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January, 2002

Dad's Plus
Dennis Helming

Good dads should be seen and not heard. This piece of advice is obviously linked to the preceding one [benignly neglecting your kids]. It represents a considerable departure from the olden view of father as authoritative patriarch. By it is meant, positively, that dads should be very busy and quite vocal--but behind the scenes, not throwing their weight around in public. Only half in jest, I've been known to suggest that the best service to the family (and the nation) that Congress could enact would be to offer a tax break to those families who add a den for dad onto their homes. If our reinvented dad is to do a better job on the home front, it would really help for him to have a room of his own, with a door and a minimum of privacy (even if little more than a closet with two chairs). In any case, our new father should have many more reasons and occasions for talking alone with each of his children. That's just another way of saying that much of what dad usually does in public--correcting, directing traffic, laying down the law and order--should best be handled a bit later and more calmly behind closed doors.

But these huddles should be much more than punishment summits. Dad should use them, for example, to suggest to his children positive things they might do to enliven family life, to celebrate a birthday, to please their mom, to apologize, to show appreciation to grandma....They also come in handy to spark and review performance in chores, studies, hobbies; to recount dad's own youth, especially his escapades and peccadilloes; to share a newly heard joke or two, even slightly off-color ones with his boys; to offer feedback, compliments and encouragement; to dissolve tensions by helping individual family members better understand each other.

It would be ideal if these huddles--sometimes in the car or over a soda--were a regular fixture of family life, perhaps weekly: something the kids were to see as the most natural thing in the world and something to look forward to. If in the kids' eyes the pluses of these chats are to exceed the necessary minuses, if dad is to endear himself thereby to his offspring and win their affection, obviously he can't leave their content to chance or improvisation and, least of all, to pique. These tête-à-têtes can't come across as manipulative ways to minimize family damage or parental hassles or the kids' fun. The good father will reflect on each of the kids several times during the week; he'll jot down observations, including his wife's; he'll pray for and dream about each of them, winnowing out the negative, accentuating the positive; he'll formulate realistic and positive goals wherewith to challenge them....

There is, however, one occasion when dad can--and in my opinion ought to--blow his stack in no uncertain terms, and that is when children disrespect their mother or take her for granted. Let this prohibition be the single, unarguable, non-negotiable, untouchable, even irrational principle of family life that justifies almost every paternal disciplinary excess, even those the neighbors can hear. "Listen, you ungrateful twerp, never, ever do I want to hear you treat your mom like that again, as if she were your slave...."

Dennis Helming is the author of "The Examined Life" which can be ordered directly from Spence Publishing

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