Saving Society - We Need to Raise the Bar, Not Lower It

In this pre-Christmas episode of The Unhinged Father, we reflect on the holiday hustle and explore the concept of “raising the bar” in parenting, relationships, and personal growth. Host Robbie opens up about his ongoing health journey, balancing calorie restrictions with holiday indulgences, and staying accountable despite the season’s challenges.

As the holiday magic unfolds, Robbie dives into the importance of dads stepping up their game—not just helping but becoming true partners in creating memorable family experiences. He challenges societal trends of lowering expectations and advocates for striving toward growth and progress, all while giving yourself grace during setbacks.

Whether it’s sharing the mental load during the holidays, being a better spouse, or holding yourself accountable to personal goals, this episode is packed with relatable insights, encouragement, and a dose of unfiltered honesty.

Tune in for practical advice, heartfelt stories, and a reminder to aim high while embracing imperfection. Don’t forget to share your thoughts and suggestions for the new year via Instagram or the message link in the description! 🎅✨

SEO Keywords:
Holiday parenting tips, raising the bar as a dad, co-parenting during Christmas, mental load in relationships, dad’s holiday responsibilities, Christmas traditions for families, holiday stress management, balancing health and holidays, The Unhinged Father podcast, fatherhood and personal growth.

Chapters

• 0:00 Reflecting on the Holiday Season
• 10:08 Shared Responsibilities in Parenting
• 15:15 Navigating Expectations and Social Media Influence

Transcript

Robbie (00:01)
All right, everyone, we are about a week away from one of my favorite holidays from Christmas. I'm gonna go ahead and put out a Christmas episode next week. So we're not gonna really dive too much into the holiday movies, things like that. But I did wanna put an episode out the week before and kind of in line with Santa's naughty and nice list, I wanted to talk a little bit about just some of the things that I've been reflecting on as we get closer and closer to Christmas and some of the things that have been coming up within my life that could possibly be.

coming up in your life as well. So we're gonna go ahead and dive into that. Quick update for anyone who actually gives a shit about the health journey I'm going on. If you've been listening for a couple months now, I've been really trying to keep myself accountable to losing weight, getting in shape, being healthier, not only for myself, but for my kids as well. And...

Yeah, I'm still down. I made it through Thanksgiving and through part of the Christmas season, still down quite a bit from where I started off. I started off at around 275, almost close to 280. And I weighed in this morning at 261. So just about a pound over the lowest that I've gotten so far. Still trying to get down to like that 235, 240 range. Haven't been there in absolute years, but it feels good to still be really close within that 260, almost into the 250s again.

It is very difficult. I, everyone always says that your stomach's going to get used to not eating as much food. I've been really restricting the calories during the week and it absolutely sucks. I'm fucking starving. I want more food. My body, guess I'm just so used to eating so much food throughout my life that I really haven't become acclimated to eating a smaller amount of food. Anyways, I'm staying accountable.

staying on track, making sure that I'm continuing to stay under my calorie allotment during the week and then trying not to go bat shit crazy on the weekends. But if you're out there and you're working towards a school, I know that Christmas, the holidays is gonna be nuts. It's all right to fall off the horse once in a while. You just gotta get back on, keep moving forward. Your health is important. Being healthy is important.

Whether you've got kids, family, anyone, it doesn't really matter. Your health should be a priority in your life, just like I'm trying to make it in mine.

That being said, the thing that I wanted to focus on this week, it's something I kind of touched upon in one of my previous episodes, but that one is no longer active right now. It's one of the earliest episodes that I ever did, but really just kind of focusing on this idea of raising the bar. And it's something that I've seen quite a bit within society, social media, just in general, I've seen this, it's almost like a reckoning of

how things have been unequal in the past or how things are not fair and how certain people are held to higher standards. For example, just in my world, dads and moms have been held to much different standards throughout the years. And that's not necessarily a good thing. One of the things that I've been seeing is that a lot of times moms will become resentful or you'll hear there's like generalizations of how like men don't do shit, men or dad, you

not doing as much as women are doing and to kind of give women a break. And I have this idea in my head that we shouldn't be lowering the bar for people and in trying to rectify issues that have happened in the past. Like we shouldn't be going back and lowering the bar, lowering the standards for others in order to make things equal. We should be raising the bar. So in my opinion, men need to raise their game. Men need to raise the bar. Men need to be better fathers.

better providers, better spouses, better partners, just in everything that they do, just be better people, as opposed to letting women come down to where men have been in the past in terms of being a homemaker or being in the house, being a family person, being responsible for the domestic life as well as the professional life. And this is something that I see in a lot of different areas. And I don't want to...

come in here and just basically come down on people and say, hey, you can never give yourself a break. You can never give yourself some grace or a little bit of slack. That's not what I'm saying. I think that we should be cognitive of where we're at, make sure that we are working towards trying to be the best version of ourselves that we can, but acknowledging that we're never gonna get there. That's a big thing for me. It's just, we're always striving towards

being better, we're always striving towards this unattainable goal, but then acknowledging that we're never going to be able to get there. That's the idea of something that's unattainable. You're never going to get there, but you're striving for it. It's an ideal. It's a goal. So that way you're constantly moving forward as opposed to taking steps back and continuing to take steps back. That's really the bigger thing is that you're going to fall, you're going to stumble and that's okay. You can dust yourself off, give yourself some grace, take a break.

but you don't wanna start taking steps back and you don't wanna lower the bar for yourself in the long run either. And that's where I see quite a bit of issues in society is this lowering of the bar of seeing disparities and then instead of asking other people to increase their game to be better or to step up to the plate.

They're like, well, I'm just gonna go ahead and I should be able to lower my standards to sit in wherever I'm at. Like this is where I should be or I can lower it even further than where I'm at right now. I can continue to go on a downhill trajectory as opposed to moving up towards whatever's better in life.

And it's something that this is this idea of raising the bar, something that is hard to, I don't know, sometimes marry within my own head to just kind of like come to grips with, because as we've talked about before, you know, you're going to stumble, you're going to fall. And on this podcast or in this humble podcasters mind, it's okay to screw up. It's okay to fuck up and.

That's, that's not necessarily the end of the world. It's what you do after you screw up. It's what you do after you fuck up or you stumble. Those are the things that matter the most. It's that grit, that determination, that will to try and move forward and move past where you're at. But I also don't want people to feel terrible about themselves if they're at a certain level. And so when I talk about raising the bar, it's not like you have to be perfect. You don't have to be this, this great person. It's just have.

a goal, have an ideal, have some sort of standard that you've set or that people have helped you set and strive towards that in anything that you do as a person, as a parent, as an employee, just for anything that you've got within your life. We shouldn't as a society go down to the lowest common denominator. It should be us trying to progress as a society as opposed to taking a step back while also not going so far back to where we

hold people to unrealistic expectations and then drag them down with those expectations. I feel like I just went in like a verbal circle right there. And that's one of the things that's difficult to really explain. It all kind of makes sense in my mind, but it's difficult for me to explain and it's difficult to make sense in a more logical perspective.

how do you marry the idea of working towards a better life, the best version of yourself that you could possibly be, but then also hold that grace to when you do fall or when you do stumble that you're not gonna get down on yourself, beat yourself up to where you start going in the opposite direction. Cause a lot of times that's really what it is. It's, sometimes you have the world will beat you down and people will drag you down.

But typically, you know, people will be upset for a while. People will drag you down for a while, but then they'll let go and people will see you starting to slip and they'll reach hands out to pull you back up, to pull you back the other way. A lot of times, at least in my life, it's my own self-talk. It's my own negative talk that makes me go in completely a different direction and down a slippery slope into depression, into anxiety and taking 45 steps backwards when I've

been on this upward trajectory. And yeah, I think that that's just something that I've been thinking about recently, trying to figure out and don't have necessarily the answers for it. But I do think that as a society, we need to stop lowering bars in order to obtain some sort of equality or equity or whatever you want to call it. Like the bars don't need to be lowered.

The bars need to be elevated. They need to be brought higher. Men, fathers, you need to step up your game. You can be a great dad. Me and my wife had conversations this past week where I'm a pretty involved father and consider myself a good dad. And I think that I...

I'm very mindful about a lot of the things I do. We've already talked in past episodes about how I try to hold that old school and the new school mentality together, utilize the best of both worlds in order to give my kids the best life that they could possibly have, the best family life that we could possibly have. But that being said, there are still areas in my life that I struggle with that I don't necessarily raise the bar that are not even on my radar. And one of them would be

like giving gifts for Christmas and buying gifts. My wife, this has been her domain. She's done this for a long time. And like, love Christmas. I get credit for giving the gifts to the kids. And there's a lot that I do do as a father, but there are certain aspects that I've completely relegated to my wife and let her take over. And it's unfair to her to expect her to do this all the time and not necessarily step in and help out.

And that's an area just as a specific example in my life that I don't think that my wife needs to lower her standards or lower what she's doing in terms of giving our kids a great Christmas and trying to make it as magical as possible. That's an area where I need to step my game up in order to give my wife some of that breathing room that she wants and take some of that mental load off of her. So that way she can enjoy the holidays. So that way she's not just sitting there constantly worried about what's going on. And that way we could.

really enjoy it as a family. Cause one of the things that I've learned as a father, all of the shit that I loved, like from Christmas and birthdays and stuff like that, I still love it all, but it's my responsibility now to put that on. There's a lot to think about. There's a lot to do for my kids. And if you don't have both parents on board and only one parent is really carrying a lot of that load, then

The holidays can be stressful. That's when moms lose their shit and they fucking yell at the kids for doing something wrong or not appreciating a present. And you could really lose sight of what the holiday is, what the season is for. We're doing all of this stuff for our kids, for their enjoyment. And a lot of times we get so caught in the pageantry of it or we're just so stressed out because of everything that we have to do that we lose sight of why we're doing it in the first place.

Me as a dad, even though, I, we, I'm saying all this stuff now, but in the moment when my wife brought it up to me, I was defensive. I put up the walls. said like, I'm a good dad. I do all this shit. I'm way more involved than any other fucking dad that I know. And I'm constantly trying to be the best that I possibly can. And just because I'm not involved in this area doesn't mean that I'm not involved. But my wife also has valid concerns and valid, I guess you would say,

criticisms of me because I have just let my wife take over and not paid attention to that as much and let her really just run with it thinking that, you know, hey, she does a good job here. I'll let her do that, but not checking in with her and seeing if she does want help with that and not even just like wants help, but if she wants a partner in creating some of these magical opportunities for our kids and holding some of that mental load for her. So

I don't want her to lower her bar. I don't want her to try less in terms of giving our kids a great Christmas or other people great Christmases as well. Just providing this great family holiday season environment for anyone that comes into contact with us. But I also want her to be able to sit back and relax and not necessarily feel like she's walking on eggshells and she's the only one responsible for creating this season or like getting presents or

figuring out what we're gonna do or going on a train trip with the kids or setting up a time to go see Santa. There's a lot that she's doing that I could definitely be involved with. I hesitate to use the word helping because as a father, you shouldn't necessarily just be helping. You should be involved and it should be like a meeting of the minds. You should be talking to your wife, having meetings and pretty much coming up, like it's like a business meeting, coming up together with

who's responsible for what, figuring out what people are going to be doing. And then that way you both can hold on to the load a little bit more equally. And even though it may be a little bit more stressful for you, you know, your wife or whoever, it doesn't have to be wife and husband in our situation. That's how it's, that's how it's been. And I'm sure in a lot of typical households, it's probably the wife that does a lot of this stuff and carries a lot of the load, but I don't want to discount any of you dads that are out there doing that already. that being said,

both people should be carrying that load. So that way there's a, you know, a certain amount of stretch, stress on each one. But at the end of the day, they're not carrying everything. And it's not like if they take a seat and give themselves a little break that all of the balls are going to come tumbling down and no one's there to carry it to the end zone. So, that's just something that I've been thinking about. I'm not even sure if it's still in line with what I was initially talking about with lowering and raising the bar.

But yeah, I feel like I see that a lot on social media. And as I mentioned last week, don't really know. Social media is not the real world, obviously. And I don't even know if some of the trends that I see within social media translate well into the real world, just because there's a certain group of people that are on social media and that are active on social media. And then there's a certain group that are not active on social media. And so who really knows where society and where culture is at?

It's somewhat of a barometer if you look into the social media world, but it's not a true representation of what society and culture are truly at. But I do think that sometimes we try to, in order to make things more fair, lower bars, lower expectations, lower the ideal, as opposed to raising expectation, raising the bar for anyone who is not holding their own weight or not contributing enough.

I think that that's the direction that we want to go. As a dad, that's the direction I would prefer to go. I don't want my wife to lower her bar in order to meet me where I'm at. I would rather raise my bar in order to meet her where she's at. And then we can progress together as a family and really be that team that we want to be. yeah, mean, that's really all of the thoughts that I had this week. It's been...

As I said in all of the episodes, or I feel like I'm constantly just going to be saying this is that it's the holiday seasons. We're busy. lots of changes going on within our life. Some good changes. New year's going to be starting off, with some good news for us and a positive direction, but it's still just a lot going on. a lot to plan a lot to accomplish in a short amount of time. Love the season, love Christmas and

really happy to be able to listen to Christmas music with the kids and enjoy certain traditions that we do. I hope that you and your family are able to enjoy all of those traditions as well. And like I said, my next episode is going to be coming out. It's going to be coming out on Christmas day. And that one, I'm going to dive a little bit more into some of the Christmassy stuff. But this one, I just wanted to go into some of the things that are at the top of my mind. Some of the things that I've been seeing. feel like this one definitely was less, less thought out and

a little over the place. I'm hoping that coming into the new year, I'll have a little bit of a better rhythm when coming up with these episodes and getting different subject matter that people are interested in. so as I always say, but really this year, know, what I want for Christmas is send me a message on Instagram, send me a message in the little, in the description of this episode, there's a send a message about the episode. Like I said before, I can't respond to it, but

anything that you'd like me to talk about or dive into, even if it's something I really don't know anything about, I'm a very opinionated person. And even if it's something I don't really know a shit ton about, I'm sure I've got an opinion on it. So for Christmas, send me a message, Instagram email, the little link at the end of the podcast episode description. Let me know some of the things that you want to hear in the new year. Some of the things that you're focusing on and what I can do.

to kind of help, even if it's not, you know, I'm not here to change anyone's lives completely. I'm not a life coach. I'm fucking barely got my life together, but I do have a lot of different ideas, a little different thoughts that go through my head. And my thought process is, is if I can give you just a small sliver of something for you to grow upon, that's enough for me. And I feel like that might be helpful for you. It's like when you're reading a book, you don't have to understand the whole book.

You don't have to fucking like the whole book or even really believe in everything the book says. But if they give you one little slice of information that you can take and it can push your life in a positive direction, then that book was definitely worthwhile. And I think same thing for this podcast. If I could give you just a little sliver of something that's going to make your life a tiny bit better, then I hope that you listen and you progress with it. So other than that, I'm going to call it for this episode. I feel like I'm just rambling now.

Hope you all have a fantastic Christmas Eve and I'll see you all here on Christmas Day for the next episode of podcast. Have a good one everyone.