One of my goals as a parent is to make sure the kids aren’t bothered too much by what other people say. I don’t think it’s healthy to let your emotions be ruled by other people.<\/p>\n
Take, for example, the word “fat.” A lot of people think it’s a dirty word. Call them fat and they immediately burst into anger, outrage, or a deep depression. That gives the word too much power, in my opinion. I much prefer being able to laugh it off.<\/p>\n
So, I’ve explained to the kids that it’s not nice to call people fat, particularly strangers or anyone who might be feeling a bad about their weight. “But,” I added. “It’s okay to call me fat. I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me. In fact, I think it’s pretty funny to joke about it.” <\/p>\n
Flash forward to two weekends ago. I’d been feeling inordinately tired all week. When Saturday came, and my wife and oldest headed out to a birthday party, I made an attempt to take a nap.<\/p>\n
“Hey big guy,” I said to my youngest. “Daddy’s really tired. Want to watch a movie while I take a nap on the couch?”<\/p>\n
“A nap?” he asked.<\/p>\n
“Yeah, I don’t know why I’ve been so tired lately, but I’ve been really sleepy.”<\/p>\n
He looked at me very seriously, his brown eyes big and round. “It’s ’cause you’re too fat, Daddy. That’s why.”<\/p>\n
Hmph.<\/p>\n
So much for that lesson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of my goals as a parent is to make sure the kids aren’t bothered too much by what other people say. I don’t think it’s healthy to let your emotions be ruled by other people. Take, for example, the word “fat.” A lot of people think it’s a dirty word. Call them fat and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[122,120,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-embarassing","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6DpYi-fat","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}