With Father’s Day approaching, I want to take a moment to celebrate the unsung paternal instinct.  Even though it’s somewhat retrograde when stated explicitly, I feel like the notion of the mother’s instinct–some superior sixth sense that governs female parenting decisions–is still widely assumed.

That is, in parenting matters where there’s disagreement between mother and father, mother is innately more right.  Egalitarian and progressive as I’ve always believed myself to be, I have found myself falling into this trap.  It venerates the mother and marginalizes the father and, perhaps worse, can lead to decisions that are less beneficial than children.

Because, dear reader, the paternal instinct can be a brilliant thing.  Here’s why.

It’s a question that’s been on my mind–probably on a lot of people’s minds–since the NSA leaker’s identity has been revealed.

I’m not sure if what he did was right, if it will have some unforeseen national security consequences, but from all I’ve read so far, it was done from a place of conscience: He believed the American people ought to know the extent of the domestic surveillance program, and how it’s being carried out.

Many of us are confronted with such moments on a smaller scale, moments when we can act on our conscience, when we have to decide whether to speak up or remain silent.  When you find yourself in a moment like this, what do you do?

As a tennis fan, I’ve been following the French Open, especially the human interest stories.  The male world number one player, Novak Djokovic, won his third round match and then was greeted with the news that his first coach (the one who’d coached him as a child) had died.  He was too upset to give a press conference.

It got me thinking about the meaningful emotional connections–attachments–that children make to people outside the family, those whose influence can span a lifetime, and how, as parents, we can encourage our children to make those sorts of attachments.

In my last post, I wrote about how to balance dreams and reality for ourselves, and for our children.  I said that we have to help our kids calculate odds as they get older: Risk versus reward, where best to allocate energy, which dreams are likely to come true.

But it occurred to me that our own assessment about those things might not always be accurate.  It will most assuredly be shaped by our own experiences of success and failure.

Last month, I sold a novel to Harper Collins.  It was the culmination of five years of hard work (and several other novels that I couldn’t find an agent for).  All that effort, all that rejection, and to be honest, I’d decided that this novel was my last hurrah, my final attempt.

If no agent wanted to sell it, then I was giving up.  I’d write this blog and focus on my family and practice therapy and that was plenty, right?  It would have to be enough.

But dreams are about what’s more than enough.  They’re larger than life.  We want our kids to reach for the stars, until…?  When do we–and our kids–need support and when do we need a reality check?

I met with a client today who I hadn’t seen in several weeks.  She started telling me about her Mother’s Day–where what she wanted was peace and quiet, but what her kids needed was crisis management, and guess what won out.

“Well,” I said, “that does sound like a real mother’s day.”  We both laughed, and what I was thinking of was my own Mother’s Day (my second), from a few weeks ago.

It’s easy to catch a case of this: You see someone else’s life (or what you think you know of someone else’s life), and you think how much better they have it than you do.

Why are we so susceptible?

It’s not the kind of thing you’re supposed to admit in polite company.  But I know from my practice–and my own life–that it’s more common than we want to think.

Say, you’re home with your daughter all day; your husband works full-time.  You get more time with her, which he envies; he gets more time with adults, which you envy.

When does envy become full-blown jealousy?  When it is a problem?

I started out calling this post “Building Kids’ Self-Esteem”, but then I realized I really want to talk about something else.  Esteem is really about how other people see us, while worth is about feeling innately, inherently worthy.

I talked in my last post about the Catfish phenomenon, and how I believe it is fueled by low self-esteem on both sides.  But maybe I was wrong.  Maybe it’s about low self-worth on both sides.

Urban Dictionary defines “catfish” as “someone who pretends to be someone they are not online; to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.”  I just watched the “Catfish” documentary (I know, I’m a little behind), which first brought widespread attention to the phenomenon, and it got me thinking:

Why do some people grow up to behave this way?  How do we protect our children from catfish, but also from becoming catfish themselves?