In honor of Father’s Day, I’d like to honor the qualities of fathers that foster children’s emotional sense of security, well being and resiliency, and share a few quotes and a favorite poem.

“Fathers, like mothers, are not born.
 Men grow into fathers -
 and fathering is 
a very important stage in their development.”

~ DAVID M. GOTTESMAN

Certain qualities that fathers represent and model are invaluable, such as standing up for and believing in ourselves and our dreams, to never giving up and mustering the strength to face our fears with courage. Healthy fathering nourishes children with a strong and healthy sense of self, agency, determination and momentum to make things happen.

It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. If so then capturing your life on paper with a timeline exercise may be worth millions.

A timeline or lifeline exercise is a grid that allows you to have a bird’s eye view of your life, and to see the positive and negative shifts along the way on a single trajectory.

Even more, it can be a tool to make conscious self-directed changes that, literally, rewire your brain to heal itself. Known as plasticity, your brain has an innate capacity to make changes in positive, healing directions. Like other tools, you need to know it’s there to access, and how to use it.

Everyone has a unique timeline. It consists of a series of events, trends and turns that culminate in producing cycles of positive and negative shifts, highs and lows in the course of a lifetime from birth.

What are the benefits?

Putting your timeline on paper is an opportunity to record vital information about your life and past. There are several benefits to completing this exercise.

Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man (dreamstime.com)

Human beings are fascinated by stories. It’s part of our nature, as much as breathing, and our brain learns best through the telling of stories.

Simply put, we are born storytellers. We fashion a story about ourselves from the time we are born, if not earlier.

Our story contains an array of verbal, visual, and other felt sensory elements, in addition to a storyline that can endure a lifetime.

This storyline forms an inner dialogue of thoughts, a stream of consciousness, or ‘self-talk,’ that explains and interprets our life, self and situations – to others and to our own mind . We have an average of fifty to seventy thousand thoughts a day, most of which are repetitive in nature, and not conscious thinking, but rather under the control of the part of the mind that runs all the systems of the body that we don’t have to think about, often known as the ‘subconscious,’ ‘unconscious’ or ‘non-conscious’ mind.

Paradoxically, we are the creators of these running commentaries, and at the same time, the stories we fashion turn around to shape us and our lives in profound ways. 

Have you noticed persons who do scary things are scared themselves? In the movie series, “Star Wars,” Master Yoda observes this very human emotional response when he says, “Fear is the path to the dark side.”

It’s true.

Fear can take us in one of two directions.

Whereas low levels of fear can energize us to achieve our goals in healthy ways, not so when it comes to intense and prolonged levels of fear, which can negatively impact our health and choices.

It can be especially scary to us, as parents, when faced with having to deal with our children’s fears. When they behave in ways that challenge us, for example, lying, being defiant, hitting, etc., it can threaten our sense of efficacy. This can scare us.

Fathers, like mothers, are irreplaceable. They have a significant impact in the growth and emotional development of their children, daughters and sons alike.

Many fathers tend to underestimate the power of their love and support, encouragement and presence in the lives of their child or children. Often it is because they been conditioned to believe that a father’s value depends on being a superhero who fixes all problems, and sweeps away all heartache. For generations, however, these unfair expectations have kept fathers separated from – relationships – the heart of matters in the home.

In honor of Father’s Day, I’d like to share three poems today.

One of these honors the qualities of strength and security that are so essential to children, and another for the quality of fun and playfulness that is equally vital.

A third poem is honor of grandfathers, or, as one person put it, fathers who are just grand.

In the words of David M. Gottesman:

“Fathers, like mothers, are not born. Men grow into fathers – and fathering is a very important stage in their development.”

Hope you enjoy them, here they are: