Elephant Lessons

Making a point about youth violence, writer Lori Borgman tells the tale of the missing elephant dads. Baby elephants at an African game preserve ran wild until mature bulls provided the missing discipline and role modeling to set them straight. Her point: so do young men and women without fathers.

The thing to remember is that there is a soft side to fathers' relationships as well. That gentler, almost teary side is explored in a Japanese cartoon of how a father elephant chooses to spend his last month with his children and wife:

Tragicomedy

Face it. As long as it does't involve you — or anyone you know, love or admire — it's pretty easy to imagine comedy growing out of tragedy.

Neither pretty nor admirable, it is a fact that a 4-year-old kid finding a gun in the middle of the afternoon under the pillow of his napping dad and "accidentally" shooting him in the tummy has a certain comic potential. Similarly, the picture of a dad up a tree with an electric saw seems rife with possibilities for slapstick scenes. It becomes less funny when he drops it on his daughter, but still there is the sense of wonder at what was the dad thinking?

And face it, the irascible father is a staple of levity. A deadbeat dad swearing at a TV reporter makes for entertaining viewing. The "journalist" is intrusive; the father is getting the infamy he deserves; and the bleeping of the curses only makes it that much better. Of course, one can't help be left amused and awestruck at the impotence of a system that sends a dad owing $126,000 back to jail only to release him and return him into incarceration a couple years later when he owes $200,000 in child support.

Add up the rage and stupidity and threat of violence and dad and child and what do you have? A "Saturday Night Live" sketch:

Bouncing Boys

Smashing, crashing and burning. While daughters offer their own parenting hurdles (mostly emotional) to dads, boys are more often the ones going from rough-housing to roughshodding.

The biggest challenge is to manage the transition from acting out to something a bit more socially acceptable. Among those dads who misstepped along their managerial path is the Malaysian father who told his 30-something son to reduce his DVD watching only to have his son take up watching their house burn down ... after he ignited it in the rage that followed his trying to stab his father.

There is also the British father who nicked the on/off button for his son's behaviour when he chose not to pay his allowance — he said the son hadn't been to school and so didn't deserve it this week. The teen rampaged through the house, costing much more in damage than the allowance as well as ending up in court on charges pressed by pop.

To be fair, potential violence may have been precipitated by the son, but it doesn't mean it was necessarily his fault. For example, there was almost a Chinese slugfest over text messages suggesting infidelity. Fortunately, the father and mother found peace (if not total trust) when it turned out they were in combat over their son having borrowed dad's phoen to text his girlfriend.

While children must learn to take responsibility for themselves, it is undoubtedly true that a lot of problems are quickly traced back to poor choices by fathers. Most recently, a 10-year-old crashed a van after racing it through town at speeds as high as 90 MPH. While he shouldn't be forgiven for getting behind a wheel without a license, it probably should be noted that his dad was in the car ... wearing a "buy this dad a beer" t-shirt ... drunk ... really, really drunk ... and the father had "ordered" the son to take the wheel.

This isn't your father's (or maybe it is) rough-and-tumble.