ROB PARSONS OBE

Chronicling life as a new father to his beautiful firstborn child – daughter Thea – Chris Kerr’s goal is to provide all men experiencing fatherhood for the first time with some invaluable tips and tricks as they are learned – the hard way. Acknowledging he needs help too(!), Chris has called on a group of dad’s he calls, ‘The Father Hood’ to ask them for their tips and wisdom. In this edition, Chris sits down with Rob Parsons OBE. Rob is the founder and chairman of Care for the Family, a national charity which aims to strengthen family life and help those who face family difficulties. Rob is the best-selling author of 25 books, including the Sixty Minute Father and the Heart of Success. This interview was originally published in Sorted Men's Magazine.

Two weeks before Thea was born, I thought I was a smarty pants. Through my consultancy work, I had just helped another charity get out of an existential crisis, and the compliments were flowing my way. But before I could get too big for my boots, my 7lb10 baby girl Thea brought me back down to earth. You see, nothing humbles a man quite like those first few weeks of parenting. If the nappies don’t get you, the complete lack of knowledge about how to look after your baby will.

Fortunately for me, I had Rob Parsons OBE and Commando Dad at my beck and call. Well actually, I had their books, which I turned to every time I had a question (approximately every five minutes or so). Such was my reliance on them in Thea’s first weeks that my wife would jokingly ask if she should pop some extra placemats down for them at the dinner table. How wonderful then that they, and others, have agree to share their wisdom with you and I as we navigate these early days of fatherhood.

Rob, thank you for helping us new dad’s out. Could you tell us a little about yourself and why you set up the national charity, Care for the Family?

I was a senior partner in a ten-office law firm but my wife and I had, for a number of years, been in a Church on a vast housing estate in Cardiff. At that point there were 20,000 people living there, although it is more now. There was an immense need and we began talking to some of these people in our homes, sometimes counselling them.

My wife then went through a tough time after the birth of our son, she went through a depressive illness and her immune system crashed and it just taught us that vulnerability and saying to people, ‘we have been through that’ is very powerful. It gave us a real desire to reach out to other families and help them. Tough times hit every home.

I was doing pretty well at the law practice but I noticed that there were a lot of good charities that came to the bottom of the metaphorical cliff, bringing an ambulance when families were broken up. But nobody was putting a fence at the top of the cliff to stop families falling in the first place. I wanted to do this so I left the law practice and started Care for the Family. One minute, I am in a law practice employing 120 people where I can press a button and someone will make me a coffee, next I am operating out of a small room, making my own drinks and putting my own stamps on envelopes! We have just under 100 employees in the UK and abroad now.

Ah yes, the lesser spotted Barrister to Barista Story! Having worked with families for so long, can you tell us how important dads are to raising healthy kids?

Well, first of all, we work with families of all kinds. I see a lot of pain on a regular basis. I know therefore that it is not always possible to keep families together. This means we do a lot of work with single parents, most of which will be single parent mums, many of whom would prefer to be bringing up their kids with help from their partner. There are many reasons for that – it is emotionally hard and physically hard, for example.

I believe fathers have a vital role to play. My own father never praised me or never told me he loved me but he was present, always there. He put bread on the table. My mother would ooze love, telling us that she loved us fifty times a day! All of my memories of that home were of love and security.

Certainly, I went through a period with my own kids where just after they were born, I was very busy – at work and I was speaking all over the place. Then one day my wife said to me, ‘Darling, I don’t think we are going to make it’. That was a massive wake up call. She needed me, and my kids needed me and I was just not meeting them. I remember thinking, if I don’t make a change, the things I value most are going to slip through my fingers.

I would say this to all dads. The time you put in with your kids when they are little tends to bring fruit later on. You are depositing into that emotional bank when they are small and that is very important.

So, I would say mothers and fathers are important, and if you asked me which was the most important, you couldn’t put a cigarette paper between it for me. We need each other.

A lot of dads worry about the early days, and how to bond with their baby. What do you recommend doing to build a strong, two-way bond between dad and baby?

Well first of all, it is important. We do a lot of work here with regard to attachment theory which is basically a principle that those early interactions are very, very important. It’s not to say that they cannot be overcome but they are important.

I remember when my daughter had her first baby, Harry. She had tears running down her face and said, ‘Dad it is really hard isn’t it’. And it is hard! They don’t come with a manual, we are always worried we are going to mess up and a lot of fathers feel that. It is very easy to abdicate responsibility when we feel that. But we mustn’t.

Here are some tips. Search for ways to connect with the baby through touch, or songs and I am a great believer in telling stories to kids. They won’t have a clue what you are talking about but you are building connection.

Bonding is another way of looking at the tough moments too – the 2am wake ups, putting them in the car seat to drive them around and get them to sleep. These are building relationship.

When they become toddlers, get down to their height and cup their heads in your hands and look in their eyes. The greatest compliment you can pay them is to look in their eyes. These things build attachment.

It is an ongoing thing. If I got anything right with my kids, and I got plenty wrong, it was building connection. From the time my daughter Katie was 13, we would spend an evening together perhaps once a fortnight. We would go to local hotel in the foyer. She would have a Coca-Cola and I would have a coffee and we would talk. Katie would talk for England! So when Lloyd was 13 I tried to do it with him. It was agony! I was dragging syllable after syllable out of him. I almost gave up and then we discovered the hotel had a pool table in it. As we were playing Pool, we would talk a bit. When Lloyd was 19, sometimes, he would come into my room about 11pm and wake me up. He’d say, hey dad do you fancy going for a curry? I would climb out of bed, get into a pair of jeans and eat Chicken Tikka Masala at midnight more times than you have had cooked dinners! You have to take communication when you can get it.

If we live busy lives, kids will fall for your ‘Dad will do it later’ routine. Too often, those days go by, and those years go by and suddenly they are teenagers and don’t want to go fishing with us. It is very, very important to put those times in when they are small.

Let’s take you back to the day before your first child Katie arrived. What would you tell that young Rob, knowing all that you know now about being a dad?

I realise that not everyone who reads this article will share my Christian faith but I would be praying for my kids even before I had them. When I finished the Sixty Minute Father book I put a story in at the end about one night when I was putting Lloyd to bed. He was five or six years old. He said to me, ‘Dad, could I say the prayer tonight?’. He said, ‘Dear God please help my father to be very brave and not make too many mistakes’. I think that is a great prayer for every father.

As a father I have often been brought to my knees. I have felt like a rubbish father, and I have felt like I was making too many mistakes. In those days, I have prayed to my heavenly father and asked for wisdom. If I could do anything else, I would seek that wisdom more. Even if you are not sure what you believe you can still do that. ‘God if you are there, please help me to be the best father I can possibly be’.

Is it possible for dads to have a successful career and an excellent family life? How do you navigate that tension?

Recently, I was speaking to a big bank just before lockdown. I was talking about not missing your kids lives. In the Q&A at the end, a man asked, ‘my wife and I work for the bank, and work long hours, are you telling me that we shouldn’t do that?’

I said, no. If you need to work long hours to put bread on the table, you should do it but don’t miss your kids young lives for the sake of a Lexus and a second holiday.

So, can you have a successful career and be a good dad? Yes! Can you do everything? No. Time is limited. We cannot be in two places at once. We can choose to work until 9pm at night we make a choice. We cannot be there and with our child. So, every choice precludes another and when we get it wrong is when we think, ‘I’ll spend time with them tomorrow’. When we do this, we miss our kids lives one day at a time. Our sons and daughters will only be our ‘kids’ until they are 18. That’s 6,570 days. If your daughter is now 10 years old, you have 2,920 days left but we don’t think like that.

When Katie was small, I would read her a bedtime story. As I was reading, the phone would ring downstairs. I would tell her I was just going to take the call. She would plead with me not to. I would tell her not to worry, that I would be back very shortly. After 30 minutes, I would remember I had not yet finished the story. The princess was still stranded in a castle somewhere. I’d rush back upstairs. The light would be on and the book would be on the pillow next to her like we had left it. But Katie would be asleep. She fought as hard as she could to stay awake.

I will tell you what I don’t understand about that. I have had an interesting life. I have been a Partner in a big law practice. I have been in murder trials, I have lectured all over the world, I have written almost 30 books. All those things have involved me having thousands of work calls. They are all described as urgent. I cannot remember one that couldn’t have waited ten minutes until I finished the bedtime story. That’s the problem.

It really does take discipline. We have to take an active decision to spend time with our kids or we face losing our kids childhoods one day at a time.

Let’s go to the source of these conflicts: the boss. The CEO who sets the workplace culture and behaviours. For example, I know of a number of companies who make it impossible for staff to be promoted unless the spend all their time at work. What would you say to them?

They need to acknowledge that it is total foolishness to ask your employees to leave their troubles at home at the office door. You may as well as them to leave their left leg there. They cannot do it.

Really bright companies understand that if you have people who are satisfied, happy and secure, as they possibly can be as every family goes through troubles at home, they will generally be more effective in work. It is a bright business decision therefore if you can achieve this.

There are a couple of things the business leader can do. The first is that they can lead by example. What one doesn’t want to do is slip into a long hours culture for the sake of doing it. In many businesses, there are periods where you have to work long hours if you are going to get the job done or the deal through. But do not slip into a long hours culture for the sake of it.

Many of us, particularly men, and forgive me for the generalisation, are more insecure than we let on. One way we prove ourselves is by working long hours, the ‘jacket over the chair’ culture. ‘Oh, I worked until 10pm last night’. When I was in the law practice, I could have often left the office at 5pm but I would check that file one more time and stay later. It was like I was saying to the law firm, how on earth would you get by without me? The answer is actually simple: ‘Very easily Rob’.

I was giving the KPMG leadership lecture some years ago and the Senior Partner came up to me and said, ‘What you say is right Rob. If you want to find out how much they miss you when you are gone, take a bucket of water and put your fist in it to make a hole in the water. The hole that is left is how much they will miss you!”.

Set an example as a leader and go home. This is always a balance. There was a very famous notice on the noticeboard of a Canadian log firm. It said, ‘Since the stress seminar production is down by 10% and nobody cares a damn’! That’s not what we are looking for is it. It is very easy to say, oh just go home every night at 5pm. But you have a business to run too, so it is about balance but take the lead when it comes to finding that balance.

I remember saying to my staff in the law firm, if you are still here at 8pm every night one of two things is happening. Either we are giving you too much work to do or you are not bright enough to work here.

One thing that complicates home life now is the digital world. People can email or contact us 24/7. How can we manage that issue?

Men now have to be very intentional about not using their phones and social media when they should be spending time with their children. Too often, fathers are in the room with their kids, but they are not present. Our kids are sat with us watching Peppa Pig, and we are watching an online video.

Logically, what is wrong with that? Our kids are watching what they want to watch, we don’t want to watch it and so we aren’t. Well, we are not in this together. In 10 years’ time, the dad will say to that kid, ‘do you fancy doing this’? And that kid will say no. You missed that chance to connect with your kid for the sake of a cat video.

Rob, what makes a dad ‘great’ in your opinion?

Somebody once said, ‘there is no one way to be a perfect father but there are a thousand ways to be a great father’. I think that when our kids have grown up into adults, they will not judge us a dads in the way we think they might.

It certainly won’t be by the expensive presents that we brought them. They will forget that. It won’t be the expensive holidays either.

Whether they consider us to be a great dad or not tends to come down to a few things. Number one, was dad always there for me? I sometimes drove dad crazy, and I certainly didn’t always live in the way he wanted me to live but he was always there for me. Sometimes he yelled at me, was disappointed in me but I knew that I was truly loved. That’s how I think our sons and daughters will judge us.

Number two, is time. I have spoken to men all over the world, often very successful men like CEO’s of blue chip companies or leaders in Government and many of them, when they reach 50 years old have a tremendous regret. They have achieved a lot, they have got the car parking space marked CEO but they have missed their kids lives. The funny thing is, what they want now more than anything else is relationship but they haven’t put the time in to cultivate that. Time is our greatest asset, without doubt. Someone once said, kids spell love, t-i-m-e.

Number three is, laughter. When we talk to people who had wonderful experiences with their dads growing up, so often they start with the words, ‘we always…’. We always had fish and chips on a Friday night or we always did this on Boxing Day.

I can remember asking a very sophisticated young lawyer about her most precious memories. She recounted that, aged four, she would wait for her father to come home from work. He always sit in the same chair, and the conversation would go like this:

Girl: Daddy, can I sit on your lap?

Dad: Absolutely not. Only girls with black hair can sit on my lap. N

Girl: But Daddy, I have black hair.

Dad: Only girls with black hair and brown eyes can sit on my lap.

Girl: I have black hair and brown eyes.

Dad: Well, only girls with black hair, brown eyes and pink shoes can sit in my lap.

Pretty soon, that girl with a dozen other things her dad described would climb onto her fathers lap and when she was a woman she remembered it.

Number four, is encouragement. If you go on to have more than one child you will probably find that they are chalk and cheese. That’s particularly galling when your first is compliant, as it lures you into having that second child! The second may drive you crazy and all they may hear is negative comments: ‘Don’t hit your sister’, ‘Why don’t you do your homework’. But I say to people, when the ear never hears praise the heart loses the will to try. The wise father will therefore search for something they can say that is positive.

I spoke to a businessman once and asked him to tell me about his family. He said I have three kids. A daughter who is 28, she’s doing a PHD, another girl who is 24 and she’s doing and MBA and a boy of 19. He then proceeded to pick up his knife and fork and started eating. So, I said, what about your boy. He said, well he’s dyslexic, his bedroom is a mess and he doesn’t pay his car parking fines. He needs to toughen up, it’s a hard world out there. Well, I touched this man on the arm and asked him whether or not he could remember the last time he praised that boy for anything. He couldn’t. So I told him, when you go home tonight find something that he does remotely well and praise him for it. It will revolutionise your relationship with him. To his credit, he said he would.

These are the elements that make a father great, and ultimately it will be how we are judged. They are simple things really. Dad was always there for me. He spent quality time with me, consistently. We did fun things together and laughed. He was always a great encourager.

Many men grew up without a present father or their father was abusive, where can we learn how to be great dad?

I wouldn’t underestimate for a moment this experience. In some ways, I didn’t have a great role model as a dad as he never told us he loved us, never hugged us and never praised us. That experience spurred me on to be an even better father. Even now, I tell my kids every day that I love them. My father was a stern disciplinarian, but I wanted to laugh with my kids.

I think we needn’t be limited by our past. The Bible says a lovely thing in Joel 2:25: ‘I will give you back the years that the locusts have eaten’. It doesn’t mean tomorrow is going to be perfect, but it does mean that tomorrow doesn’t always have to be like yesterday. If we have had a bad experience, that may be more difficult but we should look for role models of dads who were great.

There is something in us as fathers that if we follow our heart, will often lead us to be the father we want to be. Do you know what, there are all kinds of ways to bring kids up. I have written almost 30 books on this stuff but I can tell you that when it comes to their own children, there are no experts. None. They are just people trying to get their kids through the best they can.

Talk to other fathers and read books about fathering but know this: Nobody knows their children like you do. So be the kind of father you want to be. That is desperately important. Sure the shackles of the past may be challenging but they need not define you as a father.

The number of men who become depressed in the first year after becoming a dad is double that of the general population. First time dads are particularly vulnerable. What tips do you have for men in that situation?

When a couple have a child it often outs enormous strain on that relationship. You have a new guest in your home who is very demanding. If you had any other guest that demanded to be fed every couple of hours throughout the night, and demanded you cleaned up every time they went to the toilet, and they screamed half the night then you would probably kick them out!

Being a new parent is all-consuming and often we can think, what happened to our marriage. The sexual relationship often takes a total nosedive and you have to have patience with each other during this time. I think some men do feel disenfranchised, they suddenly feel that the mother and baby are very close and bonding and they don’t feel part of it – which isn’t anyone’s fault.

Although it is not always true, often men who write to us say that they find it hard to share their feelings/emotions with other people. We desperately need each other. The fascinating thing about being involved in Care for the Family is that I have come to believe that everything we go through, somebody else has been there. One thing we do is put people together who have been through similar experiences, sometimes traumatic experiences. For example, if someone has lost a child, we put them in contact with someone who lost a child 15 years earlier. I would strongly recommend fathers speak to each other.

What has been the most challenging thing for you as a father?

I think it is knowing how to handle the testing child. Lloyd wasn’t testing in the sense that he was massively rebellious but Kate was so compliant that I think for three or four years we thought we were perfect parents! We wondered what all the fuss was about. For a while we were even giving people advice about where they were going wrong – what a mistake as Lloyd would soon come into the world smoking a cigar! He woke up every day of his young life praying, ‘God help me to drive my mother crazy today’ and every day God answered his prayer.

How do you handle that testing child because I will tell you the problem. All the testing child hears is negative and if you aren’t careful as a father you tick the wrong boxes. It’s easy when they are 14 – you want them to have a tidy room, not to smoke, to do their homework on time and so forth. But that won’t be enough for you when they are 35. If they do all of that aged 35 but actually they are quite arrogant and they are proud and rude, that won’t be enough for you then.

Actually the testing child often has lovely qualities. They walk into a room and just light it up, they have great friendships, they are the first ones to visit their friend when they got knocked off their motorcycle. From very early stages, how do you handle that testing child? Because you are trying to mould them, discipline them, bring boundaries but at the same time you can so easily alienate them from you.

When Lloyd was 14 he said, Dad I don’t believe this now but when I was little I sometimes thought you loved Katie more than me. It wasn’t a surprise. He was always getting into trouble and she, the little sneak I realise now, put some of her trouble on to you. Lloyd and I are very close now.

A huge thank you to Rob Parsons OBE for his valuable time and wisdom.