Most of us picture fatherhood on a fairly predictable timeline. Finish school, start a career, meet someone, start a family. Chris Stream's path looked nothing like that.

Chris spent his twenties and thirties building his career and searching for the right person to build a life with. He did not get married until his late forties. And when he did, it came with more moving pieces than most people navigate in a lifetime.

His wife Brooke was a widow. Her daughter Campbell had never known her biological father. Chris became an instant dad to a five year old while simultaneously marrying for the first time and navigating the legal complexities of adoption. Then came a premature baby who spent three months in the NICU. Then a son born into a family that was still finding its footing.

He will turn sixty this year. His son is eleven.

In this conversation Chris talks about what it means to be an older father, the deliberate advantages it brings, and the challenges nobody tells you about. He and Brooke had the financial stability to invest in experiences over things, but that created its own parenting challenge: how do you build resilience and work ethic in kids when it would be easy to just give them everything?

He also talks about parenting a child with Tourette's without defaulting to medication, why he has always talked to his kids like adults rather than children, the weekly family ranking system he uses to keep his kids competing for his attention, and how his son Calvin at eleven years old articulated something profound about the difference between the family you are born into and the family you build.

Chris is a college professor, a Las Vegas native, and one of the more unconventional dads we have had on the show. His path to fatherhood was anything but typical. What he built when he got there is worth hearing about.

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