Dad Street

I can remember the first thing I said outloud as the Dr. pulled Jake from my wife the day he was born.

BALLS!

I was so excited to have a son! I would have bet anything we were going to have a second girl. From that moment on it’s been such an amazing experience watching him throughout the last two and a half years of his precious life. Watching him grow and seeing the differences between his personality and his big sister (who’s only 16 months older) has been amazing.

But now?

Now, he’s found his penis. As in, “I’m going to touch this thing until it stands as tall as a toy soldier and tell you I have an itch”.

So now what?

Penis’ have a horrible rap in our society. Here’s what I mean:

Someone cuts you off in traffic and they’ve transformed into a Penis because they’re now a “Prick”. Maybe that guy took your parking space at the mall and he’s now transformed into a “Dick head”. Things like oral sex which are pleasurable have now turned into outright insults like calling someone a “C0#&sucker”!

Not only have we confused the penis with what we call our worst enemies but now it’s used to determine our manhood. I mean afterall when we’re not “Man Enough” we must have a small penis too! It’s a never ending horrible cycle of hate for the penis and it starts when we’re just boys.

Jake is starting to touch himself now, in a very innocent way mind you, and he has no idea the penis is this horrible thing. So I have a choice at this very impressionable point in his life. I can tell him to stop touching his penis because that’s gross, and we shouldn’t touch ourselves and everything else that goes along with reminding a 2 year old that there’s something wrong with him OR I can help nurture, love, and accept him for who he is. He is a boy with a penis and he’s finding out that touching it probably tickles or feels good in some capacity. His penis isn’t this horrible thing that we’ve convinced ourselves it is. It’s a part of the male body and is a body part not too dissimilar from many others. Do I want Jake growing up learning that it’s okay to sit in school at 13 years old “playing with himself”? Of course I don’t but that’s not my point here. Of course there is a time and place to “explore” your body. At this point, now that he’s out of diapers, he’s only touching himself when his pants are off or when he’s butt naked which isn’t the majority of the day. I also don’t encourage him to touch himself. In fact, I don’t make much of a deal about it. My wife and I will ask him if he has to go “pee pee” and that’s about it. When the time is right and if it came to the point where we needed to say something we would certainly encourage him to touch himself when he’s alone or at home. However, we’re far from that point in his young life.

For my 2 year old son the last thing I want to pass along is that there is some part of his body that’s not good or that there’s something “wrong with him”. It’s easy for parents to feel some shame when their children touch themselves, especially in a public setting. Unfortunately, we wind up passing that shame on to our own children. We do everything in our power to get them “to stop”! Normally, it’s in a hurried, loud fashion because “others are looking” and we want them to stop now! The problem is now we’ve given our own shame over to our impressionable children and they’re now left to carry on with that.

It’s about time we stop passing on all that shame around little boys and their penis’. Children have no boundaries and just want to be loved. Loving starts with us parents and the best thing we can do is affirm, accept, and appreciate our little boys even if they happen to discover there’s something between their legs.

Ever tell yourself you’re ugly? How about tell yourself you’re stupid? Not good enough? Maybe you tell yourself you’re a screw up?

It’s not uncommon for us, at different times in our lives, to talk to ourselves like this. We often complain about how others talk to us but sometimes we’re our worst critic. Even worse than being critical about ourselves, we outright lie. The truth of the matter is we’re not ugly, we’re not stupid, and we’re not screw ups.

We all live according to paradigms or maps. These paradigms are the lenses with which we view the world around us. Everything we say, feel, and do is filtered through these lenses. Somewhere along the line, from when we were babies, we decided it was appropriate to change the maps we were born with. We convinced ourselves it was okay to lie and so we changed our paradigms.

This can be a very hard subject to digest so let’s start at the beginning. If you’ve ever held a baby close in your arms, gazing deep into his or her eyes you see so much beauty. You see a baby that’s precious, beautiful, innocent, joyful, good enough, worthy, intelligent, and many other qualities. We don’t even think twice that these things are true about babies. It’s not something we need to try and prove or convince ourselves of, it’s just the way it is. These qualities we see in these babies are their inherent nature. They’re born with these qualities. Every child is born with these qualities, including you. These qualities never go away, they’re always there.

Somewhere down the road from baby to toddler, to child, to pre-teen, to teen, to adult that inherent nature gets covered over. It becomes too foggy to see and we put on new glasses. Only the new lenses are filled with lies we tell ourselves. Usually we come up with these new maps/beliefs as a way to protect us from childhood trauma. It doesn’t have to be trauma in the sense of physical or sexual abuse. Remember, what’s important to reflect on is not “what” happened to us as children but rather “how” it impacted us. No two people are alike and what causes you trauma and distress can be totally different than someone else. It’s not important to focus on the what but more so the how. We easily get caught up in the, “Well I wasn’t beaten half to death as a child so I didn’t have any trauma.” The reality is shame plays a huge role in most of our lives and how we are shaped as young adults. Parents shame children every day and in fact it’s so common that many of us don’t even notice we’re doing it to our children or that it’s being done to other children around us. This shame and childhood trauma, however brought about, shapes these new maps that we carry with us today.

These maps are the basis for our beliefs. Our actions are tied so close to our beliefs. They can cause us to pull away or overcompensate. Take for example the person who doesn’t think they’re attractive. Most of us who think we’re unattractive will give up on obtaining what we consider being attractive. We may not work out, we may eat poorly, we may not get annual physicals. We don’t take care of ourselves because we don’t think we’re attractive. On the flip side, some of us might overcompensate for our beliefs. We don’t think we’re attractive and because we feel so much shame around that we go out of our ways to make others think we are. We may spend and exorbitant amount of money, time, and energy on trying to look (in our eyes) attractive. This is an example of the extremes that we face when we carry these false beliefs. We’re much more moderate when we’re living in our adult realities and aware of our inherent nature. It’s these false beliefs we carry that swing us back and forth in these extremes and ultimately become the basis for how we respond to everything in our life.

Imagine what your life would be like if you believed you were intelligent, attractive, good enough, loveable, precious, innocent, committed…

You already are all of these things, you just need to believe it.

My Son Has Found His Penis, Now What?

Stop Lying To Yourself And Start Believing Again

When Did I Become A Judgy Judge?