Sidney McGill - HEALTHY SEX 101My child arrived just the other day
He came to the world in the
usual way
But there were planes to catch
and bills to pay
He learned to walk while I was away
And he was talking 'fore I knew it and as he grew
he'd say
I'm gonna be like you, Dad
You know I'm gonna be like you.
My son turned 10 just the other day
He said, Thanks for the ball, Dad, com'on let's play
Can you teach me to throw?
I said not today, I got a lot to do
He said, That's okay
And he walked away but his smile never dimmed
He said I'm gonna be like him, yeah
You know I'm gonna be like him.
Well he came home from college just the other day
So much like a man I just had to say
Son, I'm proud of you, can you sit for a while
He shook his head and said with a smile
What I'd really like, Dad, is to borrow the car keys
See you later, can I have them please?
-Sandy & Harry Chapin
Reminiscing about father
IT IS inevitable. Getting older and incrementally slower, vision blurring, hairline receding, I reflect on my father's fathering and compare his performance with mine. He is a man with a happy disposition, reared in the West by a
single mother. He occasionally visited his father who married another woman in St. James. They had, like
many boys and their fathers, a distant relationship.
My father respected his father but they were never close. My relationship with my father was clearly better than theirs but it too was distant during my boyhood years and only got better after 30. My fathering abilities are really not very different than my father before me. There is the distance, the respect, the compulsion to provide but not the chumminess or candor even with my daughters.
I was still very fortunate to have had a functioning father who saw his primary role as the main provider for his family. Food, shelter and clothing wer his main concerns, the emotional needs were secondary. He was a good moral example that I learned to follow and a leader in his own right who made people's lives better having touched them with his photography, handyman skills and simplistic humour. My father nurtured his relationship with my mother though they seemed to have had a mother-son transaction going on.
Balancing the 'I' and the 'We'
Too many fathers abdicate their responsibilities for leadership in the lives of their sons. Some fathers seem to only sleep at their homes or occasionally visit with a few token dollars that can hardly buy the boy's school uniform or books. An American research in the 1970s yielded the startling result that fathers interacted with their children about 37 seconds per day! By extrapolation they communicate 4.3 minutes per week with their children while the average preschool child watches about 40 hours of television per week. Your boy may be getting more of his values from sources you do not necessarily approve!
The achievement of a healthy balance between the need for aloneness (autonomy) and connectedness (affiliation) is a predictor of a man's mental health and his capacity to sustain close relationships with his family. The balancing act is also predictive of marital satisfaction, 'good-enough' fathering and the children's positive mood. The autonomy-affiliation balance is important for both men and women but men's definition of those terms differ greatly from women's. Men who showed strong affiliation to their children did so through giving attention, physical play or teaching while women appeared to be more comfortable in having greater physical contact such as holding and hugging.
A father's quality time spent with his son is critical to the boy's emotional development, his emerging self-concept and sexuality. So make the sacrifice to spend
more time with your son. He wants to be like you.
The experience will grow you into a better man.
Dr. Sidney McGill is a Marriage and Family Therapist and Executive Director of the Family Counselling Centre of Jamaica,
St. Ann; email: yourhealth@gleanerjm.com.
