Always too supportive, too loving. What a bad dad
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Father’s Day has got me thinking about the kind of father I am at the moment. And I think I’m an OK dad, I’m doing alright: I’m a bit chubbier, a bit more maternal – I’m putting the “fat” and the “her” into “father”. But I haven’t always been such an OK dad. I’ve done some pretty crappy parenting in the past and sometimes I wish I could go back in time and do it differently – though to be honest, I’d probably just go back further in time and write Cole Porter’s Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye before Cole Porter wrote it. That’s how bad a dad I can be: forget about fixing my fathering – I’d steal a Cole Porter song, kill baby Hitler, then stop off on the way home to pick up some Apple shares in the ’90s. Ahhh, the perfect time-travelling spring weekend getaway.
What a bad dad. Always bailing my kids out of trouble, never letting them feel sadness or stress – it was practically abusive.
Photo: Fairfax Photo Library
Of course many of you are probably thinking, “Oh come on, Danny! No way could you be a bad dad. I’m sure you were a wonderful, caring, encouraging and loving father – and slim, so alluringly slim!” And it’s true, I was a wonderful dad – but I was too wonderful; it’s a terrible parenting mistake and I really regret doing it. What a bad dad: from the day my kids were born, I was overpraising them, inflating their already-massive baby-heads. If they did a poo in their nappy, I’d be going, “OH LOOK AT YOUR POO-POO! IT’S SO PERFECT! IT’S PERFECT!” even if it wasn’t perfect – if it was substandard and they hadn’t earned the poo-poo-praise. Then as they got older, I kept it up, kept overpraising them: “OH LOOK AT YOUR EXCREMENT, YOU’RE SO CLEVER, OH WOW!” (I called it “excrement” because you don’t want to talk down to teenagers, it’s so patronising.)
What a bad dad. Always too supportive, too loving – it was disgraceful, I highly un-recommend it. I was there for every one of my son’s junior footy matches, standing on the sidelines, yelling, “COME ON, SON! SIT ON THAT BENCH! YOUR POSTURE IS EXCELLENT! KEEP IT UP! GOOOOOO SON!!!!” He was a natural bench-sitter: he usually sat in a centre-half-back bench-position, but later in the season he got moved up to full-forward bench. I was so proud.
What a bad dad. Always bailing my kids out of trouble, never letting them feel sadness or stress – it was practically abusive. Doing their chores for them, driving them around everywhere, even finishing their schoolwork. I sat up all night building my daughter’s school project: a 3-D model of the human digestive system from recyclable materials, using a cardboard toilet roll as a large intestine and a Pine-o-Clean trigger-spray bottle as a rectum. A lemon ‘n’ lime-scented sphincter. It was art.
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