Category: relationships


REG AND REG  This article is by my sister, Jennifer R. Owens – she  writes  on her blog at Life of JennRene and she  does a really  good job writing, is a writing coach, and  a social worker in the field who has worked with lots of families. Sometimes I  share with her I wish she were here, in Rochester, N.Y so we could work together. One of the best things I have witnessed in my lifetime  and  in my   family is my brother and my nephew, Reg & Reg – working together in the field  of  counseling and advice for men and fathers. I had a chance last year when I visited Rochester, to sit in one of their fatherhood  groups. I had never  witnessed them working together, and I tell you … it was amazing to see and hear their input, firsthand. It’s funny, I have to tell you, I never thought my nephew (Lil Reg – we call ’em) – would go into the field of social work or counseling of men.  I just thought “football” would forever be his life!   Reg LOVES football more than anything else, so when he spoke about  goals  and pursuing them in life, I never heard him even slightly talk about  doing this kind of work. One of the things I have been to my brother Reg, and I am sure he won’t mind I say this, is a “sister coach” of sorts, I have always  mentioned  to him, when things were not so  positive in the past with his kids – to “keep reaching out”…  and I and delighted to say, Reg has done just that. As he  works on his business with The Fatherhood Connection, I see  the program growing and helping men find broken pieces of their lives and find understanding.  I love most of all, they find ANSWERS.

I am the creative mind behind Reggie’s blog  and help him with social media, and  last year when I was home in Rochester, I spent time in a group for the men.  I was in the audience on the floor, videotaping and… my brother putting me on the spot. He asked the impact that having  a father who was an alcoholic in my life growing up had on me. I  began to just share with the men in the group my thoughts and insight about this, and I share also on the blog.(http://www.jennrene.com/2011/06/power-of-making-amends/)

As I spoke, I  shared  with the men and I saw something I never saw before in a large group setting. I saw men in front of me, with sincere looks of   concern, and   I heard  stories of where the neglect  we experienced by my father early on came from. I was able to see fathers holding on, being strong for daughters and telling stories of how they reach out to their daughters,  and will do even more, because of what they heard me tell about my relationship  with my father, when young. I heard fathers say they will continue to “cover” their daughters,  when there are no men in their lives, and I heard stories of how fathers love their daughters and want more, and will do more because  they desire  her to be happy in her future. I was also able to see on a larger scale the effects father hunger has on women. I had never really considered  this in-depth while at the same time mentoring fathers of this pain and seeing the expressions on their faces in having them know just how important it really is, helped me to  desire to DO MORE for women in terms of bringing families together. In this group, in particular,  I found a greater passion for the women I serve in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I shared stories of these women who have  not had fathers in their lives — where they end up. Hopefully,  my  words helped someone in that group, and hopefully, my cause will be greater, because of my pain and my hurt when young. Hopefully, fathers will change their lives because of those words shared in the room, that day. When I observe my nephew’s future and  I  observe also the reconciliation between father and son, between my brother and his son, I  become emotional; yet grateful.  I also  I become confident and hopeful about my nephew’s future. Reggie ( Jr.)  will have  a more positive relationship with his children and his  wife, because  of what he has witnessed in terms of my family’s healing, and  for that, I am thankful. This didn’t come about easy,  it has  taken a  long time, and a lot of prayer, and a lot of communication and re-building — even when family members didn’t want to, and were hurt because of it. Yet when I look at the next generation, they will have HOPE, because we are taking  care of what we needed to , first.

So …build on…. fathers, build on… Selah.

-By JennRene Owens –  Blogger at Life Of JennRene JennRene ( a.k.a Jennifer Owens) is from Rochester, NY and currently resides in Tulsa Oklahoma.  Jennifer has been in the social work field for  over twenty three years and loves to help change minds and hearts for whole -hearted living.  Jennifer is  an  author and published  “Red Sea Situations: Finding Courage in  The Deep Seas of Life,”  last summer. Her blog Red Sea Courage can be found at http://www.redseacourage.wordpress.com and she has a compassion  to serve the underserved, the oppressed and those who long to find their voices.  JennRene also has a  gift for encouraging  people to  write books and is a life coach.   Once again, it’s all about finding voice

In the movie, Big Daddy, Adam Sandler plays a dad in this movie called “Big daddy”. He tells his father and the judge why he deserves custody and he really is a “good father”. He really defeats fear… and says: “Don’t be scared.” The things we do for our kids as fathers, must not be done in fear.

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Apparently his words have an impact, and we love this clip, and thought you would too.

What Makes a Good Father?

By: Shawn Donovan
 

Anyone can have children, but not anyone can be a father. So before you claim that “World’s Greatest Dad” mug, take a look at some of the criteria that illustrate how to be a good father.

Sharing time. You can’t be a father if you’re not around, let alone try to be a good father. Spending time with your children and being involved in their lives is imperative to being a good dad. You only get a few years to make a lifelong impression on your child. Don’t miss those moments because work or other interests seem more important.
Being a role model. As their father, your children naturally look up to you. They think of you as their superhero. While you may not be able to leap over buildings in a single bound, children are equally impressed by the simple things you do. Children will emulate your behavior. If you’re rude to a waitress, they’ll think it’s okay to be rude to waitresses. If you treat others with honesty and respect, your kids will do the same. It’s important that you lead by example, not by, “Do as I say, not what I do.” Always be mindful of what your children see, because you’ll see the same behavior down the road.
Being honest. How are you going to expect honesty from your children if you’re not honest with them? When your kids ask tough questions, you need to respond with open, but age-appropriate, answers. You may not want to talk about smoking pot in college or how you ran up a huge credit card debt, but you’re not doing your kids any favors if you lie to them. Tell them the truth and tell them what you learned from the experience. Tell your kids what you did wrong, and you may keep them from making the same mistakes.
Be loving, yet stern. It’s important that your children feel loved. That goes without question. But a father should never be a child’s friend. Loving your children means grounding them, withholding allowance when chores aren’t finished and saying no to things they really want. You are the authority figure in their life. If you’re too much of a pushover, your children will grow up lacking discipline. On the other hand, if you push them too hard, they may end up resenting you. A good father should know how to straddle this delicate line.

Resource:  www.wingclips.com

As you can see, I am very serious about what I speak, so excuse my expressions, but please hear the message!

Two more styles are: the Authoritarian and the Permissive Styles of Parenting

Authoritarian tends to be:
Fear-Based Parenting
Parent is Demanding
Parent is Resistant

Permissive tends to be:
Parent Wants to be ‘Friend’ vs. Disciplinarian
Parent Desires Child to Feel Comfortable
Child/Youth Has NO Accountability

We are our Brother’s keeper! Ask Nathan McCall. He has a great book out called makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Man Black in America. It will make you understand several plights of the African American Male. Examining the complexities of the problems of black youths from an insider’s perspective, an African-American journalist recalls his own troubled childhood, his rehabilitation while in prison, and his successful Washington Post career.

nathan mccall

Nathan McCall  is an African-American author who grew up in the Cavalier Manor section of Portsmouth, Virginia.

As the stepson of a Navy man, McCall also grew up in various locations, such as Morocco and  Norfolk, Virginia. After serving three years in prison, he studied journalism at Norfolk State University. He reported for the Virginian Pilot-Ledger Star and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution before moving to The Washington Post In 1989. He has dedicated his career to improving race relations in the United States.

In his first bookMakes Me Wanna Holler, McCall provides a detailed story of his life and the hardships he experienced growing up with racial profiling, class differences and peer pressure.

His second bookWhat’s Going On, used personal essays to discuss some larger issues such as social, cultural, and political tensions that affect the modern day United States.

After the success of his books, McCall was in demand as a speaker. He left The Washington Post for the lecture circuit. Today he continues to write, and holds the post of lecturer in the Department of African-American Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

His first novel Them: A Novel, dealing with issues of gentrification in an Atlanta neighborhood, was published in 2007. Them tells the story of Barlowe Reed, a single, forty-something African-American man, who has to come to terms with the gentrification of his neighborhood, in particular the influx of white people to the area.

Find out more about Nathan at http://www.nathanmccall.net

 Source: wikipedia

By Susan Scutti

In her 1992 bookWomen and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life, Victoria Secunda concluded that a number of men and women grow up with a “remote and aloof father.” Those women who do not feel affirmed by their fathers develop a tendency, then, to respond to the men in their lives as they once responded to their elusive father: they desperately seek intimacy but are unable to believe that men can be trusted and so they remain always on guard.

Fathers, then, have a profound impact on their daughters’ lives. Yet many women, because of separation or discomfort, are unable to fully explore their relationship with their fathers and spend instead much more of their time examining their mother-daughter bond. Clearly, though, to fully develop her life and her self, a daughter needs to consider her relationship with dad. Understanding how that essential bond has shaped her, she can then face the challenge of accepting her life (and her father) and get on with the general business of becoming the woman she wants to be.

Easier said than done? Maybe. Two recent studies might help you better understand this process.

Empowerment

In a study published within the past year, researchers examined whether the quality of the father-daughter relationship is related to a daughter’s stress response. Specifically, the researchers measured activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis as well as activity in the autonomic nervous system among daughters considered to be emerging adults.

Physiologists define stress as how the body reacts to a real or imagined stimulus that causes a reaction of alarm, resistance, and then exhaustion. This three-stage reaction is defined as the general adaptation syndrome (GAS). The HPA axis, a major part of the neuroendocrine system, is the mechanism for interactions among glands, hormones, and parts of the midbrain that mediate GAS, in addition to many other body processes, including digestion, the immune system, mood and emotions, sexuality, and energy storage and expenditure. When measuring activity in the HPA axis, then, the researchers were trying to discover the actual physical levels of stress and not just a reported level of stress, which might be either underestimated or exaggerated, depending on an individual woman.

The researchers divided the young women participating in the study into two groups: one group of women who reported their father-daughter relationships as characterized by rejection, chaos, and coercion, and another group of young women who reported their father-daughter relationships as characterized by warmth, autonomy, support, and structure. The researchers found that the first group had lower morning cortisol levels than the second, and they were temperamentally more sensitive to emotional changes. They also discovered the young women of the second group showed lower pretask cortisol levels and relatively weak cortisol responses to a discussion of problems with a friend in comparison to the women of the first group (rejection, chaos, and coercion). Among these women, pretask cortisol levels were elevated as were their cortisol levels in response to a problem discussion with a friend. Interestingly, they were also more likely to self-disclose their psychosocial stressors.

The researchers concluded that their findings suggest father-daughter interactions potentially influence a woman’s social cognition and her HPA reactivity to important stressors.

Yet, this was not the only measure taken by the researchers. They also examined the autonomic nervous system (ANS) of these two groups of women. The ANS functions for the most part below the level of consciousness and controls visceral functions: heart rate, digestion, respiratory rate, salivation, perspiration, pupillary dilation, micturition (urination), and sexual arousal. Most autonomous functions are involuntary, though some work with some degree of conscious control. Surprisingly, the researchers observed no differences between the two groups of young women and their ANS levels.

This result seems to suggest our deepest, or at least our most unconscious, level of functioning in the world is unaffected by our relationship with our fathers. Do women have more independence from their fathers’ opinions and therefore a greater abilty to shape our lives than purely psychological studies suggest? Another, very different study might shed light on this issue.

Perception Management

The purpose of another recent study was to examine three areas of father-daughter relationships — engagement, accessibility, and responsibility — within the context of daughters’ self-esteem, life satisfaction, and psychological distress. The researchers defined engagement as a father’s direct interaction with his child, accessibility as his physical or psychological availability, and responsibility as his provision for the care of the child (as distinct from performance of care). Each of these types of involvement directly relate to a child’s well-being, the researchers posited having reviewed literature on the subject. “What is important to the children in the long run and what most heavily affects children’s current and future behavior is the long term parent ‘residue’ within the children that is encapsulated within the children’s retrospective perceptions of their parents,” the authors wrote.

What is unique about this study, then, is that it is all about a daughter’s perception of her father’s involvement and not the facts of his involvement.

For the study, the researcher recruited female participants from general education classes at a public university in the western U.S. All participants were single females between the ages of 18 and 21 and the mean age for the participants’ fathers was 50.9. The students completed a 10-minute questionnaire during class time.

Overall, results supported the prediction that the retrospective perceptions of a father’s involvement have a moderately strong positive relationship with the self-esteem of emerging adult daughters. When emerging adult daughters’ retrospective perceptions of overall father involvement during adolescence are higher, the self-esteem of daughters is also higher. Additionally, there was a positive relationship between perceived levels of father involvement and the life satisfaction level of their daughters.

Yet, the researchers also addressed another component of psychological well-being in their study: psychological distress. In keeping with past studies, the researchers hypothesized that a negative relationship existed between psychological distress and perceptions of a father’s involvement. Contrary to what was expected, a negative correlation between perceptions of father involvement and the psychological distress of daughters existed, but it was statistically insignificant. Ultimately, the authors conclude that retrospective perceptions of nurturing fathering and expressive types of father involvement during adolescence might have strong relationships with self-esteem and life satisfaction of daughters in their young adult years.

Because these findings revolve around relationship perception and impact on a specific time of life, two things should be considered. First, since the actual accuracy of the father’s behavior does not matter and it is only a daughter’s perception that is significant, might optimistic daughters — those who see the possibly distant father as loving enough — be more inclined toward life satisfaction? If so, maybe we should all strive to see our fathers in as forgiving and positive a light as possible. Secondly, this study concerns a very specific period in a woman’s life. Perhaps over time, even those women with absent or truly unloving fathers find satisfaction in their lives as well and maybe even find an advantage in how their fathers shaped their lives.

Sources: Allgood SM, Beckert TE, Peterson C. The Role of Father Involvement in the Perceived Psychological Well-Being of Young Adult Daughters: A Retrospective Study.North American Journal of Psychology. 2012.

Byrd-Craven J, Auer BJ, Granger DA, Massey AR. The father-daughter dance: the relationship between father-daughter relationship quality and daughters’ stress response.Journal of Family Psychology. 2012.

Scheffler TS, Naus PJ. The relationship between fatherly affirmation and a woman’s self-esteem, fear of intimacy, comfort with womanhood and comfort with sexuality. The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality. 1999.

Victoria Secunda addresses relationships with women and their fathers.

Victoria Secunda addresses relationships with women and their fathers.

SOURCE: Medical Daily. Click here. June 12, 2013

Men’s Fellowship of Mount Olivet Baptist Church

Invites You to a special forum on Fatherhood in Rochester, NY

Moderator
Thabiti Boone… White House Champion of Change

 

President Obama’s Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative

Guest Panelist: Pastor Reginald Cox

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Fatherhood Initiative Coordinator, Monroe County, NY
Andre Harper
Action for a Better Community (ABC)
Angel Alicea
IBERO American Action League
Chief James Sheppard
Chief of Police, Rochester, NY
Mitchell Harris
Author of “Building a Black House”
Mt Olivet Baptist Church September 7, 2013 at 4 –6 pm
141 Adams St Rochester, NY 14608

It’s never too late, fathers… to connect.

1. Poverty
2. Education
3. Substance Abuse
4. Incarceration
5. Teenage Pregnancy
6. Emotional and Physical Safety

Children Need Their Fathers. They also need their mothers. How can one replace the loss of a father when there is such Father Hunger? There are consequences from absent fatherhood. Some of these are complications that happen after a father is absent in the home, and some are absent even when mothers are not present.  Wouldn’t it be GREAT if we took the time to parent and notice the needs of our children in all areas of their lives.

One of the areas here that stands out the most, is that of emotional and  physical safety. I was reading an article recently for couples and found that an area that stands out  for their relationship to be secure is these three things:

A.  The first, is ACCEPTANCE .   The more accepted and valued by your partner you feel, the more you are in the safe zone emotionally because your sense of self is intact. However, if you feel that your partner believes something negative about you, your sense of self may suffer and you will feel emotionally unsafe.

B. GOOD ESTEEM-  This IS WHEN YOU FEEL LIKE: ” (I am OK).”  If you feel that you are lovable and adequate, your self-esteem will generally be pretty high and you will feel entitled to receiving love and care in your relationship. If you don’t feel like you are okay, it breeds to a lack of closeness and  conflict.

C. And thirdly.  one needs SECURITY. Security is about  means that “there are no threats to how loved and cared for, “and you feel safe with those you are in current relationships with.

Reference for Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2149700

The Fatherhood Connection recently graduated a group of men who were committed to being fathers and had a great time fellowshipping as a group of men! We are proud of the men who graduated and proud of their commitment as  well!

We thank the men for coming out and participating and be committed to this group and this type of sharing !

 

Your teen still needs you more than ever

Although it may seem like your teen doesn’t need you anymore, children at this age actually need their parents more than ever. And although it may seem like he isn’t listening to what you say, teens do consider their parents’ actions, opinions and values when making decisions for themselves. Life gets busier as children get older, and your teen probably spends most of his time outside of school with friends or talking to friends. Although these friendships are important, it is also important to talk and listen to your teen and spend time together as a family.

How to build a good relationship with your teen

  • Be actively interested in your teen’s life. Even though your child no longer needs you to arrange her get-togethers with friends, you should still know who her friends are and make an effort to meet their parents. Your teen may be responsible, but you should still know where she is, what she is doing, and who she is with.
  • Talk with your teen, not at him. Try to avoid arguing with your teen, because as both of you get more emotional, you will be less likely to listen to the other person and more likely to say something you don’t mean. If you need to, take a time out from the conversation and come back to it when you both are calm. Try to listen to your teen’s emotions and his point of view. Remember that things have changed from when you were a teen.
  • Share things with your teen. Your teen is old enough to understand what is going on in the world around her. Take your teen to work with you for a day to see what the real world is like. Talk to her about what she thinks she might want to do after high school and encourage her to explore this by taking on an after school job. Let your child know of stressful circumstances, such as if things are tight financially for your family right now. Children see and hear more than we think. Discuss things in the news with your teen.
  • Schedule in family time. Make sure to schedule some one-on-one time with your teen. Although everyone has busy schedules, take advantage of the short times you have his undivided attention, such as when you both are in the car together, to ask him about school or friends. Even though your teen may be too old for a bedtime story, take a few minutes to sit in his room when you go in to say goodnight and talk about things. Family dinners are important, even when your child is a teenager, so try to make sure you eat together as often as possible, and away from the television! Find an activity that you both can enjoy together, from going to the gym to watching the news together for a half hour every night.

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