Author David Cohen’s childhood experiences shaped his conviction that being a father means putting time into your children
I WAS VERY determined not to be a bad dad, says David Cohen.
The psychologist and broadcaster had plenty of experience of bad parenting to measure himself against. As a young teenager he was effectively abandoned by both parents.
Yet his book, What Every Man Should Know about Being a Dad, is humane and witty, an outcome of his own experience as a parent, and of his training in psychology.
“I couldn’t have written it without having children and stepchildren,” he says. “And I couldn’t have written it without having been a psychologist as well.”
His childhood experiences no doubt shaped his conviction that being a father means putting time – a lot of time – into your children.
Certainly his own parents could not have been accused of going out of their way to give time to the young David Cohen.
He was the child of an unhappy marriage, with parents who seem to have been wrapped up in their own lives to the exclusion of many of their duties towards him as a child.
The family lived in London, but when he was 13, his mother went to Israel to sell a flat they owned there and never really came back.
His father took her absence as an opportunity to spend most of his time elsewhere, possibly with the “sexretaries’’ – as his mother called them – with whom she accused him of having flings.
His father moved out, leaving David “lonely and confused’’, and living on his own in an apartment at Marble Arch – though he brought his son out for dinner on Fridays.
Cohen’s desperate letters to his mother seeking her return had no effect. She had met a millionaire who died before they could marry and before he got around to changing his will in her favour, a development which left her embittered.
Nor were his parents unique. When he attended a parents’ evening at his children’s school, the headmaster informed the meeting that he had had to draw a line: “Some parents had asked if their children could board while they were still in kindergarten.”
The answer, they were told, was no. Children needed to be at home until they were five.
Today, Cohen says, our increasingly self-centred culture makes many people in their 20s and 30s wonder if having children is worth the trouble.
He’s definitely on the side of having children. “Maybe, if I hadn’t become a father at 24, I would have made more memorable films, or written the novel I like to believe I always had in me . . . but I don’t mind one bit.’’
His book covers both the practicalities and psychology of child-rearing all the way from birth to the teenage years.
Any currently-practising dad, in my opinion, could benefit from dipping into it at various stages of the parenting saga.
At the very least, being seen with the book will please your children’s mum/mums, who may slag you but will be secretly impressed.
I loved his chapter on teenagers – not least because he avoids preaching and doesn’t bother to pretend to know how to transform your teen into an altar boy or girl.
He writes: “Parents have to learn to be sensitive and to be prepared for the following kinds of dialogue”:
Parent: You look nice.
Teen: What do you know? Who cares what you think?”
Parents of angry teenagers, he counsels, need “eternal patience”.
And there is light at the end of the tunnel. He quotes American research suggesting that “parents of teenagers should not fear conflict too much. Rows when teenagers were 13 to 16 did not make for ‘disruptions’ or a bad relationship in the later teens’’.
Parents may spend huge amounts of emotional energy trying to reform their teens – but Cohen is also witty on teens’ attempts to reform their parents. Questions he was asked during lectures by his teens included:
“Do you realise that you are eating too much red meat, dad?”
“Do you ever count how much booze you consume?”
“A run before breakfast wouldn’t kill you.”
This is what I like about Cohen. On the one hand he knows his psychology inside out – and this book deserves to be on psychology reading lists – but on the other hand he is full of humanity.
His humanity also shines through in his chapter on discipline. He points to the oceans of research showing that beating and emotionally abusing children doesn’t work, noting that “we cling to what does not work out of ignorance, anxiety and exasperation”.
“Discipline until very recently has included getting beaten,” he writes. “My father certainly did that to me. And I was frightened of him and hated it.
“All parents feel they fail sometimes, when it comes to discipline. Do not beat your child and do not beat yourself up over that . . . the good enough disciplinarian lays down boundaries, does not lose his cool and is ready to explain why something is wrong.’’
Cohen favours an authoritative – not authoritarian – approach in which parents are warm and supportive but lay down rules for their children and expect them to be kept. Explaining why a rule should not be broken works better than hitting, he suggests.
In the divorce era, it’s worth noting that Cohen has a good chapter on life in stepfamilies. He doesn’t offer magic solutions to a tough situation, but I believe parents in such families would greatly benefit from reading this chapter.
Perhaps we all would.
“Some statistics predict that by 2030 no one will be living in an ordinary family with a mum, a dad and the children they have conceived together,” he writes.
I said above that it will do you no harm at all as a man to let your partner spot you reading this warm, witty and humane book.
When you’ve read it, pass it on. I think she’ll like it, too.
What Every Man Should Know about Being a Dadis published by Routledge, €11.87