Every Father's Day we hand out the same compliments: steady, strong, reliable, the rock. My co-host Dan Rose and I spent an episode on fatherhood, and we came away convinced the profession should be more careful about which of those words it rewards.
Consistency matters. That isn't in dispute. Dan described the good father in object-relations terms: a circle around mother and child, held together by "rhythm and consistency". A bad father, he said, "would be someone who is inconsistent. The circle has gaps." Children of volatile fathers have a hard time organizing themselves around someone who is loving one hour and explosive the next. "It's hard to sort of pattern yourself."
But consistency gets confused with rigidity, and rigidity is worse. Dan put it more sharply than I would have:
The only thing worse than no preparation at all, and I think it's ten times worse than that, is inflexible preparation.
His reason: "your child is going to become what they are." A father who has already decided who his child will be has started a fight he can't win. It plays out between them and inside the child.
The position this column takes
counselors, family therapists and supervisors should stop treating paternal rigidity as a form of strength. We should name flexible consistency as the clinical target in parent work: being dependable in rhythm while staying open about content.
Three reasons.
First, nobody arrives with the mind for the next stage
Dan borrowed Bion's idea that we have to grow "a new mind for each developmental phase." "I did not have a father's mind until I had a baby." The first time you parent a teenager, you don't have that mind either, and neither does the teenager. A father who prepares rigidly is preparing for a child who doesn't exist yet.
Second, rigidity is often avoidance in disguise
In Dan's psychodynamic framing, "the only real sin is avoidance," and the angry, volatile father is often angry "because underneath the anger is something else." Men are seldom taught what to do with their feelings. The Marlboro Man didn't cry. A rigid rule gives a frightened father something to hold so he doesn't have to feel. That isn't strength. It's a defence, and the child pays for it.
Third, flexibility is what makes learning possible
Bion said the goal is to learn from experience, and Dan's addendum is the honest part: nobody wants to. Learning means tolerating shame and confusion. It means admitting the moment you raised your voice and heard, as I once did, that "the words were my father's words." Dan's advice is unglamorous and right: "you might need to screw up to learn that," and then "apologize to yourself, maybe to your kids."
A rigid father can't do that. A flexibly consistent one can, and his children learn that repair is possible.
Fathers increasingly come to therapy because an adult child told them to. When they do, we shouldn't congratulate them for being the rock. We should help them become a rock that can bend.
Got Therapy? is hosted by Michael Baltimore Ph.D. and Dan Rose Psy.D.