Have you been feeling especially concerned for your kids lately? World chaos—-epidemics—-social media. You can’t control external realities, but research shows that through your presence, you enhance your children’s internal strength. Internal strength that gives them that extra support to stand up for themselves, to feel centered amid confusion and to resist destructive influences. Whether your values align with a spiritual, an institutional religious, or a scientific framework, your kids look to you for guidance: for your loyalties, for your most important priorities. In talking with Dr. Jerrold Shapiro, author of When Men Become Pregnant, he describes how men often connect to their spiritual side for the first time when they become fathers,
Men sense their place in the universe and contemplate Life and Death. When a man becomes a father, he becomes father to all children. He becomes concerned about his contribution to the world, his influence on his child and all children.
What are values and why is it so hard to get a hold of them? They are both present and future; they move from potential to actual, from being to becoming. To use a mechanical picture: values are power sources, will is the on/off switch and moral decisions show the chosen direction of energy. Evaluation, literally means “to find the value,” é-(from)—-Latin valere (be strong, be well; be of worth). The process of deriving meaning from values always involves subjective interpretation. When you start a sentence with, “I think” or “I believe” and both your mind and your heart are in those words then you are making a value statement.
You inspire your child to reach for values
Your relationship as a father is separateness powerfully linked, a primal I-Thou pattern. You were not merged with your child during pregnancy and early infancy, your presence challenges and inspires value development as your child reaches across the gap between you to grow, testing values and developing character.
Our house was burglarized by one of my son’s friends who knew we were on vacation. He was understandably upset, but when I talked to him about it, he wanted to “stay friends” with the thief. I explained that his so-called friend had violated our family and that friendship was out of the question, and that he had to do this to stand up for our family, which was more important. He was distressed, and blurted out “What if I don’t get any more friends?” I told him he would get new friends but he would always have his family.
When confronted with a new problem, your child evaluates the situation and exercises their will in coming to a decision on how to act. This process becomes clearer by contrasting its opposite: impulse. Impulse is action without premeditated thought. An impulse-driven child is much more vulnerable to peer pressure compared with a child who can take a moment to pause and evaluate, who feels that sense of center that grows into self-control.
You are your child’s first initiation experience, first threshold to that which is beyond grasp. James Fowler, a leading thinker in the field of the psychology of spirituality, in Stages of Faith, defines faith as the “relation of trust in and loyalty to the transcendent…a generic feature of the human struggle to find and maintain meaning that may or may not find religious expression.” Even though Fowler does not directly link father to transcendence, he establishes a context for understanding father’s impact on his children’s values.
When my daughter entered Junior High school, she was old enough to attend my Sunday school class. At the first class we were all sharing stories from the summer and I invited the kids to make comments or ask questions about life. My daughter, looking to challenge me in this role as teacher, said, “There is no God and you can’t prove he exists.” As the other kids laughed and looked in amazement, I pondered how to answer. Basically, I said, “you are right, I could never prove God to you…He is a personal discovery which many take a lifetime to figure out.”
We associate the words “faith” and “transcendence” with institutional religion, yet those terms apply equally to living where “meaning” remains an essential aspect.
You build your child’s inner strength
Sometimes fathers avoid talking about deep things with their children because they are afraid that they won’t know what to say or how to describe what they believe in words. Here is the good news: you don’t have to have all the answers, you just have to be a positive presence. The most important thing that you can do is to allow your children’s aspirations. By talking to you about what matters, they are flexing their values muscle and it is important to let them do so. When your child looks at you with adoring eyes as if you were God, don’t panic! Your child’s aspirations are a natural response to the powerful I-Thou dynamic between you. Transcendence encompasses the promise of becoming someone in a world of possibility and significance.
In some parts of contemporary culture, “character” may sound old-fashioned, obscured by glib media smiles or measurable success markers like test scores. Here is my attempt at a definition: character is a presence that conveys strength of values and the ability to withstand assault on that level. This is a world of hope, where overcoming obstacles is invigorating, where struggle is the watchword of progress: This strength is not a fortress against the world, it is a bastion for the world.
Father and the Child’s Value Development: How it Works
- Just as father is outside and beyond the child’s self, so transcendence is outside and beyond the self. Within the context of personal spiritual experience, the human father essentially introduces transcendence.
- As representative of transcendence, father’s presence challenges and inspires value development as the child reaches beyond him or herself to grow, testing values, thereby developing character.
- The pattern of the father-child relationship, his non-merged status, rather than his personality, a universal pattern as opposed to his unique personhood, establishes a framework where certain developmental phenomena occur.
- Research findings show that father plays a very strong role in passing along religious tradition.
- There are also strong results of father child closeness correlated to values among those fathers who claim no interest in institutional religion.
Recommended Reading
Erikson, Erik. Young Man Luther. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1958.
Fowler, J.W. Stages of Faith. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981.
Philips, Donald T. Lincoln on Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times. New York: Warner Books, 1992.
United States. Administration for Children & Families. Building blocks for father
involvement: Building block 1: Appreciating how fathers give children a head start. June 2004. 19 Aug. 2005<http://www.headstartinfo.org/publications/ building_blocks 1.htm
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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