If there’s only one golden rule to guarantee that fatherhood will be a success, it is to make sure a father will be his children’s best friend. Mark Dayrit knows this too well. In each other, he and his children – Alexandra,12; Samantha, 10; and Matthew, five – find great allies. So fiercely loyal are they to each other that Mark believes he and his wife Mylene are blessed to have them.
"A child who loves his or her family is a child who will do good in life," Mark shares the time-tested recipe for rearing a child that he learned from his own dad, Ting.
"To be each other’s best friend means a conscious and constant effort to be with them no matter how busy I am. It means spending quality time with them and quality time happens every day," adds Mark who is president of Gold’s Gym Philippines and chairman of the Miladay Group of Companies.
Mark, according to his three children, is a generous, kind and loving dad. "He always makes us feel that he loves us through his words and actions," says Alexandra. "He works hard for us so we can go to school and buy our needs," Sam adds. "Papa loves me by bringing me to the movie house and to my favorite fastfood restaurant and by playing wrestling with me and my sisters all the time," Matthew butts in.
Well, bonding time for them seems endless that before they sleep at night they have to play Commando, another family-invented game that Mark and his siblings played when they were kids. This game will have all of them crawl inside the master bedroom set in total darkness. No standing. No snickering. No noise. Only their instinct is required. The idea of the game is to find each other "knowing that there’s strength in unity." The lights will only be turned on when every member of the family is well accounted for. Everybody will go to bed after the game with a smile on his or her face.
Weekends are very sacred to Mark and his family for they go out of town. Once a year, apart from their whole clan’s vacation, Mark and his wife and their three children travel abroad for a "super relaxed bonding." Visiting a museum is always part of their itinerary because Mark is always, always enamored by the beauty of the past.
"We love traveling with Papa because he’s such a historian. He can tell us about the legend of Sampaloc Lake in San Pablo City, the scientific explanation of Chocolate Hills in Bohol or the stories behind the pictures and relics we find in any museum anywhere in the world," shares Alexandra.
More than that, Mark is also his children’s mentor in the classroom of life.
"I also teach my children the value of hard work; that they have to be conscientious so they can continue the business. Luckily, my children are very interested in what their Mama and Papa do," says Mark, adding that every summer vacation, his two daughters hold summer jobs in Miladay "designing" jewels or doing "PR" work at Gold’s Gym.
As the chairman of the Rotary Club of Manila Bay Foundation, Mark gets to expose and involve his children to his many a socio-civic activity. Alexandra, in fact, even performed before a crowd of thousands during their biggest international convention in Manila.
"I always tell my children, too, that money is not everything; that there are so many things that money can’t buy; that they are far more precious than money. This early, they understand that they should treat every individual equally because everyone is a child of God," he concludes.