From dad blogging pioneer to founding The Study Buddy
As a newly married 23 year old, apprehensively mulling over his thoughts about impending fatherhood while driving the A39 to and from Bristol, Nathan McGurl, founder of The Study Buddy did what we now take for granted - he started blogging.
The My First Kid website has sadly gone the way of our My Space profiles, but the story Nathan tells of dads sidelined from parenting will still resonate to many, even if supermarket parenting clubs no longer limit you to identifying as “Ms, Mrs or Miss”
We blend discussion about bad broadband, good haircuts and expensive contact lenses with a look at lazy and damaging gender stereotyping promoted by the UK government.
Nathan explains how having exhausting all the classic parenting manipulation techniques with his son, he created a system of GCSE revision planning that didn’t rely on learning by osmosis and became The Study Buddy.
Content
01:10 Nathan is a gin and tonic away from being “magenta.”
02:45 James loses the world’s most expensive contact lens.
04:10 Ian on bad broadband, good haircuts and lockdown birthdays
05:50 New marriage, new dad and new millennium - there was a lot going on.
06:50 On the road to Street and myfirstkid.co.uk was born, capturing all of these things flying through my head…
08:20 I started to become more aware of “parenthood” because I don't think “fatherhood” was much of a thing then.
10:00 Parenthood was all about the mums. The Safeway club just assumed it's Mrs. Nathan McGurl. I mean, you could be Ms. or Miss or Mrs, but you couldn't be Mr.
12:20 We talk government and gender stereotyping
15:40 Emails from Mums even more than Dads
I don't want to build it up to sound like it was profound, because it wasn't, it was things like “there's multiple births (triplets and twins) that run through my wife's side of the family… and I’m not sure if I could cope with having more than one at a time.”
It was more an irreverent type of thing, not necessarily a manifesto for fathers.
18:30 The path to creating The Study Buddy
It was deeply practical at the time, my son was going through his GCSEs when he was 16. God love him, he is me. So he's sort of a bit lazy with a sprinkling more cockiness in there than is possibly healthy.
He's every bit as ambitious as his mum and so he wanted to be a doctor, brain surgeon, quantum physicist, whatever it was that he had in his head to do, but his idea to get there was osmosis.
19:30 Using every trick in the book for motivation - “how about I give you a fiver?”
21:00 Then it came to Easter just before his exams,
The shouting is not as effective as I'd hoped. I just had two questions really that I kept asking him and he wasn't able to answer.
first one was… how much work have you got to do?
and secondly… have you got enough time to do all of that work?
22:00 It wasn't emotional anymore because it wasn't me telling him what I thought he should do.
22:47 This is how Study Buddy works
We have broken down all of the GCSEs and IGCSEs and some BTec etc so that we can create this master to do list. I mean, whatever it is you do, you've got to have, even if it's in your head, a list of things and steps that you need to go through. And then the next thing was, well, when are you going to do it?
26:30 You don't need to spend money, but for those parents who actually just don't have the time or the inclination…
27:40 It was built for the procrastinating boy, but this kind of approach helps with, those who are really anxious.
30:00 The power of the student feeling in control
I don't mean to suggest for one second that we implemented this on the Sunday and come Monday morning, we'd had the inverse Kevin and Perry effect, and my child came downstairs, in suit and tie because it wasn't like that! But what did happen, over time, was he started to feel like, he controlled it.
33:10 Tips
CKC = “Communication is key with COVID”
The power of an Excel spreadsheet - people will assume that you're busy and they will walk away.
Zig Ziglar quote “The elevator to success is out of order, but the stairs are always open.”
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Learn more here
https://www.facebook.com/TheStudyBuddyStudios/
Photo credit: @comparefibre via Unsplash
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