Should Father & Son be Friends?

He overcame many obstacles. His parents were murdered by the Nazis when he was 19. He survived the war, became a physicist, and built a new life. He is 96 now. I salute him on Father’s Day.

He was always a father, never a friend. Many believe 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, “on track” meant keeping me in school.

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

After high school, I wanted to 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.)

My father exerted great pressure, including the inducement of the old family car, to make me enroll at the local university at once.  I succumbed and fell into a clinical depression. I only completed three of five courses with poor marks.

My spirit broken, I ended up staying at university, at first as a kind of hospice, and finally getting a Ph.D.

When I was eleven-years-old, my friends and I were swiping copies of PLAYBOY magazine from newsstands.

Nevertheless, my father’s liberal response created a bond. I really dug him for it. I wish now he had taught me that I was making a mistake that would ruin my life.  He was doing his best and was no wiser than I. “Sexual liberation” was the rage in the sixties.

So here I am wishing for a better friend and a better father at the same time. 

Now that he’s old, he just sits and watches TV. He says he isn’t bored.  Many old men are crotchety but my dad has never been kinder and sweeter.   Happy Father’s Day, dad!

“My dad’s and my relationship was always pretty much about electronics… Dad was always helping me put science projects together…When I was six, he gave me that crystal radio kit I mentioned. It was just a little project where you take a penny, and touch it with some earphones. Sure enough, we did that and heard a radio station…It was so darned exciting, I distinctly remember feeling something big had happened, that suddenly I was way ahead–accelerated- above any of the other little kids my age..” (27)

Fathers build men. Fathers change the world.

I like the American idea that anyone can be the President. I would expand on it: your kid can become anything.

I suggest you read “What Is a Man? 3,000 Years of Wisdom on the Art of Manly Virtue.” In this book, you will find thoughts about what a real man should be. Why should our kids be anything less than those great men in history? Why should they instead drool over Beyoncé or Kim Kardashian and spend their days on Facebook? Even if your son is not successful moneywise, he should end up with a noble heart and a wise mind.

We forget that in a kid, there are all possibilities opened to a human. At the same time, he is just a kid. Be too harsh, and you may raise a cruel perfectionist. Be too soft, and you end up with a confused and lost young man. There is a place for love and a place for instruction: both are needed.

I still dream often of my father, who passed away many years ago. I wondered many times why, and I think I know now. Fathers are more than real persons to us, they are symbols of our need for acceptance, of a longing for God, of instruction, a symbol of our search of a model for how we deal with life. Without fathers, we feel lost. Eventually, God Himself should fill this position. “