This podcast episode plus companion essay doubles as an ROGD Repair bonus lesson. In the course, it can be found here, along with reflection questions to help you personalize the material. You can also find the video on YouTube, or the audio wherever you get your podcasts.
There is a particular kind of father I see often enough in this work that I have started to refer to him as the disenfranchised dad. He shows up in a significant minority of the families I advise, and he is usually a decent man; he works hard, he provides for his family, and he loves his kids in a way that he doesn’t always know how to express. He’s opinionated about a lot of things, often with strong views about how the household should run and what the kids should be doing differently, and yet, in the family system he is supposedly the head of, he is sidelined. He is not the person his kids go to when they’re upset; he is not the person his wife talks to when she’s worried about them; he is not the one who knows what the kids are doing on their phones, or who their friends are, or what they’re reading and watching. He is on the outside of the emotional life of his own family, looking in.
What hurts about this dynamic is that from his position on the outside, he tends to criticize. He notices the kids slouching at the table, or that his wife is too easy on them about screen time, or that they’re not eating properly, and he points these things out intending to be helpful, doing what he thinks a dad is supposed to do. But the family does not experience him pointing these things out as the loving correction of an involved father; they experience it as the cranky drive-by of a man who isn’t really in the room with them otherwise. So his wife rolls her eyes, the kids smirk at each other, and over time he becomes, in the family’s internal mythology, a kind of joke or a problem, the thing the family manages around. He doesn’t realize this is what has happened, because from where he sits, he is just trying to be the dad, and it should be obvious to everyone how much he loves them and is trying to help.
So how does this happen? I don’t think it happens because he’s a bad guy; it happens for a few reasons that weave together over the years, and I want to take them one at a time. The first one has to do with temperament. A lot of these dads end up with a son or daughter who is sensitive in ways that he never was, and I am specifically talking to my Gen X dads here, the ones who drank from a hose and rode their bikes until the sun set and whose parents never knew where they were. Your kid is more anxious, more bookish, more sheltered; perhaps he grew up with a helicopter mom, your loving wife; perhaps he cries more easily; perhaps you have a son who doesn’t like roughhousing, or a child on the autism spectrum. And as a Gen X dad, you don’t really know what to do with this kid, because the way you were fathered and the way you understand what it means to be a father does not connect easily to what this particular child needs. It may even bring up values conflicts, because you might believe, as I do, that kids would benefit from having a thicker skin; but there is a temperament mismatch that needs to be dealt with, and this mismatch, when it goes unacknowledged, produces a kind of confused withdrawal in the father. He hands over the kid to mom because he doesn’t know what to do with her, sometimes even from a young age, and then there develops a pattern of mom as emotional center and dad as distant figure on the edge. It gets locked in, and then it just goes on for years and years until the problem compounds. Trans enters the picture, and the family finds themselves consulting with me.
Let me pause to talk about that moment when the family comes to me. I think of trans as a mind virus that infects those whose psychological immune systems have particular vulnerabilities that let that particular virus in; it is very well-engineered to exploit certain weaknesses. My job when I’m working with the family in front of me is to understand how that affected this particular family and this particular child, what the weaknesses and vulnerabilities are in the child’s psychological immune system and in the immune system of the family where this problem got in. That involves looking at intrapsychic and interpersonal factors, at the psyche of the individual, at social environment, at peer influences and social media and devices, at cultural messaging, and also at the specifics of the family dynamics themselves. Often, as we unpack those dynamics, this is one of the patterns that shows up, and we begin to notice the connection between the child’s difficulty receiving love from her father and the father’s difficulty parenting a child with a cross-sex identity. This could be a boy who rejects his male role model or has come to associate his father’s masculine characteristics with something toxic; it could also be a girl who is not receiving her father’s protective love in the spirit in which it is intended.
We might also need to look here at what’s happening in the marriage. A lot of the moms I work with are more verbally fluent than their husbands, more emotionally intelligent, more comfortable in the realm of feelings and dynamics and inner lives. What can happen there is that the mom takes over the emotional running of the family; she becomes the curator of the kids’ inner lives, manages their appointments, knows the friend dynamics, manages school drama, and becomes the one the kids turn to with their emotions. She takes on more and more of that role, and dad becomes less and less central, until at some point he is commenting on dinner from the periphery of his own family. Mom, without quite realizing it, has trained the kids to bring everything to her. At its most extreme, this dynamic results in kids saying that they don’t feel so-called safe bringing an issue to their father, even when there is zero history of abuse and no real reason to feel in any way physically unsafe with him. This is, of course, affected by cultural messaging around notions of emotional safety, but it has to do with the family dynamics as well.
The other component here is cultural. We’ve been living for two or three decades now in a moment where fatherhood has become something of a punchline; dads get portrayed in commercials and sitcoms and family movies as bumbling, out of touch, the butt of the joke, while mom is the competent one and the kids roll their eyes at dad. That is the script a lot of these dads grew up watching, and a lot of them have, in part, internalized it. They don’t really believe their own authority; they don’t really believe their own importance to their family; they participate half-consciously in their own disenfranchisement. The culture they grew up in told them that this is what dads now are, and some of these men have been so influenced by feminist messages that they have come to undervalue their own role. Their masculine desire to influence their family, of course, doesn’t go away; a father wants to love and protect, to serve his family, to guide his children in a meaningful way. But if his own feminist values are so pronounced that he undervalues his role as a father, then paradoxically that desire for influence can come out sideways and land worse.
Let’s talk about what the disenfranchisement of the father does to the child. I firmly and unapologetically believe that every kid needs a father; it is not an interchangeable role, a second parent who just happens to be male. A kid needs a dad in the particular role that a father plays in a child’s development. In healthy development, the father is the figure who helps the child move out of the fused, all-protective world of mother and into the larger world; he helps with the transition from an environment where you are unconditionally loved and accepted just as you are, into a world that will demand more from you and will sometimes be punishing and unforgiving. The father is the bridge between home and world, between fantasy and reality; he plays an essential role in coming of age, and in an ideal family he represents reality and structure and the world the child has to grow into. When he is doing his job well, he gives the child a felt sense that the world is a place she can grow into, that she has someone behind her who believes she can handle it, and who will make sure she has the skills she needs to succeed.
Without that involved father, or with a father who is in the room but functionally not involved, that piece of development gets much harder. The child stays enmeshed with mother; she has more difficulty separating and individuating, more difficulty going out into the world, believing in herself, standing up for herself in healthy ways, trying new things, taking on risks, and coping with failure. The kind of kid I often see in this work is sensitive, gifted, a little developmentally lopsided, sometimes autistic, and that kid’s difficulty can show up in a lot of different ways, including the way she relates to her own body and her sex; her body and her sex become the scapegoat, aided of course by cultural narratives.
For the boys who end up identifying as girls, the dad piece tends to be especially charged. The boy often has a temperament that does not map well onto his father’s; dad doesn’t know how to bond with him; the boy drifts further and further from masculinity as a category, and at some point during adolescence or young adulthood he looks at masculinity as if from the outside and thinks he can opt out. He says, no thanks, I don’t want any part of that. The trans identity, when it shows up, becomes a way of declaring permanently, with the help of the medical establishment, that he is not going to participate in becoming a man. This is a pattern I see often in this population, and it is usually interwoven with a strained father relationship.
That is what I see in cases where there is a temperament mismatch between father and son, or in cases where the son has some reason to reject the father; I also work with single moms divorced from dads who were abusive, who had mental health problems, perhaps a personality disorder, perhaps a criminal record, perhaps a history of alcohol abuse. That is what it looks like at the extreme, when the son rejects the association he has between fatherhood, masculinity, and toxicity. But that is not what I am talking about primarily in this episode. I am talking primarily about the boys who are simply more sensitive, less sporty, less competitive, less rough and tumble than their fathers.
Another profile of boys with a disconnect from their fathers are the ones where the boy sees himself in his father in a way that is too painful to admit. These are the boys who do have strong, aggressive, or competitive drives, but who have unfortunately grown up in a culture where they felt there wasn’t a place for them; perhaps they were shamed for being a so-called privileged cishet white male, and they learned, because of the current narratives around social justice, that it is bad and wrong to express your aggressive and competitive drives as a male with all that so-called privilege. These boys often actually have a temperament mirror with their father; they might be a lot like him, they might even look a lot like him. What I have noticed is that when these boys reject their sex and claim to be female, they are often especially aggressive, which is quite ironic. These dads who resemble their kids sometimes carry the most heartache of any fathers I have seen; they really see their son in themselves and struggle so much to know how to help.
For the girls who end up identifying as boys, the dad piece looks different, but it can be central too. Often these girls had a dad they admired, maybe even idolized, but who was emotionally unavailable, or who left in the divorce and faded into a Disneyland dad version of himself on weekends, or who never quite figured out how to be present with a daughter. These dads may remain happily married to the girl’s mother but not know how to handle adolescence and puberty; perhaps the dad has such strong feminist values that he tried to raise his daughter in a way that was so similar to how he would raise a son that he ended up being a little too rough and tumble with her, showing her that he overvalues those traits and missing out on giving her the type of protective love a father has for a daughter, the kind that shows her that to be female is a very special and valuable and cherished thing in his eyes. The dads who make this mistake do it with the best of intentions; they want to raise a strong, powerful, confident young woman, and what they end up with instead is a girl who thinks it is better to be masculine than feminine. Sometimes, when we dig under the surface, a few of these dads, by no means all of them, do in fact prefer masculine over feminine qualities, and have shown their daughter that they are not particularly interested in the more feminine side of her personality; but that is in a minority of cases. In these girls, the trans identity often carries underneath it a longing for a father that nobody is reading correctly. She does not make it at all clear that she wants to be treated like a little princess, but there is a part of her that is looking to him to show her how to be a young woman in relationship to a loving, present father figure.
Let’s talk about what repair can look like for the disenfranchised dad. I am not bringing this up today to trigger further despair; I am bringing it up to inspire hope, because there is so much these fathers can do. When the dad reenters the picture and changes how he is showing up, it changes the whole family more than anyone expected. Relationships get stronger through rupture and repair, just the way muscles do; you tear a muscle when you work out, and the muscle rebuilds itself stronger. Relationships are the same way. The dad who has been on the edge of his family for years has a relationship with his kid that has been ruptured a thousand small times, in every cutting comment, every missed bedtime, every time he wasn’t the so-called safe one. The repair work is not about having one big conversation; it is about lots of small ones, lots of moments that are fairly unremarkable in their subtlety, lots of times that the dad chooses not to correct his kid’s behavior and instead asks about her interests, or simply spends time side by side with her, learning more about her world.
So one thing I am sometimes in a position to tell these fathers is that the move they fantasize about making is not necessarily the move they need to make. Some of these dads imagine a big sit-down conversation, some grand reset or explanation of their love for the kid, or a clarification of their motives; that is often not the right way to go here. What the kids respond to is presence in small and persistent ways that do not necessarily announce themselves: just showing up day after day, being in the same room at the same time as the kid, being side by side, stepping into their world, looking at something with them before asking them to put it away. These moments of micro-connection become a daily practice, and you see the change build up over time.
It is important during this phase to suspend the habit of critiquing, not necessarily forever, but for longer than you think. Just put the running commentary down; right now, your relationship cannot afford it. Yes, if you were in the healthy place you want to be, those comments could be received in the spirit in which they are intended; but what you might have to accept is that this is not where the relationship is right now. Over the years, your kid may have internalized that the father’s voice is the voice of correction, and the kid does not have a relationship with him outside of that, and the correction is not always welcome. If you want a relationship with your kid that is not organized around correction, you have to build that, and you cannot build it by correcting more.
Another important piece to remember when we are talking about correction is autonomy. The most valuable correction is the one that we ask for; we don’t ask for correction or guidance until we have struggled with a problem enough to realize we need help, and we recognize that the person we are turning to is someone who is appropriate, not only safe but also knowledgeable enough to ask for help on that matter. That is the kind of relationship you should be aspiring to have with your kids during adolescence and early adulthood, not the one where you are giving them unsolicited feedback but the one where they are struggling with their own problems, discovering areas where they need help, recognizing you as a source of wisdom and guidance on that issue, and asking you. That is the perfect moment, and moms can help with this. Sometimes moms can build a bridge; if the mom is the one the kids are always turning to for advice and some of those subjects are actually things the dad knows a lot about, that is a perfect opportunity for mom to say, you know, your father is really good at that, you should ask him. When your kid does turn to you for advice, it is important to take that opportunity not to deliver it in a way that could land as critical, but to make sure that the net result of your actions is that the kid walks away feeling glad they asked for your help.
Another thing for moms: you can make room for dad in your family, or you can keep filling the space yourself. When we encounter this pattern in parent coaching, a lot of moms have a moment where they recognize that they have been the gatekeeper. It has not been conscious or malicious, but functionally they have been managing dad’s relationship with the kids, editing his input; unconsciously, they have been protecting the kids from his roughness, which contributes to framing masculinity as toxic for them subconsciously; they have been protecting the father from the kids’ feelings, and vice versa. The price of all that gatekeeping is that mom is emotionally exhausted, and the kids don’t have direct access to their father and full knowledge of his love for them. Sometimes the most important move a mom can make in this work is to step back and let the dad and kid figure something out together without her in the middle of it, even if they do it poorly a few times.
Part of the reason I take this work so seriously, the repair of relationships between fathers and children, is because I have been on both sides of it. I grew up as a daughter who did not have a father, and as a woman who married a divorced dad I have watched up close at home what it looks like when a father is in the room and is doing the work of being a present and loving father figure. A good dad is not replaceable; he is a particular kind of presence in a child’s life, and when that presence is missing or sidelined or treated as expendable, the child grows up with a hole inside, even if she does not have language for it. The kids I get to know through my work with their parents, the trans-identified adolescents and young adults whose parents come to me at their most desperate moment, are often missing the strength and love of a supportive father figure.
If you are a dad listening to this and you have been on the periphery of your family for years, I want to leave you with this. You can start offering that presence that has been missing this week. Your kid needs you, even if everything they have said for the past three years suggests otherwise. So come back into the picture, Dad. The way back is hundreds of small steps, little moments where you decide on purpose to be in the same room as your kid, even when she might act like she wishes you weren’t there.
If you’re a parent navigating these dynamics in your own family, I created ROGD Repair with you in mind. This podcast episode plus companion essay doubles as an ROGD Repair bonus lesson. In the course, it can be found here, along with reflection questions to help you personalize the material. There’s lots more content like this for you in the program. It’s the closest thing to working with me one-on-one as a coach. Use code SUBSTACK to take half off your first month at ROGDrepair.com.
