Once fathers taught their sons the mysteries of life; now fathers have to look to their sons for hel

This is a reflection on boys and fathers. It may be different for girls. See what you think. Is ours the first generation, or the first for a long time, when boys know more than their fathers?

I am not speaking of wisdom, whatever that may be. The older generation will always believe it possesses greater wisdom than the young. Knowledge that comes from emotional experience, perspective that comes from having seen it all before, can only be taught by time. Despite the bravado of youth, children dimly sense that, and will in every age. But do not exaggerate the automaticity of a boy’s assumption that in the big, abstract questions of life his dad knows best. To some degree that deference is learnt from the boy’s direct and daily experience that in smaller and more concrete matters Dad turns out to know best, too.

If you had asked me as a boy what really impressed me about my father and why I looked up to him as I did, I would have replied that it was because Dad knew how things worked.