The Importance of Dads

If you played sports growing up, you probably had a coach or two who was big on drilling the fundamentals. And sometimes it’s good for fathers to do the same.

In football, I was a running back and wide receiver, and I remember many practices where we worked on our footwork for pass routes over and over. Or in the backfield, we'd practice something as simple as the hand-off exchange from the quarterback, taking it and then securing it so it couldn't be stripped easily.

We did those things for hours and hours! We grew sick of those drills. We had better things to do!

Maybe you played basketball, and you can remember lining up in practice to do two-handed chest passes or bounce passes, or maybe you spent extra time dribbling with your off hand.

It was boring then, but as you know, there were good reasons to practice the fundamentals. You needed those skills to be a great player. Your coach wanted you to do those things without even thinking about them. He could give you the game strategy knowing those fundamentals were already in place, and in the heat of competition doing things right would give you an advantage.

Well, guess what? Fathering is like that, too. Our research has boiled good fathering down to three fundamentals: loving, coaching and modeling. To be a championship father, you need to soak these in, practice them and make them part of your skill set.

Loving is investing time, talk and touch that lays a foundation for relationships to grow and people to thrive—our children, as well their mother. I recently heard a definition of love that I really like: proactive kindness. We need to be proactively kind to our family members.

Coaching is the lifelong process of shaping, training and empowering our children as they move toward adulthood. It starts with being highly involved in their lives and gaining insights about them—their unique needs and interests—that will help direct our actions as fathers.

And third is modeling. Our children are influenced by what we do even more than by what we say. We need consistency in our expectations and our behavior, living out the values we want to transmit to future generations.

Those are the fundamentals, Dad. I hope you'll practice them ‘til you're sick of them, ‘til you do them without even reminding yourself to do them.

I won't say they're easy; it may take time before you're in game shape, so to speak. But when you're in the heat of a fathering challenge, they'll be there for you, and they'll help you succeed.

Carey Casey is CEO of the Kansas City-based National Center for Fathering—fathers.com—and author of the book Championship Fathering (2009). Carey and his wife, Melanie, live in Lee’s Summit.