Book Notes: Successful Fathers

An older book (no kindle version!), Successful Fathers, was recommended to me by a father I really respect. Here are my book notes for it.

Fathers and mothers today, isolated as they are from their own parents and extended family, need as much experienced advice as they can get. In our own era, they need to work harder to get it.

Rings very true. Most parents, who aren’t under some other massive life stress (finances, health, etc) are very concerned about raising their kids the "right way". I am too.

However, parenting advice is an industry. It’s a business. There’s lots of advice in books, videos, courses, etc and much of it is conflicting. We aren’t missing advice, we are missing advice we can trust.

What he identifies here is this didn’t use to be a problem. Your parents, cousins, tight-night community passed down what they learned and that was it. You trusted them because you saw the outcome and didn’t try to look anywhere else. It’s definitely more complicated now.

Love is the capacity and willingness to embrace hardship for the sake of someone’s welfare

Beautiful definition.

From the earliest infancy, we acquire [values] by imitating people whose character we admire, principally from our parents.

I really enjoyed Wanting which explores the idea of mimetic desire. This is another example of how we are deeply mimetic. It’s not something that’s good or bad, it just is, and it’s important to take into account when thinking about human nature.

If my kids copy who they admire, it’s important that I become someone they can admire. This may sound obvious, but it results in interesting tradeoffs: should I spend time with my kids, or time doing something that powers the rest of my life?

I think the answer is complicated. Modern parenting advice and the current cultural norms—at least in how I perceive them—seem to push for spending more time with your kids, always. You aren’t a good dad unless you are at the soccer game, dance practice, reading to your kids, etc. Those are all good things, but the equation is more complex when thinking about how to spend your time when you have kids: making sure you are living life to the fullest is a critically important thing and can’t be sacrificed on the altar of maximizing time with your kids.

A husband’s neglect for his wife, a failure to support her authority, leads eventually toward the children’s saas and disobedience at home.

Parents need to be fully aligned in how they are raising kids—standard of behavior, discipline, etc. If dad isn’t fully behind mom, and vise-vera, kids will naturally use this against their parents to get what they want.

It’s up to parents to ensure kids don’t get what they want, but get what they need.

Psychologists have noted that much of the posturing and verbal defiance of adolescents is really testing and questioning of their father’s standards.

This aligns closely with the "high standard, high connection" parenting approach that most of the "emotion coaching"-type parenting books espouse.

The idea is that kids really want boundaries and rules and bad behavior—when they are young, or older—is their way of testing where the boundaries really are. This has felt very true in my experience.

Middle-class children today almost never see their father work

I think this is changing with remote work, but in a sense, it’s hard to ‘see’ the work that dad (or mom!) might be doing on a call or on the computer.

The idea still holds that kids rarely see dads working in an area where they excel. This decreases the respect for their parents and naturally encourages them to look elsewhere for a mimetic model for their life.

Bringing kids into your work in creative and sometimes strange ways feels key to giving them a greater understanding of what you do and why they should respect you for it.

Television and other entertainment have become the principal means by which children concepts of adult life

The core of this statement is true: rather than kids learning about adult life through a group of adults, kids do infer what ‘real life’ is like through screens. Videos, social media, news, articles, etc have an outsized influence on how kids decide how the real work operates.

The book makes the argument that this influence has grown over time because of the decreased interaction with other adults. I think this is more true than ever before—we don’t interact with nearly as many people as we used to, because we don’t have to. Mostly everything you need can be ordered quickly on a phone, work can be done remotely, neighborhoods are more isolated, etc. The lack of adult interaction changes how kids build a model of how adult life really is.

Material riches crowd out the central realities of life

The more wealth we have, the more we are comfortable and forget the suffering of others. It’s easier to empathize with others’ suffering when you are experiencing it yourself.

children come to know their father’s mind inside and out

Letting kids into your inner life—what you are experiencing, what you are feeling, how you are thinking about a problem, how you are approaching a situation is key to giving them an understanding of who you are. If they don’t know who you are, they can’t decide if they should model their life after you.

I’ve always loved families that have intense discussions. Vigorous debate and explaining how you are thinking are key to a child’s formation.