Five Things Your Father Never Told You About Fatherhood

Honest reflections from a father of five children on my twentieth Father's Day

A dad in his natural habitat: in the backyard by the grill.

As I celebrate my 20th year of fatherhood, I’ve been quietly wondering what Father’s Day means to our society as a whole and to me, personally.

In a lot of homes this weekend, kids will probably tell their dads, “Happy Father’s Day,” and thank him for grilling dinner, because it seems… that’s what dads do on Father’s Day.

That’s fine by me, and I love a good excuse to grill for my family, but what does this holiday even mean?

What is its purpose? Why do we celebrate it? What are we even celebrating?

To be honest, I didn’t even know Father’s Day was coming at all until I started seeing commercials a few days ago on the TV at my gym for things like weed-whackers and meat smokers. It seems the best way to “celebrate Dad” is to buy him something during a special “Father’s Day Sale” at your local lawn and garden supply house.

But when the smoke from the new riding mower settles, and the discounts are over, I’m still stuck trying to figure out why Americans even celebrate Father’s Day. It must just be for the hardware store sales, because, outside of that, based on their actions alone, you’d think Americans actually hate fathers and fatherhood.

Twenty years ago, I became a father. That was the most transformational experience of my life. It was a much bigger deal than becoming an adult or becoming a husband.

As I’ve often written about, parenthood is forever. It is immutable. It’s a one-way door: once you walk through it, you can never go back. Even if your child dies, you will still be a parent. Even if you die, you will still be a parent, in a sense.

(Of course, these facts are as true of motherhood as they are of fatherhood, but I can only speak of my own experience as a father, since that’s what I know.)

One of my challenges in trying to understand why we celebrate Father’s Day is that I don’t think most Americans know what they want from fathers. They don’t know what fathers should look like, what they should do, or how they should act.

For generations now, TV and movies have been filled with examples of dumb fathers who are drunkards, bumbling idiots, racists, and bigots; always the butt of jokes and the target of cynical, sarcastic one-liners and eye-rolls.

When someone makes fun of Dad on screen, we’re supposed to laugh. It’s funny.

Dad is dumb. Dad is always dumb. Dad is never smart, or wise, or friendly, or helpful.

Dad’s just an annoying ATM that dispenses cash (and, occasionally, unwanted advice), and we’d prefer he otherwise quietly sit in the background and not get involved.

As a father, I can tell what our society doesn’t like about fathers and doesn’t want from them. But I can’t tell what society DOES want from us. Most people seem very sure of how their fathers were bad, or what they did wrong, but there’s very little constructive criticism or helpful feedback to balance this out.

Our culture has been extremely consistent with messaging that demonizes men in general and fathers in particular as being “toxic,” “patriarchal” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), overbearing, abusive, red-pilled, misogynistic, etc.

Okay, fine: we hear loud and clear what you DON’T like about fathers. Is there anything you DO like about fathers? What do you want from us, anyway? This is a great mystery I’ve pondered and will continue to muse about for years to come.

This Father’s Day, I want to share five thoughts from my perspective as a father now entering his third decade of fatherhood.

If you love your father—or even if you hate your father—I hope you will at least consider these. While I obviously can’t speak for all fathers, I do believe my thoughts are at least fairly representative of most of the fathers I know.

If anything here surprises you, that wouldn’t surprise me at all. That’s because fathers rarely get to say anything—nobody ever asks us. People don’t care what fathers think. Often, they just want us to show up, pay the bills, shut up, and get out of the way.

Well, here are five thoughts fathers are secretly thinking that you may want to consider on Father’s Day.

#1: As fathers, we will fail you. We know this, but we can’t stop it.

Men try really hard to be good fathers. No man wants to be a bad father. We are very much aware of the impact we have on our kids, and this is a sobering thought.

The good things we do as fathers may have a good impact on our children for the rest of their lives. The bad things we do as fathers will have a bad impact on our children for the rest of their lives.

We’re only human, and we will fail. We know this. But we can’t help it.

Everybody fails at some point, but the stakes of fatherhood are much higher, and this is a terrifying reality.

A few times over the years, I’ve told my kids that I’m going to fail them in some way: I just don’t know how. More than once, at the dinner table, I’ve looked each one of my kids in the eye and told them some version of the following:

I WILL fail you as a father.

You ARE going to grow up and leave this house upset about something I did, or many things I did. There WILL be ways you wish I had ‘been there’ for you, but wasn’t, or times I was ‘too much’ when you needed less.

I’m sorry about that. I am apologizing now, but also warning you: I can’t help it. I don’t know what I’m going to fail at, but I will. Don’t pretend to be surprised by this.

Now, this is not a cynical “get out of jail free” card. I don’t say this as a disclaimer so I can later laugh them off and say “Neener neener! I told you I’d fail, so you can’t hold it against me!”

I say it so they know it’s coming and doesn’t surprise them.

There are some ways my dad failed me in childhood that still affect me to this day. This is just a fact of life. There are some ways my wife’s dad failed her that still hurt her and affect her on a regular basis. There’s nothing we can do about this, though.

It’s all in the past.

If I tried to confront her dad about it, he would most likely say: “Yes. I know, and I’m sorry. I did the best I could.” He would be right to say this. He did the best he could. That’s all we can ask, really.

(Her dad has plenty of his own baggage, in fact: he was a victim of much physical abuse as a child, and his own parents were involved in a nasty divorce that included such a spectacular custody fight that he even spent time in an orphanage when the state took him away from both his parents.)

You can try your hardest to be a perfect father and write out a perfect plan and execute that plan, but even if you excel at 29 things and fail at one, your kids will still remember the one thing you failed at more than the 29 things you did well.

And no, they won’t say “At least he was a good father 29 times out of 30.” Not automatically… this measure of grace doesn’t come naturally. People need to be told this. So I’m saying it here, loudly, once again, for everyone to hear.

As fathers, we know we are going to fail you. We just don’t know how yet.

Sometimes, the effects of our failures don’t show up in our kids until adulthood.

I know a woman who has self-admittedly made a bunch of bad, self-destructive life choices. I won’t detail them here, but regardless of morality, her choices for the past decade have hurt her greatly.

I asked her once why she did these things—things that she knew were foolish, were harmful, and made her cry. Her answer shocked me.

“Because I have daddy issues.”

That phrase haunts me, following me like a ghost, everywhere I go. I’ve heard adults use this phrase judgmentally sometimes when they see young women working as strippers or prostitutes: “She has daddy issues,” they’ll say, as though that’s the source of all her problems and she’s just too dumb to see it (and, with the implication being that it’s all her fault).

But when I heard a woman say this herself out loud, I couldn’t quite believe it. She was admitting it? So it was true after all?

Yes, it is true. She has daddy issues. My wife has daddy issues, too. Her dad has daddy issues. We all do to some extent.

That doesn’t excuse fathers, but it is just reality. What fathers do during fatherhood tremendously impacts children.

Please don’t think we don’t know this. We do. But we can’t help but fail.

We will never stop trying, but the goal, being the perfect father, is always out of reach.

What will my own kids say they “have daddy issues” about? I don’t know. But they will, and this thought terrifies me and wakes me up in cold sweats at 3:00 in the morning.

#2: The hardest part of fatherhood is knowing when to tell you “no.” It’s also the most important thing we do.

Contrary to what children wish, fatherhood is not a popularity contest. Sometimes, it seems like it’s the literal opposite: in order to be a good father, I have to do things that are unpopular.

Why? Because that’s my job.

It’s my job to teach my kids right from wrong.

It’s my job to protect my kids from others (and, sometimes, from themselves).

It’s my job to set them up for success and avoid pitfalls and (to a certain extent) failure.

Sometimes, this feels terrible.

Sometimes, doing my job makes me “the bad guy.”

Sometimes, I receive hateful language spewed from the mouths of angry teens who just want me to say “yes” all the time.

Usually, these fights are just short arguments in the privacy of my home between my kids and me. Sometimes, though, it boils over into outside relationships and becomes somewhat of a public spectacle.

A few years ago, one of my daughters went to a birthday party for a boy in her church youth group. It wasn’t even for a boy she knew well; it was just: “Hey, everybody in the whole youth group, you’re all invited to the trampoline park this Saturday, and pizza will be provided.”

I dropped her off for a few hours, and she jumped around with all the other kids, having fun. When I went to pick her up, it turned out she had met another girl her age, and they had become fast friends.

“Hey, Dad, this is Sandra. She wants to know if I can have a sleepover at her house next week,” she told me. I was a bit shocked. Not angry, but just surprised at how quickly this all happened.

“Umm, whoa, okay, uh, Hi, Sandra, nice to meet you,” I sputtered. “I’ll have to think about that for a while. Can I get your parents’ phone numbers, and I’ll talk to them about it?”

I didn’t necessarily have a problem with this girl, but I had literally only seen her for about 18 seconds before my daughter was asking if she could go to her house and spend an entire night away from home.

This gave me pause. I didn’t like the fact that she asked me in front of her new friend, which is an unfair trick teenagers often play. They either don’t know not to do this, or they do it on purpose, hoping they can pressure us into wanting to be “cool parents” who just say “yes.”

That doesn’t work for me: I’m immune to peer pressure. But I also don’t want to be a jerk, so I like to politely let people down easy, or buy time to think and make a bigger decision.

Eventually, I decided I wasn’t opposed to my daughter going over to her house, but I said she couldn’t have a sleepover... at least not yet. I still had so many questions.

Who was this girl? Who were her parents? Had I ever seen them at church? Where did they live? What did their daughter and my daughter have in common?

Allowing her to go over and swim and stay up late on a Friday night, despite my knowing nothing about this family at all, was gracious on my end. But this earned me zero points from my daughter. She was just angry that I said “no” to the sleepover.

Of course, I cared that she was upset, but that didn’t sway me enough to change my mind. I thought agreeing to let her stay at their house until late in the evening (essentially granting 50-75% of her request) was reasonable.

Actually, I know this was reasonable. But she didn’t see it that way. And, shockingly, the other parents—total strangers to me—didn’t see it that way either.

When I went to pick her up, I drove all the way across town to bring her home, and walked into the backyard and told her it was time to get out of the pool and go home.

“Awww, Dad!” she whined, as though she were shocked and offended. “Can’t I spend the night? It’s okay with her parents!” she said, once again, in front of everybody.

This was extremely awkward and totally unfair. But it got worse. The woman came out of the house and (finally) introduced herself to me, then joined in with the mob.

“Your daughter can spend the night here… It’s fine with us. Really. It will be fun.”

“Uhhh, this isn’t a good night for that. Maybe in the future,” I said, trying to allow her to save face. Then she insulted me, right there in the open, in front of the other adults and children.

“Why not? What’s the matter? You don’t trust us?” she badgered.

I was gobsmacked by this outrageously immature and disrespectful act, but continued to demur, saying it wasn’t a good night, perhaps another time.

On the inside, it was all I could do not to shout at her.

“Trust you? Lady, I don’t even know you! I don’t know your husband, I don’t know if you have any creepy uncles living in your basement or whatever. You are a total stranger to me. How dare you bully me and try to make me look stupid in front of my daughter?!”

I told my daughter to get out of the pool, and we left. She was angry at me the whole way home. We walked into the house, and she stomped off to her bedroom and slammed the door. I still don’t think she’s forgiven me for saying “no” that night.

I didn’t care then, and I still don’t. I did my job. I was made the bad guy that day. I was not a cool dad. But that doesn’t matter.

The hardest part about all of this is knowing that I could have just said “yes,” and perhaps everything would have turned out fine. But I don’t know. I’ll never know.

It’s a calculated risk a father has to take, balancing your children’s hopes and dreams along with your need to protect them.

Sometimes I say “yes,” and regret it. Sometimes, I say “no,” and regret it.

My kids (and my wife) will almost never be angry at me for saying “yes” to the wrong things (and they likely won’t even remember the times that happened). But the times I said “no” that they disagreed with? They will never forget those.

Saying “no” is good. It’s important. It might not be what friends or boyfriends do, but it is what fathers do.

#3: Our culture does not value fathers or fatherhood.

Fathers, as I’ve mentioned, are not appreciated, and oftentimes, are unwanted and unwelcome. For proof, I offer two specific examples: divorce and abortion.

Regarding divorce, I have a friend, a man with two children, who was recently divorced. The family court judge who determined their custody arrangement also ruled that my friend can’t leave the state where he lives.

This was a completely absurd ruling that was financially devastating to my friend and to his ability to provide financial support for his kids. His job required him to travel outside the state on a regular basis.

But did the judge care? Nope. My friend had to hire a lawyer, pay more legal fees, and force his ex-wife back into court to try to resolve this issue.

Divorce is a topic that I (thankfully) don’t know anything about first-hand, but I have met a lot of men over the years who’ve experienced the dissolution of their family.

It’s a horrendous experience.

So many men I know have been forced to pay child support for their kids, while the legal system blocks them from seeing those same kids, and enforces arbitrary rules that make it feel like the courts (and, often, their ex-wives) want to destroy their lives, and charge them for the privilege.

Even in our liberated society that is obsessed with “gender equality,” when it comes to paying for children, it’s almost always assumed the father is responsible for the financial burden, even if everything else is alleged to be a 50/50 split.

Outside the courtroom, too, there’s an unfair bias against fathers after divorce as well.

“Single mother” is a term often thrown about, like a reward or a position to which one can aspire. “Wow, single mothers are amazing,” people often say, especially politicians.

How many of those “single mothers,” though, are actually women who divorced their husbands and took the kids, even when he wanted to stay involved? Or perhaps the split was amicable, but rather than calling her a “divorced mother,” people have given her the badge “single mother” because that turns on a spigot of compassion?

Of course, there are plenty of legitimate single mothers who ended up with deadbeat husbands and men who are poor fathers of their children. I know this. But that is not always the case, and a lot of times, it’s just assumed that when you see a woman with children and no man is involved, that it was his choice, whether this is true or not.

In social media and polite conversation, there always seems to be a presumption of innocence on the part of mothers and a presumption of guilt on the part of fathers.

I’ve watched multiple sets of friends get divorced recently, and the way they approach this publicly—and the responses they get—is wildly different.

A woman will make a post on Facebook and say: “I can’t take it anymore. I’m leaving my husband.” Instantly, women will pile on with nothing but love and support, without a single person ever questioning how or why this came to be in the first place.

“Good for you!” “Love you, girlie; let me know if there’s anything you need!” “I’m here for you.” “Text me!” “Your kids can sleep on my floor!” “You are brave!”

The kind, supportive comments are often intermixed with extremely harsh and nasty notes toward the man, even without any evidence of wrongdoing.

“You deserve better than him!” “Good riddance!” “F*ck that guy!” “You’re better off without him!” “I never liked him anyway!”

You know what happens when men make a divorce announcement on social media?

Nothing. Because men don’t do this.

Or if they do, a few men might say “That sucks man,” and that’s about it.

Fatherhood isn’t just threatened after birth either: it’s erased even earlier in some cases. As if losing your parental rights in a family court weren’t hard enough, some men lose their parental rights before their children are even born.

It is never more apparent how much Americans hate fathers than how the law treats them when it comes to abortion.

A man and woman can make love, and if she becomes pregnant in the process, she becomes a mother and makes him a father. But that very same woman who gave him the gift of fatherhood can also take away his fatherhood by aborting his child (in most states) without his permission or consent, and sometimes, without him even knowing.

It takes a mother and a father to create a child, but a mother alone can decide to end that child’s life, and the father typically has no legal power to stop her.

This is profoundly depressing, and because of this, there are many men who are quietly, secretly, fathers, and yet, even on Father’s Day, nobody celebrates them.

Earlier this year, on Mother’s Day, I saw several people online make pronouncements about how Mother’s Day is a tricky holiday, and that we need to celebrate all mothers, including women who may be quietly hurting due to infertility and miscarriages or other complications.

To be clear: I completely agree with this and fully support this. Yes. Absolutely, I want to celebrate ALL mothers, even those who were secretly mothers who have quietly mourned the loss of their children and, by extension, the loss of their motherhood.

But I have never, ever heard anybody say this about fatherhood. I’ve never heard anyone warn us to be careful about who we do (or don’t) say “Happy Father’s Day” to.

Nobody cares about including them in the celebration of fatherhood.

Nobody asks them what they think or how they feel.

This is a tragedy.

#4: Our kids can hurt us more than anybody on Earth.

A few years ago, a young woman I know (different from the one mentioned previously) told me about some crazy and dangerous things she had done late at night when her parents didn’t know.

Alcohol was involved. Marijuana may have been involved. The police were eventually involved.

I asked her why she felt the need to do these things. At one point, amid an explanation I still didn’t fully understand, she said something I’ve never forgotten.

“I just didn’t know that my behavior as a kid could hurt my parents.”

This was a “record scratch” moment for me. I nearly fell out of my chair. How could it possibly be that children think their actions don’t, or can’t, hurt their parents?

My goodness… it is with certainty that I say I’m speaking for all parents here: our kids can hurt us more than anybody on Earth.

I’ve met some men who hate their wives. I’ve also met men who really hate their ex-wives, who have gone to great lengths to try to hurt them. But I have never, ever met a man who hated his child, no matter how old that child is, and no matter how much that child has hurt him.

I still don’t understand how kids don’t realize how deeply they can wound a father with their actions. And I don’t just mean legally or financially (though that’s true too).

My insurance agent once told me he had a client who didn’t have a very big insurance policy. His 16-year-old daughter was driving his car recklessly and ran a red light, killing two people in a car crash. The victims’ families sued the father for $2 million, and he lost. He is now completely financially destroyed and will never be able to pay off the debt fully, even by the time he dies.

But finances aside, I have seen men weep over their children who make poor choices: both as kids and adults, who live their lives as criminals, drug addicts, drunkards, or who commit suicide.

I know men who are physically big and strong, who are completely broken and have become undone over the actions of their children. Some of them can barely function as human beings, much less as fathers.

I think about this in my own life. If my wife leaves me, divorces me, hates me, or wants to see me dead, that would obviously be devastating. But, to a certain extent, I may still be able to “get over it” and move on.

My wife isn’t related to me. She made vows to me, yes, but we don’t share any DNA.

If my children, however, were to leave me, hate me, and cut me out of their lives for some reason, I don’t know that I could ever get over that. They are my own flesh and blood. Their bodies came from my body. Their souls, somehow, mysteriously, came from my soul.

How can someone get over being hurt and rejected by their own offspring? That is a punishment far worse than divorce.

If my wife chooses to leave me, I could, in theory, get married again and start a new life with a new wife, and smile again.

But my kids will be my kids forever. I can’t start over with them. And even if I can somehow father more kids down the road, that will never dissolve the fatherly bond I already have with my existing kids.

I don’t know why there is such a disconnect in this misunderstanding, but I’m telling you… This is very real.

People, I’m begging you to hear me: your actions can hurt your parents more than the actions of anyone else. Even as an adult, you hold much more power than you know.

Please consider how what you do will affect your parents. Your parents did things you can’t even imagine just to keep you alive… keep that in mind when you consider what you do to them or say to them, no matter your age, or theirs.

#5: We want to give you good things.

Something kids don’t seem to understand (or believe) is that fathers really want to give their kids good things. We love to see you smile! It does our heart good to see you happy and fulfilled.

In the Bible, Jesus addresses this issue: in a long discussion on the power of prayer with His disciples, He makes a simple comment that shows how fathers are automatically inclined to want the best for their children.

“Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he?”

The presumption here is that fathers would only give their sons (and daughters) what they ask for, and what they want. Of course. Because fathers only want to give their children good things. We don’t need to be taught to love our children.

There is a burning desire in every father to give his kids the desires of their hearts, and it makes us sad when we can’t. This means we are secretly sad inside fairly often, because unless we’re loaded with cash, we can’t give you the things we wish we could.

When my oldest daughter was about five years old, I heard her crying in her bedroom late one night. She was sobbing and saying something about “a puppy.”

I had no idea what was going on, so in a panic, I ran upstairs to see what the matter was. She was sitting up in her bed, reading by the light of the moon through the window. I saw what she was holding that was making her sad: a toy catalog from one of those upscale, expensive toy companies like FAO Schwarz.

She tearfully pointed to a stuffed, black, curly-haired, fancy poodle on one of the pages and, through her tears, said, “I want this poodle. I want it. I want it.”

The price tag on it was outrageous: something like $180. I was angered at the idea that a toy company somehow found a way to mail a catalog to my house without my permission, just to make my kids jealous over toys we couldn’t afford to buy them.

But at the same time, when she said “I want it,” it pierced my heart with desire and sorrow. I wanted to buy this toy poodle for my daughter to make her happy, and I was sad that I couldn’t.

She was crying because she couldn’t have it. I wanted to cry because I couldn’t give it to her. I wanted to give her that fluffy puppy even more than she wanted it herself. I looked around at the stuffed animals she had in her room, which were old, worn, and cheaply made.

She already had plenty of stuffed animals, but this one was different. This one was luxurious, fancy, and life-like. It was on a whole different level than anything we had in our house.

I would have done almost anything to find the money to buy her this fancy poodle, even as insanely, ridiculously overpriced as it was. I wanted to give her the greatest, the most expensive, the best poodle there was.

But I couldn’t. I went to bed feeling defeated.

Many times since that day, I’ve felt the same way: where I wanted to give my kids the desires of their heart, no matter how ridiculous or expensive, but I can’t. This makes me feel terrible.

I love to see my children smile. I live for it. I can’t always do it, and that makes me sad. When I can, that makes me feel tremendous: like I’m a super-dad.

Sometimes it’s big, expensive things that cost a lot of money, like prom dresses, haircuts, and fancy nail jobs.

Sometimes, it’s just a $6 tub of ice cream and a $2 two-liter bottle of soda I share with the family on “family night,” where we watch a movie for free at home. No matter the cost, the net result is the same.

When you smile, we smile.

When you are happy, we are happy.

We want to see you smile, be happy, and give you good things, more than you know.

This Father’s Day, I am planning on grilling in the backyard, just like most other dads.

And if all of my children are still alive, and are near me, spending time with me, and I can give them good things like sodas and hot dogs, and see them smile, and spend time with them, that’s all I want out of life.

That’s all I want out of this Father’s Day.

If that’s what I get, then it’s a holiday worth celebrating after all.

---