So, You Want to Get Married and Have Kids? (Part 3 of 3)

Getting Married and Having Kids series really talks about building a strong marriage foundation (Part 1),  baptism into fatherhood (Part 2) and  fatherly decisions (Part 3, this post).

My mentors have taught me that there are three basic decisions that a father needs to make:

• The decision to provide for the family
• The decision to protect the family
• The decision to be a moral beacon for the family

Providing for the family

Filipino culture, and almost every culture, vests the responsibility for providing for the material needs of the family on the father. These material needs primarily refers to food, clothing and shelter. Higher needs would include education and recreation.

The decision to provide for the family frightens many men. I know of not a few who delay marriage because of this fear. Success in this decision is the dream of all fathers, if not for the love, then at least for the pride of it. Pride or sense of affirmation is important to men. Yet time is also running.

The questions would be:

• How much money do you want in the bank?
• Are you willing to do what it takes to reach this goal?
• What is your time frame?

Whether we like it or not, whatever we do, as men, is also our legacy to our children. Children who follow the footsteps of their parents are fairly common. This sometimes happens even if they dislike the parent.

So, in whatever occupation we do to provide for our family, the basic question would be:

• Is this a legacy you want your children to carry on? 
• If yes, good.
• If not, where can you make a change today? 

This change, whatever this might be, does not need to be drastic. It simply has to be one doable step that you can do today that points you to the direction that you want. You would want to follow this up with another step tomorrow. But you can worry about that step tomorrow. Just make this step today.

Protecting the family

This task is carried out in many dimensions. Physical protection has something to do with the physical health of each person in the family. This can mean buying insect repellants and pest killers to buying health insurances for each one. But this can also mean talking one-on-one with the boyfriend of your daughter who got drunk one night, couldn't drive, and your daughter has to take a taxi to go home.

What steps have you done in this area?

Protecting the family also happens in the emotional dimension. In Part 1 of this series I recommended The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman. We can protect our loved ones from emotional pain by knowing their love languages and observing what makes them loved and where their vulnerabilities to pain are.

For example, your wife or your child may have the love language of quality time. How do you protect them from emotional pain in the midst of your busy schedule? One suggestion is to treat them like clients that you have to put into your own calendar. Otherwise, their vulnerability can make them think you are ignoring them, and therefore not loving them.

Have you read that book?

Lastly, protecting the family can happen in the mental dimension. Many professional say that "experiences between birth and age 5 matter significantly to children's long-term emotional and psychological health." Thus, being active in family affairs, most especially in the early years of a child, is something we cannot take for granted.

In our case, just to share with you, protecting our kids in the mental arena has involved turning off the TV and showing them pre-selected VCDs and DVDs instead. There's just no telling what our friends behind the screen can cook up the next moment, and they are not necessarily good for our children's perception of what's right and what's wrong.

Another little way we can protect our loved ones in the mental plane is to teach them about money. Please check my cute post that discusses why we should teach saving money and compound interest to our kids.

Most often, it's only a matter of how you spend time at home, without touching the time you need to be at work.

Becoming a moral beacon

This is the part that is very personal, because this is the part that has something to do with you, or with me, as a person. What sort of a person are we? If everybody follows what we do, will the world become a better place to live in?

Once upon a time we were restless kids doing everything we like to do. We made mistakes and called them adventure. We hurt some people and called them spices of life. We messed up people's lives and called it experience. Then we saluted people with lots of experience!

I have talked to a friend one day. I have known him to be a very carefree person. His attitudes about life changed for the better the day he had a child with his girlfriend, whom he married later. They are now living happily ever after. That "change" has been his moment of decision.

I knew that he was speaking truth when, in our last conversation, we talked about homeschooling and Waldorf and about getting involved in our children's young education.

Some of us, men, do this early. Some of us do this late. Some of us do this deliberately, while some of us do this as a matter of course. But either way, we realize that who we are, as a person, matters in our roles as husbands and fathers.


May you live a great life with your wife and kids!


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• So, You Want to Get Married and Have Kids? (Part 1 of 3)
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