I fairly recently became a father for the third time and through a combination of luck and planning was able to take 6 months paternity leave, compared with the four weeks I had with my first two. I was able to think about things a bit more and wrote some thoughts down at first for just for myself but ultimately decided to share them - I did it on LinkedIn which I appreciate is a bit weird but I don’t really do social media and it’s the only place I have people who follow me.
It provoked a lot of reaction from both men and women who had strong feelings about their own experiences as parents and as children, and I learned a lot from them. But to me the biggest thing was how much some people valued having a space to discuss this stuff. I looked and there aren’t a lot of spaces where men talk about paternity, or people talk about paternity in general. Mumsnet has over a million subscribers but there’s no equivalent for dads. Many discussions about the role of fathers are pulled into debates about the fairness or not of custody or child support decisions after divorce.
I know there are a lot of fathers on here, and probably also a lot of people who while maybe not having kids themselves are thoughtful about what it means to be a father.
So I wanted to ask what people think. Do we need to find ways for dads to share experience more with other dads so that we can all be better dads? For those of you who are fathers what do you wish someone else had shared with you? And a question to everyone - is the way we think about fathers and their role in children’s lives right, wrong, somewhere in the middle and why? And if we don’t have it right, what should we do differently?
Maybe this isn’t the right place to ask these questions and this will die a quiet death down the recesses of the General Chit Chat forum. But this is a big online community mainly - but not only - comprised of men. So it seemed like a reasonable place to ask these things.
Lastly if you are interested in what I wrote on this - and warning, I’m verbose and it’s long - it’s here: To view the link you have to Register or Login
It provoked a lot of reaction from both men and women who had strong feelings about their own experiences as parents and as children, and I learned a lot from them. But to me the biggest thing was how much some people valued having a space to discuss this stuff. I looked and there aren’t a lot of spaces where men talk about paternity, or people talk about paternity in general. Mumsnet has over a million subscribers but there’s no equivalent for dads. Many discussions about the role of fathers are pulled into debates about the fairness or not of custody or child support decisions after divorce.
I know there are a lot of fathers on here, and probably also a lot of people who while maybe not having kids themselves are thoughtful about what it means to be a father.
So I wanted to ask what people think. Do we need to find ways for dads to share experience more with other dads so that we can all be better dads? For those of you who are fathers what do you wish someone else had shared with you? And a question to everyone - is the way we think about fathers and their role in children’s lives right, wrong, somewhere in the middle and why? And if we don’t have it right, what should we do differently?
Maybe this isn’t the right place to ask these questions and this will die a quiet death down the recesses of the General Chit Chat forum. But this is a big online community mainly - but not only - comprised of men. So it seemed like a reasonable place to ask these things.
Lastly if you are interested in what I wrote on this - and warning, I’m verbose and it’s long - it’s here: To view the link you have to Register or Login
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