A map through the minefield of being a 21st-century dad
At the age of 15, his father bought him a dictionary. But had he passed his exams with flying colours, it would have been an electric guitar. Just one example of a life lesson that led to his father’s greatest gift:
IN my bookcase there is a Chambers 20th Century Dictionary which does not have an entry for the word internet. It cannot tell you what the snowflake generation is either and has nothing to say about sharenting – the practice of over-zealously posting pictures of your children on social media.
But it does have an inscription which, for me, never gets old. ‘For Jonathan,’ it says. ‘With commiserations on a missed guitar – but just as the pen is mightier than the sword, so the word is mightier than the amplifier; as you will realise when you have learned all this volume contains.’
It closes with the words ‘Love Dad, ‘O’ Grades 1983.’
This was my father’s way of cushioning the blow when his teenage son failed by a whisker to secure enough As in his school exams to qualify for the reward of an electric guitar.
He was saying: ‘Close, son, but no guitar.’ And he appeared – ludicrously I felt at the time – to be suggesting the consolation prize of a fat dictionary was a better thing to have in any case than a Fender Stratocaster.
If my filial munificence these last 35 years of Father’s Days has not always been as manifest as the old man would have wanted, he might care to think back on that little episode.
I certainly reflected on it a generation later when my daughter sat her Standard Grades. Were there any conceivable circumstances in which she would not be rewarded handsomely for her exam efforts, irrespective of her grades, so long as those efforts were genuine?
None that her father could imagine. What, disappoint my darling girl? Make her suspect she might have, cover your ears children, failed in a task and that the judgment of Dad was now upon her?
Never. We were off down the guitar shop within minutes of the results envelope arriving and I was magnanimously overspending on her gleaming six-string minutes after that. In fairness, her grades were more richly deserving of a grand fatherly gesture than any I ever achieved.
The point in these contrasting stories is not to extract a mea culpa from my father who is generous to a fault and takes his role as a parent every bit as seriously today as he did when he was penning patronising inscriptions for his son in 1983.
NO, the point is to reflect how vastly different the landscape of fatherhood has become in a few decades. The dad to whom I send my love on Father’s Day tomorrow operated under terms and conditions which would be barely recognisable to the daughter who may or may not remember to send me a card.
For one, it was part of the job description to be scary. One sharp word, one black look brought junior into line. Back in the 1970s, the threat ‘wait till your father gets home’ still carried some thwack even if, in practice, fathers rarely did.
Today the threat is comically bereft of menace. ‘Gosh, what’s Dad going to do?’ sarky 21st century teens might reasonably inquire. ‘Tut at me? Wag a disapproving finger?’
Dads used to rib children, make fun of them – yes, sometimes even to the point of tears. One of my father’s most fiendish specialities was making his sons laugh in spite of themselves.
I remember appearing in a children’s stage production in Aberdeen when I was about nine and scanning the audience for my parents.
I soon saw them. My dad was the one staring straight back at me, pulling faces to start me giggling. He succeeded too. I laughed myself out of any future in theatre.
In our wildest, most devilish dreams, would I or any other noughties father consider for a second that fun was to be had from throwing our kids off their stride at a Glasgow Youth Theatre production?
Again, never. And had we been indecorous enough to do so we should have expected instant ejection and withering lectures from youth workers on the turpitude of trampling on our little ones’ dreams.
Much of this sound and fury I would likely have agreed with too, for I am a 21st century dad with next generation protective programming preinstalled. And yet I laugh today at my dad’s attempts to unsettle me.
Thanks to them, maybe I am a little less easily unsettled than younger family members I could mention. Thanks to all the ribbing back then, it is like water off a duck’s back today – and I have learned to give as good as I get.
My father and his generation of dads will not have been unaware in their early years of parenting of the Johnny Cash hit A Boy Named Sue wherein a father gives his son a girl’s name in the hope the ensuing embarrassment will toughen him up.
Though never written down, never advocated by social workers or sociologists, elements of this cruel to be kind philosophy echoed through fatherhood – and my early childhood – in the 1970s. Children, particularly male heirs, should not be wimps.
That was at least part of the reason why, a decade earlier, a disconsolate Charles was dispatched by his father Prince Philip to Gordonstoun school in Moray – or ‘Colditz in kilts’ as his son shudderingly remembered it.
It was why sons two and three, Andrew and Edward, were made to follow in their older brother’s scholastic footsteps – to put roses in their cheeks and scuffs on their knees and, for their own bally
well good, to acquaint their still puny bodies with the unbending rod of discipline.
Their mothers may mollycoddle them but, by Jove, their fathers would make men of them.
My brother and I played rugby at school – not football which, we were assured, was a game for ‘sissies’. Observing today how respective exponents of these sports respond to robust tackles, I have to wonder if my dad may, once again, have been on to something.
Our sporting injuries, bathed and soothed and kissed better by the mollycoddling half of the parental partnership, were mere ‘scratches’ to the father who, so he told us, once had to see himself to hospital by train after shattering his jaw on the rugby pitch.
How touchy-feely my dad must find his son’s approach to fatherhood. For, instead of turning my daughter into a toughie I endeavour to be tough on her behalf and to anticipate problems before she is confronted with them.
Like many working parents, her mother and I are the professional fixers on our daughter’s journey through life – the taxi service, the proof readers, the negotiators, the advice bureau, the emergency call handlers…
‘I think there might be a mouse in my flat,’ my daughter told me in traumatised tones when I answered the phone in the middle of a meal in St Andrews last week. And I swear, had I not been immobile through injury I would have given serious consideration to dropping my cutlery and driving straight through to Edinburgh to her rescue.
What kind of 21st century father leaves his darling daughter at the mercy of a house mouse?
How, I wonder, might my dad have handled a similar distress call in the old century? ‘Well, kill it,’ I suspect, is all that he would have had to say.
Yes, we parents raise snowflakes today, and somewhat unfairly perhaps, accuse the next generation of exhibiting snowflake tendencies.
The trouble is, the present century puts rather more on our parental plates than the last and there is arguably an even bigger adjustment for the father than the mother.
Our age is one littered with technology beyond the ken of the average middle-aged dad yet instinctively grasped and often used foolishly by his sons and daughters.
We live in times where perils present themselves almost daily on our teenagers’ smartphones and tablets – where being safely ensconced in their bedrooms does not mean safe from malignant forces which walk through our parental defences like ghosts through walls.
Somewhere in Scotland this weekend, a teenage son or daughter supposedly ‘safe’ in the family home will be urged by an unseen online scoundrel to post an indecent selfie. It could lead to blackmail. In extreme cases it has even led to suicide.
No one prepared my father’s generation for predators so cynically advanced. Parents are only now just beginning to appreciate the biggest threat to their children’s safety is an insidious, invisible one which they lack the technological chops even to accurately assess.
The state, too, confounds the traditional parent. Fathers, once anxious to avoid raising wimps, are today confronted with a gamut of gender identities from which their offspring are encouraged, at their leisure, to take their pick.
Your son identifies as a running, jumping, tree-climbing male? Very well, but we do hope, sir, that you have not been coaching the boy in these very personal life choices. And we may nevertheless require him to wear a skirt if it makes classmates who have chosen alternative gender identities feel more comfortable.
Thankfully, such diversity-crazed nonsense formed no part of my wiring as a father, far less my own father’s, but it seems increasingly likely it will be fitted as standard for next generation parents.
It is depressingly clear, too, that as fathers learn more of the workings of the online gizmos which threaten their children’s safety, they will blithely feed the beast with ever more pictures of them on Facebook. This is the ‘sharenting’ phenomenon which, I was explaining earlier, the 20th century dictionary my father gave me could tell you nothing about.
It’s one thing to voluntarily invade one’s own privacy before strangers online, but a more sinister thing altogether when we do so with our own children. How bizarre an age of parenthood in which we nurture near defenceless snowflakes while simultaneously making their images available to anyone in the world, friend or foe, at the tap of a few keys.
But I overstate the case, perhaps, to make the point. My own daughter, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, is far from defenceless.
Somewhere along the line, for all her father’s protective indulgences, the snowflake has developed herself a backbone and, occasional mice-related meltdowns aside, she thrives.
The father who once sought his dad’s advice on career matters now stands ready to impart to his final year student daughter counsel of similar sageness, trusting that the world has not changed that much – that, in earning a crust, some principles span the generations.
Nor on this Father’s Day weekend should those of us of a certain age lucky enough to still have fathers cast the old man’s parenting instincts as obsolete or unworthy of our enlightened times.
My father was – is – an exceptional dad and my favourite man on the planet. Plus, he’s a big softie.
The reason I was in St Andrews the other day and unable to see to a daughter who thought she had seen a mouse was I had fallen off my bike, badly injured my leg and, even on crutches, could barely make it to the sink for water to down a co-codamol.
Did my dad tell me to man up? No, he drove 80 miles to Glasgow to pick me up and another 80 home where he spent the next five days as my carer. Unsurprisingly, he excelled in the role. He is a dad. Did he care to see the iPhone picture of the ‘scratch’ I had suffered in my horror fall? I saw him wince. No he did not.
When I was better able to fend for myself, he drove me back to Glasgow again. Another 160-mile round trip.
And, as I re-read that 35-year-old inscription, the meaning becomes obvious. True fatherhood is not about the showering of gifts or the cultivating of Mini-Mes or the indulgence of daddy’s little princess. It’s about being interested, being involved and, when the chips are down, being there.
That much about being a dad does not – and must not – ever change.