Daniel Goddard plays Cane Ashby on the hit soap The Young and The Restless, the highest-rated daytime drama in Canada and the U.S.

This Australian soap star is also a husband and father of two boys,  4-year-old  Ford Martin and 1.5 year old,  Sebastian William.

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Daniel on fatherhood and on being a… ahem… sex symbol.

On family balance:

It’s tough. My wife has her own business.  She’s a designer. She built it from ground up 8 years ago. There are not enough hours in the day for her. She’s great at time management. We have a nanny during the day otherwise we couldn’t do it because we’re both at work and we don’t have immediate family and extended family nearby, you know the saying it takes a whole village to raise a family.

On fathers:

When I talk to guys who are becoming dads, I tell them that from a woman’s point of view, they have a child growing inside them. They form an emotional  connection to the child.  The man can’t experience that… it’s a foreign experience for the man. Men by nature respond to stimulation – we need a stimulus to make us feel.

The child doesn’t respond to us the way it responds to the mother because it knows the mother’s heartbeat, smell, milk.  It’s  not until the child really turns  1 until you start you get the “dada”, they throw the ball back, smile, and then the man starts to come alive.

On kids:

The weekends are always about the children.  I love spending time with my kids. I go bowling with my 4 year old, Ford.  He runs and throws the ball as hard as he can. We go riding his bike. I bought him an electric Ferrari go-cart, we go to the school and he rides there.  He’s very much into anything into mechanics.  He’s very good when it comes to his hands; he’s very dexterous. He pulls things apart and rebuilds it.  That’s his thing.

On sleep:

We used the Ferber method for my 4-year-old Ford because he didn’t fall asleep well.  The fourth day of Ferberizing, he slept well.  He wouldn’t sleep, wake up at night… he was tired during the day and would literally fight to go to sleep. He sleeps 8 to 10 hours now.  Sebastian didn’t need that, he just says “night night” and give him some milk and he’ll go to bed.

On Facebook:

I enjoy the social experience to giving back to fans and interacting with them.  At the end of the day, you hopefully build a fan base in order to express your art.  I enjoy interacting with the fans. I find it to be a rewarding experience for myself and the fans, and to have some sort of rapport.  I enjoy what the fans have to say, it’s a solid barometer and brings me joy.

On women:

A woman, from a marketing point of view, can be a perfect 10 physically, but if she doesn’t have a sense of worth a sense of direction within herself, for me that makes her not as attractive.  I like women who know what they want, they go after what they want and have a great sense of humour.  I like a woman who lets a man open the door for her and pull the chair back for her. I like a woman who respects herself and isn’t afraid to tell people what she wants and how she’d like to be treated. You need to have a strong sense of values and moral core.   

On self-empowerment: 

I think as human beings we can try to improve ourselves, because as years pass by, if you don’t improve yourself you’ll be 38 with a 20-year-old mentality.  Every person has the capacity to resolve things about themselves you don’t like. Everything can be fixed you can take some small steps to get there.

On parenting:

It’s important as a mother and a father, you set examples for  your children. You don’t talk about them in front of them in a derogatory or negative way, you don’t reference them and compare them to other children, you don’t compare your siblings, you give them the respect that you would expect.

I look back retrospectively at my childhood and things that I now understand to be major turning points in my life and major factors that made me who I am, and I try and apply those to my parenting skills. Or eradicate those behavioural patterns that I think I may have had because of certain circumstances, in order to give our children the right skills to be successful individuals.

Watch Daniel as Cane on The Young and the Restless on CBS in the U.S. and on Global in Canada.