Asher's Blog

There are sacred things in my life. Some of them I decided on in my teenage years, long before I had the wisdom to fully understand what I was deciding. Others I only arrived at recently, after enough living had taught me what truly matters and what is just noise.

But being a husband and a father, that one I decided early. And I decided early that I was not going to be average at it. I was going to be exemplary. That was the standard I set for myself before I even fully understood what it would cost me, what it would demand of me, or how much it would shape me in return, because some commitments are worth making before you can count the cost.

This post is for fathers. Biological fathers, adoptive fathers, stepfathers, and men who are quietly showing up for children that are not technically theirs but who they have chosen anyway. It is also for the man who does not have children yet but knows one day he will. Start thinking about this now, because the decision of what kind of father you want to be deserves far more time and intention than the moment you are standing in a hospital room holding a baby for the first time.

The weight of the role

Fathers shape their children in ways that are almost impossible to overstate, and I want to say that carefully because I mean every word of it.

I have observed this for a long time, in the people I mentor, in the stories people share with me, in research, and honestly in my own story too. So much of what we carry into adulthood, our ability to trust, to love, to lead, to feel secure in who we are, to believe that we are actually worthy of good things, traces directly back to our relationship with our fathers, or the absence of one.

Sigmund Freud, whatever you think of him, said something that has proven remarkably difficult to argue with, which is that he could not think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection. And that need does not disappear when childhood ends. It simply transforms into the way we relate to authority, to love, to ourselves, and to the God we are trying to find.

A landmark Harvard study that tracked men across their entire adult lives found that the quality of childhood relationships, particularly with parents, was the single strongest predictor of wellbeing in later life. Not wealth. Not education. Not status or achievement or any of the things we spend so much energy chasing. Relationship with Parents. And for so many people, the father relationship is where that foundation either gets laid carefully or gets broken quietly in ways that take decades to understand.

Barack Obama, who grew up without his father and felt that absence deeply and wrote about it with honesty, said that the hole a man leaves when he abandons his responsibility to his children is one that no government can fill. He was speaking from personal experience, and he was right.

Most of our dysfunction, and I use that word deliberately because I think we need to be honest about what we are really talking about, comes from a broken relationship with our fathers or no relationship at all. It shows up in how we attach to people. It shows up in how we handle conflict and criticism. It shows up in the stories we tell ourselves in the dark about whether we are enough. The father wound is one of the most common and most consistently unspoken wounds a person can carry through an entire lifetime. It has been commonly opined that one of the transformation that can happen in the black American society is to close the gap between incarcerated Fathers and their children. In fact, this will not just improve the life of the children but will make society better through less crimes, lower incarcerated rates and more employment opportunities. 

The things I have seen with my own eyes

I do not want to be abstract about this, because I think abstraction is where we go when we want to sound wise without actually saying anything that costs us something. So let me be honest, because honesty is the only thing that actually helps anyone.

I have seen fathers who neglect their wives completely and then genuinely expect their children to love and respect them in return. It does not work that way and it cannot, because a child watches how you treat their mother every single day without you knowing they are watching, and that is their earliest and most formative education in love, in respect, in what relationships are supposed to look and feel like. You cannot teach values you are not living. You cannot point to a standard you are not meeting.

I have seen another situation that genuinely disturbed me and stayed with me longer than I expected it to. A man who abandoned his children emotionally because he was angry at their mother. He divorced her, remarried after fifty, started a new family, and stopped contributing to the schooling of his first three children, children with real school fees, real needs, real futures being shaped in real time by what he was or was not doing. And yet he expected them to continue to love and honour him.

I want to say this plainly, because I think plainness is what this deserves. That is not a father. That is a man who produced children and then decided that his feelings about their mother were more important than his responsibility to them. Fatherhood is not a biological event. It is a daily commitment, and it does not pause because a marriage ended or because your emotions told you that you had done enough.

As James Baldwin once wrote, children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. So the question worth sitting with is what exactly we are showing them, what we are modelling every single day inside our homes, in the ordinary and unremarkable moments that turn out not to be unremarkable at all.

The rule I learnt early

If you do not love your wife and treat her with genuine care and respect, do not expect your children to do the same with you.

Read that again slowly, because I want the direction of it to land properly. Not with her. With you. Because the way you treat their mother is the standard they will quietly hold you to, whether they can articulate it or not. Children are always watching and always measuring the distance between what you say and what you actually do, and when they see a father who dismisses or belittles or is simply cold toward their mother, something registers in them, a quiet disillusionment that does not announce itself but hardens slowly over time.

And the reverse is equally true, because this works in both directions. If their mother does not treat you with genuine respect, watch your children closely, because they will absorb and mirror exactly what they have seen modelled in the home they grew up in.

The relationship between a father and a mother is not just a marriage. It is a classroom that never closes. Children do not learn love from lectures and they do not learn it from the speeches we give them on their birthdays. They learn it from observation, from watching us over thousands of ordinary mornings and evenings, and they are always in session, always watching, always taking notes on things we did not know we were teaching.

Scripture speaks to this with a clarity I have never found a reason to argue with, telling husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church, and Christ did not love the church from a distance or in theory or when it was convenient or when the church deserved it. He gave everything. That is the standard, not perfection, but totality, a love that is willing to cost you something real and keeps showing up anyway.

Theodore Hesburgh put it in a way I have never forgotten, saying that the most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. Not buy them things. Not build a career they can be proud of. Not give them the best schools or the best opportunities, though none of those things are bad. Love their mother, consistently and visibly and genuinely, because that one act communicates safety and stability and dignity to a child more powerfully than almost anything else a father can do.

Show me a man who genuinely loves his wife and whose wife genuinely loves him back, and I will show you children who are grounded and whole and functioning. Not one thriving while another is broken. All of them shaped by the stability of what they grew up watching at the breakfast table every morning.

Be present, and actually present

I know fathers are busy, because I am one and I know what that pressure feels like from the inside. The pressure to provide, to build, to show up professionally, to be enough in every direction at once. I carry that pressure too, and I am not dismissing it. But I want to push back on something I think has quietly become an excuse in our generation of fathers.

Presence is not the same as being in the house.

You can be physically home every single evening and still be completely absent, absent in your mind, on your phone, exhausted and unavailable, present in body but nowhere close in spirit. And your children will feel that absence just as sharply as if you were not there at all. In some ways they will feel it more, because you were there, and you were still somehow not there for them.

When you are home, be home. That is the whole instruction.

Play, and play far more than you think is necessary, more than feels dignified, more than your schedule seems to have room for. Get on the floor with them. Be ridiculous. Let them climb on you. Let them win sometimes and watch what it does to them. Laugh more than you do anything else in that house, because your laughter tells your children that life is good, that home is safe, and that you are genuinely glad to be in the same room with them, which is something no amount of provision can communicate the way that laughter does.

C.S. Lewis wrote that children are not a distraction from more important work but are the most important work, and I think a lot of fathers know this intellectually and still live as though their career is the main thing and their children are a supporting act. That is a reversal we have to be honest enough to name and intentional enough to correct.

Do not be rigid and do not be the kind of father whose arrival home makes the atmosphere in the room shift to something tense and careful. There is a version of authority that produces obedience through fear and a version that produces love through safety, and only one of them actually works over the long term, and only one of them keeps your children choosing to include you in their lives when they are adults and the choice is entirely theirs.

Bless your children with your words, consistently and deliberately and often. Tell them they are capable. Tell them they are loved. Tell them you see them, not just their performance, not just their results, not just the version of them that is succeeding, but them. Children who are genuinely seen by their fathers carry that with them into every room they ever walk into.

And please, never curse them, never insult them, never speak over them in contempt or in a moment of frustration, because you may not remember those words five years from now but they will carry them for decades. Words spoken by a father land differently than words spoken by anyone else in the world. They go deeper and they stay longer, and they become part of the voice a child hears in their own head for the rest of their life.

Maya Angelou said that she sustained herself with the love of family, and family begins with what a father builds inside the walls of his home, with his words, his warmth, his presence, and his consistency, day after unremarkable day.

You are your children’s first hero. Before the world tells them who to admire, before culture and peers and social media get to them, they are already looking at you and deciding what a man is supposed to be. They believe what you say about them more than they will believe almost anyone else on this earth, and that is not a small thing. That is an enormous thing, and it deserves to be handled accordingly.

A final word

I am not writing this from a place of perfection, and I want to be clear about that. I am writing it from a place of commitment, the kind I made to myself before I even became a father, and the kind I recommit to regularly, because I know how easy it is to drift, how easy it is to let the demands of life crowd out the most important work, how easy it is to tell yourself you will be more present next week when things calm down, and next week never quite arrives.

Goethe wrote that the greatest thing a man can do is to show his children that he is worthy of their respect, not by demanding it but by earning it every single day. That is the work. Not one grand gesture. Not a speech or a memorable moment. Every day, in the ordinary moments, in the small choices, in the way we show up when we are tired and when it would be so much easier to disengage.

Fatherhood is one of the most sacred responsibilities a man can carry, and it deserves our full attention, our humility, and our genuine willingness to keep growing into it, because our children are growing every single day and they deserve a father who is growing right alongside them.

Fathers, try. Keep trying. When you get it wrong, and you will get it wrong, acknowledge it honestly and go again, because your children do not need a perfect father. They need a present one. A loving one. One who shows them, by the way he actually lives, what it looks like to be a good man.

God help us all to be that.