How to Be a Good Father to Your Child
In order to understand what I mean by a good father, I first need to awaken you a bit by bringing up some negative things, in hopes of illustrating what we’re faced with. In other words, to tell what a good father is, I believe I must first pursue the bad direction in which our fatherly images have traveled in the past few decades.
Parenting Style
People can say that alarmists have always stood up and said that things were not right with our young people and pointed to the father images and the homes in general as the culprits. Yes, this has been done many times in various parts of the world and during a great many different time periods.
If you were to randomly survey people off the street to ask them to define a good father, you may be very surprised by what you hear, unless you focused your efforts on a group of people who see the need for a strong family leader. They might tell us that the father is the one who usually tried to get the sympathy of the other family members and especially the attention of his wife. He may do this with some type of childish action or even some form of hypochondriac procedure. This I imagine has been drilled into our population by the one-eyed monster, we call television, that graces most all our homes.
I digress, as television can only be held responsible to an extent. Through the years, our society has become liberal to the degree where strong leadership is feared by many, and at the best, avoided by the vast majority. Seldom do we see elected to public office, true leaders of character, ability and strength. This goes for the father image as well. Perhaps a strong-willed, God-fearing head of the household projected in either real life or fiction would be damaging to the youth, with his domineering personality, causing children to be subservient and silenced in their true voice and expressions.
I could not disagree with this more! Conversely to this assumption, leadership is ONLY passed along through example. Unfortunately, we have lost almost all of our examples as far as fatherly leadership is concerned, so there is no one to perpetuate this image. No young man with a weak father figure can identify with the strong paternal image, and so he doen’t truly know what a real man is. He may see his mother taking on an overwhelming amount of responsibility, as his father grossly neglects both his family and his responsibilities.
Youth Home
So you’re probably wondering when I’m going to get around to tell you what I thing a good father is. By describing a bad father, I am surely telling you what a good father should be. He should certainly be just the opposite of a weak, poor father. I would prefer seeing a strong-willed, man of character pass his child, and in doing so, observe the child somewhat flinching in fear of the repercussions of their actions, than see the reaction of most children to their father today. Maybe I’m a bit old fashioned, but I really feel children of all ages should have a type of fearful respect for their fathers: not because he is going to harm them physically, but because they have been brought up to the point that they dread him giving them even a glance of disdain.
Protecting your child in a seductive world
A good father should do some of the things that we commonly picture a father doing. This includes teaching his kids to ride a bike, playing ball or taking them fishing; cultivating the bond between himself and his daughters, and being a strong, yet also a sympathetic figure. He should do all these things, yes, but he must first and foremost be the family leader. He has to take the helm of leadership and guide the household through the storms it is going to face as the years go by.
