My wife and I will soon welcome our first child into the world. Though I know much of what it means to be a father is learned by experience only, here are some insights I’ve gleaned in preparation:
1. If I don't indoctrinate my child, someone else will.
Whether we like it or not, we all see the world through a particular worldview. Jordan Peterson explains it this way: We face an infinite number of facts, but (as finite beings) we can’t attend to them all and are thus forced to favor some facts over others. How we prioritize information constitutes a hierarchy of values, i.e. an ethical framework or worldview. That’s all to say, everyone is helplessly biased, including parents.
Acknowledging this fact, it is a naive father, then, who is not explicit about the values he teaches his child. Cassandra Hedelius writes:
All decent parents indoctrinate their children with the importance of kindness and honesty. Most parents also indoctrinate their children with their political views. Even parents who might say they oppose all indoctrination, and instead teach their children solely to be open-minded toward all ideas, are actually indoctrinating their children in the belief that open-mindedness is the highest value. There’s no escaping indoctrination, and when people disparage it as something only fanatics and bigots do, they’re actually trying to discredit a specific doctrine being taught without actually making a case against it.
Better to be intentional about the values you pass on than to be ignorant or careless about them.
Moreover, if your society’s prevailing worldview does not match your own, you must be especially dutiful in teaching your child. Otherwise, they’re more likely to absorb whatever worldview pervades the dominant culture. Jonathan Haidt shares a funny anecdote in his book The Righteous Mind that illustrates the point well:
I was talking with a taxi driver who told me that he had just become a father. I asked him if he planned on staying in the United States or returning to his native Jordan. I’ll never forget his response: “We will return to Jordan because I never want to hear my son say ‘fuck you’ to me.”
Haidt goes on to explain how some cultures value respecting parental authority more than others do. So if you leave your child’s worldview up to chance, it may not be what you want.
2. A father can help anchor children.
The more a society lacks shared values and norms, the easier it is for its people to lose their sense of direction and belonging. In Suicide: A Study in Sociology, Émile Durkheim explains it this way:
“Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.”
This detached state (that Durkheim calls anomie) is a growing risk. But a father who provides rules and structure can be an anchoring force in a child’s life to help keep them from feeling lost and purposeless.
3. Let children be children by restricting their media use.
In his 1982 book The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman argues that TV is blurring the conceptual distinction between child and adult. The medium exposes children to immediate, visual, non-linear content in a way that collapses the information hierarchy on which their education depends. And without sequential learning, Postman argues, there can be no real childhood.
Today, the plight of children is even worse due to social media and smartphones. Children are constantly bombarded by addictive, unorganized content without context (e.g. unrelated 15-second TikTok videos strung together in an endless stream). To fight against this excess of unstructured information, parents must impose sensible media restrictions on children.
4. A father’s protective instinct knows no bounds.
In the movie The Godfather, Vito Carleone tells his son Michael, “I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.” The line beautifully articulates the traditional male (and paternal) role to protect family, and puts the entire film in context. All the violence the Carleone mafia men commit is ultimately in the name of protecting family.
In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, the unnamed father kills a man to protect his son. Later, he explains to his son: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?” The father’s insistent tone betrays an underlying insecurity—that ultimately, he can’t protect his son from the perilous world they inhabit, but his instincts demand he try anyway.
In both stories, the father expresses a primal need to protect his family at all costs. If there’s a point at which that responsibility ends, it’s not clear what it is. What’s clear is that the buck stops with the father.
Any dad who is reading Neil Postman is gonna be a great dad!!
Thank you for such a well thought out article. You make some great observations.