By Denise Turney

Some father son books are getting it right despite the fact that few people may want to admit it. Fact is, some father and son relationships are painfully complicated. Strain in these male relationships exist whether the father is living in the home or has been absent from a son’s life for months or years. Perhaps complications come because some fathers see a competitor, someone vying for their wife’s attention, when they look at their sons. Other fathers might look at their sons and see a child who will, one day, be as physically strong and looming as they are, someone who could easily replace them in a position of power.

Impact Father and Son Relationships Have on Society

Glimpses of this might reveal themselves in relationships male animals have with their teenage sons. After all and although it’s not written in stone, there might be something to male lions, long considered the kings of the jungle, pushing their teenage sons out of the den. If the sons don’t go straightaway, it can create problems, causing male lions to attack and harm their own sons. This tradition ensures that fathers remain kings of their families in the animal world. As difficult as it is to watch a male lion force his sons away from family, often for the remainder of the sons’ lives, when considering the harshness of the wild, it can be understandable.

What’s not understandable is how some fathers vacate their sons’ (and daughters’) lives. This trend among human fathers and sons is especially hard to understand considering the negative impact that complicated father and son relationships have on families, communities and society at large. If fathers vacate their sons’ lives, it could cause sons, even after they reach adulthood, to search for the love and support they should have received but didn’t.

Complicated father and son relationships can also impact sons’ academic performance, whether or not sons abuse alcohol or drugs, economic conditions sons grow up in and sons’ self-esteem. Of course, many of these complicated father and son relationships occur whether fathers force their sons to vacate home prematurely or whether fathers exit the family structure. To force their sons to leave home prematurely, fathers might physically, psychology, financially or emotionally assault their sons, forcing their sons to see leaving home as the only way they can gain a semblance of peace.

Father Son Books Forcing Sons to Vie for Themselves in a Cold, Harsh World

Raymond Clark and his father, Malcolm, a bitter man facing the evils of untreated alcoholism, confront these and other dilemmas in Love Pour Over Me. Yet, Malcolm doesn’t leave. His presence brings pain, yet a comfort of sorts. What isn’t evidently clear is why Malcolm stays, why he doesn’t become another father who walks off and leaves his son, the very thing Raymond both fears and begs for.

As Malcolm and Raymond discover in Love Pour Over Me, one of the thought provoking father son books on the market, nothing short of probing and addressing the struggles fathers and sons share may help open fathers’ and sons’ eyes, allowing them to clearly see that the price of not working to heal complicated father and son relationships but instead continuing to attack and hurt each other is too high. . . for everyone.

Fortunately, organizations and initiatives like the National Fatherhood Initiative, Father and Sons Together, National Center for Fathering and Supporting Father Involvement are taking steps to encourage fathers to develop and maintain healthy relationships with their sons, beginning at infancy. After all, men are not animals, and, when nurtured and guided with love, sons generally grow up supporting their fathers, not competing with them for power as might happen in the jungle with male lions and their sons.

Thank you for reading my blog. To learn what happens to Raymond, Brenda and the other characters in Love Pour Over Me, hop over to Amazon.com, B&N.com, Ebookit.com and get your copy of Love Pour Over Me today. And again I say – Thank You! Consider Love. 

Sources:

http://www.healthyplace.com/parenting/dads/connection-between-father-and-son/ (Healthy Place: Relationship Between Father and Son)

http://www.fatherhood.org/media/consequences-of-father-absence-statistics (National Fatherhood Initiative: The Father Factor)