Fathers Are to Talk To

There are some wonderful words in our language, words that are inseparably associated: home, mother, father, family⎯and in our thoughts they are linked in fondest and most meaningful remembrance.

Where the normal pattern prevails, father is more away and less closely acquainted with the daily problems and program. But fathers are people in whose footsteps sons are apt to follow, and with whose hearts daughters are likely to have their way.

Fathers are people by whose name the family is known. Fathers are people whom sons and daughters should feel free to approach with their problems. There are hazards in going it alone in life, and fathers are to talk to⎯even if they seem to be too busy; even if they are doing so much for the family in other ways that they are not enough at home.

Some three centuries ago John Locke said, “. . . a father will do well, as his son grows up, . . . to talk familiarly with him;…The sooner you treat him as a man, the sooner he will begin to be one: and if you admit him into serious discourses . . . with you, you will . . . raise his mind above the usual amusements of youth, and those trifling occupations which it is commonly wasted in . . . And I cannot but often wonder to see fathers who love their sons very well, yet so order the matter . . . as if they were never to enjoy, or have any comfort from those they love best in the world . . . Nothing cements and establishes friendship and good-will so much as confident communication . . . Other kindnesses, without this, leave still some doubts, but when your son sees you open your mind to him, [he will know he has] a friend and . . . father . . .”

It is sobering when a father sees in his son himself, his mannerisms, his ways, his words. It is a great moment in life when a father sees a son grow taller than he, or reach farther. It is a blessed thing for fathers to see their sons exceed them.

God bless fathers⎯and bless the sons and daughters who give fathers their greatest gift in the love they bear them, and in the virtuous, honorable, useful living of life.