Should a Father be His Son's Friend?

He overcame many more obstacles than I ever did. His parents were murdered by the Nazis when he was 19. He faced a monumental challenge to survive the war and build a new life in a new country. He married and had a family before he was ready. Nevertheless, through his intelligence, courage, and hard work, he not only survived but prospered. He is 88 now. I am 62. I salute him on Father’s Day.

My problem is that he was always a father, never a friend. I know the orthodox view is that fathers should not be friends. “It is the job of parents to see that the [societal] barriers hold,” W. Cleon Skousen writes in “So You Want to Raise a Boy?” (1958, p.232)

My father saw his role as keeping me “on track.”  Since his success was based on higher education, keeping me “on track” meant keeping me in school.

I was not allowed to get off the treadmill. Despite the fact I was a bright kid, and had written a syndicated newspaper column at age 11, he never believed in me, my talent, and especially my good intentions. He always treated me like a loose cannon that needed mooring.

After I graduated from high school, I wanted to take a semester and work in a mine. Then, I planned to go to an out-of-town university known for its radical leftist professors. (I was a Lefty back then.)

I’ll never know how this would have turned out. My father exerted great pressure, including the inducement of a car, to make me enroll at once at the local university.  I succumbed and fell into a depression. I only completed three of five courses with poor marks that first year.

My spirit broken, I ended up staying at university as a kind of hospice from a world I didn’t understand. I ended up getting a Ph.D. that I have barely used.

On another occasion, I wanted to use the family cottage as a spiritual retreat, a kind of Thoreau’s Walden. Again, no deal. Get your thesis done.

I complain he was not my “friend” yet once he did act like one and made a mistake.

This was much earlier when I was ten or eleven-years-old. My friends and I were going through puberty. We were swiping copies of PLAYBOY magazine from newsstands.

I summoned my courage and asked my father for a subscription. He agreed. I papered the insides of my bedroom closet doors with Playmates-of-the-Month. In retrospect, this distorted my perception of women and  undermined my future relationships. I fell for the “Playboy Philosophy” that a woman’s sex appeal and appearance were the Holy Grail.

Nevertheless my father’s response created a major bond for me. I really dug him for it. I wish now he had known better and taught me that I was making a mistake that would mess up my life.

So here I am wishing he were a better friend, and sometimes wishing he had been a better father. But I don’t blame him. We all have many limitations. He gave me a lot. I wasn’t an easy child – always resisting his “discipline.”

Now that he is old, his good nature is on display. Many old men are crotchety but my dad has never been kinder and sweeter.  

I have tried to be a friend to my only son, who is now 24-years-old. I really didn’t have a choice for two reasons. Because of my immaturity, due partly to my dysfunctional relation to women, I did not have a positive model to present. Secondly, his mother, my ex-wife, had physical custody. I only saw him a few times a week.

Someone said men don’t want to have children because they are not finished being children themselves. That’s now more true than ever. We have been re-engineered to be perpetual adolescents.

I tried to influence my son to become a historian because true history has been suppressed. He took a few history courses, was bored and became a lawyer instead. He is happy with his decision, and so am I.

The baseball player Harmon Killebrew tells this story: “My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard.  Mother would come out and say, “You’re tearing up the grass.” 

“We’re not raising grass,” Dad would reply.  “We’re raising boys.”

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Related: Why are Dads Afraid to Say No to their Kids?