{"id":73335,"date":"2013-06-16T08:52:03","date_gmt":"2013-06-16T08:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=73335"},"modified":"2013-06-18T07:44:12","modified_gmt":"2013-06-18T07:44:12","slug":"should-a-father-be-his-sons-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=73335","title":{"rendered":"Should a Father be His Son’s Friend?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

by Henry Makow Ph.D. <\/span>— henrymakow.com <\/span><\/strong>(Revised from June 18, 2011)<\/em><\/h5>\n
\"\"<\/a>I am not the<\/span><\/strong> world’s greatest father and I don’t expect my father to be perfect either.<\/span><\/h5>\n
He overcame many obstacles. His parents were murdered by the Nazis when he was 19. He survived the war, became a physicist and built a new life. He is 89 now. I salute him on Father’s Day.<\/h5>\n
He was always a father, never a friend. I know the view that fathers should not be friends. “It is the job of parents to see that the [societal] barriers hold,” W. Cleon Skousen writes in “So You Want to Raise a Boy?”<\/em> (1958, p.232)<\/h5>\n
My father saw his role as keeping me “on track.”\u00a0 Since his success was based on higher education, “on track” meant keeping me in school.<\/h5>\n
I was not allowed to get off the treadmill. Despite the fact I had written a syndicated newspaper column at age 11, he never believed in me, <\/em>and my good intentions. He always treated me like a loose cannon. I must have given him reason.<\/h5>\n
After high school, I wanted to work in a mine. Then, I planned to go to an out-of-town university known for its radical leftist professors. (I was a Lefty back then.)<\/h5>\n
My father exerted great pressure, including the inducement of the old family car, to make me enroll at once at the local university.\u00a0 I succumbed and fell into a depression. I only completed three of five courses with poor marks.<\/h5>\n
My spirit broken, I ended up staying at university as a kind of hospice, finally getting a Ph.D. that I have barely used.<\/h5>\n
On another occasion, I wanted to use the family cottage as a spiritual retreat, a Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Again, no deal. Get your thesis done.<\/span><\/h5>\n


\n“FRIEND”<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Continues … <\/a>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Father’s Day reflections on the role of the father<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73335"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73516,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73335\/revisions\/73516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}