Ryan Davis: When Trying to be Deep Goes Wrong

The Ryan Davis situation, with him appearing on Club Shay Shay and discussing his daughter in the light that he did, is an example of when trying to be too deep goes wrong. I get it because there have been viral moments out of Club Shay Shay; Davis was hoping to create and capitalize on his turn. Unfortunately, this viral moment came at the expense of his daughter. 

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So if y'all don't know, Ryan Davis is a comedian, and he has recently funded his own comedy special. Part of his promotion for said special is to make media appearances, and Club Shay Shay was his most recent stop. I don't know if. Shannon Sharp is not taking any journalism courses or lessons on his own. If Sharpe is not, he really should look into it because his behaviour and interviewing skills are not giving journalism. He is not a journalist. He is not a coach. He is not a therapist. He is not anything with any credentials. 

Where this comes into play for me is Sharp’s conduct. What people are not talking about is how he did not have the wherewithal to steer the conversation towards a more productive and constructive outcome. It is also concerning because he went on to post an extremely clickbaity post and appeared to give zero forethought to posting a picture of that man’s underage child. 

That, in my opinion, signifies a lack of professionalism, a lack of media knowledge, and a lack of basic child development, which in this case is material to the conversation. 

Ryan Davis also exploited his own emotions for clicks and likes as well. To provide a brief summary, he basically relayed that at one point, his daughter saw him more as an ATM machine than as her daddy. He, in essence, said one day she’s a daddy’s girl, and the next day she’s a mini gold digger. And here I am (and the rest of the internet) thinking he must be talking about his grown 20-something daughter. But he was not. He was talking about his 11-year old child. 

Now, he did go on to say that he felt like he contributed to the turn because he did not spend enough time with her, and so he then made it a point to spend more time with the children. The issue that I have with this is that although he identified the problem of needing to spend more time with her, he framed it in an adultification reference to his daughter, which also highlighted his lack of understanding of basic child development. People are saying we are missing the context, but we are not. If you are working a lot and not spending time with your children, that will have an effect on your children in some way, shape, or form, and you, as a parent, need to course-correct.  That's not rocket science. 

The conversation put his ignorance and bias on full display because there's just a basic lack of knowledge about adolescent growth and development. Heck, did he even talk to other parents? Children get to an age where they will ask and ask and ask without any thought to a parent’s capabilities or feelings. They do this whether you are a full-time or part-time parent. This is where the teaching moments are built in. My daughter once thought that we HAD to do Black Friday shopping because the commercials said so. She had a list. That is what they do. They reach a point when they're just gonna ask you for stuff. It seems to me that part of the problem was that he was projecting his feelings of inadequacy and insecurity about not being as present as a father as he would have liked to be onto her. Instead of internalizing those feelings and taking a moment of reflection, he adultified his daughter. He really put it on a child because, again, the way he was talking, you would think that maybe she was in her mid-twenties. No, it's a 10 to 11-year-old child.

A parent is supposed to provide for their child’s needs, whether you're present or not. I give him kudos for choosing to be more present. But the fact that he even said that she sees him as an ATM is absolutely crazy to me. It does not compute because ask and ask is what they are going to do. You could be down to your last 50 cents, and they're going to ask you for something that costs 40. Hopefully, the increase in Davis’s presence will provide the opportunity for him to teach her about money, about being grateful, about not being selfish. These are lessons children are supposed to learn through parental interactions and instruction.