Did You Know? - Dads as Parents


by Paul - Date: 2007-08-07 - Word Count: 369 Share This!

A father tends to:

- Bond with children in short bursts of connection, both physical and emotional ("short-touch" bonding, rough-and-tumble play).

- Focus on teaching children order, pattern thinking, and ritualized action, (Dads will tend to care less about the minutia of the child's needs, but care more about larger structures and tools the child might need for future survival.)

- Downplay emotion, even at the risk of hurt feelings, in order to "up-play" performance. (Males are chemically and neurally directed toward immediate rewards from performance, and they prod children in this direction.)

- Promote risk taking and independence in the growing child. (Many moms promote independence, but in general, dads push children toward separation from caregivers and encourage them to "grow up!" faster than moms do.)

- Expect and enforce discipline and provide contests and tests of skill. (Dads tend to be more competitive than moms, especially in their assertion to children that being able to compete in tests of skill against others is the key to future success.)

- Teach the child to fight against personal and group vulnerability. (With less of the male brain's blood flow devoted to emotional processing than the female, fathers tend to deny any emotional vulnerability or try to problem-solve quickly to avoid such vulnerability.)

- Guide the child to sacrifice his or her own thinking in deference to "authority thinking" until the child has proven his or her own core nature to be mature enough to become authoritative. Although there are certainly exceptions to this, fathers tend to employ more authoritarian parenting styles than mothers and retain that authority well into the child's adulthood, waiting for the child to prove himself (this generally applies more to sons) worthy of being respected as an adult.

- Direct the child's search for self-worth toward the larger society (that is, encouraging less introspection and more immediate action).

- Try to help the child feel stronger in the long term even if the child does not feel better in the moment. Fathers tend to care less than mothers about whether a child "feels good." Fathers tend to want obvious shows of strength from children. This is especially true in their attitude toward sons.

Find features advice from experienced dads on parenting, dad care, pregnancy care, adoption, newborn baby, and on raising kids and teens.

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