Читать книгу The Complete Parenting Collection - Steve Biddulph, Steve Biddulph - Страница 76

It’s okay to be unpopular with your kids once or twice a day! If you have lots of good time together and a long history of care and involvement to draw on, then you have goodwill saved up, like money in the bank. Sometimes dads are around so little, they want it all to be smooth sailing when they are there. But kids need to know when they do something wrong. It can be hard to find that middle point between hard and soft. Maybe it’s about being clear, and not about using power or force at all.

I have a friend, Paul, who is very close to his kids – I admire and envy how natural a father he is. But he too gets it wrong sometimes. Paul told me once how he ‘lost it’ with his twelve-year-old son after a nightmare day at work. He exploded over some small thing and sent the boy off to his bedroom, yelling at him as he went. The son deserved hardly any of this, the yelling was louder than was necessary, the boy was wincing in fear – it was a disaster.

Paul stood for minutes, ashamed and red-faced at what he had done. He realised it had to be fixed. He went and sat on the boy’s bed. He apologised. The boy said nothing, just lay face down on the bed. But ten minutes later, the father was in the bathroom. The boy walked past him on the way to brush his teeth and get ready for bed. As he passed, he uttered some words that touched his father’s heart in a most unforgettable way: ‘Why is it so hard to hate you?’