Fatherhood is to be relished

It is quite likely that sometime in 2026, I will read a bedtime story to my son for the last time. There won’t be any fanfare — I probably won’t even realise what has happened until a little while afterwards — but a chapter of my life that has lasted for over ten years now will have come to an end. We started with That’s Not My Dinosaur and Spot and the Gruffalo, when he was a baby, and just before Christmas we finished The Lord Of The Rings.

The sad truth is that parenthood is full of such moments. Children are constantly growing, developing, and learning new skills, leaving behind the charming habits and foibles of earlier times. I still remember the day I realised, with a certain sadness, that my daughter had learned to say “banana” properly, after a long period of referring to “banamas”. At some point in about 2021, I realised that I was no longer having to regularly scrub gravy off the grouting on the floor of the dining room. Even the progress of their handwriting has its own poignancy. In my study, I have signed artworks and poems from my children dating back five or six years, and the increasing clarity and neatness of the numbers and letters tells its own story of how — in the words of the old hymn — “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away”. If you have a nostalgic, elegiac temperament, like me, the loft can be a dangerous place. In one box the cute little dress that Girl wore for World Book Day in 2020; in another Boy’s Brio train set, a reminder of the days when we would make complicated layouts together. Into my heart an air that kills, and all that.

It is worth trying to discipline and redirect our emotional responses so that doing the right thing becomes less difficult and more natural

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So it was with mixed feelings that I read a Tweet by the US academic Justin Murphy, reflecting with brutal (and perhaps excessive) honesty on his ambivalence about spending time with his young children. “Playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic, peak experience. Yet for every single minute, on the inside, I just don’t want to be there. I want to be drinking my coffee in peace.” It’s not quite as unnatural or callous as it sounds — playing with very young children can be repetitive and tiring, and doesn’t come as naturally to some people as it does to others. It is entirely possible to be a good and loving father without meeting all the expectations of direct involvement that have arisen in the last three or four decades. Even those of us who try very hard to be hands-on, attentive fathers will have occasionally baulked at the prospect of yet another game of snakes and ladders, or hide and seek, or tag. And it certainly sounds like Murphy is trying very hard to not let his lack of emotional satisfaction impact on his willingness to actually Do The Work. Love is after all an orientation of the will, as well as an impulse of the heart.

All the same, as many people pointed out in response to Murphy, it is worth trying to discipline and redirect our emotional responses so that doing the right thing becomes less difficult and more natural. There is such a thing as feeling the right way, and children can be remarkably perceptive about the inner states of adults. 

This is especially important given the distractions with which most of us must contend. Murphy doesn’t mention his smartphone or tablet or laptop, but when he talks about being able to drink his coffee in peace, or his desire to be “working, or accomplishing something” rather than playing with his children, one wonders whether he might be alluding not only to professional or academic responsibilities, but the allure of Online. Again, I’m loath to be too critical of Murphy. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. There can hardly be a parent in the contemporary world who has never yielded to the temptation to doomscroll or check their emails when they should be focusing on their children. And possibly I’m doing Murphy a disservice — maybe he just has the kind of personality that would have struggled to enjoy games with children fifty or a hundred or two hundred years ago, long before Twitter and TikTok. But it can hardly be denied by any observant person that for many parents, devices are more attractive companions than their own offspring.  

One way to think about internet-enabled handheld devices is that they are technologies of Elsewhere. They remove you from a concrete situation, and open up a million other potential situations, to which you need not commit and which you enter and leave on your own terms, in accordance with your own feelings. If your toddler is boring you, your phone can present you with someone or somewhere or something more interesting. If you come to a complex paragraph in your book, you can see what your favourite YouTuber thought of the finale of Stranger Things. Even if you are reading e-books or articles on a device, there is much less opportunity for discussions to start, or for the realisation of shared interests, than with a real newspaper, or a magazine. This is because other people can’t see your screen. A roomful of people on their phones is a mass of solitudes, in a way that a roomful of people reading physical books is not, because their activity is closed off and illegible to those around them. 

What children want, and need, is the exact opposite: presence, attention, reassurance that they are important to us. Watch a school performance or a sports match, and you will see them scanning the audience or the crowd, searching for their parents’ faces, and breaking into broad smiles when they find them. Whether it is an art project or a Lego set or a daring climb to the top of a rock in the park, children search for recognition from the people who are important to them. Repeated refusals of that recognition, in favour of a 37-page Reddit thread on the latest Trump rigmarole or a funny TikTok about how men really do be like that, are bound to affect children’s sense of themselves, or their understanding of how human interaction should work.

We can train ourselves to not be yearning for a glimpse of Elsewhere

It is difficult to free ourselves from the intrusive, tyrannical thought that we could or should be doing something more diverting. But it can and must be done, especially when children are involved. Time is really very short. Almost before we know it, childhood will be over. 

I have no great wisdom for Justin Murphy, except perhaps to say that we can train ourselves to not be yearning for a glimpse of Elsewhere. Virtue is habit, as the ancient philosophers said; we become what we habitually do. Generally, the less we indulge our impulses, the less power they have over us. So hide the phone away, if you must. Lock up the laptop. Commit to simply being with children, and sharing their delight and joy in the world. Relish their tenderness, their curiosity and their wild imaginations.