A trip to the Badlands with my 8-year old offered lessons in boyhood — and manhood.

By Sam Graham-Felsen

Sam Graham-Felsen is a novelist and freelance writer who has visited over 30 national park sites in the past year with his son.

Published Oct. 19, 2025

Updated Oct. 20, 2025

Our Theodore Roosevelt-themed road trip started out just the way Teddy would have wanted it: terribly.

First of all, my 8-year-old son and I nearly got sucked into the sky, because I didn’t think to check the weather before setting out from the airport and hadn’t seen that there was a tornado alert for the area. Then, after panic-driving through an insane storm at 100 miles an hour, we finally reached our destination, a hotel named for Roosevelt, which looked OK in the thumbnail on the internet but turned out to be the moldiest, stinkiest hotel I’ve ever stayed in. Early the next morning, we hit another snag, when we stopped for gas on our way to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. I let my son, Saul, take a turn pumping, and he got confused and somehow ended up absolutely dousing both of us with fuel. And so, instead of watching the rays of dawn slowly paint the Badlands gold, we spent the next three hours under the halogen flicker of the laundromat-slash-CBD-shop near our hotel, trying to get the stench off Saul’s prized Junior Ranger vest.

After two rounds of power-washing the vest with an industrial strength powder, Saul demanded a third, because the faint, lingering whiff of petroleum was driving him crazy. When I refused, he was devastated. I tried my best to be a good sport about all of this — to act like I was relishing the setbacks. The idea of embracing discomfort, after all, was a big part of why I wanted to bring Saul to the Badlands in the first place. (To protect his privacy, I’m referring to my son by his middle name.) It was here, in what is now North Dakota, that Saul’s hero, Teddy Roosevelt, worked as a cattleman and ultimately transformed himself from a soft coastal aristocrat into an avatar of frontier grit and vigor. I hoped that by learning more about Roosevelt’s metamorphosis — and by hiking through the hard land where it happened — Saul might come to appreciate, or at least tolerate, what Teddy called “the strenuous life.” This was my secret goal for our very first father-son journey: to nudge Saul to be a bit more resilient.

Of course, Saul had his own reasons for wanting to follow in Roosevelt’s footsteps, which had nothing to do with the strenuous life. You might be wondering: What kind of 8-year-old, in 2025, idolizes Teddy Roosevelt? I’ll tell you: the same kind of kid who wears his Junior Ranger vest at social gatherings and says things like, “Anyone want a tour of my first-aid kit?” Saul’s first-aid kit, which he won selling popcorn door to door for the Cub Scouts, is among the many pieces of survival gear he carries in his vest, alongside a Swiss Army knife, some rubber bands, string, a star wheel, a whistle and an ancient, crumbled pack of emergency-ration saltines.

Visiting national parks — always in his vest and matching Junior Ranger bucket hat — is Saul’s all-consuming passion. He stays up late at night reading about N.P.S. sites, memorizing their founding dates, their visitation stats and the designs of their Junior Ranger badges. His ambition is to visit all 433 N.P.S. parks, and this is why he reveres Theodore Roosevelt. No president did more to establish our parks and expand our public lands; thanks, largely, to T.R.’s efforts, nearly a third of our gigantic country is set aside for the permanent enjoyment of nature nerds like Saul.

When we finally pulled into Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Saul’s mood lifted. He’d been dreaming about this place all year. He couldn’t wait to see a bison — the iconic American mammal, whose image we saw emblazoned on every park ranger’s badge. Pulling over again and again, we scanned the buttes. Bison are supposed to be easy to spot, thanks in part to Teddy Roosevelt, who played a major role in saving them from extinction (albeit after shooting at least one himself). He was instrumental in the founding of the Bronx Zoo, where some of the last remaining members of the species were housed, and he backed the initiative that reintroduced Bronx-bred herds to their native habitats in the West. Today, there are tens of thousands of wild bison in America, and hundreds of them roam freely through Theodore Roosevelt National Park. But after an hour of driving, we hadn’t seen a single one.

It was getting late, and I decided we should start hiking. I picked a three-mile trail, which I realized was pushing it, but that was the whole point. About 10 minutes in, Saul started asking when the hike would be over. I responded with the same kind of Yoda platitude my dad used on me when I complained during hikes.

“Don’t worry about the destination. Just enjoy the journey.”

“I’m tired,” he said. “I want to go back to the visitor center and finish my Junior Ranger booklet.”

“I thought you wanted to see a bison,” I said.

We were walking through a wooded area along the Little Missouri River, when I heard a rustling in the brush. I veered off-trail, toward the noise, and Saul squeezed my hand.

“Dad, this could be dangerous,” he said. “Bison can charge at 35 miles per hour.”

“Dad!” he said. “Can we please go back to the car? You’re scaring me.”

I decided to take it easy on him. It was our first day; there would be plenty more opportunities to live the strenuous life.

Driving back to the visitor center, we finally saw a bison. It was munching grass about 20 feet from the road, and then it ambled right past our car. Saul and I looked at each other, awe-struck. There it was, with its huge, humped back, its skinny knock-kneed legs, its long, brooding face and absurd mop-top hair. An incongruous, hideous-handsome beast that seemed like it shouldn’t exist — that very nearly stopped existing — but somehow was here, inches away from us. We would come to see many more bison on our trip, and eventually they started to seem like big, hairy squirrels. But that first one, seen up close, felt like a divine gift, passed down to us by the 26th president of the United States.

As a boy, Roosevelt was a weak, asthmatic geek, who later described himself as a “wretched mite.” Saddled with the infantilizing family nickname Teedie, he had a high-pitched voice, and he was consumed by anxiety, afraid to leave his house without his little brother at his side, for protection. What electrified him, at that time, wasn’t feats of physical prowess but the life of the mind. He worshiped Charles Darwin, whose theory of natural selection profoundly shaped the way he saw the world. He went around making voluminous lists of birds, two of which became highly regarded texts in the ornithological community, and collecting specimens of insects and small animals, which he labeled with their Latin names and put on display at his own private Roosevelt Museum of Natural History, which was located in his bedroom.

Teedie planned to become a naturalist and may well have spent his days blissfully roaming the woods, bagging mosses and salamanders. But then, something happened to him and everything changed.

When he was 13, his parents sent him, unescorted, to a lodge on a lake in Maine, to breathe in the piney air and recuperate from his debilitating asthma. When he arrived at the Bangor and Piscataquis Railroad station, two local youths sized him up, called him a sissy and started beating him. “They found that I was a foreordained and predestined victim,” Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography, “and industriously proceeded to make life miserable for me.” When Roosevelt tried to fight back, he was humiliated to see that his faint, flailing blows did no “damage whatever.”

He spent the rest of his time in Maine brooding. When he returned to New York, he threw himself into calisthenics and weight lifting. He got a boxing tutor and started fighting in amateur bouts. He took epic multiday hikes and exhausting canoe journeys. By the time he was 22, his doctor warned him that he had a bad heart and would very likely die if he didn’t chill out. He didn’t chill out. He continued to live the strenuous life, and soon he set out for his greatest physical challenge yet: driving cattle in the Dakota Territory.

Roosevelt’s story spoke to me, because the seminal moment of my boyhood came when I was mugged at age 13. I remember it better than any other day of my childhood. I was playing basketball with a couple of friends at a public court near my mom’s office in Boston. A bigger kid who was playing with us, and who’d seemed friendly, suddenly demanded that I give him my brand-new Nike Airs. I’d spent months coveting and saving up for these shoes. When I refused to hand them over, the kid told me he had a weapon in his backpack. I had 10 seconds to comply, he told me, before he took it out.

While I doubted that he would stab or shoot me, I was sure he would hit me in the face. As a kid, I was terrified of pain, so squeamish around needles that my doctor had to strap me to a restraint chair. If I couldn’t bear a pinprick in the shoulder, how could I possibly handle getting slammed in the retina? So I caved. Afterward, I walked the streets in my socks, tiptoeing around broken glass, until I reached my mom’s office, fell into her arms and wept. The next day, word spread around school that I’d forfeited my kicks without a fight, that the kid hadn’t even brandished a weapon.

This incident decimated my confidence. It caused me to live in fear of physical disgrace, not just in fights, but on ball fields and on dance floors. It hampered my game, too. One of the prettiest girls in school asked me out and — to the utter consternation of my friends — I rebuffed her, feeling unworthy of her affection. It took me over a decade to fully get over feeling like a predestined victim.

I did get over it, though, and I did it the same way Teedie did: through grueling physical training. The confidence I feel today has less to do with being bigger and more to do with my relationship to pain. I wouldn’t say I like pain, but I’m no longer governed by the dread of getting hurt or humiliated or of trying new things, and my life is much better for it. What I wanted for Saul was to get to this place sooner than I did.

That night, I talked to him about how Roosevelt had been attacked as a boy, how he’d started out weak and afraid but had made himself strong and brave. Saul nodded in a pro forma way. It was obvious that he wasn’t into the conversation.

“I think it’s a good idea to go back to karate,” I said. “Not so you can attack someone, but just so you don’t have to feel so scared if someone threatens to attack you.”

Saul lasted for a year or so in our local karate school, progressing up to orange belt, which is when you start sparring with other kids. After one sparring session, he quit.

“I’m never going back to karate.”

“OK,” I said. “But I do think it’s important to stand up to bullies, if they won’t leave you alone. Are there any bullies in your school?”

He thought about it for a second.

“Not really,” he said.

“Well, you’re going into fourth grade next year,” I said. “There might be some bullies in fourth grade. And it can’t hurt to be ready for them.”

I wondered if I was projecting. I’d experienced some bullying as a kid, but that was three decades earlier. There are all kinds of anti-bullying initiatives in schools these days. Saul’s peers seem more accepting of difference than the kids I grew up with. Still, Saul is a sensitive, eccentric kid, just like I was. That combination, I reasoned, could make him a target.

“Dad,” he said. “I’m not very strong.”

“That’s the thing, though — you can get strong. Teddy was weak but he got strong. I was weak but I got strong.”

My wife had warned me not to lay it on thick, and here I was, slathering him.

“OK,” he said. “Can I please play with the N.P.S. app on your phone now?”

s freakishly beautiful. It looks like an upside-down-cake version of the Grand Canyon, an endless sprawl of red and gold buttes, punctuated with mushroomlike hoodoos and perfectly spherical cannonball concretions. Walking amid the rock formations, striated with tens of millions of years of sedimentary history, you’re instantly made aware of your puny notch in the cosmic timeline. It’s a perfect place to go if you want to feel like a speck. And this, I’m guessing, is exactly how Roosevelt wanted to feel in the aftermath of the calamity that upended his life.

Roosevelt began the day of Feb. 13, 1884, a very happy man. He was 25 years old, and he had already achieved renown as an anti-corruption warrior in the New York State Assembly. That morning, in Albany, he received a telegram bearing the wonderful news that his wife, Alice, had given birth to their first child. But soon after, Roosevelt got another telegram. His wife had taken seriously ill with Bright’s disease, and on top of that, his mother was suddenly dying of typhoid. Roosevelt rushed home to Manhattan. At 3 in the morning, on Valentine’s Day, Roosevelt’s mother, Mittie, who had been a major steadying force in his life, died. Hours later, Alice died, too. The normally verbose Roosevelt wrote a single sentence in his diary that day: “The light has gone out of my life.”

Roosevelt chose not to run for re-election. He left his baby daughter under the care of his sister Bamie and headed for the Badlands, by himself. Unceasing brute labor, the stunning surroundings and rapport with fellow cattlemen were his salvation. The men who worked alongside Roosevelt started out skeptical of the Manhattanite with the fancy clothes and posh mannerisms, but they quickly came to admire him for his indomitable hustle. They watched him ride 14, sometimes 16, hours a day on roundups, barely complaining, seeming never to tire.

Roosevelt would spend the next three years moving back and forth between the Dakota Territory and New York. His cattle business had failed miserably and he’d lost a ton of money, but he emerged from it all with an unshakable self-assurance. “Black care,” Roosevelt later wrote of his deliverance from depression, “rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.” He’d clawed his way out of a nightmare, and he was now ready for anything. He would later credit his time in the Badlands for making him the man who would one day become president.

On our second day, Saul and I drove an hour north to a remote, much less visited part of the park. The ranger there informed us that we were free to go off-trail and roam anywhere we wanted to. We pulled off the main road and started climbing up a butte. When we got to the top, we climbed up an adjacent, even higher butte. We edged our way through a narrow channel, and then scaled a pretty steep wall, clinging to a crack. We kept going higher and higher, huffing and sweating but not wanting to stop. No one else was around and it felt like we had the world’s biggest, coolest playground all to ourselves. Saul was euphoric.

“This place is a miracle,” he shouted. “How did it get born?”

We’d been hiking for well over an hour, and Saul was showing no signs of slowing down. I’d never seen him like this: resilient, rugged, ready for more.

“This is the strenuous life!” I said, giving him a high five. We kept climbing and the ridge line was getting narrower. The sky was turning gray, too, and it was starting to get windy.

“This has been awesome,” I said. “But I think we should start heading back.”

“What are you, chicken?” Saul said. “We are living the strenuous life! I want to get to the very top.”

“Sorry,” I said. “But no. You could get blown off the butte.”

On our way down, I remembered why it’s important to stay on trails, rather than randomly wander in the wilderness. It’s one thing to ascend a steep slope; it’s another thing to descend one. Saul was 15 or so feet ahead of me when I slipped on loose gravel and rocketed down the butte, right into him.

I couldn’t believe it. He was completely unruffled. He didn’t even seem bothered by the gash on my leg. Normally, he freaked at sight of blood.

Limping down the slope, I smiled to myself, pleased that my plan seemed to be working.

We had a long drive that afternoon — we were heading all the way to South Dakota, to visit a bunch of other Roosevelt-related N.P.S. sites — and I decided to reward Saul with some iPad time. I loaded up “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” one of my childhood favorites, which was now available for streaming.

“I’m literally crying,” Saul said. “This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Pee-Wee had just offered his archnemesis, Francis, a stick of chewing gum. As Francis chewed, black ooze began flowing from his mouth — it was trick gum! Saul rewound and rewatched the scene several times, and it kept killing him.

“Where can I get trick gum?” he said. “I need some trick gum!”

“I used to have trick gum,” I said.

“Wait — where’d you buy it?” Saul said.

“There was this place in downtown Boston called Jack’s Joke Shop. I used to buy all kinds of pranks there.”

“Tell me every single prank you bought,” Saul said. He was even more animated than he’d been on our butte adventure.

“Let me think,” I said. “I had this hand buzzer, where you can pretend to be a nice guy and shake someone’s hand, but then it buzzes their hand and shocks them.”

“I need a hand buzzer!”

This conversation went on for a long time. I’d never felt so connected to Saul. I could see that he was a budding comedy nerd, just like I’d been, and this excited me. I couldn’t wait to show him my favorite childhood comedies, like Weird Al Yankovic’s “UHF” and Mel Brooks’s “Spaceballs,” the movies I watched, and literally cried through, countless times.

“Look,” I said, “if I can find a place, I’ll get you some pranks for your birthday.”

“Really, Dad? I would be so happy if you did that. I would be, like, honored.”

Over the next five days, we visited six more National Park sites. One of our stops was Mount Rushmore. As I stared up at Roosevelt’s 60-foot face, the thing that struck me most wasn’t his famous mustache but his wiry pince-nez glasses. On top of having horrendous asthma and a weak heart, on top of being skinny and incredibly anxious and a squeaky-voiced animal nerd, at age 13, Teedie also got glasses.

For years, people teased him with names like Old Four Eyes, and in the rough and tumble world of the Badlands, this could become a real problem. One day, as Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography, he walked into a saloon near his ranch, and a belligerent drunk demanded that “Four Eyes” buy rounds for everyone in the bar. Roosevelt tried to laugh it off, but when the man stood over him brandishing a gun in each hand, Roosevelt socked him in the face. As the guy fell, both guns went off; thankfully, no one was hurt. It’s unclear if this happened inadvertently, or if the man was intending to kill Roosevelt. Either way, the man hit his head on the bar and was knocked out cold. After incidents like this, no one tried to emasculate Old Four Eyes.

I thought about this moment a lot, as I continued to puzzle over what, exactly, I wanted to teach Saul. On the one hand, punching a bully who’s pointing two guns at you is pretty badass. On the other hand, it’s immensely stupid. Roosevelt had a baby daughter back home, and he was willing to risk leaving her fatherless, just to save face at some dumb saloon. But — but — it worked. The bully was vanquished, Roosevelt won everyone’s respect, and that respect gave him a rock-solid sense of his own worth and potential. I wondered: Was it possible to carry oneself with the confidence of Theodore Roosevelt without being willing to kick someone’s ass?

This whole time, I’d been telling Saul to be tougher and to stand up for himself, but it was all abstract. I’d avoided something central, concrete: the question of violence. Should I, or should I not, tell him to punch a bully in the face? My best friend’s father had given him tangible advice: Hit first and aim for the nose. It’s easy to break someone’s nose, his father told him, and if you do, the blood will flow in buckets, spooking the bully and ending the fight early. My dad, a big believer in nonviolence, never gave me advice like that.

I thought more about why I didn’t fight as a kid. Yes, I was a coward, worrying that I might get hurt, but I was also worried I might hurt the other guy. By the end of high school, I’d gotten pretty strong, and I feared that if someone attacked me and I fought back, I might lose control and fight back too much. I had this one, specific horrible vision that I couldn’t shake — of hitting someone so hard that he’d fall, hit his head on the curb and die. The friends of mine who got into fistfights didn’t have this kind of fear. I witnessed some of them repeatedly punch prone dudes in the head, with a dull murderousness in their eyes.

There was one night I spent among these friends — the guys who weren’t afraid of fighting — that I’ll never forget. We were in our early 20s. A terrible thing had just happened. One of these guys had learned that his uncle had been arrested for murder. The details were horrific: His uncle had stabbed his wife multiple times. They had young twins, who would now spend the rest of their lives with neither of their parents.

Anyway, a bunch of us gathered at my buddy’s house to support him. We smoked some weed, drank some beers and made uncomfortable small talk. No one knew what to say. Then, one of the guys had an idea: There was a fight on pay-per-view. It was my first time watching M.M.A. — back then, the sport was relatively new — and I had no idea what to expect. I was surprised to see that the fighters didn’t have boxing gloves — just some thin, protective layer over their fists. At a certain point, one guy pinned the other and punched him directly in the ribs, over and over and over again. The guy’s ribs turned pink, then red, and it seemed like there was no way they weren’t being shattered. I wondered if the shards might puncture his heart. I looked around the room to gauge the reactions of the others. No one seemed to find it strange that we were here to comfort a friend whose uncle had murdered his wife, and that the way we’d chosen to do it was to watch another person get brutally bludgeoned.

I remembered walking away from that night, feeling sick with confusion. I had always seen these guys as more masculine than I was, and I had long envied their success in sports and ease around girls. I yearned for what they had: the insouciance that flowed from never doubting that you were a man. And I knew that on some level, unless I got comfortable with violence, that insouciance might never come. So, I tried to enjoy watching that guy get hit in the ribs. But even the darkest parts of me couldn’t enjoy it. I remembered thinking, with no small amount of shame, Maybe I’m a pacifist. I wondered if it was possible to be a pacifist without feeling like prey.

As our trip went on, I noticed that Saul was starting to imitate Pee-Wee’s mannerisms. He was also starting to sour a little on Teddy Roosevelt. Each night before bed, I’d been reading him a kid-friendly Roosevelt biography and there were things in it that didn’t sit so well with him. For one, Roosevelt’s penchant for violence. “I like the conservationist part of his story much more than the Rough Riders part,” Saul said, referring to the ragtag group of non-enlisted soldiers Roosevelt rounded up to fight in the Spanish-American War. “Why does anyone like the Rough Riders? They were basically just a weird gang.”

There was something else that bothered Saul even more. It was the fact that when Roosevelt finally came back from the Dakota Territory and reunited with his daughter, Alice (and it’s worth noting that despite his travels, Roosevelt was a devoted, loving father), he withheld something crucial from her. Not once did he ever tell Alice about her mother, for whom she was named. In fact, there’s no evidence that he ever spoke of his deceased wife to anyone. He even left her out of his autobiography.

This outraged Saul.

“You can’t do that!” he said. “That was her mother. You can’t just pretend someone’s mother didn’t exist!”

“Well,” I said, “I guess it just made him too sad to talk about it.”

“But that’s not fair to her,” he said.

For all his physical timidity, Saul has always been an attuned and emotionally intrepid kid. When he’s struggling, he’ll say, plainly, “I’m feeling sad today because I miss my friend,” or “I feel jealous of my sister because people pay more attention to her than to me.” He’s able to name and sit with feelings in a way that I never could as a boy, and in some ways, still can’t as a grown man.

I thought about my incapacity to feel difficult feelings — my tendency, when confronted with the unsettling, to throw myself into motion and work, motion and work. I thought about my father, too, who is technically retired but somehow still works incessantly, volunteering for an array of noble causes, mostly because he’s a good guy, but also, I think, because a part of him is trying to outhustle the pain of his past. My dad’s parents were both Holocaust refugees — people who left behind close family members and friends and carried survivor guilt throughout their lives. His mother, Sima, ended up taking her own life. My father was a young man when this happened, and he had been extremely close to her. I hadn’t known about their closeness — I had known very little about Sima — because, until we became adults, my father almost never spoke of her to me or my two brothers. One of his personal anthems, which I often hear him humming, is a social justice song: “Gonna keep on moving forward / Never turning back /… / Gonna show our children courage / Never turning back.”

As our road trip came to a close, I wondered if, maybe, I’d been focusing on all the wrong goals with Saul. Did I really want him to be like Teddy Roosevelt — tough and resilient but always in motion, always grinding? Saul’s own instincts were pulling him toward Pee-Wee. He’d just spent an hour on Amazon, researching red bow ties and gray suits he planned to save up for and buy, so he could dress like his new idol.

Pee-Wee may have been a wimp, but he was a free wimp. He wore the weird clothes he wanted to wear, danced the weird dances he wanted to dance and rode his big red bike around town with the brio of a man in love with life. The beautiful thing about “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” — and the reason, I think, Saul was responding so strongly to it — was that Pee-Wee wasn’t punished for his eccentricity. If anything, he was rewarded for swerving from macho norms. The cool mountain-biker guys in town gave him props; the pretty woman at the bike shop had a huge crush on him. His confidence, his joy, was contagious. This was what I really wanted for Saul — to become a man on his own terms — to be celebrated for his singularity.

Still, I hadn’t gotten past my fear of him being bullied — and I couldn’t quite let go of my mission to toughen him up. And so, after I tidied up our Airbnb and packed all our bags for the flight the next morning, I decided to do some role-playing with him before bedtime.

“I’m going to pretend to be a bully,” I said. “And you pretend to be you, OK?”

“Uh, OK,” Saul said.

“Hey loser!” I said, putting on a menacing face. “Give me your lunch money!”

“I don’t have lunch money,” Saul said. “I just tell the lunch lady my card number.”

“I know,” I said. “Just pretend. OK, I’m gonna start again. ‘Gimme your lunch money, dweeb!’”

He stood there, frozen, and I could tell he was trying to think of a snappy comeback.

“You don’t need a comeback,” I said. “Just tell me, loud and clear: ‘No. Get away from me you jerk.’”

“Get away from me you … jerk,” he said, with zero conviction. Then he smacked me, lightly, on the forearm.

I was ready to put an end to my little experiment, when Saul said, “Wait, pretend to be the bully again.”

“OK,” I said. “I’m the bully again. ‘You’re a loser, Saul!’”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, politely. “But I don’t want to fight you. Can I offer you a piece of gum instead?”

I took the pretend gum and pretend-chewed it.

“I have news for you,” Saul said. “It’s trick gum.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49378540)

Now he tells me that was one of the best days of his life.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49378553)

haha, no. that must have been some other graham-felsen kid with an oversharing writer dad!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49378554)

Deport all jews. Now.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49378567)

ny ny Oct 20

D

Hey, Saul. Don't ever change for anyone. You're awesome just as you are - and funny, too!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49378626)

california Oct 19

Recommend (18)

Some of the worst hotels/motels are in South Dakota.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49378628)

Ex Californian Oct 19

P

This man, this father, does not pay attention to what is going on in the moment where his son is. He can't because he already has his own ideas on how things must go according to him. He seem seems unaware, forging ahead even though there might be danger ahead. His son seems brighter than the father

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49378638)

PA Oct 19

Flag | Share

D

I feel compelled to mention a few things:

8-year old children should never be

permitted to pump gasoline; it's hazardous for them in many ways. And the way to encourage confidence is not in the pushing, but in the teaching - of skills, problem-solving, gradual exposure. It bothered me that the father kept on hiking to see a bison, even after the son was clearly terrified, then hiked alone, walking a narrow trail high up holding onto a crack without thinking ahead about how to safely descend? The author was extremely fortunate that his fall and injuries weren't more serious, or that his son didn't get hurt when he collided with him. Would the son have known what to do if his father had been

badly injured?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49378636)

I got everything I needed out of this part.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49378644)

Every boy needs to have the bullying talk with dad a number of times before it takes. It goes like this, “First, at every stage of life you will encounter bullies. You are obligated to fight them for your own sake and for the good of the community. There is no such thing as disproportionate violence. And you are expected to have the judgment to know the difference between a bully who has it coming and a good kid who is just being uncharacteristically dickish in a moment. Second, everyone—every single person—has insecurities. You must learn to read them so that you can be sensitive to issues people around you are facing. And, just as importantly, so that you can find your enemies soft spots and tear.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49378711)

"Oh wow - the 8 year old kid oscillates from being whiney to carefree over the course of a vacation. How unusual! This should get at least 4,000 words in the NY Times."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49378815)

is it possible that the NYT knows exactly what it's doing with these articles? valorizing feminine men who rise in life by sucking up to elite lib?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49379226)

sorry gookboi

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49379613)

His biggest issue with him seems to be that the kid loves this first aid kit - which he then goes on to explain that the kid won at a boy scout contest. So the kid just likes to show off a Swiss Army knife that he won? Seems completely normal.

It just seems to me the Dad is just a shitty dad, but thinks he isn't because he's a lib. But if he actually went to an 8 year old baseball/soccer/basketball game, he'd realize even the "cool" 8 year old boys end up fucking crying every other game.

Shane Gillis has a great joke about how every little boy is basically their mom's gay best friend until they start jerking off.

The article here seems semi-abusive when he thinks this 8 year old kid needs to toughen up to be able to stand up to bullies on behalf of the world.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49379878)

number one thing is that the dad needs to not be a sniveling Jewish dork and be an example of a man for the kid. trying to channel TR to do the heavy lifting is especially pathetic

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790361&forum_id=2Ã#49379939)