Did You Come Up Empty for Father’s Day?
It’s not a humorous topic but according to psychologist Dr. Joshua Coleman, it is becoming a more prevalent one. Coleman published an article about Father-child estrangement in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. This is not a new topic to him. He has written “Rules of Estrangement,” a book about adult children severing ties with parents. In January Psychology Today published a piece about a trend toward men feeling lonely and isolated. Thus a trend seems discernable.
This ties in with the never ending debate about whether parents can cause estrangement of children from other parents. There seems to be little question that it can be done but Coleman’s article suggests that men often contribute mightily to the estrangement process. What makes it doubly painful is that many men have stepped up in the last 25+ years by actually stepping away from work or their own amusement to promote the development of their children-only to find themselves rejected.
Part of the problem is how they have stepped up. They typically take leadership positions as coaches, scout leaders or Sunday school teachers. Their child plays on the team or is part of the “pack.” They do so kind of expecting an adulation dividend. And, many do it for their own glory. They revel in telling their lawyers and the courts about how they missed a vital sales call because softball or the soapbox derby came first. All the better if the team won the championship.
Kids see this for what it is. Yes, they want to win, too. But who does the school call when the tooth is chipped or the permission slip wasn’t correctly signed? Who takes the child to the weekly clarinet lesson where there is no banquet or encomium at the end of the semester? Dads are more involved than ever before, but they often dictate or at least moderate the terms of engagement.
Dad’s also have a difficult time negotiating how children launch. All parents experience this. The once adorable child now “talks back,” becomes sullen or withdrawn. Not every bit of parental attention is celebrated because the child is now beginning to be socialized by his/her peers as much as the parent. A colleague who coaches soccer for nine year olds casually mentioned the other day that she’s not certain she wants to follow them as coach through middle school and beyond. They get “attitude.”
The transition to adulthood has never been easy. And kids bring their developing “attitudes” to both moms and dads. Dr. Coleman suggest that moms tend to take the evolution of child to adolescent more in stride than most fathers. Some of this is anthropological as our society still struggles with whether women are destined to obey. If you don’t think that true, perhaps you should check with some of your Southern Baptist friends who were told last week that women weren’t qualified to be pastors- a change affecting as many as 1,900 churches.
So, what is the solution for any parent feeling the pain of rejection? According to Dr. Coleman, the first lesson may require some humility. Managing a child is a completely different enterprise than managing a business or even a scout pack or sports team. It is all about listening and, yes, acknowledging that you don’t know it all. It may even mean confessing that you feel you are losing touch with your kid and how that makes you feel sad. If you and your ex are in a constant state of conflict about child-rearing, it also means telling your child that you see how he/she is caught in the middle AND it may even mean yielding to the other parent’s unreasonableness as a means of taking pressure off the child caught in the conflict. Tweens and teens fancy themselves as adults in miniature, but we now know that they are just beginning to grasp how to navigate adult decision making and they don’t yet have all the emotional tools to negotiate what they want or need.
If these self-help mechanisms don’t yield better outcomes, it may be time to bring in the mental health professional. This writer is not a big fan of parent/child direct therapy. From the kid’s point of view, it is what hockey players call a 2 on 1 break. From the child’s perspective, two powerful adults (shrink and parent) are trying to manage their way to a compliant child. Better that you and your kid each see the mental health person individually so that that person can speak openly with the child about what you do right or wrong (whether fairly or not) and how you can best work to achieve a more compatible relationship. Note the word employed is “compatible” and not “compliant.” The latter word has to do with exercising power and most kids are going to recoil from being told what they should think or feel. Above all, do not employ the easy scapegoat of how evil/inept the other parent is or worse, commenting on how there never was problem with your kid’s siblings.
These problems are not easily “fixed” and sometimes the problem is irreconcilable. But if you are sad now, those feelings of sadness will not diminish unless you are satisfied that you did everything in your power to keep the flame of filial affection burning. Realize as well that the data show kids are not very happy these days either and chances are you are not the only cause of your child’s angst.
