Bruce Feiler The council of dads

Where can I find you dads?

The staff are the moms and dads of America's children.

And I said to myself I would call this group of men the Council of Dads.

Someone asked me if he cried when I asked him to be in the council of dads.

And mostly what good dads should be doing this time of year is nestling with their kids and decorating the Christmas tree.

So it turned out that starting a council of dads was a very efficient way to find out what my wife really thought of my friends.

So a few weeks after my diagnosis, we went up to Vermont, and I decided to put Jeff as the first person in the Council of Dads.

And don't tell me it's from the guys and the coaches and the dads, because the women in my life are harder on me than anyone else.

And then I asked him a question, which I ended up asking to all the dads and ended up really encouraging me to write this story down in a book.

And that is, the secret of the Council of Dads, is that my wife and I did this in an attempt to help our daughters, but it really changed us.

All my childhood, while my friends' dads would tell them Grimm's fairy tales, my father would tell me stories about very unassuming heroes with unshakeable utopias who managed to make miracles.

And that particularly happened there was one in my life is this Council of Dads that Linda said, what we were talking about, it's like what the moms talk about at school drop off.

Because it's not anymore Mom, Dad, the flowers and the bees, and then there's the baby. No, it can be two moms, three dads, in vitro there's the whole idea of how babies can be made today that has changed.

I wrote a letter to my girls that appears at the end of my book, The Council of Dads, and I listed these lessons, a few of which you've heard here today Approach the cow, pack your flipflops, don't see the wall, live the questions, harvest miracles.

Diagnosed with cancer, Bruce Feiler worried first about his young family. So as he shares in this funny, rambling and ultimately thoughtful talk he asked his closest friends to become a council of dads, bringing their own lifetimes of wisdom to advise his twin daughters as they grow.

But male role models for boys that say it's all right to be smart they've got dads, they've got pastors, they've got Cub Scout leaders, but ultimately, six hours a day, five days a week they're spending in a classroom, and most of those classrooms are not places where men exist.