Best Things Fathers Do
Ideas and Advice from Real World Dads
Introduction
Why a book on the best things fathers can do? Because, in our age of equality at all cost, like it or not, fathers and mothers are still very, very different. Yes, things are starting to change, but that change is happening slowly. So we need to be honest and realistic—especially about something as crucially important as parenting.
In general, men tend to be very good at controlling their feelings. Most women may complain, with good cause, that we are too good at it. We are particularly good at “getting on with things” in the face of hardship, danger, pain, and turmoil. It is our training, our history, and even our mythology, weaned as we were on larger-than-life heroes stoically pushing forward to overcome enormous difficulties and crippling losses.
This skill, this ability to function effectively in the face of emotional pressure, has served us well, but it has also exacted a very high price. It has allowed us to create and accomplish out in the world with single-minded focus; but, largely unnoticed, it has also forced many of us to lose track of what is most important and precious, the reasons why we work so hard and what we are working for—our loved ones.
In homes all across the country, men are “getting on” with the business of living. But, as the statistics painfully demonstrate,
This book will hopefully give fathers some concrete tools (yeah, we love tools!) to build a close and powerful emotional connection that flows like a current of electricity between father and child. It is a most powerful thing and a most fragile one. It can be lost or interrupted abruptly, or it can persist over vast distances and time. It can make the difference between a life that is rich and full, and one that is empty and meaningless. It is one of our deepest desires as men, yet, for so many of us, it has proven to be painfully elusive.
Sadly, the tradition of fatherhood handed down to most of us is one of distance. And it is that distance of the father— physically and, much more important, emotionally—that is at the heart of the crisis. Paradoxically, however, it is the miracle of becoming a father that opens up for us the most inviting, most surprising, and most promising avenue for finding our way back to our hearts and souls. Fatherhood is a precious opportunity and we know it, even if we cannot comprehend or articulate why. It is something we feel in our bones. We want to understand it, to face the challenge and be found worthy; we know that there is something to it that can transform us if only we do it right, but often we don’t even know how to begin.
Out of fear, out of ignorance, it is easiest to gravitate toward the patterns of fathering in which we were raised. From the birth of our first child, we tend to concede the role of comforter and nurturer to our wives and find ourselves removed from the child. The family dynamic becomes established, and we find ourselves somehow inexplicably “outside.”
For most of us, it is not a good place to be, but we feel powerless to change it; we don’t even have a vocabulary for how to talk about it. It is just a feeling, a very deep and painful feeling, but talking about our feelings is not something with which men are terribly comfortable. This distance, which is created slowly and silently, can no longer be tolerated. Somehow now—not tomorrow, not next year—we need to begin to forge a path back to our children, to discover how to create and maintain deep and strong emotional connections with them and ourselves.
I’ve also come to see that, when discussing fathering, there are no experts. There are only men who have tried to do their best and are willing to share their experience—their accomplishments and their failures, their heartaches and their joys, their confusion and their clarity.
There are no secret answers. Building and nurturing a father-child relationship requires the knowledge that it can be done, the commitment that it will be done, the persistence to keep on trying, and the courage to do whatever is necessary to make sure it does get done.
Like it or not, we are in the midst of a major economic, social, and cultural transition. The roles of men and women, and therefore the roles of mothers and fathers, are changing— and changing rapidly. These changes stem in part from new and often courageous choices being made by the emerging generations of women and men, and also in part from the very impersonal and inexorable economic shifts taking place.
What we want, need, and expect from our most intimate relationships are being reexamined and redefined as we go. At the same time, women are moving into the workplace at an astonishing rate, out of both choice and necessity. The result is
Change is difficult and painful—painful because the ways of the past now appear sadly inadequate, painful because what should replace the ways of the past is not at all clear, and painful because, regardless of the wounds, constraints, injustices, or inadequacies of the “old way,” they also had benefits, particularly the comfort of familiarity. Painful or not, these changes are upon us. Whether we applaud, fear, or resent them no longer matters; they are here and we must deal with them.
The distance our fathers accepted as natural and appropriate is now threatening to unravel the very social fabric of parenting. The simplistic response to this by many men is an angry rejection of the “old ways,” most often expressed in some variation of “I won’t make the mistakes my father made.”
It is true that, if we are smart enough, courageous enough, persistent enough, and vigilant enough, we won’t make the same mistakes our fathers made—we will make our own mistakes. But before we toss out our fathers with last year’s calendar, it may help to remember that they grew up in another time and, in a very real sense, pioneered a new era.
This is more true today than it has ever been. Television, jet airplanes, telephones, copiers and fax machines, personal computers, the list goes on and on—all are essential fixtures in our lifetime that did not exist when most of our fathers were growing up. And, of course, their most important lessons about fathering came from their fathers, many of whom were born in the nineteenth century. We can turn our backs in hurt and
Despite what anger or sorrow we may have at how we were fathered, we can’t afford to discard the hard-won lessons of our fathers carelessly. We need to take the best of what they gave us as we plot a course toward a new kind of fathering—one built on strong bonds of love, one that is expansive and courageous, and one that will bring us back into the richness of a deep emotional connection with our children.
If we ask people to select words to describe positively what it means to be a mother, invariably they come up with such terms as nurturing, compassionate, caring, and comforting. For fathers, the words are protector, provider, responsible, dependable, hardworking, and problem-solving. Those characteristics fit well with our culturally projected father images, like those portrayed in Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best. In these television households, fathers Ward and Tom are portrayed as kind and understanding men who are primarily problem-solvers—that is, men who diffuse and avoid emotional situations by presenting real-world solutions.
If we combine these characteristic mother and father qualities, we end up with an impressive résumé for good parenting. Traditionally, however, these characteristics have been divided up by gender, with women assigned the internal or emotional tasks and men assigned the external tasks of dealing with the outside world. This division has deep roots in our history but, for better and for worse, it is rapidly deteriorating. The radically changing nature of what it means to be a man or a woman is not news, but it is a constant source of challenge and opportunity.
Over the past thirty years, it’s become obvious that women are no longer content to live within the boundaries of traditional gender roles that severely limit the scope and magnitude of their dreams. What is now becoming evident is that men also cannot continue to play out their appointed roles blindly without increasingly disastrous consequences to their own emotional health and that of their children.
When we examine social evolution in more detail, at least some of the reason for the urgency in dealing with the changing role of fathers begins to emerge. For, although the traditional roles of mothers and fathers may appear clear and defined, in practice, they were never as stark or as isolating as they appear to us today.
Until relatively recently—the past 100 years or so—men and women carried out their roles in close and constant contact with each other and with their children, whether on a small farm or running a small business or shop. Indeed, for most of our history, men and women worked side by side—undertaking different tasks, but performing them in a manner that involved continuous interaction, feedback, and assistance.
Dad was indeed the protector and provider, but he was also right there, downstairs in the shop or out in the field preparing it for next season’s crop. More often than not, Dad was there every day for the noontime meal, as well as for breakfast and supper, and the opportunities (and indeed, obligation) for children to spend time with Dad by helping out in the fields or in the store were frequent.
Fathers fulfilled their role in frequent daily contact with their children, and that contact nurtured the kinds of emotional connections that can only come with the investment
Increasingly, this new economic reality found fathers leaving home early in the morning and not returning until late at night. The thread of daily contact with their children was lost, as was the constant contact between husband and wife. The division of labor between men and women, which in the past had existed as a relatively intimate partnership, became a division in time and place as well. Fathers were increasingly removed from the home, and mothers became more isolated from the workaday world. This everyday enforced distance became the true rupture with the past.
It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this change. For, in building and maintaining close personal relationships, time is a key ingredient, and it is our time with our fathers when we were growing up, as well as with our children as they are growing up, that has been taken away from us.
We don’t live our lives in isolation from these larger social conditions. We don’t make the rules, and we aren’t even given a decent map to follow. The vast flow of history, with its wave after wave of social and economic change, has established the conditions under which our lives must be lived. We would like to believe that we have more control over our lives, but time and experience prove to us again and again that the most we can do is choose how we will respond to the circumstances we are given.
Fathers today, young and old, have been dealt a very difficult hand. Because of the massive social and economic migrations over the past 100 years, as a group, we have been deprived of the
Separated from both our fathers and our children, we have been cut off from the heart of the fathering traditions of the past and have been handed a decidedly garbled message about how we should go about being good fathers today.