Hi and welcome to Parent Samurai! I’m Brian Betts, and I represent the Dad perspective of Parent Samurai. There are many voices on the internet and in media sharing their perspectives on raising kids. As those kids become tweens and teens, though, there are fewer and fewer parents and experts sharing advice. And of that small pool, there’s a mere sliver of them bringing the dad experience.
Why are dads underrepresented both as an audience and as a source of parenting information? We fathers, step-fathers and foster fathers (and grandfathers) have a lot to say! So, along with Samurai Mom, I began Parent Samurai to share our experiences, sources and lessons. Our vision is to create content from both a mom and a dad’s perspective to help other parents raising their teens.
In the early days as newly minted (and anxious) parents, we cast a wide net in search of good parenting strategies even before our kids were born. We were surprised that so much of the information we found was contradictory. It seemed as if every expert supported a different parenting strategy. And so many of those authorities disagreed, often vehemently. We could accept that there are differing theories of child-raising. What we didn’t get was why experts often attached blame to parents who didn’t follow “the program”.
So we took out the middleman and read the studies ourselves, forming our own judgment along the way. The best advice we ever got was from that sage Dr. Spock, who put it this way: “You know more than you think.”
‘Nuff said, right? Yet, the world is a different place now, and teens are different, too.
The advancement of technology and the impact of outside influences on our growing teens has made raising them ever more complicated. There are challenges facing our kids today that we never could have conceived of in our own teen experiences. We’re all stronger and better prepared when we can lean on other parents for reinforcement or just a fresh perspective.
There’s no single way to approach the challenges. All parents bring a lot of knowledge from our everyday-world into our parenting. For me, my experiences as a project manager for the last 20 years have helped me improve my ability to communicate, support, motivate, empower and solve complex problems. I work with teams representing diverse perspectives, countries and personalities each day. It’s also helped me to develop an approach where I begin with the end goal in mind and work backward to create a plan to achieve it. I use all of those very same skills to navigate the challenges of parenting teens.
Samurai Mom and I want to raise strong, responsible, compassionate, independent adults. The Bushido code gives us us a flexible framework for raising teens in this shifting, sometimes crazy world. Through the lens of the code, we’ve focused on our core values as parents and as a family.
Our goal is to grow ParentSamurai.com to provide the most helpful resource possible. We support parents navigating the labyrinth of raising tweens and teens. Parenting teens takes GRIT!
You’ve got this!
Thanks for reading,
Brian (a.k.a. Samurai Dad)
