If you have heard it once, you have heard it a million times–it’s the phrase that every kid has heard–so much so that it eventually reverberates in their ears like that of noisy cymbals or a loud gong…if they even hear it at all.
It goes something like this:
“I’m your father…that’s why!”
or
“I’m the boss of this household and you must do what I say!”
Pick any variation of it cause I know you have either heard it before, or have said it yourself (and when you find yourself uttering the phrase yourself, it’s then that you know you have jumped the shark in your parenting style).
Why Point Out Fathers
This is a statement that all parents will eventually utter at some point in parenting, usually coming at the point of exhaustion, and with the helpless feeling that there are no other choices. Hence I like to call it the nuclear option of parenting. It’s the proverbial line drawn in the sand…and, if this doesn’t work, well then we are left there shaking our heads, or waiting for things to escalate.
Moms and dads both say such phrases, but I find that father’s most often resort to this methodology of parenting. I have noticed in my 15 years in youth ministry and in my recent years as a therapist that fathers tend to stick to this one way of parenting more than moms, while mothers tend to be more resourceful, often reading books on parenting, attending conferences and getting support in parenting groups. With these resources, moms find less of a need to resort to the “I’m your parent, that’s why” card, but instead have a plethora of creative parenting options at hand that dads often tend to lack.
Now, I know I’m stereotyping here, and I know plenty of dads who don’t only resort to this, but in my experience it is definitely more common. When your child was in the womb it was more than likely that it was your wife who was reading all the books and researching things on food, immunizations, toys and cribs, while you thought she was lucky to have you attend a birthing class or two. If it wasn’t for mothers, our babies would be born into this world and fathers would drag the babies back to a cave to eat the leftover meat of the mastadon that they clubbed the night before. And this doesn’t end there at womb and birth, but tends to be a habit dads carry on into their kids later years.
