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One of the things Napoleon advised his generals against was \\u201cforming a picture\\u201d of the battle. What he meant was that your preconceived notions, your predictions, were a dangerous liability in something as fluid and fast-paced as a battle.\\xa0

As it happens, this is good advice for fathers as well. It\\u2019s easy to go into it thinking that you know. Because you\\u2019ve read the books. Because you\\u2019re on your third kid now and have it handled. Because you and your spouse have a plan for how to do it all right. And then guess what? Unavoidable reality quickly humbles anyone with this kind of certainty.\\xa0

Many dads go into fatherhood with strong ideas of how differently they\\u2019re going to do things than their own parents. They were upset or hurt or never understood why their dad was the way he was. And what do they soon find out from firsthand experience? That, in a lot of cases, there was actually a logic to it. That dad wasn\\u2019t as big of a jerk as he seemed to you, a little kid. That it was more a timeless function of the job than any decision they were consciously making.\\xa0

When we talked to James Frey a while back about what he\\u2019d learned about fatherhood, his answer was along similar lines. He described being a father as an \\u201congoing process of learning and adjusting and adapting.\\u201d Every situation, every kid, was different, he said.\\xa0

In other words, you can\\u2019t form a picture. Not of fatherhood. Not of your family. Not of each of your kids. You don\\u2019t know how it\\u2019s going to go. You don\\u2019t even have much of a vote in a lot of it. Which is why we have to be willing to adjust. To be flexible. To always be ready to learn and to change.

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