I just finished reading a Father’s Day story in the WSJ “A Father’s Tough Love” (link is below). It really struck home for me experiencing my family and father during the ‘60’s and made me think “how is tough love today different from the past”. When I was growing up there were different expectations for my brother than for me (the girl). I think my brother took the brunt of my father’s discipline, I was lucky to have my mother to soften the blows. Growing up I never felt close to my father and did not really get close to him until I became an adult. Being a boy my brother had to answer to my father, me to my mother. Due to this my brother left home and the state, right after high school. My father’s method of fathering has definitely fallen out of style, especially in our home today.
When I was a kid, boys got bb guns for Christmas and no one batted an eye. When my kids were growing up, people thought badly of you as a parent if your kid made a gun out of a piece of toast. It was politically incorrect for a kid to have guns, luckily they make some fancy squirt guns.
Dad’s of the past never showed a tear, but I do remember when my brother was a teen and needed to have thyroid surgery, my father was telling someone and he broke down and cried. It scared me at the time to see my father cry. Not an emotion he shared openly. Was the parenting of the past really that bad? Both my brother and I have become healthy adults.
But now there appears to be a change in the psychology of the fathers parenting role today. We see the “Dangerous Book for Boys”, which reintroduces boys to rough and tumble, and a new book coming out this fall “The Dead Father: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry” which is based somewhat on the thought that society has suffered as dads have become more maternal than authoritarian.
Now my question, what is tough love today? Back then tough love was when Dad got home from work. Is tough love today “setting boundaries“? Is tough love today sending your teen to Wilderness? Is tough love today a therapeutic boarding school?
When I tell people that my son needed an intervention and we sent him out of state to a boarding school instead of the local school. Many have replied “oh tough love, I believe in it.” I think it is meant to make me feel good. I never thought of it as tough love, my son needed help, just like a person with an injury and we are getting him help. I don’t have a definition for tough love. I do believe that mother of father, we need to let out teens know we love them.
Links to tough love stories, some not easy to take:
A writer recalls his dad’s tough love
What a gruff dad taught his sons about parenting, work and dying
Father’s tough love turned into tragedy
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