By Dr. Johnathan Hines, DCC • Dr. Hines Inc.
You love them. You'd die for them. You'd work three jobs for them. But sitting on the floor and playing with them feels impossible. Conversations feel forced. Hugs feel mechanical. You watch other dads toss their kids in the air and laugh and wonder why that doesn't come naturally to you.
Something is in the way. And it's not your kids.
The most common reason men struggle to connect with their children is that no one connected with them. Your father was distant, or absent, or angry, or so consumed with work that you learned fatherhood from observation: it looks like this. Quiet. Distant. Transactional. Present but not close.
You don't have a template. Other men seem to know how to play, how to be silly, how to hold space for emotions. You didn't learn that. You learned to provide. To fix. To solve. And when your kid doesn't need a problem solved but just needs you to be there, you freeze. Because "being there" without a task feels like standing in a room with no floor.
Some men can't connect because they're performing fatherhood instead of living it. Every interaction is evaluated: am I doing this right? Is this enough? Am I messing them up? The self-monitoring is so constant that it blocks the actual connection. You're so busy grading yourself that you can't be present.
Kids don't need perfect fathers. They need present ones. A dad who is fully there for ten clumsy minutes is worth more than a dad who is half-there for hours. Your kids don't need you to be good at this. They need you to show up and try.
If you shut down emotionally, your kids feel it. They might not have words for it, but they sense when Dad is in the room but not really in the room. Over time, they stop reaching. Not because they don't want you, but because reaching for someone who isn't there hurts.
This is the cycle: your father wasn't there, so you don't know how to be there, so your kids grow up without you being there, and one day they'll struggle to be there for theirs. The generational transfer of emotional absence is quiet, invisible, and devastating.
The cycle breaks with awareness. Name what you didn't receive. Grieve it. Then make a conscious decision: my kids will get what I didn't.
Start with five minutes. Floor time with the six-year-old. Car time with the fifteen-year-old. No agenda. No lessons. No fixing. Just proximity and attention. It will feel awkward. Do it anyway. The awkwardness is not evidence that you're bad at this. It's evidence that you're doing something you were never taught.
Phase 4 of the Lion Protocol is about this: building what you want to keep. Identity means nothing if the people you love can't feel the change.
Ready?
The Lion Protocol is for men who are done hiding. 12 sessions. 6 months. Everything changes.
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