The Perils Of Strict Parenting

Dadpack Newsletter, Volume II

Dear Dads,

Welcome to our second newsletter, the "terrible twos" but with fewer tantrums and more fully formed sentences. This week we're packing up the Halloween decorations for the year, polishing off our kids' candy stashes, and cozying up for the holiday season.

So while you sip on a cup of tea, a hot toddy, or whatever warm beverage of your choice, we will be interrogating strict parenting tactics, highlighting the benefits of wearable tech, and more.

For starters, a growing amount of research shows that raising your voice with kids can lead to anxiety, depression and other mental health issues later in life. At the same time, parenting is hard and sometimes it's going to piss you off.

So what we want to know from you is, how to you avoid losing your shit? Whether it's taking a walk, working out, or finally using that meditation app you downloaded back in quarantine, sharing is caring. And when it comes to keeping your cool in heated moments, it helps to borrow tools from each other. It's just that these ones aren't stored in the garage.

Until next week, keep calm and dad on. Why? Because we said so.

This week from Dadpack:

• The Perils Of Strict Parenting: You don't get any points for being a dick, but you may get a depressed kid.

• Changing Gears: Can wearable tech finally get men to go to the doctor? Experts are hopeful that it might.

• An Ode To Halloween Dads: Your commitment to the art of spooky season never ceases to impress.

• Grounding Your Kid From Studying: A frustrated father of a teenage girl implodes on Reddit when he can't figure out a way to discipline his daughter. Spoiler: he's wrong.

• Nick Kroll Is A New Dad: But don't ask to see a picture of his baby. He's still got plenty of personal anecdotes up his sleeves, but he's not going to show you his kid.

Who Needs A Strict Parent?

Strict parenting used to be a point of pride for most moms and dads. For those of us who were raised in the 1980s or earlier, phrases like “spare the rod, spoil the child” were said in earnest, and implied that unless kids were harshly punished, they would grow up to be jerks.

Unfortunately, all this accomplished was raising a bunch of depressed adults. New research suggests that harsh parenting can change children on a molecular level and put them at a greater risk for depression later in life – which affects approximately 9.5 percent of Americans.

So... that’s what your problem is.

“We discovered that perceived harsh parenting, with physical punishment and psychological manipulation, can introduce an additional set of instructions on how a gene is read to become hard-wired into DNA,” Evelien Van Assche, a psychiatrist and researcher who conducted the study, said in a press release. “We have some indications that these changes themselves can predispose the growing child to depression. This does not happen to the same extent if the children have had a supportive upbringing.”

Van Assche and her team presented their data at the 35th European College of Neuropsychopharmacology annual conference, and found that when children experience physical punishment, excessive strictness and manipulative behavior, it increased the range of methylation in their DNA.

First, a quick sidebar in genetics: Methylation is not Walter White slang for starting a “home lab,” but what happens when a small chemical molecule is added to the DNA, and consequently, changes how your DNA is read. For instance, the amount of enzyme produced from a gene is a result of methylation. More importantly, the degree to which methylation varies has been linked with depression, which is why an increased range of methylation is very bad.

Van Assche noted that this correlation needs to be confirmed with additional studies and larger samples, and speculates that methylation may be a response to childhood stress in general, rather than hot-head dads specifically.

“In this study we investigated the role of harsh parenting, but it’s likely that any significant stress will lead to such changes in DNA methylation,” she added. “So in general, stresses in childhood may lead to a general tendency to depression in later life by altering the way your DNA is read.

In other words, childhood shouldn’t be stressful. Sure, you’re only human and every parent has bad days, but overall, harsh discipline is a dumb thing to use on a kid – no matter what grandma and grandpa say.

So find better ways to deal with your stress without putting it on your kid. Think less time outs and yelling, and more deep breaths and letting little things go. Then they might grow up to be happier than you are.

For more on how to breathe better:

Make Men's Health Fun Again

At this point it seems cliché, but it's true. Everyone knows men hate going to the doctor almost as much as they hate asking for directions. And if they have to ask for directions on their way to the doctor? You may as well go back to bed because the day is over.

But according to physician Dr. Frank Lipman, the rise of Fitbits, Oura Rings and other wearable technology are doing what their nagging spouses never could: getting men proactive in their health.

“A lot of guys are learning that they can do a lot of health testing at home, use wearables, and do things in order to perform better,” Lipman told Fatherly. Tracking their workouts, sleep, exercise and diets have given guys something to talk about and one-up each other over, while motivating them to take better care of themselves.

“Men generally are more competitive, so if that can be spun in a positive way, then they will take more notice. Being able to measure these things at home and compare it to their friends is a positive,” Lipman said.

As a fan of wearables, clinical psychologist Alexander Alvarado agrees. He personally uses the WHOOP, a lightweight wrist band that combines sleep and exercise tracking with journaling.

“Then at the end of each month, provide you with a report on how your behaviors affect your emotions, sleep patterns, and exercise,” Alvarado told Dadpack. Through this, he has discovered that if he has even one alcoholic drink, “I do not receive adequate REM or deep sleep and it affects my functioning the next day.”

He also recommends wearables to his therapy clients at the Thriving Center of Psychology, mostly to track their emotions and progress. And although Alvarado cannot recall a time when his WHOOP motivated him in to see the doctor, he has noticed that when his respiratory rate is higher than normal, it’s usually a good indicator he’s getting sick.

That said, if your wearables convince you to dabble in preventative medicine, Lipman recommends asking for an advanced lipid panel to look at how big your cholesterol molecules are, which is an indicator of inflammation. “It’s a much more extensive test that gives us much more information about heart disease and inflammation than regular tests,” he said.

You don’t have to love going to the doctor, but if you like your body even a little bit, do as Beyoncé says, and put a ring on it — or wristband.

Best Halloween Dads Of 2022

Life is a competition and Halloween is no exception. At least that was the logic of dads who go overboard with their decorations, costumes, and procure dry-ice to make witches brew. But as Simon Holland pointed out on Twitter, sometimes this escalates to dads handing out ribs to trick-or-treaters.

Holland is probably joking — or maybe he’s not, it’s kind of a genius bit if he is serious. But all kidding aside, one Twitter user @beautyfiendblog commented that there was a Ramen house in their neighborhood. So anything is possible, and anything is better than candy corn.

The point is, Halloween is a holiday for dads to go hard, and 2022 was no exception. Here are some of the most intense dads of the season.

Monster Dad: Iowa-based dad Greg Dietzenbach's costume went the extra mile this year and transformed his house and himself into a monster simultaneously. We give you MonstDOOR, the fuzzy purple monster that comes to life just to startle children. And indeed, it is a graveyard smash.

Hobbit Crocs Dad: Cartoonist and rad dad Tom Fowler shared a game-changing hack for adding hobbit feet to your costume: socks over crocs plus paint and viola! Big creepy feet for Halloweens yet to come.

An Animatronic Family: Cameron Gutmann and his dad Steve, a father-son duo based out of Queens, New York, have about 100 visitors at their massive Halloween display. They feature well known characters like Krampus the Christmas demon and Beetlejuice, along with a new animatronic skeleton that extends up to 9 feet tall named Mr. Dark. He's a Scorpio whose favorite hobby is scaring the neighborhood dogs.

App Dad: Even if you don’t live near Queens, rest assured you can find the best Halloween decorations in your area — all thanks to Philly-based dad Michael Kane and his new app FrightMaps. And if you find a cool new “haunt," you can upload a picture to the app and share the Halloween spirit with the rest of the neighborhood... and maybe scare someone too.

Am I The Asshole? The Dad Edition

Earlier this month, a frustrated father posted in the Reddit group r/AmItheAsshole looking for advice about his “extremely rude” teenage daughter who is seemingly immune to punishment. Unlike his other kids, anytime he tries to take her phone away, it wouldn't upset her because she loves school and that meant she could study more.

And then he took away her studying privileges.

To be fair, when an unruly kid is that unflappable in the face of lost privileges, it's a true power move and that can lead to a power struggle. That alone is funny in a relatable way. But this guy could not have handled the situation in a worse way is not just an asshole. He’s the asshole.

Parting Paternalism From Nick Kroll

Joining the ranks of older comedy dads like Bill Burr, Nick Kroll recently did an interview with The Cut about becoming a new dad in his forties. But unlike his Oh, Hello co-star and fellow new dad, John Mulaney, you won’t be seeing pictures of his kid on Instagram. For now, he doesn't plan to share his family life the same way he's shared his adolescent life on the Netflix series Big Mouth.

Now that he's a parent, privacy is Kroll's ultimate priority. Or as he puts it, “I’ll tell you all day about shitting my pants, but you’re never gonna see a picture of my child.”

And that is a pretty good response for any of us to use to when people ask why you don’t post your kid all over the internet. No further questions.