Today Show co-host Craig Melvin starts his day earlier than most when his cell phone goes off before 4 a.m. every morning to get ready to help millions of people start their day.
“When I wake up, I say, ‘Father, if you just get me out of this bed, I will try to walk in your steps today.’”
Now, he’s trying to do the same thing in his new children’s book, I’m Proud of You.
Craig Melvin
He hopes to bring his audience along on what it means to be a dad by sharing moments he experiences with his children.
“These little moments, I call them micro moments, of my son learning how to tie shoes, along with him learning how to shoot a basketball and catch a football, he was achieving all these little milestones. And life just moved so fast. There’s so much chaos. I found myself not missing these moments, but recognizing and realizing I needed to capture them,” he explained.
He wants to help every dad capture the same kinds of experiences.
“I wanted to depict an intergenerational family,” he said. “You’ll notice there’s some grandparents in the book. That was important to me. I wanted to make sure my son’s and daughter’s friends resembled America and they looked like some of their actual friends in real life.”
Although he’s seen on TV by millions of people, he wants to show that the rest of his life is much like everyone else’s. He enjoys being a father, and he likes to read books with his kids. And as for every other dad, finding enough time can be hard.
“It’s more of a challenge now than I think it’s ever been for most dads and moms too,” he said. “I maintain that at the end of the day, the biggest obstacle is technology and social media that keep us away from the special moments of being a dad.”
So, he has challenged himself to handle his cell phone and social media carefully. “I’ve done a lot better over the last year or two, to put the cell phone away when my kids are around and while at home to leave it on the counter during our family times.”
On air, he has been authentic in sharing about his own awkward relationship with his father at various times in life. Melvin grew up in South Carolina and chronicled his relationship with his own father in his previous book, POPS.
“I probably couldn’t have done this book had I not done the first book,” he said. “My father and I had a complicated relationship, due to his addiction. I had become very angry with my dad and at my dad, that anger that I felt toward him. He was physically present, he just wasn’t emotionally present. The older I got and started having my own children, I had to address that. I had to figure out where this was coming from and, and how to treat it.”
Looking back, he understands more of his family lineage and how that affected him.
“My dad was born in prison, my grandmother was a bootlegger, she discovered the Lord late in life. But I wanted my dad to see something he hadn’t seen; he didn’t know how to be a dad. It took me 35 years to understand that, but when I came to understand that I could meet him where he was, we could journey together, and it’s been such a blessing.”
Investing in family, being present with his kids, allows him to give the gift he could not receive. And he sees this as a blessing from God.
“It’s been one series of blessings after another,” he said. “I tell people all the time, and I think sometimes people think I’m joking, but I’m not, ‘If I got called tomorrow and they said, “You know what, Craig, this has been great. We love you; we want to move in a different direction,” I would be like, ‘This has gone on longer than I thought it would, I have done more and seen more and experienced more than I ever imagined that I would.’”
He doesn’t want that cutoff to happen, of course, because he sees his work as part of God’s plan too.
“I have resigned myself to the fact that I am an instrument of his. The Bible tells us to whom much is given, much is required. The longer I live, the more I try through my work to glorify him, and the more I’ve done that, the more abundant the blessings have been from God.”