There When He Needs You: How to Be an Available, Involved, and Emotionally Connected Father to Your Son - Softcover

Bernstein, Neil I.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416560920 ISBN 13: 9781416560920

Verlag: Atria, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Men want to be better fathers, and today they're trying harder than ever. They jog behind strollers, leave work early for parent-teacher conferences, and roughhouse with their kids before they've had a chance to change out of their suits.

But many men aren't building the relationships with their sons that they'd hoped for. And sons are finding it hard to confide in fathers who must devote so much of their time to building careers that both keep them from their families and keep their families comfortable. Many fathers admit that they don't have a clue what's going on in their sons' lives, from ball game schedules to online communities to fears and anxieties about school, friends, and relationships. Fathers often walk around burdened with guilt, worried they're just not able to do the right thing, even though they're trying to be equal partners in parenting with their wives.

There When He Needs You is the first book to tell the truth about the challenges that fathers of sons face today -- including the intergenerational legacies of self-doubt that they anxiously carry from themselves having had distant, unavailable fathers. A self-treatment program as well as a psychological X-ray of today's father, There When He Needs You shows you how to create and strengthen a real, meaningful bond with your son. Through real-life stories of real-life dads who have lost and found their way, you as a father will learn to reorder your priorities, express yourself more openly, connect with your loved ones, and become the role model that your son needs.

Wives will learn how to gently help their husbands do this -- no nagging, threatening, or criticizing -- while becoming their husband's best friend, cheerleader, and coach. Turning the father-son dynamic inside out, There When He Needs You helps fathers, sons, and mothers to understand their roles in the family and create relationships that fuel closeness and trust.

There When He Needs You will open your eyes, tickle your funny bone, and touch your heart. Ultimately, you'll understand what it really means to be a father to your son and discover new ways to be there for him.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brooke Lea Foster is an award-winning journalist whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe Magazine, and People, among others. An alumna of The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, she is the author of three nonfiction books and the novels Summer Darlings, On Gin Lane, All the Summers In Between, and Our Last Vineyard Summer.

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There When He Needs You

CHAPTER ONE

A Dad Is Not a Male Mother

From Half-There Fathers and Peripheral Parents to Good Enough and Better

I met Kevin on a cool autumn afternoon. His wife, Larissa, and his fourteen-year-old son, Jason, had arrived in my office at four o’clock. We were meeting to talk about what was going on with Jason. A ninth-grader, he had grown moody, stopped talking to his mom and his dad, and his grades had dropped.

Jason looked uncomfortable in my office, trying to sit straight on the squishy black leather couch. Wearing a Borat T-shirt and bowling shoes—he liked the way they looked, he said—he rarely looked up when I talked to him. I made small talk with him about school, friends. Larissa, a prim woman in a pale pink sweater set, often answered for him.

Kevin arrived fifteen minutes late. He charged in, out of breath and still wearing a suit from work. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There was a meeting at the office and it ran late and I had to excuse myself to get here and anyway, I’m here. I’m sorry.”

Larissa and Jason were unfazed by his explanation. A tax attorney at a large firm, Kevin was often late. It wasn’t uncommon for him to miss dinner. If he did make it home, he was exhausted. Larissa also worked as an attorney but had a flexible schedule. She and Jason spent most family time alone. “We’re used to him not being around,” she said.

That comment put Kevin on the defensive. He lapsed into an explanation of how hard he worked to make sure his family had a good life—“the nice house, safe neighborhood, megavacations, saving for Jason’s college.” He said he knew that Larissa wanted those things as much as he did. He was willing to make the sacrifice.

I suggested that it must be hard for him to relax and spend time with his family. Kevin sighed. “I try to go to as many of his basketball games as I can,” he said, “but there’s only so much time in a day.” Trying to go to basketball games, Larissa informed me, meant he’d gone to one all season. Of course, Kevin wanted to go and because of that he’d felt like he’d gone to many more. But the truth was he was torn between work and family.

I felt similarly when my kids were young. I’d leave for the office in the morning and my son would hang on to my legs. I’d rush home to read him a bedtime story and sometimes find him already asleep. I’d go to sleep with a knot in my stomach. I felt a tug—as if my love for my son was pitted against the power of my obligations.

“Kevin’s a good man,” Larissa chimed in. “I try to support him, but he’s not around enough. I wind up doing almost everything for Jason. I cover for his dad in a way, and try to be his mother and his father. And it’s not easy being a—”

“—single parent,” Kevin said. His cheeks turned crimson. “That’s what she says sometimes—that she feels like a single parent.”

Jason tucked his hands under his thighs. He gazed down at his feet and said he was used to hearing his parents bicker over how little time his dad spent with him. I asked him how that makes him feel. “Can I listen to my iPod while you talk about this?” he asked me. His parents shot each other a look.

Kevin told his son that he wished he could spend more time with him, that he feels as if he’s always apologizing. He said he’d be there if he could, and that “I’m doing the best I can.”

MOVING AWAY FROM OLD STEREOTYPES ABOUT FATHERS

Forty to fifty years ago, fathers were silent when it came to family matters. It was a mother’s job to wake the children, dress them for school, pack their lunches, and draw their baths. Mothers stroked their sons’ foreheads when they struck out in Little League, and instructed their boys to be like their fathers. A son’s job was to understand what it meant to be a father by observing his father from afar, by following him around the golf course or watching him flip steaks behind the grill. These “cavemen dads” would come home from work, plop themselves in front of the TV or behind a newspaper, and nurse a scotch or martini. These dads started to become obsolete as more women entered the workforce and as the divorce rate rose, making it necessary for fathers to become more engaged in everyday routines with their children.

Cavemen dads generally didn’t learn good parenting skills, because their wives took care of the emotive, expressive, and intuitive aspect of caring for another family member, including their own sons. Whenever boys had a problem, cavemen dads would tell them to “suck it up,” “take it like a man,” or “talk to your mom about it.” Mothers allowed their boys to cry and express a range of emotions. Cavemen dads grunted or gesticulated their feelings. All in the Family’s Archie Bunker defined this prototype for a generation of men; Married with Children’s Al Bundy defined it for another. These men were generally considered beloved, harmless, and laughable. They worked hard, had their bigoted opinions, but were there for their families in the only way they knew how to be. Their wives and children often made excuses for them.

Even today, many grown sons will protect their fathers’ cavemenlike behaviors. “He was a good man,” one forty-five-year-old man said of his dad, after he had spent thirty minutes listing all the ways his father hadn’t been there for him.

Being a good man doesn’t mean you’re a good dad, I reminded him.

Expectations of fathers have evolved over the last few hundred years. Dads in the 1600s were expected to educate their sons in trades, and emphasize respect and authority. In the next hundred years, fathers shed that persona and became their sons’ best friends and moral guides. In the 1800s, fathers returned to an authoritarian role, but at the turn of the twentieth century, “masculine domesticity” took hold, and—believe it or not—fathers and mothers ran households together. But in the mid-1900s, increasing consumerism led fathers away from the domestic role and returned him to a “provider” role. Even with the rise of the two-income family in recent decades, fathers remain the primary breadwinner. Women today earn only seventy-five cents for every dollar earned by a man.

Fathers who focus on “providing” tend to raise lonely sons. They offer birthday parties and baseball mitts, summer trips and fishing poles, but don’t always give time to their sons. I’m reminded of the father-and-son pair in the classic holiday film, A Christmas Story. Twelve-year-old Ralphie dreams of owning a BB gun. His mother, his teacher, and even Santa Claus, tell Ralphie, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” Ralphie’s father surprises him with the gun on Christmas morning, but when Ralphie goes outside to try it out, his father doesn’t follow. He doesn’t give his son a lesson or watch him shoot. Ralphie gets hurt shooting the gun and his mother comes running out to comfort him. His father’s job is done.

Most sons of cavemen dads vowed never to be like their fathers. These boys fantasized about having fathers as sympathetic and responsive as Ward Cleaver, Andy Griffith, or Charles Ingalls. They aspired to be the ideal father: someone who was the man of the house, breadwinner, mentor, father figure, handyman, and role model. Their imaginations were fueled by the 1978 hit film Superman. They may have...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atria
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1416560920
• ISBN 13: 9781416560920
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande