Father's Day

I read in the newspaper yesterday that 'Fathers are becoming the new mothers.' The article described 3 men who had made drastic changes in their working lives to enable them to be more involved with their children. Once they had done this and begun spending more time with their kids, they found themselves involved in a very real way with the emotional side of parenting - something they had not been part of when they were doing the more traditional 'Hi-kids-I'm-home' role.

It was interesting that the reasoning around fathers' becoming mothers was not that the men were spending more and better time with their kids, like the mothers, but that in doing so, the men had found that they had fallen more into the nurturing, female role. Nurturing takes time - you have to be there, in order to 'be there'. There are fathers who have managed to fill the more traditional role and still have the ability to connect emotionally with their offspring, but it takes determination and talent, and not all males even know where to start. Yet more and more males can attest to the fact that, when they did slow down and consciously take more time to just 'be' with their son or daughter, the connectivity they longed for (and often had missed with their own fathers) did happen.

So many more parents, fathers and mothers, need to step back and look at the time they spend with their children. Because we tend to parent as we were parented (and so many of us Boomers were parented with the traditional mom-home-dad-at-work approach), it takes a conscious effort to change, but change we must. Our children can only benefit if we can have fathers who are more involved in their whole lives, rather than coming home at night to inquire if they have done their homework or not.

I think I started out well with my children, but after a time the pressures of single parenthood and personal struggles caused me to focus on my own internal landscape more than my sons'. And for that, I will be forever sorry.

To the son who is now a father, I would say 'Do this, as I did, but better'. And I think there's a good chance of that. Happy Father's day, DJ.