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Jon asked a pediatrician of thirty-five years for the formula for influencing your kids. She gave him three words.
Dr. Meg Meeker, author of Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, says her job is to speak to dads on behalf of their children. So Jon asked the question every man here eventually asks, which is some version of just tell me what to do. She gave him a list. Attention, affection, acceptance. Whether your child is two or twenty-two or fifty, they want the same three things from you, and the third one is where most of us quietly fail.
The part that will sting is the grocery store. You are listing what your daughter has done to someone you ran into, straight A's, varsity as a sophomore, and she is standing right behind you. "She doesn't feel accepted. She feels like a performer."
IN THIS EPISODE
FULL EPISODE: https://frontrowdads.com/459
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Every couple has a dance, and most men have never seen the steps written down.
One of you closes the distance and gets louder. The other creates distance and shuts down. What makes it a loop rather than an argument is that each one's way of coping is precisely the thing the other cannot tolerate. Mark Groves names it, then takes it apart: Gottman's four horsemen, why men stonewall more than women do, and the single sentence that breaks a defensive pattern even though saying it feels awful.
Then the harder half. Groves admits he spent years in a relationship with someone who needed exactly the skills he teaches, and asks the question underneath it: what if you need the problem to be there? What if the fixing is the point?
IN THIS EPISODE
FULL EPISODE
How to Co-Regulate: The Science Behind Relationship Harmony: https://frontrowdads.com/474
Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is all about? The Brotherhood Experience is a free, one-hour online session where you meet other like-minded men who are committed to being family men with businesses, not businessmen with families. You will hear the core ethos and values behind the community, and why this brotherhood is a strategy for connecting with your kids, building a thriving marriage, and winning in business. It runs every month. Pick a time that works for you at https://frontrowdads.com/experience
Jon walked into a band meeting with seven things to do and walked out with one.
Episode 4 of Walk With Jon. No studio, no script, no guest, no editing. Jon Vroman walking the lake in downtown Austin on a Wednesday afternoon, thinking out loud. The audio is rough on purpose: traffic, wind, and footsteps are part of the deal.
He recorded this straight out of his monthly band meeting, where he put business on the table. Two things he admits he hasn't always done well: saying his truth out loud instead of withholding it to spare feelings, and being humble enough to ask for counsel. He did both. Then his buddy Tim kept saying the same thing until it stuck: "there's only one thing you need to do after this meeting," and until it's done with excellence, don't do two.
IN THIS WALK:
Front Row Dads is a brotherhood of family men with businesses, not businessmen with families. To learn more, go to frontrowdads.com.
She calls it puberty in reverse. It can last a decade. And most husbands have no idea it's happening.
LIVE WITH DR. HIRSCH, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8TH.
She is joining the Front Row Dads community for a live session with Q&A on how men can support the women in their lives through menopause. Free for members, and a limited number of guest passes for everyone else. Details at frontrowdads.com/menopause
Dr. Heather Hirsch is board-certified in internal medicine, founded the Menopause and Midlife Clinic at Brigham and Women's Hospital, taught at Harvard Medical School, and has treated thousands of women through perimenopause and menopause. She flew to Austin for this one because, in her words, most of the conversation about menopause happens with women, and it's the men who share a bed, a marriage, and a family with them who never get the briefing. This is that briefing.
She defines the terms every husband should know, explains what actually happens as the hormones flicker out like a failing light bulb, and walks through what it does to sleep, mood, memory, weight, skin, and sex. Then the practical half: how to bring it up without saying "this explains everything," why tracking symptoms beats blood work, the bedroom at 65 degrees, why so many women see five to seven doctors before the right diagnosis, and what real treatment looks like.
Her story is the first 20 minutes. The practical breakdown starts at 19:56.
Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is actually like? We run a live Brotherhood Experience most months. Jon and a few other dads, 60 minutes on Zoom, and a real conversation about how fatherhood is actually going. It's not a webinar, and you won't leave drained. On any given week, most dads give support and never get any. That's what this hour is for. It's free, and the next date and your seat are both at frontrowdads.com/experience
Most of us don't have a plan for our marriage. We have a repair schedule.
Something breaks, we patch it, things are fine for a while, and then we sit there quietly waiting for it to break again. Lance Salazar lived in that loop.
He describes a defeatist stretch where even when things were okay, he was just wondering when it was going to go bad.
So he and his wife stopped fixing and started designing, borrowing the thing they already knew how to do in business: decide what you want, build a plan, commit to it, track it.
What came out of that is a framework they call the four legendary relationship elements. You. The partnership. The friendship. The lovers. And Lance is insistent about the order, because a great partnership needs a great partner first, and it is very hard to feel like friends with someone you are arguing with about the garbage.
IN THIS EPISODE
FULL EPISODE
Legendary Couples with Kids: https://frontrowdads.com/39
Jon's eleven-year-old had been more anxious than usual, and his wife told him why.
You have been more stressed at work. He is a reflector. He picks up on your energy.
Bryan Post takes that and does something more useful than reassurance. Your son has his own part, formed long before this week. You have yours. And the moment you take his behavior personally, you lose the ability to be present for him, because you have made his stuff your stuff. He gives the actual words to use, and the reason they work: all behavior arises from stress; a stressed child regresses to a younger age, and between the stress and the behavior there is only ever love or fear.
Then the part most parents get backward. When your kid's fear frightens you, what you do next is control, suppress, and correct, and you tell yourself that is good parenting. It isn't.
He finishes with the child who goes quiet instead of acting out, what happens when you try to pry that child open, and the one thing that works instead.
IN THIS EPISODE
FULL EPISODE
This is a short cut from one of the best conversations on this feed. The whole thing is worth your time: Love-Based Parenting Is Firm, Honest, and Harder Than Yelling Ever Was — https://frontrowdads.com/531
Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is all about? The Brotherhood Experience is a free, one-hour online session where you meet other like-minded men who are committed to being family men with businesses, not businessmen with families. You will hear the core ethos and values behind the community, and why this brotherhood is a strategy for connecting with your kids, building a thriving marriage, and winning in business. It runs every month. Pick a time that works for you at https://frontrowdads.com/experience
Nobody got married hoping to work on it.
That is where Ted Lowe starts. After a long day of working hard, the last thing anybody wants is to work some more, so telling a man his marriage needs more work tends to land like a chore. His alternative is a habit he calls serious fun, built on simple accounting: you cannot make withdrawals from a relational account you never deposited into. And the hard times come, and they require withdrawals.
Then he asks the question that gives this episode its name.
Jon takes the second half and gets honest about a six-month stretch where his own marriage went into a storm, and the realization that came out of it: he had become boring. Too routine, too practical. So he ran a thought experiment about what he would do if they split up, realized he would immediately become fun and kind and generous for someone else, and asked himself why he wasn't doing that for the person he loves most.
IN THIS EPISODE
FULL EPISODE
How to Not Make Marriage Complicated with Ted Lowe: https://frontrowdads.com/17
Geoff Woods set a goal of thirty-six date nights with his wife, tracked it all year, and then had to admit it wasn't working.
What he found instead was the idea he spent years teaching at The ONE Thing: find the one domino that makes everything else easier or unnecessary, and knock that one over first. In his marriage it wasn't the date nights. It was a cup of coffee at 5:30 in the morning, before the kids were awake, on the couch, looking each other in the eye and asking How are you doing.
This is from a training Geoff ran for the Front Row Dads brotherhood. He walks through how he goal-sets backward from twenty years out, why being the accountability guy with his wife on money backfired, and what he says to a spouse who has no interest in planning anything.
IN THIS EPISODE
WANT MORE FROM GEOFF WOODS
Goal Setting for Couples: https://frontrowdads.com/107
How Leaders Can Leverage AI for Strategic Thinking: https://frontrowdads.com/458
Nobody claws their way out of rock bottom alone.
Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is actually like? Come sit in on a live Brotherhood Experience. It's 60 minutes on Zoom with Jon and a few other dads, free, and it's the easiest way to find out whether a room like this is for you. You don't have to share, and you don't have to prepare. Dates and sign-up at frontrowdads.com/experience
Matt Aitchison was expelled from high school, arrested in college, and facing real jail time. He is quick to say that might not be your story, but that every man has his own version of the bottom: the moment you realize the way you are living is not who you are, and you are not going to let it become who you are.
What rebuilt it was not dramatic. One small decision at a time, over and over, for a long stretch, which only looks like a fork in the road looking backward.
He also makes the case for why the men around you matter this much: the board of directors, the people who would not let him stay down. Short, practical, and worth a listen on a hard day.
IN THIS EPISODE
Five versions of you are already running your marriage. The work is building the sixth.
Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is actually like? Come sit in on a live Brotherhood Experience. It's 60 minutes on Zoom with Jon and a few other dads, free, and it's the easiest way to find out whether a room like this is for you. You don't have to share, and you don't have to prepare. Dates and sign-up at frontrowdads.com/experience
Dr. Kelly Flanagan says we each carry five versions of ourselves: the lover, the loner, the hider, the fighter, and the ruler. They formed early, they never go away, and they surface uninvited in exactly the moments that matter most.
You cannot uncreate them. What you can do is build a sixth version, the one he calls the welcomer, that greets those parts and guides them instead of being run by them.
Recorded live at one of our online summits, this one moves from framework into three real stories, and the last one is the reason to stay to the end.
IN THIS EPISODE
WANT MORE?
This was a members-only online summit, so there is no public episode to link.
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