they know, but that now your personality, your persona is larger than you, and your family comes along for the ride. So how have you managed all of that and helped your kids to manage that? Dan Command [00:14:09]: I love thinking about that. So I do beard care for a living. I help people trim their beards and style it and how to use products and feel confident in their beard. But what I actually do is I bring together people in a positive community. And a big part of what I do is complete transparency. YouTube is my main hub for education, but I also do a couple livestreams a week on Wednesday nights, 9 PM EST. Me and my wife are together. And so we talk all sorts of things. Dan Command [00:14:38]: We get an advice shelf. People can send in questions, get advice on their beer, their relationship, teaching, anything. And so we go over that. And I say that because on my Instagram side of things, I pretty much document most of our life just because I I love my family. I love being transparent. And that’s part of not necessarily my brand, but who I am and and why people resonate with it so much. They see that it’s a family man. They see that I value my children, that I really am in love with my wife and respect at a high level. Dan Command [00:15:08]: And so to my kids, it’s all just kind of intertwined as one thing. They don’t really see a separation of, like, dad or dancy bearded or work, and it’s just kind of all morphed into this one type of lifestyle that really is unique and kinda hard to explain. I’m I’m kind of working at all times, but also family at all times. And we found just a really good balance with that. And even early on, me and my wife would have a lot of hard conversations where especially in the in the first couple of years, and she would say things like, hey. Today, maybe I don’t know if if you know us, but maybe you’re on your phone a little bit much. And then I would have to take a step back and realize that, Or other times, I would have to kinda give her a heads up. Like, hey, babe. Dan Command [00:15:48]: It’s November. This is our busy season. I just wanna let you know. This might be a time where I gotta kinda turn things up a little bit. And so it was just really trying to keep that in mind because I do have an obsessive personality. And if I have a checklist of items I need done, I kind of get really, really, like, focused on those. But then realizing this unique world of my career and my family, I gotta find that balance. And then also be sure to respect my kids at all times. Dan Command [00:16:15]: And as they’re getting older too, making sure I’m checking with them on, hey. Are you comfortable with this stuff? Are you guys okay with that? And and so far, it’s been pretty seamless, to be honest. Everything’s just kinda fallen into place. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:16:27]: Now I know that in your past life as a teacher, you were also a coach, and you did a lot to be able to help kids to foster their passion without going so far or to go as far as they wanted to go. And I know that in that opportunity to to be in that type of role, you learned some things about what it really took to be able to do that. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and what you learned as a coach, but also how that’s transitioning and trans continuing on as you as a father as well? Dan Command [00:17:03]: Oh, absolutely. So my kids are all 3 into soccer. I never played soccer a day in my life before my kids started playing. I was a basketball player, but then really excelled in swimming and water polo and went pretty far with that and coached at a high level. And with doing that as a coach and as an athlete, I saw a lot of parents that, I don’t wanna say forced because I don’t think that’s the right word, but kind of led their kids into the sports that they were excelling at and passionate about because I’m assuming they enjoyed it. They thought their kids would enjoy it and they had the skills for it. So they kinda led them that way, especially in something like the swimming world. If you’re a swimmer, you’re usually a swimmer. Dan Command [00:17:41]: There’s not like you don’t see, like, oftentimes you have football, basketball players, and baseball players kinda playing sports. Swimmers are kinda just swimmers. And so I didn’t ever wanna put that pressure on my kids and and force them into something or live vicariously through them. And so we just put them in everything, and we let them kinda discover. And for some reason, soccer resonated with all of them. And other than family vacations and the daily lessons, bonding over sports with my kids has been probably the most paramount aspect of our relationships, whether it’s me coaching them now in soccer or cheering for them in soccer or just making it a family culture. And as a coach and as an athlete, I saw a lot of kids burn out. I saw a lot of pressure from their parents that wasn’t fueled by passion for them to kids. Dan Command [00:18:29]: And so we, in our house, we have high expectations, but we also are very aware of that burnout. And we wanna walk this balance of giving our kids enough opportunities to take it as far as they would like to go, like you said, or as as as short as they would like to go. It’s entirely up to them. But our biggest emphasis is fostering their passion. So with soccer, we go to pro soccer games. We allow them to get soccer cards. We watch soccer clips at home. We have a soccer net at home. Dan Command [00:18:59]: When my daughter just the other day asked to play soccer, even though I was tired, even though I had some work to do, it took a couple seconds to check myself and kinda remind myself that I would regret this if I said no. I said yes. And we went out into the yard and did that because I’ve been there before where I was so exhausted, so just burnt out from the day. And my daughter says, hey. Do you wanna play soccer? I’m like, not now. Like, it’s just not a good moment. And then I go get her to bed, cutest thing in the world, give her a hug, give her a kiss. I lay down. Dan Command [00:19:26]: Now I feel like garbage. I told my daughter no. How could I do that? And so this has taught me lessons on how to help them. This has brought us closer together, and they know their parents have their back a 100%. They know that when we’re at the game and they mess up, we had to talk about this yesterday, they don’t look over to us and and have fear about what the reaction’s gonna be. My son went to take a shot the other day and completely whiffed and fell on the ground. He looked at us and started cracking up. Like, he has that comfort with us and then the ability to build the passion through all those other avenues outside of just playing the sport has brought us closer and closer and closer together, and it’s really great for the kids too. Dan Command [00:20:05]: My sons take a lot of pride in kind of being the, like, helpful brothers with Violet and teaching her soccer and, you know, bringing it down to her level and just having a lot of fun with it. So it it’s been absolutely paramount in our, like, bonding and growth together as, like, parents and kids. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:20:21]: I love that. I mean, it’s so important to be able to find those ways to be go be able to make those connections with your kids, whether it’s through sports, whether it’s through whatever it is. You know, it’s so important to be able to just get on to their level no matter how what their age and be actively involved from day 1, and you’re doing just that. So I commend you on that and and the work that you’re doing to be able to help your kids to be able to make those connections in that way. Now, we always finish our interviews with what I like to call our fatherhood 5, where I ask you 5 more questions. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:20:52]: to delve deeper into you as a dad. Are you ready? Absolutely. In one word, what is fatherhood? Oh, man. Fulfilling. Now when was a time that you felt like you finally succeeded at being a father to a daughter? Dan Command [00:21:06]: Quite literally today, when my daughter was sick from school, she didn’t wanna go home. I went to go get her from the classroom and she was not having it. I told her I would step outside. I’d be there when she’s ready. And then when she came out, I got down to her level. For all the fathers out there, I think that’s unbelievably important. I’m a tall man and my daughter is very small. And so I get down on her level, speak to her, and I was able to get ration through to her without any kind of raising my voice, without any kind of threats of taking a tablet or treats or anything like that. Dan Command [00:21:38]: And she reasoned with it, and it was explaining that she didn’t wanna get her friends sick. It wasn’t about her. It wasn’t about the class. And she walked out, went to hold my hand. We got back, and she’s definitely she loves her mom and dad, kinda equally mommy’s girl, daddy’s girl. And she was like, will you stay with me on the couch? And it was like, really cool kinda breakthrough moment today. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:21:57]: Now if I was to talk to your kids, how would they describe you as a dad? Dan Command [00:22:01]: Fun and loving. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:22:02]: Let’s think 10 years down the road, 15 years down the road. What do you want your kids to say? Dan Command [00:22:07]: I would like for my kids to say they knew that their dad prioritized them in all situations. He created every opportunity that they could ever want to fulfill their passions, and he just unapologetically loved them unconditionally. Who inspires you to be a better dad? Absolutely my wife. She is someone who battles with more, mental struggles than I do, more physical struggles than I do, and it is constantly on her mind. She is way too hard on herself and is an unbelievable parent, and it absolutely makes me go harder every day to try and support her in that motherhood journey, but also be the best dad that I can be. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:22:51]: Now you’ve given a lot of piece of advice today, things that you’ve learned along the way. As you think about other dads, what’s one piece of advice you’d wanna give to every dad? Dan Command [00:23:01]: I’m a quote guy. And when you become a father, especially a father of a daughter, you get all sorts of quotes, all sorts of things thrown at you. But the one that really resonates me on the hardest days is that days are long and the years are short. And as I reflect, especially as my sons get older and you do realize when everybody told you to enjoy the chaos because it you will miss it, you start to really realize how quickly it goes and how these long days do become short once you start looking in the rear view mirror. And so I always tell myself that in the challenging moments, the days are long, but the years are short. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:23:39]: Now if people wanna find out more about you and what you’re doing and they wanna keep in touch in some way, what’s the best way for them to do that? Dan Command [00:23:47]: Instagram, Dan c bearded, or YouTube, Dan c Bearded. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:23:51]: Well, Dan, I just wanna say thank you. Thank you for sharing your own journey today, for being a great example of what fathers should be, to be engaged to be engaged with your kids and to be able to have that relationship that you want with your kids. And I truly appreciate you sharing that and being here today, and I wish you all the best. Dan Command [00:24:09]: Thank you so much for having me, and shout out to all the dads out there. It’s not easy, but it is genuinely always worth it. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:24:15]: If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode of the dads with daughters podcast, we invite you to check out the fatherhood insider. The fatherhood insider is the essential resource for any dad that wants to be the best dad that he can be. We know that no child comes with an instruction manual and most dads are figuring it out as they go along, and the fatherhood insider is full of resources and information that will up your game on fatherhood. Through our extensive course library, interactive forum, step by step roadmaps, and more, you will engage and learn with experts, but more importantly, dads like you. So check it out at fatheringtogether.org. If you are a father of a daughter and have not yet joined the dads with daughters Facebook community, there’s a link in the notes today. Dads with daughters is a program of fathering together. We look forward to having you back for another great guest next week, all geared to helping you raise strong and powered daughters and be the best dad that you can be. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:25:14]: We’re all in the same boat, And it’s full of tiny screaming passengers. We spend the time, we give the lessons, we make the meals, We buy them presents and bring your a game. Because those kids are growing fast. The time goes by just like a dynamite blast calling astronauts and firemen, carpenters, and musclemen. Get out and be the world to them. Them. Be the best dad you can be. Be the best dad you can be.

Balancing #Work & #Family – Darren Rowse ( @ProBlogger ) at #DadChat

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Work-Life-Balance-#dadchat

This Thursday, October 23 at 6:00 p.m. PT/9:00 p.m. ET we will take on that contemporary struggle of HOW to balance work and family: Work-Life Balance. And, we’ve got Darren Rowse aka @ProBlogger to lead us in this important dialogue. Anyone EVER struggle with this issue?

I’ve regularly expressed that we ALL need tech time-outs. One of my suggestions to help with this problem is that families have a tech basket at the family dining table. At ANY meal, ALL devices go in the basket, turned OFF!

We’ll be talking about small issues like:

~~ Work hours

~~ Taking work HOME with you

~~ Working while you eat, weekends, travel, 24/7

~~ Knowing HOW and WHEN to turn it off!

Work-Life-Balance-#dadchat

We will discuss such things as (per Darren):

– Boundaries – around your work and around your family
– The importance of modelling good work ethic (I want my kids to see me working hard to achieve my goals – rather than just shielding them from ‘work’ as if its something to be avoided)
– Communicating to your family when you’re at work — when you work at home

Darren-Rowse-#dadchat

Darren Rowse is widely regarded as Australia’s top blogger and is one of the most followed Australians on Twitter and other social media sites.

In 2002 Darren started his first ever blog – not knowing that what would start as a personal hobby site would grow into a full time profession and multi-million dollar business! Since that time Darren has been involved in publishing over 30 blogs but now is active on two as founder and editor:

Digital-Photography-School.com – photography tips, camera reviews and photoshop tutorials
ProBlogger.net – a blog teaching others how to build successful blogs

His two main blogs are read by over 4.5 millions unique visitors a month. Together they
have over 260,000 forum members and 1,200,000 subscribers.

Suggested tweets to bring out your friends and others to this week’s #DadChat:

~~ Work-Life Balance…Got it? We do with @ProBlogger at #DadChat Thursday

~~ Raise your hand if YOUR life is in perfect balance? #DadChat and @ProBlogger take on Work and Family Balance tomorrow!

~~ TONIGHT @ProBlogger exposes the SECRETS to balancing #Work and #Family at #DadChat

 

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