^{Originally published on BabyCenter.com November 5, 2015}

Hockey season has begun, and our son has taken to the ice for the first time. By default, he’s already better on skates than I am, since he’s able to move about ten feet before falling down. This season’s all about learning to skate, which means all the hitting and actual competition can wait.

Hockey is a realm where I have very little experience. I’m a big football fan, and I played soccer, basketball, and baseball at an intramural level in school. But hockey is an area where I’m only passingly familiar with the rules and the idea of hitting a puck around the ice is foreign to me.

Since this is such a new experience for me, and since this is only my second time dealing with the sports-dad scene, I’m learning quite a bit. Here are a few of the basic discoveries I’ve come across so far:

Continue reading “5 Things I Learned as a New Hockey Dad” →

^{Originally published on BabyCenter.com September 23, 2015}

I seem to have fallen over backwards into helping as a coach with my son’s soccer team. As it turns out, you only have to express an interest (or maybe, as in my case, have a brother-in-law who is also coaching) to do this. It’s quite fun, but really weird when parents say, “Hi, Coach.”

Continue reading “Are Boys and Girls Really That Different at Sports?” →

^{Originally published on BabyCenter.com June 13, 2014}

I often have imaginary conversations with my 18-year-old self. The 18-year-old version of me is a kid who is stuck in the worst year of his life, suffering through an abusive relationship, and in a spiral of depression that he is not getting any help for.

He’s also a smartass who thinks he knows everything there is to know about life.

Continue reading “Conversations with My 18-Year-Old Self” →

^{Originally published March 7, 2014 on BabyCenter.com}

Thanks to the Internet, parents have access to a lot more data these days. The problem is that it’s hard for a lot of people to tell the good data from the bad data.

One of the big errors that people make when evaluating reports floated around various blogs and news sites is the mistaking of correlation for causation. I’m pretty sure that most people reading this have heard the phrase, “correlation does not imply causation” at some point. However, I think it’s worth going into again because so few people seem to realize exactly what it means.

Continue reading “Correlation, Causation, and Hope for Less Parental Sanctimony” →

^{Originally published on BabyCenter.com February 22, 2014}

Today marks one full year since I started blogging at BabyCenter. My first official entry was about reading to your kids. Since then, my son has turned two and we’ve added a baby girl to the mix. Reading still remains important, and there’s a lot more I’ve learned over the past year.

Continue reading “Reading to Kids is One of the best Parts of Being a Parent” →

^{Originally published on BabyCenter.com January 24, 2014}

My wife had a singing engagement, so I was left alone with two kids who took turns crying for two and a half hours straight.

Uncontrollable sobbing is a good way to make a parent feel useless, especially in men since we lack the magic boobies that calm infants down. But in the end, it’s not that big a deal.

Continue reading “Dads, it’s Okay if the Baby Cries” →