Hearing Voices

From Menletter September 2003

By Tim Baehr

I'm having a "discussion" with my teenage son about some infraction against responsible behavior - homework, clutter, staying out late; it doesn't matter. Things are getting hotter and hotter, and voices are getting louder and louder. Doors get slammed. Nothing is resolved. We both feel like shit. And it takes several hours for things to calm down enough to get a real dialog going.

My boss calls a meeting of her staff and spends an hour berating us for not complying with some company directive. Our loyalty, intelligence, and commitment are called into question. It's a huge scold. Nothing is resolved. We all end up feeling like shit. And a real dialog never does get going.

What's going on here?

Next time you're criticizing or belittling someone, stop and listen to yourself. Whose voice do you hear? Is it only your voice, or is it tinged with the accents and rhythms and vocabulary of someone else?

Who else might that be?

In the case of my boss, it was her boss who had descended on her in a rage, and ordered her to "do something" about her staff. Rather than analyze the situation and figure out how to get the staff working as a team toward a solution, she just passed on the bad news, venom and all.

In the case of my son, I discovered that, once again, I had been speaking with his mother's voice, with a little added spice from my dad, plus some of my own stuff.

I would guess that something like these episodes has happened to you. You can fill in your own mental details, as either the sender or recipient of criticism that escalated into a nasty confrontation.

Let's stay with the example of dealing with children, because it touches on some issues that can arise for us as men and fathers. But the issues can be generalized to other areas of our lives.

Raising children is tough work - tougher, more rewarding, and with greater consequences for society than any paid job. However, our society has largely exiled most fathers from their own homes for great chunks of the week, and child rearing has been given over mostly to mothers. Even when mothers are employed outside the home, their contact time with their children is greater than that of men. Mom is the one who gets to take time off after giving birth, and who often returns to work part-time (while Dad, perhaps, works overtime). And our society - through government policy, media, advertising, availability of products - promotes active motherhood much more than it does active fatherhood. We men may even contribute to the problem, unwittingly, by letting these gender roles slide into a regular pattern.

So Mom gets to the end of her rope one day and has a nasty encounter with the kid(s). She may be SuperMom most of the time, but one of the kids has just put one too many pebbles in her psychic shoe, for the twelfth time this week.

Don't get me wrong here. Mom has a job to do, and she often feels that she's the only one who is concerned, perpetually and without letup, about the children's safety, comfort, nutrition, and learning "right" behavior - and that Dad often can't be relied upon. (Again, our society supports this. How many dads have been to a park with their kid on a weekday and been asked if they were "babysitting" - their own children?)

So you arrive and she unloads on you. She recites the litany of misdeeds, gives a detailed account of the nasty exchange with the kid, and wants you to "talk to" the kid. You arrive at the kid's room (where he or she has been sent), primed with Mom's anger and frustration and maybe your own frustration at having to fix things. And if you make the same mistake I've made, you've arrived to continue the confrontation using Mom's voice, mom's arguments, mom's anger. And you've added your own anger at the kid for making Mom unhappy. The fireworks begin.

Whoa. Let's back this up a bit.

Maybe we need to broaden our source of "voices" to use, or find our own.

Let's think of a time we've interacted with our kid or kids on our own terms. It may have been when we spent an entire day with a toddler, preteen, or teen and had a chance to settle in to being just ourselves. And maybe this time when this interaction went particularly well, when we ended the day in that comfortable golden haze of mutual love with our child.

Can we remember the situation, and remember our voices? I'd be willing to bet that it went something like this: We didn't talk much. We gave permission to do things or eat things that are normally forbidden - sometimes with a wink of let's-not-tell-Mom conspiracy.

What about when we were successful in a disciplinary or admonishing situation? What made it work? My guess: When we had differences, we resolved them by age-appropriate negotiation if possible, by fiat if necessary, by action if safety was an issue - all with an economy of words and minimal scolding, lecturing, or sometimes even explaining. We may have been a bit stern or grim, but we did a lot of listening.

Whose voices were we using on these occasions? Maybe it was Dad or an uncle. Maybe it was that crazy aunt who took us for ice cream even when we'd been "bad" - and then gave us some good advice about judging when and how to break the rules. Maybe it was even Mom's voice when she was in a better place.

And maybe it was just our own voice, finally, rising out of a deeply masculine, deeply nurturing, deeply fatherly place.

Does this mean that we dads shouldn't discipline, that we must be the good-time Charlies and appeasers to counter Mom's Wicked Witch role?

No. It means that we men can discover our own voices for both the pleasant and the unpleasant encounters with our kids.

A child psychologist told me once that kids remember being scolded or punished, and all the bad feelings, much more readily than they remember what they're being scolded or punished for. I think the same thing goes for praise and love. Kids may not remember the subject matter of these encounters, but they do remember, cumulatively, the feelings.

How do fathers - how do men - discover our own voices? Here are some suggestions.

● Talk with our own dads about this, if they're still alive. Both father and son may make some astonishing discoveries.

● Recapture the good memories of our dads at their best. Let their voices and manners resonate and echo with ours.

● Discover or rediscover our own values and principles. Then live them. Not only will we be a good example, we'll have confidence and conviction that will comfort our children.

● Just spend time with our kids. We can't get good at what we don't practice. We don't need an activity or agenda. Remember that some of our best times with other men have been random and unstructured. Build on that.

● Spend time with men. We need role models in older men, sure, but we also just need to keep rediscovering what it's like to be a man - and that takes the context of other men.

Bonus: Finding our own voices - becoming fathers on our own terms and not adjuncts or enforcers - can take a lot of pressure off a woman to be the perpetual mom and free her up to also be a wife and lover.

Note: Serious family problems may require professional help. You don't have to go it alone if things regularly get out of hand.