Fathers as parenting role models.
A while back I posted a survey about fatherhood and asked readers about how their father influenced their parenting techniques.
Interestingly enough, there was almost an even split between respondents who thought their own fathers were positive role models for parenting and those who thought that their dads were negative role models of how not to parent.
I’d like to pose this question again because I’d like to get a larger sample size of how dads relate to their own dads. I find it an interesting commentary on how people interact with their parents and whether they learn more from the positive or negative aspects of relationships.
The survey is below, please feel free to add comments to the post if you have more to say.
{democracy:4}
That’s an excellent question. I voted “mixed.” My father has always been supportive of me, but I’ve been uncomfortable with the way he treats my mother. He was also either working or doing his one hobby. So if I wasn’t working with him, I wouldn’t see him often. Different generation I guess.
So as it relates to my own children, I try to see my children morning and night. I don’t have any hobbies (other than late night blogging and podcasting) so I’m there for the family during non-work hours/days.
I know my parents love me, but after 40 years of hearing advice on what to ‘fix’, I’m done trying to please them. There comes a point in your life when you figure out who you are and you need to be comfortable with that person.
I love my kids and I’ve always ‘accentuated the positive’, it’s taken my kids incredibly far and I believe we’re a much happier family for it.
Unfortunately, my relationship with my Dad is still strained and this is largely because he’s an angry man who loves to point the finger…. whoops I’m doing it back at him now. Damn!
Good question and interesting thread…
one of the interesting things for me was that when my oldest son hit about 2 years old and started to do things that made me angry - I realised that I still held some very deep resentment about the way my dad dealt with his own anger when I was very little.
I’ve never really talked about it with him, and he’s a great father and grandparent, but it hit me pretty hard. I found myself exploding quite angrily (I mean… little kids can do infuriating things)…
…I believe that anger is a natural and healthy emotion, but that how a person expresses it reveals a lot about them. I found myself expressing my anger in ways that my father used to, and that, before I was a parent, I NEVER would have done. I wasn’t violent. Just angry.
It was strange how strong those deep-down memories proved to be.
I would like to see a continuation of the topic
I voted Negative role model based almost completely on his consumption of alcohol and the ruinous effects it had on our family. He is gone now and I find myself with tons of things I wish I could ask him about now that I too am a dad. He had some good personality traits, but booze just wrecked it. I am trying to make the word DAD feel like a positive thing after a lifetime of just the opposite.