Father's Day

I've had a few posts in the pipeline for a while, and as I've got some spare time (ish!), I wanted to get a bit of momentum going again. Sunday was Father's Day, both here and in the UK, and I count it as my first one (I really don't remember much of June last year!). I'm torn about the day, because on the one hand, it's a commercialised holiday and I hate the idea of people spending money on gifts, food or cards simply because someone at Hallmark decided that they should. On the other hand, I think celebrating fatherhood is a good thing (part of the reason for writing this blog is to do so!), so I had wanted to write a post with some general reflections on being a father.

However, after watching some TV over the weekend, I want to write about the portrayal of fathers in the media. These are just my thoughts, feel to agree, disagree, tell me off for taking things too seriously as you will, but three adverts jumped out at me:

The first was for moonpig getting people to buy their fathers gifts and cards for Sunday. They had a series of men doing "manly" things like barbecueing, using power tools and playing golf, all of which feels stereotypical. I'm not sure that they would run a similar advert for mother's day (I don't remember seeing one on TV at the time!) and there was nothing about fathers playing or being with their children.

The second is for SMA formula. In it, you see mother after mother caring for their baby at home with the idea that all of them use SMA to help them through the weaning process. The thing that gets me is that out of 4 example pairings, all of them were mothers. This may be as a result of targetting by the ad agency after demographic research, but it would have been interesting to put a man in there.

The final one is for Robinson's juice (although the advert for Weetabix also hits this theme!). In this one, you see two boys playing out all day, drinking the juice, and the reveal at the end is that one of them is the father and the other the son (interesting, yesterday's version of the advert removed the bit about the father encouraging the son to go talk to a girl!). Whilst this moves towards how I feel we should be representing fatherhood, the tag line is It's good to be a dad, it's better to be a friend.

Now I may be thinking with my teacher head, but I think there's a difference. I think you need to be able to have that adult - child relationship with your kid so that they know boundaries and respect adult authority when they see it. I get worried when I see parents at school treating their kids as equals and friends, and these are often the children who will kick up a fuss in my class when faced with something they don't want to do. I hope that I have a good relationship with Jake (we certainly seem to have a good time together at the moment!) but I want him to see me as his father, someone who will help him develop and progress in life, play with him, love him unconditionally, but not someone that he sees as an equal until he's an adult himself.