Mitch's Tips for Parents

What Fathers Do

Fathers are vital to the health of their sons, to their families, and to their communities. They serve an important function which as a society we have failed to appreciate and now are seeing the results.

It is the father’s responsibility to stand fast in the values that are acceptable conduct in the home. Fathers cause children to socialize by the father’s intolerance.
The father is an example of how to treat women and children by the way he treats his wife or partner and the children. Social conduct for the benefit of the community is in the domain of the father. It is the father’s job because mothers will excuse misconduct when their instinct to nurture is activated.
What mothers do creates more work for the mother, what fathers do, creates less work for the mother. Fathers wield the final no. In fact, the father’s job is to drive the children away from the mother. Mothers often do not have these limits for themselves and drive themselves to exhaustion. The way my wife describes it is at times it feels as though the children are eating her alive with their needs. She will continue to give to them even at the expense of herself. Fathers stop this from happening.
It is human predatory nature to attempt to take the position of greatest advantage. Fathers with their strong values can re-establish and maintain security so that the child can move away from this primal instinct.
I would like to say mothers can do this also but it creates at least two problems. First a mother must stop nurturing to raise the expectations of social performance and as a result we have a mother who thinks less of herself. That is not good. Second if the young male is large enough and a mother shows this kind of strength and fortitude, it raises the potential for the situation to become dangerous for her.
Let the father be the one to face the matter and raise the expectations of conduct and performance. The mother should side with the father when the son resists, however difficult that may be. Any collusion between the mother and son at this point will be at the demise of the family and ultimately her son. She must trust the father with her son. She must look away.
The father and son are engaged in a war. They are both in love with the same woman. One supplies the resources, another must eventually leave to make his own resources and create his own family. The father is doing a service for the son when he raises the bar of expectation. When he increases the demands upon his son, he is striving to encourage the best in the young man and give him the tools to survive in the bigger world. A young man without a father or men in his life is often in for a rude awakening when he gets into the bigger world. He won’t have the fortitude to make it on his own. No one is there to do things for him. He’ll think he’s capable of much more than he actually is. And sadly, if there were no men in his life until now, the men he’s likely to meet will be the law-breaking kind and eventually and ultimately it will be men in uniform.
When fathers do their job (and are allowed to do their job), our whole society benefits.