Father-Daughter Baking: Lessons Beyond the Kitchen

Romanian author Vlad B. Popa has published a book about his journey of fatherhood, exploring the unique perspective with which he approaches his role. In his book, he describes the special bond with his young daughter Luana and the messages he wants to convey to her.

He chooses to deliver these messages in unconventional ways. One such method involves baking with his daughter, through which he imparts educational messages. "It's not about the bread, but something entirely different," Vlad writes in a post that quickly went viral.

"We kneaded the flour, poured water on the yeast, didn't knead the dough enough—we made every mistake possible. But we had one rule: if we didn't get good dough within an hour, we'd figure out what went wrong and try again the next day. We agreed that this was our plan, and despite the sadness in failures, we stuck to this rule until the end."

After 26 days of trial, error, and plenty of 'messages' imbued along the way, Vlad explains: "Even if we made dozens of mistakes, we never repeated the same one twice. And when we finally managed to create a beautiful and magnificent bread and took it out of the oven—Luana was overjoyed. She couldn't find words for the pride she felt, and each bite of the bread was dreamy."

What's the ultimate lesson learned?

According to Vlad, she didn’t learn about patience, attention, and delayed gratification. "She's only five," he explains, happy that he still has a decade of baking or other activities to do with her before she grows up and decides to do things independently.

"Through these lessons, I try to teach my daughter that dreaming big isn't enough. The world doesn’t simply belong to you once you dream, no matter how often we hear these quotes or read magical success stories of people on social media. I can't let my daughter believe in such things.

"It's like throwing her out of a plane without a parachute and hoping somehow she'll grow wings before hitting the ground. I want her to understand what comes after dreaming a dream—working, sweating, failing, falling down, learning, getting up, working again, and then getting there. That's what I want her to internalize, how real life works."