When I was growing up in the late 1960s, boys like me craved the admiration and approval of our dads; we wanted nothing more than to impress them. And now that we are dads, we crave the admiration and approval of our children; we want nothing more than to impress them. But the curious thing is, they don’t care about impressing us. In fact, our teenage children are just like our dads were — distant figures who are busy getting on with their own lives.
Today we demonise dads of the recent past for being cold and uncaring. For failing to change nappies, read stories at bedtime, provide the unconditional love and praise children need to grow into happy, well-adjusted adults. Despite the fact that historians have shown that fathers of the past — both in Victorian times and the 1950s —were much more involved with their children than the popular stereotypes allow, they provide modern dads with the perfect example of how not to be a dad.
But as an anxious dad who is always desperate to impress his 15-year-old son, I envy the dads of old. God knows they had plenty of faults, but Dad Anxiety was not one of them. They didn’t worry about being a Good Dad or a Bad Dad, the way we modern dads do. They didn’t read books with titles like How To Be a Good Dad: What Every Father Must Know To Be a Good Dad and Raise Great Kids (John McQuilkin) or George Zelina’s The Loving Dad’s Handbook: Raise Them Like Your Life Depends on It.
Dads were just… dads.
And they didn’t worry about boring their children, either. They’d drag them off for long, tedious Sunday car trips that ended in places of ‘historical interest’ that nobody found interesting but dad.
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