Am I alone or have you also struggled with balancing your roles as disciplinarian, parent and friend to your children? Sometimes when my kids misbehave, I’m too easy with the punishment. At other times my frustration gets the best of me and I react too harshly. Unfortunately, neither of these methods encourages my children to succeed and do better the next time. My hope and desire is that I would be an encouraging and consistent guide that would help my child understand and learn from their mistakes.

Since we are in the midst of the NBA playoffs (go Nuggets!), below are some thoughts on discipline and team sports from one of the quiet giants of fatherwork, Mark Perlman. Mark is the creator of The Nurturing Fathers Program, a fatherhood curriculum used nationwide to help men be the kind of dads their kids need them to be. He believes, and I agree, that a great way for dads to consider discipline is to compare it to sports, where working together as a team and abiding by the rules is essential to achieving success.

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One of the more entertaining moments of my parenting experience has been helping my children learn to ride a bike. Although each of them took to two wheels in their own unique way, my assistance always involved the dilemma of when and how to let go, when to hold them up and when to let them fall. One child would get mad at me for holding on, another hardly needed help at all. One would yell at me for giving intentionally vague answers to her repeated queries to whether I was holding on or not, and one will never let me forget that I steered him right into a bush! By the fourth child I was ready to search the yellow pages for Riders Training Classes!

The transition to young adulthood is never quite the same for everyone and parents often live with a subtle terror as they experiment with how much freedom and control to let their children have.

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Years ago psychologists at Stanford University found that kids who were able to hold off eating a marshmallow did better in school and in life. Children were presented with a simple but enticing dilemma – you can have one marshmallow now or if you wait (in this sterile room alone with the marshmallow) for fifteen minutes you can have two marshmallows. After conducting the original experiment, psychologists followed these children for 18 years and discovered that the ability to wait for the second marshmallow was an amazingly strong predictor of their success in school, their adjustment, their happiness, even their popularity.

Dr. David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and the Family is a big fan of the original marshmallow test research, and wrote about it in his book, No: Why Kids--of All Ages--Need to Hear It and Ways Parents Can Say It. Check out this humorous and insightful recreation of the “Marshmallow Study” with Dr. Walsh and some children on You Tube.

The marshmallow test is about kids developing self-discipline, which is the focus of Walsh’s latest book and the community conversation he is promoting, “Say Yes to No.”

In a society that seems to focus on immediate gratification it is important for dads and moms to help their children develop self-discipline.

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Since the launch of the Colorado Dads Web site, our Watercooler Blog has served as a place where fathers and fatherhood practitioners could post their views of fatherhood and family. To make this section more interactive, we launched a blog entry contest. Dads were asked to submit their answer to the question: “What does being a dad mean to you?”

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Follow this You Tube link for the teaser trailer of the upcoming feature documentary  "The Evolution of Dad." Visit www.evolutionofdad.com for more info on the project. Great Stuff!

Boston Celtics’ past and current legends, Bill Russell and Kevin Garnett talk basketball . . . follow this link for the an NBA TV clip of their interview. Listen for Bill’s slamdunk wisdom about family and parenting at the end of the interview.

“The first thing that I knew as a human being was that my mother and father loved me. And That’s what you got to give your kids. And in doing that it will enhance your life so much.”

. . . child development? According to a report presented yesterday (May 4) at the Pediatric Academic Societies' meeting in Honolulu, one-third of parents of babies have a surprisingly low knowledge of child development, including basic concepts about what their children should know or how they should act.

Dr. Heather Paradis and colleagues at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York analyzed parenting know-how based on a national sample of parents representing more than 10,000 9-month-old babies. These parents completed an 11-question survey designed to see which parents were well prepared and which were not. The survey asked questions like, "Should a 1-year-old child be able to tell between right from wrong?" and "Should a 1-year-old child be ready to begin toilet-training?"*  Parents who got four or fewer correct answers were considered to have low parenting knowledge.

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After a false start the Rockies are 1 – 0 . . . "Rocktober" is just around the corner! I never was much of a baseball player but some of my best memories with dad are playing catch in the backyard. You don’t have to be a baseball player or even a fan to appreciate the movie Field of Dreams or learn something from the game of baseball. One of my favorite books on fathering is a simple 100 or so page paperback by Jack Petrash called Covering Home: Lessons on the art of fathering from the game of baseball.

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Who do you turn to when you need parenting advice?

The best place to turn, of course, is to the people who know you and your situation best, family, friends, church members etc. But sometimes that just isn’t possible. We live in a time when there are a seemingly unlimited number of books, magazines and websites about parenting but that can be a challenge to sort through because of the overwhelming number of choices and expert opinions.

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Using the Internet for homework, entertainment, and connecting with others is becoming more and more of a given for many families.

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