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Forging A Different Parenting Path

NPR | By NPR Staff
Published September 20, 2013 at 3:25 AM EDT
Dan Miller grew up in a family of nine children in Wisconsin. They were poor, and his father supported them by working at a local paper factory.
StoryCorps
Dan Miller grew up in a family of nine children in Wisconsin. They were poor, and his father supported them by working at a local paper factory.

When Dan Miller was growing up, his family lived about a mile away from Wisconsin Rapids, Wisc. He had eight siblings and the family was poor. His father, Robert, supported them by working at Consolidated Papers Inc.

"My father did not lead a happy life," Dan says during a visit with his wife Celeste Januszewski to StoryCorps in Chicago earlier this month. "I don't know if he felt trapped in the paper mill, but by the time, you know, I was little, he was a pretty serious alcoholic. If he was mad at us for something, he would take his belt out of his pants and just hit us with it."

Robert Miller died in 2001. Click on the audio link above to hear Dan Miller, 56, reflect on the influence his childhood had on him as a dad.

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Anita Rao.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Federal funding is gone.

Congress has eliminated all funding for public media.

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