Who Taught You to be a Good Dad

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
Brian Lehrer on WNYC, now to your calls. For those of you who pre-Father's Day had to figure out how to be a good dad because you grew up without a father, or maybe even with a bad role model as a father, 212-433-WNYC.
And we'll start with Ben in Hillsboro, New Jersey. You're on WNYC, Ben, thank you for calling in.

**Ben** (0:34)
Thank you, Brian.
Yeah, I'm calling in to say that my father wasn't a bad father. He just, we just didn't have much money and he worked so hard. And then when he had any free time, he really was just sleeping, et cetera. So I didn't really get to see him much. He did care, but I felt like I was kind of burdensome to him and I really didn't get to know him very well.
I became a father and fortunately I had a decent job. I got to spend a lot of time with my children and I began to enjoy them as people. And I think that became the basis or the platform in which I built a relationship with them. From the time they were babies as they were growing up, to actually get to know them as separate human beings, get to be involved in their triumphs and their failures, and just get to develop a relationship with them, as I would with anybody. But the specialness of just the relationship with your own children was very precious to me. And that became the basis of being a dad.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:39)
Nice way to start us off, Ben, really nice. And in fact, there's a little theme running through some of the callers that you touched on there. People whose dads weren't necessarily bad role models, but just work so much that they weren't around that much. Damani in Brooklyn, I think, is another one like that. Damani, you're on WNYC. Hey.

**Damani** (2:02)
Hey, Brian, long time, long time caller or listener. Not first time caller, but yes, so I can definitely relate to the theme where we don't want to blame our fathers for any, anything that they, you know, had not learned, so to speak, you know, they're, we're all still learning how to be parents. And my father did work a lot, and I was, you know, they were divorced, and I did have to share, you know, time with my dad, but normally he was busy working. So what I've done is I don't work when I'm with my son, and we have our visiting time. And it really resonated with me when a couple years ago, my son asked me if I had a job. He said, you don't work, he told me. And I loved it. I said, you know what? You're right. I don't work when we're together.
And that's something that is so precious. And one day when he was really very young, the three of us were together, my father, my son and I, and I was playing with my son.
My father had said that you wish you'd played with me when I was a child, so. Thank you for taking my call.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:29)
And obviously, I hear the emotion in your voice. You're the caller of the week, at least so far, it's late on Friday.
But that's wonderful. Happy Father's Day to you, Damani. Don in Fairfield, you're on WNYC. Don, thank you for calling in.

**Don** (3:47)
Thank you. Thank you for having me and a pleasure to be on. So I grew up in the 50s and my parents got divorced when I was 15, but he left first when I was one and then when I was, and he came back, and then when I was seven.
And from seven to 15, he was, you know, out of the house.
And that really created two situations, one where I didn't spend a lot of time with my father except on the weekends. And, you know, obviously the problem with that is what everyone has is they don't have that face time and that loving relationship. But also a lot of the plans that were made when he was supposed to come at 12 o'clock on Saturday and pick us up, you know, for the day or for the weekend, and he would show up at 4 o'clock. So there was sort of all of these missed opportunities to have sort of a wonderful day, instead turned into horrible days. And then when he died when I was 15, prior to that, right around the time of Kennedy's assassination was the year, I realized that the relationship was just so horrible. It was treating my mother so badly in terms of making payments and, you know, taking care of us the way he should have when he had time with us, that I got really angry and just sort of cut off the relationship. Then he died a few years later. So I took away a lot of strange things from that. But, you know, regarding being a father, which I am, I've got two grown daughters, and also being a husband. What I took away was from him, but also from what I saw in, you know, watching TV when all this was going on in the 50s and 60s with things like Leave It to Be, The Wren Fathers, Knows Best, and all the other black and white TV land shows we can remember.