This week’s Bunch Poll in the National Post
Ideas about fatherhood have changed pretty radically over the past few decades. Unless you live in the world of Real Housewives, dads are no longer the breadwinners who expect dinner to be ready when they step in the door after work. To use another TV analogy, it’s a progression from Mad Men’s Don Draper to Modern Family’s Phil Dunphy. So how do today’s dads feel they are different from their own fathers? We asked around to find out.
“It’s in the smallest moments that I realize how different, and how much the same, I am from my dad, as a dad. My daughter gets a splinter; I sit her down the same way my father did me, assemble the same tools, ape his bedside manner … and then fail to remove the sliver of wood from my her foot with calm expertise, as he would have. I think my generation has a deeper comfort with the language of emotion than our parents’ did -which is a great thing for our children -but also a greater resistance to fully embracing adulthood, which is what they’ll probably grow up to resent us for.”
