How To Actually Build Lasting Memories With Your Kids | Tod Francis (father of 2, Shasta Ventures)

StartupDad_TodFrancis

Adam-IntroOutro: Welcome to StartupDad, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I'm your host, Adam Fishman. Today is a special, different StartupDad conversation. I interviewed Tod Francis, who is the founder of world renowned investment firm Shasta Ventures.

He's made early investments in companies like Canva, Tonal, Class Dojo, Liquid Space, TaskRabbit, Mint, and more. You might be wondering, why is a conversation with a venture capitalist a special occasion on Startup Dad? Well, about 15 years ago, Todd started on a journey to understand why and how great memories and connections are formed between kids and their parents.

He conducted an extensive survey of young adults, analyzed that survey data, and developed a framework for memory making. We talked about it on today's episode, and the takeaways are surprising. Tod is a husband and the father of two boys who are now adults themselves. And he's still making memories.

Today's episode is filled with deeply researched insights and action steps that you can take right now to start building lasting memories with your kids. I'm so appreciative for this conversation.

Adam: I would like to welcome Tod Francis to the Startup Dad podcast. Tod, it is a pleasure to have you here today. I'm super excited for this conversation.

Tod: I'm looking forward to it as well. It's one of my favorite topics and something I spent a lot of time on and I'm looking forward to diving into it with you.

Adam: Cool. So before we get fully started today, we're going to talk about how you establish deeper, more meaningful relationships and memories with your kids. And I wanted to mention that even though we're going to talk about kids, I think this is actually broadly applicable to building memories with anyone, you know, with your parents currently, or with coworkers, but I think it is also really important to kind of go all the way back in time and start with a little bit about you and what life was like growing up, because I think that's important to how your adulthood was shaped. So Tod, tell me a little bit about what life was like growing up in the Francis household?

Tod: So first of all, I grew up in Indianapolis and a single parent household. My mom was an amazing parent. Fantastic. My parents divorced when I was, three or four, never really, my dad was not at all involved in my upbringing. So it was really my heroic mother who went off to get a degree and get a job after the divorce and, you know, bring in the income and be a parent to three boys, she was absolutely fantastic. So I'm not here with a sob story about growing up in a broken household. I will say I grew up in a household without a father and I saw my friends, you know, do a lot with their fathers, and even though my mom was so incredible, I mean, I could never replace her or want to change it. So I was like, wow, that'd be kind of cool too, to have a relationship with a dad. But yeah, Indianapolis, good Midwestern upbringing, focus on education. My mom worked really hard, you know, was not one of those moms who had time to hang out at the soccer field and the tennis courts and everything, watching her kids. She was always cranking and, you know, trying to make it work for the rest of us.

Adam: Growing up without a dad present in your life or a father figure present in your life? Do you think that put a bit of a chip on your shoulder? Did it, was it a conscious motivator to want to be a great dad when you started your family?

Tod: You know, when people look at our family and saw my mom, they're just blown away. So I can't say I had a chip on my shoulder, but I sure had that yearning and I'm sure it was part of my wiring, like I would love to have a good relationship with my kids, you know, I'd like, another point about what we're about to talk about is I had no guidebook, I had no role model as a dad. So when we get into some of the things we're going to get into, I was approaching it very freshly. Like, I just wanted this, the most important thing in my life and I just want to nail it. You know, I just want to build these deep relationships and have relationships that matter for life. So I do think it was absolutely a underlying driver.

Adam: Well tell me a little bit about life now you've got a partner, you've got two adult kids. I don't know. Can you ever think of your kids as adults? But tell me a little bit about your family now.

Tod: Yeah, sure. So I met Bonnie, my wife, when we worked at Johnson and Johnson, we were in the same incoming class at J and J at a business school, she was there four months ahead of me. So it was one of these things where she was a superstar already. I walked in and I had no idea what was going on and walked into her office.

Like, hey, what's, where do people have fun here? Like, how does this whole thing work? So that's how we met. And then interestingly, in those days, having a relationship in a corporate environment was not really, well, not at all supported. So we need to leave there. And then we moved out west to San Francisco. We have two boys now, oldest is 31, youngest is 28. They're both in startups and both living in San Francisco.

Adam: You haven't tried to dissuade them from startup life? I guess you get a lot of exposure to that.

Tod: Yeah, well, we've had very realistic conversations about it and never would I say, oh, you should go do a startup. I think it was absolutely burning desire that they had. The older 1 Taylor had a strong desire to build a climate solutions company to help with a climate crisis and that was a driver in his life and absolutely was have been supportive and in it, we're not at all involved officially, but.

I love just seeing the drive that they have to create things. So. I'll tell you one thing. It's really interesting to see just how hard it really is. You know, as a venture, we're on the board. We talk with our CEOs and, you know, there's always somewhat of a positioning and in those relationships, but when you see someone and, you know, your child go through the challenges of building companies and how hard and how rewarding it can be as like, whoa, that is full blast.

Like, it's pretty exciting. Yeah.

Adam: Yeah. And the other thing I wanted to bring up is you know, a little bit of a, you know, more sensitive topic, which is you had another kid that you lost at childbirth. And I'm wondering how did that influence your priorities as a dad? Was that another thing that sort of really made you lean into wanting to create memories and establish like really good parental bond with your kids?

Tod: Yeah. So frankly, this is something I haven't talked about publicly with people. But we have two boys and two years before my oldest son was born. We had another son, fully healthy baby. He just had complications in the delivery process and didn't make it. And so what is that? You know, you come out of it like, Whoa.

Everything was perfect. Everything was lining up so well. I mean, I thought having kids was so easy. In fact you're warned about having kids, like watch out. And then you just realize, holy cow, this is really precious. And it's not obvious. It's not automatic and every relationship and every person, every child is really, really special.

And I think that that is also another one of those fundamental foundations in my drive to like, wow, I really want to have a great relationship with these boys. Now, to be clear, I'm not an expert on parenting. I dove deep.

Adam: I don’t think any of us are, even the experts.

Tod: Right. I dove deep on how to build relationships and memories with children, cause that was my priority. I just really wanted to do things that were meaningful with them.

Adam: Yeah. So I wanted to, this is a little tongue in cheek, but, you know, reminded me of what happened during the pandemic, which is like see venture capitalists on Twitter and they, you know, they read a article about COVID and suddenly they're epidemiologists and they know everything. Right.

So I do appreciate you saying, hey, I'm not a parenting expert, but you did go really deep on this topic. Like I would consider given our prep conversation for this, that this is a fairly well researched area for you. And so of course, what I'm talking about is this idea of building memories with your kids and what it takes to actually build real long lasting memories.

And you studied this and I'm kind of curious just to start and ask you why, like, why was this a thing that you were curious about? Why did this matter to you?

Tod: Yeah. First of all, I get the joke on the venture people. I agree with it by the way. And if I hadn't been pulled into this and then done a lot of research on it, independent research. I wouldn't be willing to talk to you as a, on it. This is a pretty well researched topic. That I've put together.

So why? Okay. I think because I just, I had this priority as both of us are as parents, we had this priority. We were doing everything we could to, you know, raise our kids well and balanced and whatnot. And also this special experiences and we started to get feedback, frankly, from friends. These were in the early days of Facebook you know, might post a outing, maybe a bike ride with my 13 year old or a camping trip with my 14 year old son, and people would be like, whoa, how are you getting your teenage kids to spend weekends doing this kind of thing?

Like I'm having a hard time getting them away from the TV or the video games and off the computer. And so I kept getting this feedback actually very frequently got this feedback and it made me realize, whoa, this is an important topic for people. This is something that's worth talking about.

And the feedback kind of came together. Oh, and then I had this cold email from a, quite a well known leader and business leader. Everyone would recognize the name. And they were like, hey, I'd love to have lunch. I was like, what's this about? And he's like, I just want to hear about, you know, how you raise your kids because I've met your kids and my kids are 10 years younger than yours are and I just would love to learn from it. So that brought together for me, like, okay, this is an important topic. It's not something that's easy to talk about. It's hard to go to your neighbor and say, hey, I'm not connecting with my daughter. What do you do? But people were coming to me and wanting to do this.

So it made me realize, hey, this is worth putting some time into. It's worth putting a little bit of effort into and try to help my friends learn whatever I can learn and to help them. And then what happened, there was kind of this pivotal moment where I went to a conference. And it's a user generated conference where they ask the attendees, there's like 250 attendees.

Hey, do you even want to lead a discussion? I like threw in this topic and said, yeah, I'll lead one on how to connect with your kids. It was a tech conference. I didn't think, A, I'd be selected. B, I didn't think anybody would show up because it had eight tracks simultaneously. And the other one was about, you know, Twitter versus Facebook and Google versus Yahoo at the time.

And the room was packed. And my title for the talk, interestingly, was I think it was like, “parenting is not about going to soccer games,” and people thought I was anti-sports. I'm very active in sports, personally. I have a college athlete son. I love sports. But my point was parenting is not just about checking boxes, standing on the sideline. Like the really cool stuff happens when you're out doing other things. And we had this discussion among, I think there are 120 people in the room. It was as many people that could fit in there. And it was just fascinating to hear A, people really wanted to explore this topic and B, they had a lot of different ideas and a lot of questions.

And it was then that I decided, you know what, I'm going to go off and do something on this. And the key thing is it shouldn't be about how I raised my kids. And it shouldn't be about my memories with my kids. And I thought, I've got to do some research. This has to be representative across income groups across geographies, and it's not just about some guy in Silicon Valley who loves the outdoors and skis and bikes with their kids.

That's not the story. The story is how can anybody connect more with their kids? So we did this - is it okay if I talk about the research?

Adam: Yeah. Yeah. So I was going to say, so just to frame the research that you did, so you put forward this talk. It ended up being a thing that people were, surprisingly to you, very interested in. It led to a lot of interesting discussion. And then you're like, well, I got to go even deeper on this because it can't just be about me.

Like, I'm just one person. There's gotta be more science or more to this than just my lived experience. So you embarked on this fairly expansive journey to kind of figure this out. That kind of get brings us to the study that you conducted.

Tod: Yeah, and I do want to say for background for the rest of the things I'm about to comment on. I will use examples that relate to myself because I know them the best and it's a lot of outdoor activity, but that's not meant to say that's the prescription. You know, if I say backpacking, you could replace that word with cooking.

If I say, you know, bike riding, it could be puzzles. So I just want to point that out front. So let's go to the research. My thought was, okay, I don't want to talk to other parents about this because they have their views that are skewed as a parent and how they think they're doing. Well, I want to talk to young adults who've just been in the households with their parents. So the youngest access I could get in a research study was 18 to 21, I think was the age group. Friend of mine worked at Survey Monkey, we worked together on it, on getting the access to the kids and how to do the right survey. I have a marketing background so I did a mixture of unaided questions and aided questions and I'll explain that in a minute. And the goal was to get it out across the country across income groups so we had representative information.

I wanted both, what unaided means is you ask an open ended question. How's your relationship with your father? How's your relationship with your mother? What activities did you enjoy doing? What are some of the special memories you had as a child? So I wanted them to just respond. And then I was like, wait, let's prompt as well.

Of these 20 activities, what are the five most memorable? Of these, so there are a lot of prompts. And then I finished with a question of which I thought was the best question because here's an 18, 19 year old, maybe a college kid, someone out of their home. It's like, if you could spend a day with your parents, an afternoon with your parents, how would you design to do it?

And I felt like that might bring out the most authentic way they wanted to connect with their parents. So the goal was to do that. And then what I also did is I posted on at the time I was active on Facebook. I'm not anymore. I posted on my Facebook, the survey and I had 300 people replied there.

So I knew that that was a different income group, and there was probably going to be a little more west coast and maybe midwest because that's where I'm from. And then we combined it, I looked at those results relative to the national results and surprisingly, they're almost identical because these.

Connecting with other people is not about income or geography. It's human, human nature. And so I was pleased to see that there wasn't any difference between economic groups or geography groups. So that's the background on the research study.

Adam: So you collectively surveyed, you know, somewhere between 1,250 to 1,500, “kids”/young adults in the 18 to 20 ish, 21, 22 ish year old age group. And you asked them a set of aided and unaided questions just to kind of like, identify patterns and things like that. So, when you did this, I guess, first thing I would say is what was surprising to you when you started to see these results come in?

Tod: Well, I was surprised at two things. One was a lot of people had good relationships with their parents. Or said differently, wanted to spend time with their parents. Maybe it wasn't like a good relationship, but they valued their parents. They wanted it. Cause I thought I'd hear a lot more like, oh, it's pain or, you know, so much tension.

So there is just a genuine interest but below that was not all settings deliver the same results. Like there's a lot of settings of tension and then there's settings of the memories. The 2nd point I'd say is that the settings and the circumstances of memories tended to be pretty consistent. And I don't mean exactly consistent. Like, we all have great memories of boat rides. I'm just saying it tended to be consistent on we're spending time outside of our more pressure oriented relationship of delivering grades or sports results or things like that, where you're just out together. You're spending side by side time that tended to be, it was very consistent both in the aided and unaided results of my favorite memories.

My best experiences with my parents were in these types of circumstances, which we can talk about. I can get into more detail.

Adam: I'm curious about what some of those responses were?

Tod: Yeah, well, this is my favorite question in the research because it allowed the young adult to not be constrained by what the parents had restricted them to

Adam: Mm hmm.

Tod: or what the other sibling had to do that day. But just like, how would you want to spend time with your parents if you could have a clean afternoon?

What's interesting is how simple the answers were. It was really simple. I'd like to have a barbecue and just sit around and talk. So I would say that was the key summary. Like just most of the comments were, oh, I just like to have some downtime with them and catch up. And it was, so it wasn't about fancy, this fancy outing, this, all that, you know, there were nuances in there.

Like, oh, I just like to go for a walk or like, we'd love to, you know, do hikes or we like to do you know, cookouts together or there, lots of things like that. But at the core of the answer was spending time together. And I would say the core of the research, the connecting times were at times when they weren't being judged and they weren't in that reporting relationship, that judgment, you know, how you feel when you're talking to somebody, I'm sure you, it happens in work a lot.

Like you're connecting with somebody they're trying to figure out where you stand in their stack,

Adam: Mm hmm.

Tod: we're all sensitive to that. So the children want to be in a setting where they're not being judged and can just share and talk. And so that was, I thought that was really refreshing.

It wasn't about a trip. It wasn't about you know, spending money on something. It was just like, yeah, I'd love to go back and just have a barbecue. We'd hang out, talk. I'd love to learn more about their growing up. I'd love to learn more about their challenges. I'd like to explore topics more.

It was really interesting that way. To me, it was very encouraging.

Adam: Yeah. Love that. All right. And you said you came up with this idea of kind of a pyramid. Is it a pyramid of time that people spend or pyramid of memories? Describe that pyramid construct to me.

Tod: Yeah. So I looked at all the information and I thought, how do I synthesize this down to something that's understandable? Because my ultimate goal is to put in a presentation. I was getting asked to talk at parent groups, dad groups, mom groups. I was getting asked, so I felt like I want to do a proper presentation on this and I wanted to have a structure. So I'll introduce the basic structure, but I need to spend a little time on each layer. So the, so think of a pyramid, you have the base layer, the foundation is where we spend 98 percent of our time. And this is not a criticism. This is a recognition that most of our time is spent in the processing or foundation layer with our kids.

It is getting ready for school, taking them to school, picking them up at soccer, going to soccer, tutoring, going to these things. It's a lot of processing.This is super important again, I'm not taking away from it, but that's not where the connections are made. It's where we spend most of our time. It's not where you're connected.

Adam: One of the, one of the things you mentioned about that is that there's this idea of you're kind of in a reporting relationship with a parent and a kid. What does that mean?

Tod: So in my deck I have this big vertical arrow that's pointed down and it means that ultimately, you know, when you're with your child, most of the time they are kind of reporting to you. And what I mean by that is pick them up school. How was school? Well, what kind of question is that?

That is like, how was school? Oh, wait, I got to tell him how I did. How was the soccer game? Oh, I got to tell him if we won or lost, I got to tell him how I did. Do you see what I mean? It's not like you're going through it together. You are like reporting into your parent. On that. Or let's take it a different way versus just the communication.

Let's face it. You are in command as a parent. You are in charge. So you are in a vertical relationship with your child, and that needs to happen. We need to have, you know, authority and rules and boundaries. So again, not taking away from it, but we spend most of our time in that kind of relationship.

And again, that's usually not where the connections are made.

Adam: Yeah. So you're kind of getting sort of like status updates from a direct report, you're getting your status updates most of the time in that processing kind of logistical layer of things. It's also interesting that that's where we spend so much of our time.

Tod: I hadn't thought about this before, but think about your work day or anyone's work day, you got a calendar, it's full of meetings. It's like, yeah, I got that done. I got that done. I got that done. Did you really do much? Did you think, did you move things forward? Did you creatively connect with your co partner, your coworkers?

No, you're like just getting through the day. That's kind of what a lot of parenting is. And then what do we do in work? We do offsites. We do strategic sessions. We brainstorm, we go to try to break through and get to the next level. I think it's, there's some similarities because again, it's human nature.

At home, we're getting through the day. We're going to school. We're going to sport. We're going to music. We're going to theater. There's a lot of processing and then the breakthrough times are going to be in different settings, which we should talk about.

Adam: So as you move up the pyramid, what's kind of in that next layer?

Tod: The next layer is where the connections start, and I call it side by side, and I would turn that vertical arrow to a horizontal area, where you have two humans side by side. And what happened is, these themes started to become more clear when I read the comments. The feedback was, what are your favorite memories?

Camping, hiking, road trips, cooking, games, one on one time, by the way, I really want to emphasize for any parent listening to this, The kids want one on one time. There are literally comments of like, you know, my sister or my brother, you can insert either word is just overwhelms every time I'm with my parents.

I just every time I'm alone with them I have such a better experience. Or I am different than my brother, a sister, and I connect differently with my mother or father than my child, my brother, sister does. So, 1 on 1 time. So, these themes came back of, like, and I summarize about called side by side time.

So it means that you're going down a path where you're not reporting. You're a little more vulnerable. You're not being judged. They tend to be simple settings. So let's take the example of you go watch at a soccer game and pick them up. You're clearly watching them perform and they're delivering results, which is different than if you go on a walk through a park that you've never been on that trail before, you're both walking down that trail together, experiencing it.

Or you're going on a bike ride or you're trying a new puzzle. Or you do a backpacking trip or a camping trip. One of the quotes was one of my best memories with my father was when our camper broke down, this is a female girl when our camper broke down. We had three hours before we got picked up and we played Scrabble and we talked about how he grew up and I heard stories I'd never heard before.

Okay. That happens when you're in that side by side kind of experience. So anyway, that's the next layer is the side by side. And I can give you a few more quotes if you're interested to kind of bring it home.

Adam: Yeah, I would love to hear other things that really stood out to you and that sort of exemplified that side by side time.

Tod: Yeah. So one was we took, we took the trolley down to the harbor and watched the boats every Sunday. I love that one. It's so simple. No, one's the boss. You're experiencing it together. You're outdoors. You're probably not paying attention to other stuff.

You're just like in the moment. Another was my dad's a truck driver and I never had time with him. When his best friend died, we had to drive an hour to clean out his house. And in that hour, I learned more about my father than I had in my whole life. So that actually brings it home. Now you could say he was in charge cause he was driving, but they're sitting side by side.

They didn't have a task at hand. They're driving and they're able to talk. It creates that sharing experience. It's very hard to schedule a three o'clock meeting with your child and say, hey, let's talk about some sensitive topics. Right. They tend to come out when you're doing something together. You've, you're, you've built some trust, you've got some downtime.

And so that was one, another was I just love spending time with my mom, making food. We talk, we laugh, we tell jokes, we make mistakes. And that was another one, another woman said, my best memory with my father is when we made furniture. So she said, I love to give people gifts, furniture, gifts.

And we would do it together and so you can just see that they're out in the garage or, you know, working together side by side and sharing ideas. So those are just a few. I mean, I could go on, but those are a few of the quotes that came back. I will tell you an interesting thing on the list of the 20 items of how would you rate these things as best memories of having your parent watch you play sports was in the bottom side.

Adam: Wow.

Tod: I'm not telling you not to go watch your kids play sports. Okay. That is not the message.

Adam: Right.

Tod: The message is that's not a special bonding experience. You're on the sideline. You're on your phone. You're talking to the parents. You're not interacting with your child.

Adam: Right. Maybe you're barking some coaching instructions at them or something like that. 

Tod: Actually, on that point, an interesting example is given to me. This just happened in the last weekend. And he was saying, yeah, my daughter is a ski racer and I go and watch the ski races and we spend all day out there watching ski races, but I don't really interact with her.

Our best memories are when we're skiing and we go together as a family and we find a tree area, maybe there's some fresh snow. That's our best memories because when I'm watching her ski race, I'm not connecting with her. You said, I mean, it's a difference between observation and participating together.

So, so that's the middle thing. That is where the good stuff happens in that side by side area. But there is another layer.

Adam: Okay. I knew there would be. So there's 3 layers to this pyramid. So what's the top? What's the best layer? 

Tod: It’s the breakthrough. It's the top of the pyramid. It's the breakthrough moments that are very hard to predict. You can't schedule them and they happen only so often, but you have to put yourself in place for them to happen. I'll give you an example. I'm going to give you my own example. I was on a bike ride with my 15 year old son.

We love to climb. It was a 4 hour climb, maybe 5. And about 30 minutes into it, he turns to me and says, hey, dad, you always ask me, you know, about my life and you always encourage me to ask other people about their lives. I'm gonna ask you about your life. Like, what was it like growing up? And I had some challenging stuff growing up.

I was like, that we've never talked about. I was like, well, we got three and a half hours. I guess we can get into it. You see, I mean, that was this. This is a breakthrough moment. And so we talked. I shared a ton of stuff. I hadn't shared before. I turned to him and said, hey, how is it being a sophomore in high school?

Like, gotta be pretty tough. Like, what's going on? We still had 2 hours to go on the bike ride. So you said, I mean, this was a breakthrough moment. We shared more than we could have ever shared when we had time limits or other activities or other people around. This is one on one side by side in that rare, I think because it was so long because there was so much more downtime than we would normally cover in our processing discussion, right? How school, you know, how'd you blah, blah, blah. We got into the deeper stuff.

Adam: So the idea with these kind of magic moments or the breakthrough layer is. You know, you can't plan for those. Those are going to happen somewhat serendipitously, but you can plan for more of that middle layer and then occasionally out of that middle layer comes some of these magic moments that like 1 percent time or something like that, or 2 percent time.

Tod: Yeah. I'll tell you, there was an interesting consistency among these breakthrough moments. One was we were in a boat. We dropped the anchor. We lost it. We spent two hours drifting until we got saved. There was a, I told you about the camper breakdown. There's a bunch of these like, we took the wrong turn.

And I don't know what to make of that except, it's unexpected time together and you're kind of having to solve together. And again, no one's the boss, but yeah, these breakthrough moments are amazing.

Adam: And also could be another one of those where. No one's sort of in control in those situations. Right. It's a very vulnerable as an adult, you get a flat tire, your axle breaks, your boat anchor breaks down. Like, well, you can kind of be in charge to solve that problem. But some of it is like, we're all in this together now. 

Tod: Yep. I think that's part of it.

Adam: Yeah. Yeah. So you've got these 3 layers. You've got this processing layer, this sort of middle connection layer. And then you've got these breakthrough moments that happen. And the main differences are, you know, it sounds like that connection layer.

Side by side activity, putting the parent and the child on sort of equal footing. Maybe it even means bringing the parent down a couple pegs in terms of their comfort level or something like that. So they're less control of the situation. So then of course the next like, the next logical question there.

Tod: Wait can I just build on what you just said? I forgot to mention that in the connecting that middle layer very powerful version is when your child takes you down their path. And so now you're not only turning the arrow this way, you're turning it this way,

Adam: hmm.

Tod: you are following one of their interests in something you are not familiar with.

Some parents are uncomfortable with this, but I'm telling you, it's super special. It's even, it is breakthrough. It could be a I'll give you an example. A dad came to me and say, Hey, I'm not connecting with my daughter. I do all the sports with my son. And I said, well, what does she like to do? And she, oh, stuff.

I don't connect. I don't relate to ballet and dance. And I was like, well, why don't you ask her how she wants to spend Saturday or Sunday and go to a dance in the city, take the train, get a yogurt afterwards. See how it goes. He wrote me back later. He's like, that was amazing. I'd never seen ballet. They're incredible athletes.

I'm totally into it now. She told me all about, that's just an example of following your child's interests. And for me, I followed my kid's interest, each of them differently. One was wanting to be a ski racer. And we're like, okay, I don't know what that is, but let's go down that path together.

Another one to pursue climate solutions is like, I don't know anything about that, but let's learn, you know, let's do go to some of these events together. And so it's really amazing when they take leadership and responsibility, how they blossom and how great they feel and also how great you feel as a parent.

Adam: Yeah, it's really interesting how that sort of inverting of that relationship makes such a big difference, or at least inverting of the who has the span of control or the confidence in that situation.

Tod: And there's one other twist, which I wanted to mention, which is so there's a side by side, you could interpret that. Okay. I love the mountain bikes. I'm going to teach my kids the mountain bike. There is still some authority in that. It's totally great. That's still a great thing. It's is side by side.

I'm not diminishing at all. But learning something new together is really powerful. So think if you're a parent and a child have an interest, you're both kind of, oh yeah, that'd be cool to learn. You go learn it together. You, neither one of you is the expert. Everything is new. Every sense that you feel is new together.

And I had one of those with both of my boys that's connected us for life. My son when he was 15 wanted to learn kiteboarding. I was like, let's learn it together.

Adam: Yeah,

Tod: We were out there on the jet ski together with an instructor and flailing like crazy. And to this day, we still plan kiteboarding trips together. And my other son, we learned backcountry ski touring and learned how to take Abbey courses.

And we're ski partners. And so when you learn something new together, It's really powerful. I could even give you the simplest example of going to a restaurant you go to all the time versus you go to some new Thai restaurant that you've never been to before. It's like, oh, oh, this is so good. Oh, that taste.

Oh, that coconut. Oh, this pad thai is amazing. Versus you saying, oh, you got to get the beef, the stroganoff. You got to get do this. Do you see the difference?

Adam: Right. Yeah.

Tod: You’re just more alive when you're learning new things together. So that's all part of that middle thing. Learn together, side by side, follow your kid's interests.

Adam: Yeah. And I like that you gave that food example, because in your lived experience, a lot of it's been around sports and athletic things. Like you you're very outdoorsy. Your kids are too. Like you did a lot of mountain biking, skiing, kite surfing, like all that sort of stuff. But for those who aren't inclined in that direction. That doesn't mean you can't build connections with your kids. There's a million other things like the ballet example, like the food example, like a lot of that sort of opportunity to put yourself on equal footing or let your kid lead.

Tod: Absolutely. I'll give you one other example because I want to make sure it's not just sports. There was a parent child relationship and the child was really into trains. 

Adam: Sounds like my son.

Tod: I said why don't you take a train to Sacramento and go to the train museum?

Adam: Yep.

Tod: And they did that for the day and it was like breakthrough.

That was totally breakthrough for them. Follow the child's interests. Maybe it wasn't what the parent wanted to do that day. Followed it. They had this breakthrough thing. They understood each other more. Yeah.

Adam: Yeah. So it goes to the next logical question with all of this is, hey, if we're spending 98, 99 percent of our time in that very foundational logistical operational layer, how, what do we do? How do we make the time to not be in that layer anymore? And I think you have some thoughts on that. And then I wanted to go from there into what are some things that parents listening to this could do immediately to start working on this stuff?

Tod:Thanks for asking that because I'd say most of what we've talked about is somewhat intuitive. Like when you think about it, but if people could take anything away from this is what can I do about tomorrow to go deeper? And so I'm glad we have this chance. So, I think the main thing is to be deliberate and thoughtful about your use of time.

So I'm going to go back to the soccer example because it's so pervasive in American households. At the drop of a hat, we're going to go to a soccer game. We're going to leave work for a soccer game. We're going to miss him, you know, whatever. Oh, I got a soccer game. You know, I got to be at the soccer game.

It has a priority. Okay. But if you think about that and say, wait, there's three soccer games a week, and could I trade one of those soccer games and go for a bike ride with my son, or we could do cards or go to the train museum. It's that deliberate thought process that I think is where people are going to win.

And so working with your partner again, if you go back to one on one time is really valuable. And then the side by side and exploratory time is really valuable. You can work with your partner and say, hey, and by the way, this happened in our household. I had a sports nut as a younger child and a non sports person as an older child, I was like, hey, Brian, do you mind if I miss your Sunday soccer games?

Because he had like four a week and miss your Sunday soccer game so I can go riding with Taylor. And he's like, yeah, I don't care if you're my soccer game, you know, of course, and that built this deep connection with my other son on those Sundays. And so I think if parents should be comfortable going to their parents, say.

Hey, I'm would love to get two hours with, you know, Susie. We want to do something special on Sunday. Could I grab this game? And then you take that one and vice versa, you should make it work for your partner too. So I think that deliberate evaluation of your time and then thinking about how to spend your time together.

so I'd say, like in the next hour think about how you spend your time. Like you could literally do a quick audit real quick. It was like, oh, okay. Yeah, I do this, this, this, this. And just figure out, are you getting those side by side those connecting times? Not every hour with your child should be this.

I'm talking about just one segment of five or one segment of 10 or twice a month or something where you just have a little bit of time that's not in the processing column, work with your partner, prioritize, be willing to go off, do something to figure out what your kids might be genuinely interested in.

Where would they want to spend time with you? If you ask them the question of, hey, if you didn't have any restrictions, what would you do today? By the way, I love asking people that question, kids. Like if, if you could do anything on Saturday, what would it be? You'll learn a lot. It's so yeah, I think being very specific about that.

So in the next couple hours, you could do that, over the next couple weeks or months you can think about what can we learn together and do something new and have that as a, you know, a 6 month or 1 year project. So I think that those are those are a couple of ideas. But I think it's all about just realizing what's important.

And putting some time against it, working with your partner, make it happen, and then working with your kids, obviously, and listening and hearing and being intuitive about what they would enjoy or what might create these experiences.

Adam: Yeah. I liked the example that you mentioned of asking your older, it was your older son, if you could skip the soccer game to go do something with your younger son. And he was like, well, of course, like, I don't care if you're there, which is interesting because I think like, for whatever reason, parents are conditioned that all that presence matters so much.

It's, you know, think about the Hollywood movie of like the kids in the soccer game and like, looks at the sidelines and, oh, mom or dad's not there. And I'm like Oh, it's the anti climax of the movie, you know? And so you see enough of those types of things and it sort of trains you like. Well, I need to be there because if I'm not there, you know, little juniors going to grow up and be just beside themselves with disappointment.

But all this to say, I played hockey growing up and I don't really remember any individual game or time where I was like, oh, I'm so glad Mom and dad are here, but I do remember a lot of other things that we did together that didn't involve them watching me play sports. And I couldn't even tell you who was in the stands for most of those games.

Tod: And I don't think either one of us is saying not to go to the hockey game and watch your kid play hockey. It's just that there's so many of them. Should it dominate all of your time? I think that's really the point. There's so much of those programmed experiences. Should it consume most of your time?

And I'm encouraging, just look at what you do this weekend and figure out, are you doing something that's a little less organized, a little less programmed? I'd like to give an example. I'm on a tech stream with about 15 people. And they're agonizing over how one child, it kind of came up like, oh, this one child wants to do an outing on Saturday, but we have the volleyball tournament.

I wrote back and I said, hey, I did a bunch of work on this. I think you'd be fine missing the volleyball tournament. And why don't you ask your kid if you really need to be there? And people were like, what are you anti sports? And then literally six people replied. About four hours later, he's like, yeah, I asked my daughter about if I need to be at lacrosse.

She said, no, asked my son about volleyball. He's like, yeah, you've already seen 10 of my games. It's fine to miss this one. So I think what it is, if you were to combine the two things, cause these are hot topics, is you want to show absolute support and interest and all of that. And you want to attend and be there.

It just shouldn't be the majority of your time with your child. That's really the question I want people to ask. And want people to evaluate.

Adam: Yeah. I love that. I love that. So I wanted to ask you, so now you have two seemingly well adjusted adult sons. How are you still making memories with them? What are things that you still do even with them as adults that you would put in this camp of those sort of connecting moments and then the, you know, the magical breakthrough moments?

Tod: So we are more outdoor in it. So my answer will be skewed that way. And again, you could change these words out for other activities. We are still doing these things. We are literally still talking about and things that they want to do that. I want to do now. It's more like, hey, I would really want to go do that.

Would you be willing to do it with me? And we still do. I just, I'll give you an example of this week, because it's so fresh in my mind, we do a lot of ski touring. It's called backcountry Ski Touring and my son is at work at 9 sharp every day or 8:30 actually. And we really wanted to hit this one zone.

I've been wanting to hit the zone for years. And I said, hey, it looks like the weather's lining up. Would you be willing to do it? And we went out and got up. We had the headlights on. We went out at 5:30 in the morning and we did it from 5:30 to 8:30. It was the most amazing experience. Sunrise over Lake Tahoe was beautiful powder run.

And so that was a reminder of you just keep doing these things. I'll remember that for the rest of my life that day. That day, it was three hours. We were home, 8:30 in the morning. 

Adam: Most people aren't even up yet!

Tod: Will be seared in my mind the rest of my life. And I love that. So we're still doing that. And often when I want to spend time with them, I don't say, hey, I want to come up.

Let's have dinner and talk about work. It's like, hey, you want to go for a bike ride? You know, I'd be willing to drive up. Let's do a ride and we're in and we connect that way and we get our downloads that way. We're doing something that each of us wants to do. And then we're thinking proactively about the years, like when do, what windows do we get together and what do we want to spend our time on?

And we proactively think about these types of things and I will do a different activity with one son versus another because they're, yeah, they're different. And we want to do one on one time and then we'll do stuff together. This thought process is continually going. It is different when you have adult kids because you have much less access to time and therefore you don't want to ask for too much.

And when you do ask, I want it to be something that both of us would value and remember. So it's an ongoing, it's like, we're always thinking about this.

Adam: Yeah. This has been really awesome. I love the research that you did here, how that kind of created this pyramid of experiences. And then the advice that you had for people around like, you can get started on this right away. You just think about how do you want to spend that hour?

Is it on the sidelines of the soccer game or is it doing something that's more of a shared experience where everyone's on equal footing? So I love that. I wanted to ask if you have any kind of parting thoughts as we wrap up anything else you can think of that you'd want to share with parents who are listening to this.

Tod: Yea. I'm sure there's a lot, but there is a thought that just popped in my mind that I want to bring home. In the research, never were the comments of money luxury hotels ever mentioned. Most of these are simple settings, walking, cooking, fishing. They're simple settings. This is not about like buying your way into some special memory.

This is just about making time to be connected and explore and experience together. So I do want to point that out because again, this research came from Florida and Alabama and Georgia and New Jersey and California and Washington state. So it was all over the country and it was never once a mention of, oh, my best memories when they gave me a, whatever, a new guitar or a car.

Adam: Yeah.

Tod: So I want to point that out second. I'd say it's absolutely worth it. My wife and I are still having these incredible moments together with our boys. It's just different now that they're adults. It's great. And they all build on each experience builds to the next one. And it's so worth it to, to proactively think about time because you don't have that much time with them before they leave your house and it's so worth it to kind of make these connections then, so you can build on it the rest of your life. It's the greatest joy in my life anyway. So those would be some thoughts.

Adam: All right. Well, I appreciate you you sharing that. The last question that I wanted to ask you before we wrap up, maybe it's one and a half questions. The last question is, so you have two adult sons now, maybe at some point they will be parents themselves. Have you talked to them about what you learned and sort of this, this concept?

Have you have, they had this conversation with them and how have they, what has been their feedback or thoughts about it?

Tod: Yeah. So they were very involved. My younger son, more so because he was home at the time when I was doing the research, my other son was off at college, but they were very involved. But he would come to our talks. So if I had a, an event that I was going to talk at and he couldn't make it, he would come and I'd have him share his perspective because again, I feel like the whole thing is about what are the young adults or the youth thinking?

What is in their mind? So I'd bring them for, they are 100 percent up to speed on this and part of it. And actually the presentations are each session when they're there is way better. I mean, I would, I always wish I could just bring a bunch of high school students with me to do these talks. Very much involved though to answer your question.

Adam: Love to hear it. And then the second, the kind of final question is something I ask everyone, which is, you know, if people want to follow along or help you out in some way, what's going to be the best for Tod? If a listener's like, wow, I'm really motivated to go connect with Tod or help him or learn more about this.What do you recommend that they do?

Tod: As far as connecting, I'm not, you know, super active trying to build all sorts of followers, but I do post many of our outings on Instagram. So that tends to be where I put up the different outings we do together. And I would love to help people brainstorm on spending time with their kids. So reach out that way.

It's Tod. I think it's Tod underscore Francis. And then just any way I can help a parent connect with a child is worth it to me. I mean, that's why I do this. That's why I spent the time. I was like, I just know how great it is. And if there's a way that someone else can make that connection, it's I'd love to help.

Adam: Awesome. All right. Well, Tod. Thank you very much. This was a very special episode for me, different than the standard kind of interview that I do on Startup Dad. So I'm super appreciative that you took the time. I'm even more appreciative that you took all the time to kind of figure this out. And thank you so much for joining me today.

Tod: Well, and thanks for your interest. I was thrilled to be able to share it with you. And I hope it means something to someone out there. So great. Thank you.

Adam: I'm sure it will. Thanks again. 

Adam: One thing we talked about after we stopped recording is how broadly applicable this advice is to any relationship, anyone you want to improve.

Or any person you want to build a meaningful connection with friends, our own parents, even a coworker or a co-founder. It's not just for kids. Thank you for listening to today's conversation with Tod Francis. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, share, and leave me a review on Apple or Spotify.

It'll help other people find this podcast. Startup Dad is a Fishman AF production with editing support from Tommy Heron. You can join a community of over 10,000 subscribers and stay up to date on my thoughts on growth, product, and parenting by subscribing to the Fishman AF newsletter at www.fishmanafnewsletter. com. Thanks for listening and see you in the next episode.