Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 352 | Fathers Need to Wrestle With Their Kids

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Ep. 352 | Fathers Need to Wrestle With Their Kids · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:04
  What's up, guys? Welcome back to the 5-Minute Fatherhood segment of the Family Teams podcast. Jeff and I are here. We want to talk to you guys about wrestling. All right, so I'm not a wrestler myself, like professionally or anything, but there's interesting research that suggests that it's really important for fathers to engage in rough-and-tumble play with their children
• 0:26
  And this came up in a conversation that we were having online just today where a mother was talking about how her five-year-old is really struggling with any kind of emotional control, is reacting extremely negatively to anything that could appear like a loss or any negative vibe at all in a movie or in a relationship or a situation or a comment even. And so as she was articulating this, I asked a question. I just said, does he wrestle with his dad?
• 0:54
  A lot of people are like, why are you asking that? Well, because this is what has been uncovered. I think it's really important as dads that we understand this, is that a lot of those basic relational dynamics, those ideas of how do I handle resistance? How do I even think about my own body? How do I deal with the surges of emotions and energies coming in and through me?
• 1:20
  So much of that is really created and discovered, and we gain confidence in our ability to handle those things through rough-and-tumble play with our dads or our moms. But we need that experience. Or siblings. Those are really good things. There's something happening with a lot of homes where people may just like –
• 1:42
  try to keep kids separate, maybe because of COVID or whatever, like keep everybody different, like, and nobody's going to touch each other. Kids at this age really need that engagement, especially from their dad, if their dad's in the home. But if their dad's not in the home, the mom, you know, should also engage in that. One of the things that research is suggesting is that dads have a unique ability to sort of, they have the ability to push their kids in a kind of wrestling environment, just a little bit past where they're comfortable and,
• 2:07
  And the kids learn how to kind of handle that kind of resistance or that kind of feeling. And that this is just a really, really good thing for a child to experience. A father is sort of challenging. And fathers tend to be uniquely driven to do this. Now, one of the things that research says is the father has to obviously play at the kid's level and let the child feel like they're winning and feel like they're not actually getting pinned every two seconds and getting bored and frustrated. But it's a real fun play time.
• 2:35
  But it's physical. It's like they're experiencing resistance. They're experiencing negative and positive emotions, like back to back. Like this kind of play is really important. But yeah, Jeff, how have you thought about this one?
• 2:46
  Yeah, 100%, big believer. And yeah, and then the research actually helps it, that there's everything from physical, the amount of physical touch that a kid, a loving physical touch a kid gets is a predictor of like a crazy laundry list of things, higher test scores, job success, mental health, et cetera. Then you add in just like, yeah, the learning aspect of what it does in its actual moment. And I think, yeah, I think I heard another person say that basically like wrestling and kind of roughhousing with your kids is like their first classroom, right? They're learning so much on...
• 3:14
  reading on quickness, on speed, their brain, on dynamics, on boundaries, on communication, like so much. It's crazy. You know what I mean? And that's what you see, you know, because we have a bunch of rough houses that ends up in someone crying or whatever. So it's like, okay, well, tell them when you don't like that anymore. Tell them when, you know, tell me when it's too much or when someone says, no, you need to let go or, you know, there's so much, so much there. And so I would just say, yeah, it actually is one of the best, best ways to show kind of a myriad of things.