Symptoms?

Symptoms of Freaked-Out Fathers

or

5 Reasons Why Parenthood is a Difficult to Navigate for Keepers of the Y-Chromosone:

1. Emotional Unintelligence - [Apologies to Daniel Goleman!] When it comes to emotions and relationships, the brain wiring that serves us men well in so many ways, now lets us down. We’d rather offer a solution than just listen. We can only listen to one conversation at once, not the twelve our wives and daughters can (ever sat by a table of women all talking at once and wondered how they listen at the same time?).  We prefer that others see things our way rather than empathising with them. Parenthood pushes our anger and anxiety buttons and we often don’t know why.
2. A Man’s Home was Once his Castle - now it’s overrun by barbarians. Well, that’s overstating it a little - since I actually love my kids wholeheartedly. BUT we men need space that’s our own - once we had it (if we were lucky) but now that the family is growing or grown, there’s less space for us. That “spare room” that was your office, studio or gym is now a kid’s bedroom; possibly all the space in the house is feminised by your wife (how much say did YOU get in decorating your master bedroom?) or childified by your offspring. Where’s your space? Where can you go for peace and … maleness?? (sadly, often the bar or pub).
3. The Call of the Wild - Parenthood requires us to grow up, but what if you don’t want to??! I’m willing to be honest about this. As a male, I prefer self-indulgence to the self-denial that raising children asks of me. Someof us prefer the comapny of our friends to our families. Many more of us would rather be “out there doing stuff on my terms” than making dioramas for our 4th grader, listening to our daughter’s stories about her day or playing Go Fish. I’m not saying we’re all like this or always like this, but there is a definite tug away from responsibility and toward pursuing our own utopias. (Phew! Got a little deep there!)
4. It’s Counter-cultural - men need to express both our nurturing & warrior spirits without being labelled either soft or neanderthal. Unfortunately media, the demands of our career, often male culture itself and sadly sometimes even women tell us that men make terrible parents. We are told we need to pull our weight and yet our role models are Homer Simpson, Ray Barone, James Bond and every entrepreneur who made it rich at the expense of a private life.
5. The Discomfort Zone - let’s face it, we men gravitate to arenas where we feel we have expertise. We define ourselves by our job titles and hobbies. It gives us confidence and a sense of well-being, so we usually stay away from arenas where we might get shown up to be amateurs, newbies or flat-footed. And guess what our home life is largely about: relationships! (Which by the way, do not follow formulas. And even when we feel like we’ve worked out how to deal with a situation, the kid goes and GROWS and now the goal posts have moved and the game has changed!). Marriage (in all its forms, de facto or whatever) was hard enough to navigate but parenthood is one of those roles where expertise is nigh on impossible.

These are the premises for this website. No wonder parenthood can be a little uncomfortable, freaky and draining for us Dads.

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The guys who fear becoming fathers don’t understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man.  The end product of child raising is not the child but the parent. 

       ~Frank Pittman, Man Enough