Sections
Parental Presence, Part I
The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to the publication to stay up-to-date on Alvaro’s writing.
I’m a collector of parental stories. I’ve been knee-high with lower school students, waist-high with middle school students, and neck-deep with upper school and college students for thirty-five years. Over that time, I’ve been blessed to know literally thousands of parents.
From these relationships, I have learned a tremendous amount. I’ve seen many examples of things that work and things that don’t. Even though there is neither a manual nor a strict rulebook for parents, I have observed there are some behaviors that tend to work better than others.
One of the clearest behaviors is simple in theory, though often difficult in practice. It is the importance of parental presence.
The Importance of Being Present
I will never forget a particular story of this family from Mexico. Both of the parents had very demanding professional jobs that required them to be away from the home for long stretches of time. Their son, who was about ten years old at the time, would spend hours at home—often with the gardener. The boy loved playing in the garden with this man, fixing things, trimming shrubs, and helping him care for the plants.
At one point, the father asked his son a question that I am sure none of you would ever ask: “Who do you love more: mommy or daddy?” Much to the father’s surprise, the boy answered: “Francisco, the gardener; he spends time with me.” He was not asking for Francisco’s wisdom, guidance, or leadership. He was asking for Francisco himself. He wanted a person to be there.
G. K. Chesterton gives the famous image of children playing on top of a mountain. If there are steep cliffs on all sides, and you give them a ball, half an hour later you’ll find them huddled in the middle, afraid to play because of the danger. But if you build a wall around the mountaintop, you’ll come back and find them playing happily within it because they know they are safe.
That is what parental (and especially paternal) presence does. The presence of a parent provides a wall around children’s lives—especially when they are younger. Their presence communicates safety. Everything will be okay if a parent is around—not because of anything they do but because the presence of the strongest person a young person knows gives him a sense of security.
Challenges to Being Present: Professional Work
At the same time, it is challenging to be present at home. I imagine that most parents have experienced conflict between professional work and family life. In many cases, one’s career and children grow rapidly at the same time. And so there will be direct conflicts: Where should one be more present, and to whom should one give more attention?
Professions occupy time—long hours, commuting, after-hours work. Technology helps us stay connected, but it also becomes a ball and chain. In many professional settings, there is the implicit expectation of near 24/7 availability. Technology may help us be more present in theory, but in practice it can pull us away from truly being present to our children.
Work also takes mental energy. A parent can be physically home while mentally at work—still trying to solve problems in his head. Not to mention the modern complication of working from home, which can blur the boundaries between work and family life in the eyes of children.
There is a wonderful biography of Vince Lombardi in which his son recalls how hurt he felt growing up. In the biography, he describes family dinners where Lombardi was physically present but silent, mentally working through the Sunday game plan. One evening, near the end of dinner, Lombardi cleared his throat. The son became excited, expecting his father to finally address him. Instead, all that he said was, “Pass the salt.” Lombardi’s mental absence created a wound in his son. “My father is a great man,” he thought, “but I am not a great child in his life.”
Our professions also consume emotional energy.
I remember visiting the home of a family at my school years ago. I had arrived before the father did and was talking with the wife and children when I saw him pull into the driveway, looking exhausted after a long day.
As soon as the door opened, the four-year-old daughter ran downstairs yelling: “Daddy! Daddy! Let me show you my picture!” She had drawn a picture of the house—the sort of drawing children make with lines everywhere and colors far beyond the boundaries.
What struck me from this moment was the remarkable transformation that occurred on the face of this father. His tired face lit up. He smiled broadly, picked her up, sat her on his knee, and discussed the drawing for far longer than the work of art objectively merited. He noticed details I couldn’t even see. I was deeply moved by his ability to re-energize emotionally in order to give himself to his child.
Challenges to Being Present: Difficult Years
Sometimes the challenge is not work but personal preference. Sometimes, especially when children become teenagers, they can be difficult. You may love a child deeply—but not particularly enjoy him at a particular moment. If you are not careful, you may begin to avoid being present at home because being around difficult children drains you.
Besides reasons for not wanting to be home—like the tense family environment because of a particular child—there may be reasons for wanting to be elsewhere. Perhaps you are doing something fun with friends, or on a golf trip with buddies, or going on a retreat. Being away from home may be good and sometimes necessary. Dads especially need to cultivate friendships, which is something in all too short supply these days as sociologists tell us. Such friendships take time. The important thing is that the motive and particular details need to be explored.
Types of Presence
What is the solution to these challenges?
Usually it is not as simple as quitting a demanding job. Most families need the financial support that a demanding job provides, and it is important to serve the common good through one’s professional work.
In order to think about possible solutions to the challenges of being present as parents, it helps to think about four types of presence:
- Physical presence
- Intellectual presence
- Moral presence
- Spiritual presence
In this week’s post, I will focus on physical presence. Next week, we will consider the intellectual, moral, and spiritual presence, as well as the stages of parental presence.
Physical Presence
In the 1980s people loved to talk about “quality time.” What mattered, some people argued, was not the amount of time spent with your children so much as the quality of the time. There is some truth to this idea, for sure. The problem with it, however, is that quality time without quantity time rarely works. It is not how children work. Children need quantity—regular, predictable presence. This sort of presence creates security.
It may also require sacrifice.
One of my students once wrote a college essay about how present his father had been in his life—coaching him when younger and attending his sports games when older, enjoying family dinners, going on little excursions on the weekends. As a child, the student assumed his father simply had a lot of free time. Later in high school, however, the student learned that his father’s presence was not a lack of other commitments but the fruit of intentional sacrifice. He discovered that his father would work late every night after he and his siblings had gone to bed. For fifteen years, his father had rearranged his schedule, making life more inconvenient for himself so that he could be present to his family. That sacrifice left a deep impression on his son.
To be sure, not everyone can or should sacrifice sleep in this way. Depending on one’s constitution, some may need more hours of sleep, and to sacrifice them may be imprudent, as it would carry a heavy burden in other aspects of the family life. Regardless, every parent will need to look at his own situation and ask himself if there is a way, even a sacrificial way, to spend more time with his children.
I should also note that I have found children to be very forgiving when they understand that their parents are truly doing the best they can to spend time with them. But, they will be critical if they think that their parents are choosing to be elsewhere, even under the guise of having to be elsewhere.
Stay tuned for Part II, which will be posted next week.
About the Author
Alvaro de Vicente
In addition to his responsibilities as headmaster of The Heights, Alvaro acts as a mentor to high schoolers and teaches senior Apologetics.