I have been a father for 40 years, a grandfather for 16 years, and a family psychologist in clinical practice for more than four decades. Throughout these years, I have carefully investigated fatherhood, and conscientiously invested in it, from both a personal and professional vantage point. For thousands of clinical hours, and countless personal, family hours, I have experienced fatherhood unfolding across lifetimes and generations.

I have treated birth fathers, step-fathers, adoptive fathers, single fathers, widowed fathers, adolescent fathers, fathers of children with special needs and chronic mental or physical illnesses, fathers of LGBTQ+ children, gay and bisexual fathers, trans fathers, non-resident fathers (as a result of work travel, military deployment, or incarceration), stay-at-home fathers, ill and dying fathers, fathers who tragically lost their children to death by disease or suicide, fathers raising children as a result of artificial reproductive technologies—and of course grandfathers and even great-grandfathers.

Since beginning my practice in 1983, becoming a father in 1987, and becoming a grandfather in 2010, I have seen times change, as they always do, and I have seen fatherhood, and family life, change dramatically along with it. While there is something ancient and eternal about being a father, the reality is that to father a child of any age now requires far more than a single, confining role, such as authority figure, limit-setter, playmate, maintainer of order, protector of child and mother, primary income producer, or fixer of cars and appliances.

Fatherhood can no longer be reduced to an assemblage of skills and duties but is best envisioned as a relationship that evolves throughout a lifetime.

To be a good father requires the development of a rich and complex imagination about what children are experiencing, and an ability to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty, to befriend the complexity of parenthood, and to see the often conflicted conglomerate of fatherly feelings not as worrisome, or an indication of inadequate love, but as a creative invitation to Self-awareness and self-discovery.

To reach out to offspring in a fully loving way requires a shift in masculine consciousness, involving not just more gentleness, but a thoughtful examination of the countless and complicated aspects of intimacy, which include unsettling feelings like dependency, vulnerability, envy, fury, and aggression.

The diverse forms of modern families require a brave encounter with the many challenges (including prejudice and stigmatization) that accompany these rapidly evolving forms, and an envisioning and re-envisioning of what it means to be a father and a man.

This is why being a father and working with fathers is, for me, not just a topic to be researched, codified and explained, but a moral, relational, and existential calling.

In this series of posts on fatherhood while the nest empties, I am not really writing about how to become a successful father. In a way, I am writing about the opposite adventure—recognizing the inescapable failures of fatherhood, becoming more interested in those failures, and using those failures to heal and enrich our lives, the lives of our young adult children, and the lives of our co-parenting partners if they are in the family picture.

I am reflecting upon what makes a good man and a good-enough father, upon what fathers owe their young adult children, and upon the emotional inheritance that is likely to be left behind.

I am asking readers to relinquish their commitment to being perfect parents and to seeing themselves as perfect parents, and instead to generously commit to understanding their imperfections—to forgive themselves, forgive their own fathers, and lay the groundwork for being forgiven by their young adult children so that they can continue to grow into good, imperfect people, and into good-enough, imperfect parents, should they choose to (or have to) do so.

A stanza from Paul Simon’s song “Slip Sliding Away” goes like this:

I know a father who had a son, he longed to tell him all the reasons for the things he’d done

He came a long way just to explain…He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping then he turned around and headed home again

Too often this is the sad and unsatisfying story that defines family life—the conversation between the generations that is never brokered, the words between parent and child that are never actually exchanged.

Here, I am advocating for fathers to travel farther than this father did, to come “a long way” not just in the geographical sense but in the psychological sense. It is as a result of this emotional voyage that fathers can discover within themselves new depths and untapped capacities, and spark that same wondrous process of discovery in their young adult children.