Happy Father's Day, my brothers.
It's not easy being a good father in today's world, but keep up the good fight.
Happy Father’s Day to all of you fathers. For those of you who are engaged in the most important activity of any human—raising children well—and lucky enough to be doing it with a stable, loving partner, I salute you. I’m envious but happy for you. For those of you who, like me, are going it alone, massive respect. It’s not easy, but important things rarely are. And it’s no excuse to take your foot off the gas.
In my world, there’s only one unforgivable sin—being a bad parent. You can be any kind of disagreeable there is, but as long as you do yeoman’s work raising your kids, you’re alright by me. When it comes to who I’ll voluntarily associate with, I’ll take a good parent over a friendly nature any day of the week and twice on Sundays. If you are one of these folks, we are going to be friends.
We live, quite unfortunately, in a world that does not value families. It claims that it does, but mostly that’s an illusion to spare much of society from inconvenient accountability. We flat-out do not live in a family-friendly world anymore. If we did, things would operate quite differently.
The modern media is whatever the next worst thing is beneath a cesspool. You have to constantly monitor your family’s media consumption if you have children. I can’t even watch the news or a baseball game with my kids on cable TV because of inappropriate content in commercials. Hey, Dad, if you had Nugenix, would Mommy still be here? And no content provider, at least to my knowledge, provides a way to block inappropriate ads. Fortunately, MLB TV doesn’t run ads during breaks, just baseball highlights. So that, movies and streaming have become our go-to media sources.
Don’t even get me going about the war on dads. I don’t want to burst a blood vessel on Father’s Day. Suffice it to say, devaluing fathers is one of the last acceptable prejudices, as any man who’s been through a custody battle can probably attest.
I don’t trust much of the research done in the social sciences, but there’s been enough done on what makes families successful that I think we can glean, just from the sheer volume of data, an actual picture of what tends to work and what does not. As a child, being raised in a stable, two-parent household is generally your best path to becoming a happy, successful adult. My kids aren’t that lucky. I am, unfortunately, not that guy. But the next best thing is a single parent dedicated to making things the best that they can be. I am that guy.
Having grown up in a broken home with periods of homelessness in my teenage years, I understand all too well how that affects kids. I swore an oath on the day that all three of my children were born that I would not do that to them. Yet here we are. It’s the greatest failure of my life. But the paths forward, while all equally unfortunate, are nonetheless discernible in terms of potential outcomes. So I can feel sorry about things or get my ass in gear and make lemonade out of lemons. I’ll take what’s behind door number two.
We’ve just opened up our home to foster kids, and the first should be arriving soon. I want my birth kids to understand that someone always has it worse than you and that the lemons-to-lemonade parable is a good one. We live on five acres in the mountains with llamas, goats, dogs, and lots of wild critters. We have motorcycles, bicycles, not one but two music rooms, troves of books, endless music, and a dark-sky astronomical observatory out in the back pasture. I hope that some kids show up here soon who realize that they’ve hit the jackpot.
So, to all of you fathers out there: a few words of encouragement on this special day. Be a father, not a pal. You can be your kids friends when they are adults. Right now isn’t the time for that. You have to raise them first. Teach them kindness, manners, honesty, discipline, forgiveness, and the value of hard work. Make them study in school and clean their rooms.
Giving kids chores is not child abuse. Show your children how to work on things. Help them develop interests. Model the behavior that you’d like to see in them.
Teach your boys the value of looking someone in the eye along with a strong handshake. Teach your girls to be strong, fearless, and no one’s victim. Teach your kids to think for themselves, when to be cautious, and when to be bold.
And love the hell out of them while you can. Life’s short, then you’re dead for a long time. If you have fewer people at your funeral than you have kids, you screwed up.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.
A fine, thoughtful, article with appropriate cautions about raising children. We have 3 bio and 7 adopted from the welfare system so I hope I have credibility in cautioning you about foster kids. Being a foster parent is a noble enterprise but our two bouts left us feeling as if we were part of the team with CPS to screw over 2 young girls. Be very cautious that the agency goals for your specific foster child are caring and wholesome. Most children’s social workers chose that profession because they were compassionate but we met many with emotional problems and alcoholism because their agency policies were adverse to the children they were supposed to be helping.
Strong words Martin!
I blame a massive amount of our current issues on poor parenting. Even the woke tend to agree with me on this.
Your kids are going to be fine and the lucky foster kids should (unless they are irreparably damaged) will leave much better adjusted than they arrive.
Happy Father’s Day!