Kathryn Powell -Difficult Relationships- Rod Smith

Embark on ruthless personal inventory. If you want to know your children better, the first building block is to know yourself better. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking this is a task you have already accomplished. Many men who think they know themselves well are really quite familiar with the person whom they wished they were. Your children are unlikely, beyond about the age of four, to be impressed with who you think you are, while also possessing really good takes on who you actually are.

Every negative habit, memory, unresolved grievance, prejudice, “hot button” that you keep hidden within you will act like a filter and distort what and who your children are in your eyes (and impact your other intimate relationships).

This does not mean you have to spill your guts and divulge every dark secret in some small group (although this would not be a bad idea if you can find the right kind of group) but it does mean that you have to stop fooling yourself about who and what you are. Come to terms with the fact that our children are seldom as impressed with us as we ourselves are.

Appreciate that just because you want to get closer to your children it does not mean they, at the same time, will have similar inclinations toward you. If you are insistent (pushy, demanding) with a reluctant child, your attempts are likely to be counter-productive. Being close to dad in the heart-to-heart, arm-over-shoulder kind of way is the fodder of sitcoms and movies than it is a part of real life.

Real-life-close-to-dad is more about the capitalizing on conflict and turning it into a means of greater understanding and love. It’s about being committed to learning from each other, and long periods of silence. It is about sometimes feeling used, sometimes feeling taken for granted. It is about learning to appropriately speak up. It is about knowing what to address and when and how to address it. It is about knowing what to ignore. It is about knowing when to be loud and when to be soft. It is about knowing when to be visible and when to be in the background.

Television sitcoms can go from conflict to resolution in thirty minutes (including six to eight minutes of commercials). In real life, successfully loving children can take forty years.