there’s a new daddy, looking all googly-eyed and sweet with his little bundle of joy.
Wait. Sweat beads on Daddy’s brow; Daddy’s posture betrays alarm; Daddy is whispering something. “Help.”
Being a 21st-century dad is fraught with generational contradictions and competing expectations. And it doesn’t come with instructions.
“Dads have taken on more responsibility with child-rearing than in the past,” says Firestone blogger Jim Turner, 42, a father of four kids age 6 or younger. His blog, genuineblog.com, centers on issues faced by dads.
“We don’t have much guidance based on what our parents did. My mom was the child-rearer, and my dad was the breadwinner, and that was the way it was.”
Dads used to come home from work, read the paper in silence and speak to children only when they were prepared to talk about subjects like sports, internal-combustion engines, the military and geopolitics.
But a generation or two ago they began changing diapers, reading nursery rhymes, kissing the little ‘uns on their foreheads after tucking them in for the night, and maybe even dancing like pixies for their giggling children.
Old-fashioned patriarch met newfangled papa, and the idea of father began its 30-year-long mutation.
Not only has the dust not settled, it has tornadoed, dust-deviled and stormed.
But contemporary pops with a wide range of experiences, and fitting into different slots along the “Let’s-discuss-Donald-Rumsfeld, son” and “Pretty-please-apply-sparkles-to-my-cheeks, faerie-girl” continuum, have ideas about what’s important regarding the whole dad adventure.
Their advice, for the most part, hinges on calls to defy stereotypes.
Learn how to listen
“Play the role of listener, especially with a daughter,” says Lafayette author Daniel Glick, 49, who became a single dad when his wife left him behind, as well as the kids, several years ago. He ended up taking his children on a five-month journey to a smattering of exotic places, mostly in Asia, and wrote a 2003 book about his experiences, called “Monkey Dancing.”
“Sometimes she just needs to talk and tell me stories about her life. I’m not there to fix anything or give advice. That’s such a boy thing, to want to fix everything, and it took some learning on my part to understand that sometimes all you can do is listen.”
Glick’s surprise shove into single-fatherhood wasn’t something he celebrated. But the thrust into the world his wife used to occupy – that of pediatricians’ phone numbers, assistant gym teachers’ names, and after-school activities – forced him to “know so many more of the details about their lives,” he says.
“I know them better than I would have if I had stayed married,” he says. “Guys kind of end up abdicating some of the responsibility for raising their kids to their wives, and I think that ends up being difficult on your relationship with your kids.”
In short, he says, dads should insinuate themselves more deeply into their children’s lives.
It also helps, he says, if dads develop a “sense of intimacy” with their kids. Moms usually act as the kids’ confidant, the parent to whom they feel most comfortable revealing secrets. Dads often fail utterly to cultivate heart-to-heart trust with their kids, he says, and it’s a skill they should toil to strengthen.
Old ways aren’t always best
Where do dads turn for guidance? Much comes from trying and erring, and then trying some more. Dads who grow up with fathers undoubtedly pick up tips from the old man, but they aren’t always worthy of next-generation consecration.
When Santa Fe author and teacher Robert Wilder’s 5-year-old son was acting up, Wilder’s father suggested, without a hint of jest, that Wilder “pour a bucket of water on my son’s head.”
“I think we’re all caught between generations,” says Wilder, 40, who just published a book about his exploits in fatherhood, called “Daddy Needs a Drink.” “We have to be manly, we have to teach manly things, but we don’t want to be those hard-(case) dads. We have to figure it out.”
For Wilder, it means when he gets home from school after 3 p.m., it’s not time to “put my feet up and have a Beefeater Gibson martini.”
“I’m off to dance recital and horseback riding, and giving baths and stuff,” he says.
His advice to parents, a not-necessarily-literal tidbit offered from a friend of his who seemed to have a supernatural capacity to sit with her children and play: “Just chug a beer first.”
“I think we’re always feeling now like we have to work, we feel like we should be doing something – raking the leaves, checking e-mail,” he says. “Sometimes it’s OK to have a beer and sit down and play and slow down a little bit.”
It’s OK, too, to leap into the play without the suds.
New York documentary filmmaker Scott Mactavish’s father was estranged from the household, so when he became a father, “I had zero template to go by,” he says. “I was blind and clueless.”
Last year he published “The New Dad’s Survival Guide” to help fathers figure out how to proceed, based on his experiences raising children, all three of them now under the age of 6.
“Getting engaged is key,” says Mactavish, 41. “To (my son), ‘Star Wars’ is the end of all the universe. Now I can have a complete discourse about all of the characters, the light sabers. It’s very important to him. We laugh it off, but to him that’s what makes him tick.”
But what about Dad as the stern stoic, he who metes out discipline among the children? Is that traditional dad role history?
Mactavish doesn’t think so.
“That’s something that goes back to caveman times,” he says. “Wait until Dad gets home. Dad is going to drag home the woolly mammoth and then deal with you hitting your brother on the head with a rock.”
“My wife is a teacher; she has a teacher voice,” he adds. “She can’t bark them down like I can. The kids know I’m business.”
At the same time, however, it’s important for dads to “be more compassionate,” says Dave Thomas, 43, a Boulder technology entrepreneur who also runs a website dedicated to “attachment parenting,” an approach to raising children that revolves around developing intimacy between parents and children.
“I think as men, one of our knee-jerk reactions in a tense situation is to be aggressive, and it really doesn’t work with kids. In the long run, that’s a bad strategy,” he says. “The way I respond to two guys jumping me in an alley should be much different from having my kids jump me.”
Thomas also urges fathers to be strategic about their inevitable dad lectures. Sometimes, long-winded and austere soliloquies on sober topics are warranted, but nevertheless, “You know in the first five seconds they have tuned you out,” he says. “In the kid’s head, what is going on is, ‘I wonder if Joey is out playing?”‘
Understanding that, he says, can help dads telescope their messages for optimum effect: Keep it simple, make it powerful and move on.
Experience adds up
Single dads, fatherless dads, dads with authoritarian patriarchs – they all have interesting perspectives. But few dads can compete with Berthoud resident LarryBebo for sheer training.
His brood? Thirty kids.
“I have experience,” says Bebo, 58, a contractor.
He and his wife, Jackie, had their first two children more than 30 years ago. After Bebo’s business began flourishing, they went on an adoption spree, bringing 28 more kids from around the world – mostly from Asia – and from within the United States into their home.
Bebo says in his family, he’s always worked, and his wife stayed home to raise the children, 12 of whom now live in the 14,000-square-foot house.
He doesn’t believe in playing the “heavy” in the family, which is the role his own father played. Instead, kids are disciplined by either parent, as their infractions arise.
Sitting down and reading nursery rhymes with the kids? It hasn’t been Bebo’s thing, but in 1991 he took nine of his children to South Korea to meet their birth relatives.
They spent two weeks there “dealing with abandonment issues, and standing at grave sites sobbing,” he says. “You know, I think real men do eat quiche.”
You might think that after 30, he’s drawn a distinct bead on “Dad” and what it’s all about. But things always evolve.
“You never get done being a parent,” he says. “Kids are married and on their own, doing their own thing, and I still have to figure out how to be their dad. I’m still their dad. You have to keep stepping up.”
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
