Three Tips On Making These The Best Times To Be A Parent

Jeff Nelligan • April 26, 2020

As my Army Drill Sergeant used to say:
"Don’t count the days, make the days count."

There are two types of parents today.

The first is the Dad or Mom who is hurting; a lost job and strained finances and general despair. I emphasize I’ve been there. I work in politics and several times my candidates have been on the south side of an election. When that happens, you’re abruptly fired and you’re soon thin in the wallet. There’s only one way out: Grind on. Keeping reaching out, keep calling, keep looking, and keep driving. As my old Army drill sergeant used to yell at my platoon: “Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.”

The second is the Dad or Mom working at home and is beginning to go nuts because they’re balancing work and their kids are around all the time. Every person in the house has run out of things to do and every day is a slow march to dinner and beyond.

Either type of parent can become the third type of parent: The one that understands that this is the best time ever to be a Dad or Mom. Why? Because the kids are around and you have time - time with them that you never had before and may never have again.

Yes, hard to believe, but these unusual times are a gift. Use these moments now to get to know your kid in ways that will last way beyond this temporary setback, for years and years to come.

To come back to the first type of parent, hurting and angry: It takes a strong will to overcome adversity. I know. I didn’t think I was capable of mustering it but I did. And when I did, I became that third type of parent:

1. All Time With a Kid is Quality Time: The Bleacher Report

Most Dads know it takes effort to spend unrushed and undistracted time with your son. You’re grinding at work all week, your kid is at school, there are after-school activities, he’s got homework, it’s now 8 p.m. and you’re already thinking about tomorrow. It’s the iron grip of the Schedule. Now that iron grip is broken. It was sure broken for me when I was jobless. Even though I was anxious about finding work, I hid it from my kids and got a grip on the perpetual motion machine of normal times, i.e., when Dad is headed off every morning in a suit and tie to work.

How? I sat my three sons down and laid it out the only way I know how: With the unflinching truth. “Ok gents, we all know it’s bad right now. It won’t last forever but one thing will: Beginning today, we are making a schedule for when we spend time together.” From the web, I had downloaded copies of a blank office calendar for the rest of this year.

“We’re going into a hard routine. We’ll mark specific days and times until the end of the year when each of you individually spend time with me, no other brothers and no distractions. There’s only one rule: Each of you better be prepared to talk.”

Over time, this became unofficially known as the Bleacher Report. I and the designated son would grab snacks from home and normally go to the fields at the local high school, which on any given Saturday morning is one of the most peaceful places on the planet. If you can’t do that now, improvise. We’d throw around a football or lacrosse ball or a baseball for an hour, run sprints goal line to goal line and afterwards, sprawl across several rows of bleacher benches (hence the term) and just talk.

It was simple – I’d think up some topics to draw him out and then we’d slide into the rundown: How’d the week go? Name one big success, one big fail. Ok, here’s what happened in the old man’s week; ask me two questions about it. What’s coming up that makes you nervous, confident? Or we’d play the Fave Game: What’s your fave movie, car, cheeseburger, and teacher and why? There were zero distractions; the phones were left in car, there were no brothers to interrupt - just the fields stretching before us as our conversation graduated from everyday stuff to serious stuff.

This routine never varied. As the years went on, the conversations became more important inasmuch as the boys were wrestling with academics and sports and friends and the college matters.

The Bleacher report never ever ended. My middle kid was home from a deployment to the Persian Gulf this last Christmas and I’ll let you guess where Saturday found us. We talked as long and casually about his ship’s exploits with Iranian patrol boats as a decade earlier we had talked about the games of his 8th grade football team.

2. The Year in Review

When I was a stay-at-home Dad – that is, staying at home because I had no job to go to - in between husting for work, I took part in the All-American Pastime: Cleaning out the house.

In fact, that’s what a lot of people are doing right now. I bet like me, they are going through every room, prowling the basement and attic and garage, opening boxes and closets and discovering treasures on once-unknown shelves. I guarantee that a lot of the stuff they are finding is kid-related. I did. That’s because every kid produces a record. And by that I mean: schoolwork, art drawings (yes, from when they were four-years old), photos from the last soccer season and winter swim meets and the family vacation; a program from the college football game that he insists on keeping; the Earth Day report with glued leaves and twigs; test papers and report cards and the certificate from the Science Fair and the community newspaper article with his name in it. I could go on but you get it. Like many parents, I’ve held onto it all.

Now is the time for you to rummage through it all. Go through all this kid flotsam and then carefully sorted it, making a stack for each kid. Photos and other docs that have been on your computer for years? I printed them all out.

Then, when I was surrounded by stacks for each kid, I sorted it all out, placing the items in plastic sheet protectors and adding to each a date and a whimsical note. All was inserted in a three-ring binder for each kid, on which the front was written, “The Year in Review.” Yeah, a scrapbook. You think that’s nuts? Keep reading.

The binders were a hit with my three sons; they will be with your kids. This was an entire year of page-by-page good memories and surprisingly, they were pored over throughout the year by the boys.

Indeed, the Year binders are ongoing. I save photos and emails they’ve sent and news clippings about the regions of the world they are in and put it together every year, it’s a constant and colorful reminder of what they had achieved.

When the eldest kid, out of college, was at home carefully packing his gear for a Naval deployment in the Far East, I offhandedly asked him what he was taking. “One of the Years.” he said simply. “When I get homesick, I’ll pull it out.”

3. Get outside!

For goodness sake, GET OUTSIDE! Oh, AND AWAY FROM SCREENS! Yes, this is hardly original. But you can never do it enough. And here are some ways to change it up. No electronics permitted beyond the front and back doors! Walk through the neighborhoods and parts of your community you’ve never seen. Use this as an opportunity to tell them about your neighborhood and you life growing up as a kid. I guarantee this will spark the kid’s curiosity. Hey, you’ve got a captive audience and for now, you have all the time in the world.

In the backyard, throw balls - baseball, football, soccer, lacrosse – but just not back and forth. Challenge the kid by making it a competition. Ten times without a drop, five times opposite hand. 20 times in 30 seconds. And if want to jazz it up, put some minor money on it – 50 cents, a dollar. Have push up and sit up contests and other unusual events. How far you can walk with a book balanced on your head? How many times can you hop on one foot? Yeah, all sounds crazy.

Well, I did it all and it provided some of the most fun moments I even spent with my sons.

Last, I’m like a lot of you – working at home now and my youngest is home from West Point while the other two remain deployed on the outposts of the world. Nellie Junior has schoolwork but we have plenty of time together and sometimes I’ll tell him, Ok pal, this evening we’re gonna sit in the front room and read quietly for an hour. Then, you tell me about what you’ve read and I’ll do the same. You see, you can make even the simplest things come alive.

Sure these are odd times. Whatever your situation right now – and I’m darn familiar with both - be that third type of parent. None of us will ever again have this freedom and closeness to our kids. Don’t fall into the trap of going through the motions and wishing for it all to end and “normal” to ensue. Because my drill sergeant had another saying: Don’t count the days. Make the days count.

#####

Check out my book – Four Lessons from My Three Sons: How You Can Raise Resilient Kids.

Ok, any easy pitch. This gem is only 60-pages long, a 45-minute read, hard and fast and funny. It tells the story of how I raised my kids and propelled them to the U.S. Naval Academy, Williams College, and West Point. It’s a step-by-step guide on how to develop boys who are steadfast in conduct, character, and ambition.

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Every Dad in America wants to raise a resilient kid. Four Lessons from My Three Sons charts the course.

Written by a good-natured but unyielding father, this slim volume describes how his off-beat and yet powerful forms of encouragement helped his sons obtain the assurance, strength and integrity needed to achieve personal success and satisfaction. This book isn't 300 pages of pop child psychology or a fatherhood "journey" filled with jargon and equivocation. It's tough and hard and fast. It’s about how three boys made their way to the U.S. Naval Academy, Williams, and West Point – and beyond.

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Flag duty and the end of 30 years in politics

By Jeff Nelligan • January 29, 2026

It's 8:30 a.m. on a humid August Tuesday and I’m on the roof of the U.S. Capitol, the Dome rising 280 feet directly above. In my arms is a stack of thin boxes and I’m navigating a plywood gangplank leading to a rusted 15-foot flagpole. A colleague joins me carrying more boxes. She opens one and hands me a 2’ by 4’ American flag which I affix to the pole’s lanyard, raise and lower quickly, unfasten and hand to her as she hands me another. A third colleague brings out more boxes and retrieves the ones containing flown flags. This little dance continues for three straight hours. Afterwards, my colleagues and I carefully re-fold each flag and affix to it a “Certificate of Authenticity from the Architect of the Capitol” reading “This flag was flown over the U.S. Capitol in honor of____” and fill in the blank: “The Greater Bakersfield, California Chamber of Commerce”…the 80 th birthday of Wilbert Robinson of Bowie, Maryland, proud veteran of the Vietnam War…” We will perform this task for five days a week until Congress returns from recess. This is my very first job in Washington, D.C. and obviously, I have what it takes. *** Flag duty began my 32-year run in politics and government, which ended last week. It included four tours of duty on Capitol Hill working for three Members of Congress, two Presidential appointments serving Cabinet officers in the Departments of State and Health and Human Services, posts at two independent agencies, and a career position at FDA. The jobs were a mix of purely political positions where being on the south side of an election meant cleaning out your desk and getting good at catchy LinkedIn posts – twice that happened - and career federal government stints where the stakes were less exhilarating. *** I worked principally as press secretary and special assistant. The former job, a common D.C. occupation, was transformed in 2008 with the onset of social media, morphing from daily pronouncements of your boss’s wisdom on the issues of the day to rapid-fire postings on the obvious unreasonableness, even cruelties of your opponents. Sound familiar? As for the latter occupational specialty, special assistant, the terms ‘bagman’ or ‘fixer’ are more apt: A guy always two steps behind the principal but always ready to step up and fix whatever problem arose in daily political life. Need a special vegan lunch for Congressman Busybody, White House tour tickets for the Big Bad High volleyball team, or the personal phone number of the executive assistant to a heavy-duty lobbyist? I was your guy. Every leader needs a fixer. Like anyone else who works in D.C., I occasionally participated in a glam political moment – you know, that unique, epic event that would never ever be forgotten in D.C. history Until it was. *** The best part about government life was working for many men and women who were at the top of their game in the D.C. Swamp, one of the toughest arenas on the planet. Their success, from the vantage point of your humble correspondent, was attributable to four simple rules of life. “If you can’t measure it, it didn’t happen.” Every office I was in kept metrics on virtually every aspect of the principal’s week – how many meetings and events attended, X posts, interviews, committee votes, constituent letters, action items completed from memos?! Numbers, numbers, and always keeping score – and always the quest to improve. “Never lose it.” In a lifetime of political jobs, I may have heard a boss raise her or his voice half a dozen times, even during and after major-league setbacks. Self-control was their hallmark. One boss, a powerful House Committee chairman once confided to me, “I’m fine that 80 precent of my job is humoring these guys, no matter how crazy they get.” An equally valuable corollary skill: Humility. The ability of these individuals to admit to colleagues and staff when wrong on a particular issue. Which counterintuitively only upped their long-term credibility. “Something’s always gonna go south.” Always the need for a plan C. Every initiative during an upcoming day was scoured for what elements would interfere and how, if they occurred, they could be ameliorated. Hence, in the rare times when things did go south, there was always preparation in advance for getting to 80 percent of what was needed. “Good is not good enough.” Successful politicians and government leaders – and their staffs – never get complacent. If they do, they’re not long for the Swamp. Everyone is always hustling for the edge. A useful corollary learned from an NCO when I was in the Army: Always have your hand up. Volunteering is at the heart of the hustle, the cheerful willingness to take on the new and unknown and do whatever it takes. *** And that’s how it all started. On the second day of my first congressional tour the Member solicited volunteers “for a fun recess job that’ll get you out of the office.” It was flag duty and from that day onwards my government career could only go up. *****