Today I turn 40.

My thirties was worlds better than my twenties, but to be fair to myself, I spent most of my twenties pursuing a higher education that didn’t pan out for a large education in life along the way that did and still is. I started publishing when I was 24, and by the time my 30^th rolled around I had sold over two dozen short stories, a novel, and was in the midst of helping found a publishing house. More importantly, I married the love my life and my best friend (my honest-to-goodness soulmate), had our first child, and moved from the place that I thought I would die in North Carolina for a wide world, and while I put that old home to my back, the adventure I have been on has been grand.

It’s also been demoralizing and terrible in places. By the time you read this, I will have quit working for that publishing house twice because I wasn’t treated well either time as an employee (and haven’t been as one of their authors either), my best friend stabbed me in the back, I have a hopefully-dying brain tumor (which is benign but still is what it is), and my son is coming to life in the midst of an age of technofeudalism, environmental catastrophe, and technological upheaval that planning for his future, let alone his day-to-day challenges, is more than simply “complicated” sometimes.

I manage along the way because over forty years I have learned that discipline, tenacity/toughness, sincere love for people and ideas outside of yourself (and giving a damn) actually matter. Despite all the defeats, the shadows, and the setbacks, I have been on a grand adventure with two people and a wonderful star cat named Mona that I wouldn’t trade for anything in this world. I’m deeply proud of the work I’ve produced and will produce, and forty is not a line in the sand or an alarm clock or some trigger to let me know time is running out—it’s the next phase in becoming a better husband, father, and author of Fantasy. I can honestly tell that I’m better at my craft ten years on, and if I keep working, I can make it even better when 50 rolls around.

It also means figuring out what more I can be at forty that I didn’t think I could afford myself in my teens, or twenties, or thirties.

But enough about 40.

When I was 37 I celebrated my son Ben’s third birthday, and around that time a reader named David asked me about any advice I had about fatherhood and parenting as they were about to become a parent as well, and I resisted saying anything because I thought I didn’t know the gig well enough with a three year-old, but now that Ben is six (as of this writing), a kindergartner no less, and turning into a wonderful person with his own individual self, I have about six things I’ve boiled down to what I think is universally true about parenting. So if you will indulge me:

Jay Requard’s Six Lessons of Parenting (0-6 yrs old)

Your Feelings are not theirs, but you have to deal with both

The hardest reality of being a parent is that your child’s cognition is forming by the time yours is already formed, and unfortunately that paints us parents into corners of frustration and doubt about our readiness because why aren’t these damned kids acting better? Well, it’s because they are learning how to think/feel in the first place, and the frustrations, sadnesses, and angers they have are so small and simple next to the ones in our adult lives we often forget this perspective. Worse, we sometimes saddle children with adult responsibilities, cares, and sufferings that nobody their age should have to carry at that age. As adults we need to temper our emotions and our feelings and realize that our children are not us, but will become what we give them. If we cannot control our own thoughts and feelings then do not be surprised if they struggle with theirs. And even if you have your mental house together, they still might not! The important thing is to meet children with the empathy and kindness we should reach to treat ourselves with.

You will make it through the hard moments (though they never get easier)

I’ve been to almost every one of my child’s doctor’s appointments, emergency room visits, and have taken care of him arguably more than anyone else (I work from home while my wife goes to work healing others), and there is no preparation you have inside of you for the blood, the puke, the piss, and certainly the shit unless you’ve taken care of babies, toddlers, and small children ahead of time. The worst moment of my life was going to pick up Ben because he fell and opened a massive cut by his eye (which his teachers failed to deal with properly) and the ambulance ride to the hospital, waiting hours for a plastic surgeon to arrive, and his screams during the suturing still haunt my nightmares. I held his hand through all of it, cried beside him, and witness him be braver than I ever was as a child.

But I got through it. He got through it. And you will too.

That’s the thing—you will too. Forbid the will of whatever gods you believe in that the day comes you lose a child, but save for that terrible circumstance, everything else can be endured for their sake.

Mothers matter, but Fathers set the world

This is the only lesson that isn’t a lesson, but a worldview, but it’s one that I find true over and over and over again:

It’s really important to be a good-to-great mom. Really important. Monumentally important. Mothers and matron-figures (no binary required) provide children a foundation of love, support, understanding, and we draw more from our mothers in temperament than we realize. However, Fathers and father-figures (again, no binary required) are the tent poles that hold up the sky for children, offering them guidance and another level of support and understand that really matters.

Children desperately need both Mothers and Fathers, or at least good father- and mother-figures, in their lives to succeed.

But children, more than anything, need to understand that both of their parents love them.

Let them know they are Unconditionally Loved

The friends and family members that I have who are from families with bad parental relations are often broken in a way because sometimes, due to the cold course of fate, children are born to awful people. Let’s not sugarcoat it—there are people that neglect their kids, harm their kids, use their children as props for their own ambitions, vanity, and vices, or disregard them all together, and that breaks these kids because one primary and essential thing all children want to know is that they are unequivocally, universally, absolutely loved by those who made them. Sometimes that can be a hard love due to circumstances, but that hard love doesn’t include any of the things listed above.

If we are worth anything in this world we don’t neglect our children, we do not harm our children, and more importantly, we hold them up from the world that would seek to break them because we love them.

But make sure they know that. Tell them that. Don’t forget to hug them and tell them how much you love them. If you fail to do this you fail the entire purpose of being a parent in the first place.

I know this because I was privileged to have wonderful parents and see the effect that had on me versus those that had shitty parents, and worse, no parents that were present at all. Even a great single mom or a single dad outweighs the darkness by those that do not uphold their children, and those single parents should not be forgotten to be upheld as well, as should anyone that extends themselves to love others like they are their own.

Screens Aren’t The Enemy, But Content Can Be

This post is a product of its time, and I imagine if anyone is reading this years and decades later the situation may have changed, but the debate around “screen time” in the modern era often fails on two points: first, we are rapidly developing technology that is not only screen-based, but hands-free as well, down to the point that typing skills didn’t just disappear because we handed the babies a touch screen. That’s too simplistic, but that also doesn’t do away from the need for children to be able to write by hand, type on a keyboard, or actually use classical creative tools because not only does it enrich them, but it keeps them well-versed in the arising technology that is simply coming whether this parent-advocate or this social theorist likes it or not. Change is always happening.

What matters is what is put on the screens and how much our children interact with that content. Not all content is evil, not everything on a touch screen is bad, but parents need to be far more aware now more than ever of the dangers that giving children access independently or without real supervision poses. We’re far, far, far from debating the merits of whether or not comics, novels, video games, and cartoons are bad for kids when there’s an entire scene for pdfs in the form of Roblox, and social media, and politicized content that regularly does real harm.

Our kids will never go back to writing tomes and pouring over technical manuals or operating manual typewriters, and I truly wonder about the future of the keyboard in general. Everything will be on a screen and everything will be interactive. What matters is how we help our children in navigating the tidal flood that they’ll be wading through right alongside us. Which leads to my last point…

Remember That The World is Hard Enough

Cut these kids a break.

Be nice them, and if you can’t be nice to them, leave them well the hell alone instead of being a bully or a creep.

They are growing up with multiple fascist uprisings while the climate shifts to more extreme modes due to human greed and intentional negligence by global leaders that their generation and their children’s generation will likely spend their entire lifetimes have to defeat starting from the raw end of the international marketplace of ideas because America decided to indulge in a Dictator-daddy fetish. Meanwhile, the internet their parents grew up with transformed (with their parents help) into a predatory capitalist hell predicated by participating via sacrificing our digital civil liberties. Add drones and a geriatric generation hell-bent on squeezing one last drop of oil out of the earth for a disappearing petro-dollar, it’s a grim outlook these kids honestly face.

Cut them a fucking break. They have to clean up the mess our grandparents and parents made while being browbeaten by a toxic media bullshit machine about how much they are cared for when, in fact, they will be ridiculed and denigrated the moment they reach for their own rights. Gen X was told they were lazy and unambitious for wanting the same economic guarantees their parents did. Millennials were harangued for enjoy some avocado on their toast while their parents carved out the labor market for the sake of stock portfolios and retirement accounts the majority of my generation can only imagine. And now we’re watching Gen Z be called unskilled, untalented, ungrateful, and nihilistic, even though they are simply the product of the previously mentioned examples of greed and negligence their parents allowed for the sake of upping the stock price.

My son is six.

He’s not lazy or unambitious, neither is his generation.

He’s six.

He’s not putting avocado on his toast, but he might never have a job because it seems modern industry is bent on replacing workers with agentic AI will hollow out that future, though it may bankrupt all of us first.

And he’s worth more than Jamie Fuck-Face Dimon and his shitty stock market.

The world is hard enough. If you can’t find the time or the compunction to make it easier for the children who have to live in it, then leave them the hell alone.

You know what’s nutty? One of my favorite books growing up with George Carlin’s Napalm and Silly Putty, which is honestly where a lot of my worldview developed. I’d like to end with a quote from that esteemed tome:

“Fuck rational thought.”