Brandishing Lessons

Everyone knows that included in a father's responsibilities is teaching important life lessons to his children. Still, there is a certain art to teaching and not every dad has mastered it. Sometimes, even when the lesson is a good one, the delivery keeps it from being learned.

For instance, the Widness (UK) wonderer David Flynn was seemingly trying to explain how much pain the problems presented by his daughter and ex- were causing him. However, it was really not a well-thought plan to snatch up a sword and swing it about in a room with an 18-month-old baby and two other young children while threatening to literally demonstrate the stabbing pain they were giving him. Surely, with thought — and probably a bit less alcohol imbibing — Mr. Flynn could have made his point in a more readily grasped manner.

Similarly, kids should be careful with guns. Obviously, they have no idea of the pain that can be caused or the potential consequences of something fired ... even a bit of metal as tiny as a pellet. So we must take a moment to praise Palm Beach's Christopher Cady for disciplining his son after the latter shot his autistic cousin in the backside with his Christmas present. However, with that moment passed, it is important to point out that shooting his son in the chest to demonstrate the pain has proven an unsuccessful teaching moment unless dad was focused on teaching how one can get hauled off to the slammer for shooting someone, even with an air rifle.

Both instance do bring to mind one of the most important things fathers can teach. "It seemed like a good idea at the time" doesn't make it the right thing to do ....

What's It All About, Alf

Oy. Here comes another teaching moment with Things 1 and 2 ... like any of three of us look forward to the awkward lectures that always seem to worm their way into what is (theoretically? hypothetially?) a mature give and take between father and child(ren).

This time the subject is the 13-year-old new dad, Brit Alfie Patten, who the story goes had one go at some unprotected sex with his 15-year-old gal pal. It is of course wonderful for a father to be close to his kid and able to relate to what s/he is going through, but this is probably pushing it.

It is of course possible this story is another media canard, somebody's idea of how to update the 1966 movie about Alfie Elkins and its 2004 remake focus on a ladies man who is suddenly forced to find a new way of life as a result of an unplanned pregnancy. Perhaps this Patten tale is being floated on its way to movie of the week status on Disney XD, the channel being started up to bring boys and dads together in tube time. But a dad at 13? Really....

Our teaching moment will revolve around relationships and sex and perhaps even movies and television. It could be racy and exciting and an extraordinary intergernational give-and-take. But it won't. Maybe — if I am real lucky and those are very unhatched chickens — it will have some long term impact because if history is any predictor, our discussion of boys and why one has to always be careful and unforseen consequences will be like that second movie, very painful to sit through.

Did Alfie's dad ever talk to him about stuff like this? Are they talking now?

Ya Gotta Believe It

Belief is the connection, but you do have to check it against reality.

A shared belief in the hapless to hopes-pewing Philadelphia Phillies can tie a father and son, no matter how much it scares the father that he might be scarring the son.

The conviction of two that men can act lighter than air can be part of the passion that a father danseuer passes on to his son, just as Tomm Ruud has passed along his ballet costumes down to son Christopher.

But a guiding, unquestioning faith that your son is smarter than his teacher (or really anyone and everyone) is a path to problems, particularly if you aren't willing to listen to evidence to the contrary. It is beautiful to consider the father who will pop the teacher who says his son wasn't up to a particular mental challenge, but it seems unlikely the father has really made things better for his son.

Yes, ya gotta believe, but as a father you still have to be smart about it.

TM.com/net/edu

Teachablemoment.com and ".net" are taken, but teachablemoment.edu is still available — as of posting. So, there's still time for the entrepreneurial father who wants to guide make a couple bucks off a concerned dad hoping to take a slice of life and smush its lessons into his kid's noggin. [Ealier: Pregnant Thoughts]

But what lessons to teach and how? John Edwards campaigns on the strength of watching his father learn television math before heading off to work. Taotao's father believed his son was a musical genius, but taught him to call the police as a way to get out of lessons. And columnist/economist Jeff Haymond ruined his son's lunch by using Wendy's subtraction of one piece of bacon as a jumping off point to riff on rising consumer prices and business ethics: he says his son gets it now (eye roll, please).

** Every moment is a teachable moment, but the wise dad accepts that most of the time his kids are in back passing notes and plotting spitball attacks. **

Pregnant Thoughts

Girls get a movie heroine and boys get a literary protagonist.

So Thing 1 can go off with other daughters to bring their collective wisdom and experience to learning the lessons of the the PG-13 Juno. And since all the boys of her cohort don't read, it seems unlikely they'll be influenced by Nick Hornby's first YA Novel, Slam, a teen boy's look at being a father.

So where does a dad find the teachable moment — is it even there — to be found from a movie about a 16-year-old mom-to-be and the story of a boy who gains wisdom from a Tony Hawk poster?

Or is any attempt to guide a child's thinking doomed (hopefully only metaphorically) in the same way as the father who became NYC's last man of 2007 killed, murdered because of his 13-year-old's eyeroll.

** If only girls had the book and boys the movie. What were the culture mavens thinking? **