Fathers and Sons

While the relationship of a father to his daughter, of which I wrote in an earlier blog, is simple, his relationship with his son is anything but. For one, this relationship changes over the years.

As children, sons idolize their dads and think they can do anything. This identification is most often demonstrated by a son’s imitation of his father’s behavior by walking like him, talking like him or wearing his clothes or shoes. Or a little later even shaving like him. At this age, a son wants so much to please his father and receive his approval and acceptance that he tries to imitate him in all manners and ways.

But this changes as he becomes older. This is the age when sons are sure that their fathers are completely out of touch with real life. I remember driving in a snowstorm once, when a voice came from the back seat: “In my experience”, it said with complete confidence, “the way to handle the car is to drive into a skid”. The voice belonged to my ten-year-old son who had never seen snow or driven a car!

As teens, there is a tussle and conflict between fathers and sons. Indeed this is a period of constant conflict with anxious mothers trying to soothe them both. The sons often reject the expectations, values and directions their fathers have embraced and take on more non-traditional philosophies, placing them regularly at odds with one other. They want to be different and develop their own unique identity. This is the time of “Mohawk” haircuts or hirsute faces so disliked by the mothers. The teen may resent or even fear his father depending on the intensity of their differences, at times, carrying over into the son’s early twenties. Of course, the fathers want their sons to follow in their footsteps. But more often the teenager son has his own ideas and seeks a life as far different from his fathers as he can find.

As young adults, the father-son relationship enters into a period of growth. As Mark Twain once said, "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."

Distance may still exist emotionally and they may even ignore each other. The conscious attempts at being different than one’s father, so characteristic in the earlier stages, may even begin to appear more like competition. Competition with his father can be viewed as one of the most indirect but highest forms of flattery that exists. And the sons of successful or famous fathers carry a special burden as they seek to emulate them in their own lives. It just may be in a different area- if the father shone as an engineer, the son may choose to shine as a lawyer or a designer.

As adults in their 30’s and 40’s, sons, however, begin to move into the stage of acceptance toward their fathers. They begin to forgive, recognize strengths and even admire the qualities in their fathers that once seemed so out of step with their previous "know it all" manner of thinking. Fathers too finally understand that their sons must find and shape their own destiny. They slowly begin to accept each other’s differences. In this period, fathers and sons finally become friends, share common interests and express opinions without heated exchanges.

In their 50’s, older adult sons often become a legacy of their father’s influence for better and worse. Time tempers painful memories and in their place often remains admiration and respect for the difficult job being a father must have been. If elderly fathers are still living, an ironic role reversal may well occur with older adult sons beginning to take care of their aging fathers. It is now that the warmth and caring, no less deep than that of a daughter, which have been so carefully hidden for so long emerges. Freed from the repressive social norms of “stiff upper lip”, or “men don’t cry” or the need for preserving a macho image, the intensity of love and affection between father and son often surprises both.

Indeed life seems to have come a full circle. As Charles Williams, a psychologist, points out “Have you ever noticed how children want to be just like their parents when they are young, nothing like their parents when they are teens, and then become just like their parents for better and worse when they become adults? “ And it is a form of poetic justice that " By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong."