You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

215. the disenfranchised dad
===

[00:00:00] You must be some kind of therapist.

I've been busier than ever with my ROGD parent coaching work. I'm so busy that I haven't had time to schedule as many podcast guests as usual. So to fill in those gaps, I'm going to be doing a series of shorter solo episodes, each focused on a particular theme that comes up in my coaching work. For each of these, I've scripted a draft that I'll be reading from.

Please bear with me as this isn't my usual style, but it's something that I hope will be useful to a lot of people, as well as manageable for me as I'm juggling maintaining a weekly podcast with a full schedule of coaching clients, plus running ROGD Repair and Repair Bot. So I want to talk today about a particular kind of father I see often enough in this work that I've started to refer to him as the disenfranchised dad.

The dad I want to spend time on today shows up in a significant [00:01:00] minority of the families I advise. He is usually a decent man. He works hard and provides for his family. He loves his kids in a way that he doesn't always know how to express. He's opinionated about a lot of things, sometimes with pretty strong opinions about how the household should run and what the kids should be doing differently.

And he is, in the family system he is supposedly the head of, sidelined. He is not the person his kids go to when they're upset, and he's not the person his wife talks to when she's worried about them. He's not the one who knows what the kids are doing on their phones, or who their friends are, or what they're reading, or what they're watching.

He is on the outside of the emotional life of his own family looking in. And what hurts about this dynamic is that from his position on the outside, he tends to criticize. He notices the kids slouching at the table, or that his wife is too easy on the kids about screen time, [00:02:00] or that they're not eating properly.

And he points these things out intending to be helpful, doing what he thinks a dad is supposed to do. But the family doesn't experience him pointing these things out as the loving correction of an involved father. They experience it as the cranky drive-by of a man who isn't really in the room with them otherwise.

So his wife rolls her eyes, the kids smirk at each other, and over time he becomes, in the family's internal mythology, kind of a joke or a problem, the thing that the family manages around. And he doesn't realize that this is what's happened, because from where he sits, he's just trying to be the dad, and it should be obvious to everyone how much he loves them and is trying to help.

So how does this happen? I don't think it happens because he's a bad guy. It happens for a few reasons that weave together over the years, and I wanna take them one at a time. [00:03:00] So the first one has to do with temperament. A lot of these dads end up with a son or daughter who is sensitive in ways that he never was.

I am specifically talking to my Gen X dads here. You know, the ones who drank from a hose and rode their bikes until the sun sets, and your parents never knew where you were? Yeah, you guys. Your kid is more anxious, more bookish, more sheltered. Perhaps they grew up with a helicopter mom, your loving wife.

Uh, perhaps they cry more easily. Perhaps you have a son who doesn't like roughhousing, or perhaps your child is on the autism spectrum. And as a Gen X dad, you don't really know what to do with this kid because the way that you were fathered and the way that you understand what it means to be a father does not connect very easily to what this particular child needs.

It may even bring up values conflicts because you might believe, as I do, that kids would benefit from having a thicker [00:04:00] skin. But there's a temperament mismatch that needs to be dealt with here, and this mismatch, when it goes unacknowledged, produces a kind of confused withdrawal in the father. He tends to hand over the kid to mom because he doesn't know what to do with her, sometimes even from a young age.

And then there develops this pattern of mom as emotional center, dad as distant figure on the edge, and it gets locked in. And then it just goes on for years and years until the problem compounds. Trans enters the picture, and the family finds themselves consulting with me. Now let's pause here to talk about that moment that the family comes to me.

I think of trans as a mind virus that infects those with the particular vulnerabilities and their psychological immune systems to let that particular virus in. It's very well-engineered to exploit certain vulnerabilities. My job when I'm working with the family in front of me is [00:05:00] to understand how that affected this particular family, this particular child.

What are the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in this child's psychological immune system and in the psychological immune system of the family where this particular problem got in? And that does involve looking at interpersonal and intrapsychic factors. In other words, the psyche of the individual, their social environment, of course their social influences through peers, social media, devices, and so on, the cultural messaging.

Of course, all of those things, but also the specifics of the family dynamics. And so oftentimes as we're unpacking those family dynamics, this is one of the dynamics that might show up, and we might notice the connection between the child's Difficulty receiving love from their father and the father's difficulty parenting that child with the child's cross-sex identity.

This could be a boy who rejects his male role model [00:06:00] or has come to associate his father's masculine characteristics with something toxic. It could also be a girl who's not receiving her father's protective love in the spirit in which it's intended. So we might also need to look here at what's happening in the marriage.

A lot of the moms that I work with are more verbally fluent than their husbands, more emotionally intelligent, more comfortable in the realm of feelings and dynamics and inner lives. And what can happen there is that the mom takes over the emotional running of the family. She becomes the curator of the kids' inner lives.

She manages their appointments. She knows the friend dynamics, manages school drama, and is the one that they turn to with their emotions. She takes on more and more of that role. Dad gets less and less central until at some point, he's commenting on dinner from the periphery of his own family. And [00:07:00] Mom, without quite realizing it, has trained the kids to bring everything to her.

At its most extreme end, this may result in the kids saying that they don't feel so-called safe to bring an issue to their father, even when there's zero history of abuse and no real reason to feel in any way physically unsafe with their father. This, of course, is affected by cultural messaging around notions of emotional safety, but it does have to do with the family dynamics as well.

So the other component here is cultural. We've been living for two or three decades now in a moment where fatherhood has become sort of a punchline. Dads get portrayed in commercials and sitcoms and family movies as bumbling, out of touch, the butt of the joke. Mom is the competent one, and the kids roll their eyes at Dad.

That is the script that a lot of these dads grew up watching themselves. Anyone remember '90s sitcoms? A lot of these dads have in part internalized it. They don't really believe their own authority. They [00:08:00] don't really believe their own importance to their family. They participate half-consciously in their own disenfranchisement.

The culture they grew up in told them that this is what dads now are. Some of these men have been very influenced by feminist messages to the point of undervaluing their own role. But then their masculine desire to influence their family ends up coming out sideways. It doesn't ever go away because a father wants to love and protect, serve his family.

He wants to guide his children in a meaningful way. But if his own feminist values are so pronounced that he undervalues his role as a father Sometimes paradoxically, that desire for influence can come out sideways and land worse. So let's talk about what the disenfranchisement of the father does to the child.

I firmly and unapologetically believe that every kid needs a father. It's not a, an interchangeable role, a second [00:09:00] parent who just happens to be male. A kid needs a dad in the particular role that a father plays in a child's development. In healthy development, the father is the figure who helps the child move out of the fused, all-protective world of mother and into the larger world.

The father helps with the transition from an environment where you are unconditionally loved and accepted just as you are, and a world that's going to demand more from you, and sometimes be punishing and unforgiving. The father is the bridge between home and world, between fantasy and reality. The father plays an essential role in coming of age in an ideal family.

He represents reality and structure, and the world that the child has to grow into. When he's doing his job well, he gives the child a felt sense that the world is a place she can grow into, that she has someone behind her who believes she can handle it, and [00:10:00] who will make sure that she has the skills she needs to succeed.

Without that involved father, or with a father who's in the room but functionally not involved, that piece of development gets much harder. The child stays enmeshed with mother. The child has more difficulty separating and individuating, going out into the world, believing in themselves, standing up for themselves in healthy ways, trying new things, taking on risks, and coping with failure.

The kind of kid I often see in this work is sensitive, gifted, a little developmentally lopsided, sometimes autistic. That kid has difficulty that can show up in a lot of different ways, including the way that she relates to her own body and her sex, or her body and her sex become the scapegoat, aided of course by cultural narratives.

For the boys who end up identifying as girls, the dad piece tends to be especially charged. The boy often has a temperament that [00:11:00] does not map well onto his father's. Dad doesn't know how to bond with him. The boy drifts further and further from masculinity as a category, and at some point during adolescence or young adulthood, he looks at masculinity as if from the outside and thinks that he can opt out.

He says, "No thanks. I don't want any part of that." And the trans identity, when it shows up, becomes a way of declaring permanently, with the help of the medical establishment, that he is not going to participate in becoming a man. And this is a pattern I see often in this population, and it is usually interwoven with a strained father relationship So that's what I see in cases where there's a temperament mismatch between father and son, or in cases where the son does have some reason to reject the father, because I also work with single moms who are divorced from dads who were abusive, who had mental health problems, perhaps a personality disorder, [00:12:00] perhaps a criminal record, perhaps a history of alcohol abuse.

That's what it looks like at the extreme when the son rejects the association he has between fatherhood, masculinity, and toxicity. But that's not what I'm talking about primarily in this episode. I'm talking primarily about the boys who are simply more sensitive, less sporty, less competitive, less rough and tumble than their fathers.

Another profile of boys with a disconnect with their fathers are the ones where the boy sees himself in his father in a way that's too painful to admit. So these are the boys who do have strong, aggressive, or competitive drives, but who have unfortunately grown up in a culture where they felt like there wasn't a place for them.

Perhaps they were shamed, for instance, for being a so-called privileged cishet white male, and they learned because of the current narratives around social justice that it's bad and wrong to aggre- to express your aggressive and competitive drives [00:13:00] as a male with all that so-called privilege. So these boys often actually have a temperament mirror with their father.

They might be a lot like him. They might even look a lot like him. And what I've noticed in these boys is that when they reject their sex and claim to be female, they are especially aggressive, which is quite ironic. These dads who resemble their kids sometimes have the most heartache of any fathers that I've seen.

They really see their son in themselves and struggle so much to know how to help. For the girls who end up identifying as boys, the dad piece looks different, but it can be central, too. Often, these girls had a dad they admired, maybe even idolized, but who was emotionally unavailable or who left in the divorce and faded into a Disneyland dad version of himself on weekends, or who never quite figured out how to be present with a daughter.

Or these dads may remain happily [00:14:00] married to the girl's mother but not know how to handle adolescence and puberty. Maybe the dad even has such strong feminist values that he tried to raise his daughter in a way that was so similar to how he would raise a son that he ended up Being a little too rough and tumble with her, showing her that he overvalues those traits, and missing out on giving her the type of protective love a father has for a daughter that shows her that to be female is a very special and valuable and cherished thing in his eyes.

The dads who make this mistake do it with the best of intentions. They want to raise a strong, powerful, confident young woman, and what they end up with instead is a girl who thinks that it's better to be masculine than feminine. Sometimes when we dig under the surface, a few of these dads, by no means all of them, do in fact prefer masculine over feminine qualities and have shown their daughter [00:15:00] that they're not particularly interested in the more feminine side of her personality.

But that's in a minority of cases. In these girls, the trans identity often carries underneath a longing for a father that nobody is reading correctly. She doesn't make it at all clear that she wants to be treated like a little princess, but there is a part of her that is looking to him to show her how to be a young woman in relationship to a loving, present father figure.

So let's talk about what repair can look like for the disenfranchised dad.

I'm not bringing this up today to trigger f- further despair. I'm actually bringing it up to inspire hope because there's so much that these fathers can do. When the dad reenters the picture and changes how he's showing up, it changes the whole family more than anyone expected. Relationships get stronger through rupture and repair, [00:16:00] just the way muscles do.

You tear a muscle when you work out. The muscle rebuilds itself stronger. Relationships are the same way. The dad who's been on the edge of his family for years has a relationship with his kid that's been ruptured a thousand small times. Every cutting comment, every missed bedtime, every time he wasn't the so-called safe one.

The repair work is not about having one big conversation. It's about lots of small ones, lots of moments that are fairly unremarkable in their subtlety. Lots of times that the dad chooses not to correct his kid's behavior and instead asks about their interests, or simply spends time side by side with them, learning more about their worlds.

So one thing I am sometimes in a position to tell these fathers is that the move they fantasize about making is not necessarily the move that they need to make. Some of these dads imagine a big sit-down conversation, some grand [00:17:00] reset or explanation of their love for the kid or clarification of their motives.

That's often not the right way to go here What the kids respond to is presence in small and persistent ways that don't necessarily make themselves known, just showing up day after day, being in the same room at the same time as the kid, being side by side, stepping into their world, looking at something with them before asking them to put it away.

These moments of micro connection become a daily practice, and you see the change build up over time. It's important during this phase to suspend the habit of critiquing, not necessarily forever, but for longer than you think. Just put the running commentary down. Right now, your relationship can't afford it.

Yes, if you were in the healthy place that you want to be, then those comments could be received in the spirit in which they're intended. [00:18:00] But what you might have to accept is that that's not where the relationship is at right now. Over the years, your kid may have internalized that the father's voice is the voice of correction, and the kid does not have a relationship with him outside of that, and the correction is not always welcome.

If you want a relationship with your kid that isn't organized around correction, you have to build that, and you can't build it by correcting more. Another important piece to remember when we're talking about correction is autonomy. The most valuable correction is the one that we ask for. We don't ask for correction or guidance until we have struggled with a problem enough to realize we need help, and we recognize that the person we're turning to for help is someone who's appropriate, not only safe, but also knowledgeable enough to ask for help on that matter.

That's the kind of relationship that you should be aspiring to have with your kids during adolescence and early adulthood. Not the one where you're giving them unsolicited feedback, but the one [00:19:00] where they are struggling with their own problems, discovering areas where they need help, recognizing you as a source of wisdom and guidance on that issue, and asking you.

That's the perfect moment, and moms can help with this. Sometimes moms can build a bridge. For example, if the mom is the one that the kids are always turning to for advice, and some of the subjects that kids are asking for advice on are actually things that the dad knows a lot about, that's a perfect opportunity for mom to say, "You know, your father's really good at that.

You should ask him." When your kid turns to asking for advice, it's important to take that opportunity not to deliver it in a way that could land as critical, but to make sure that the net result of your actions is that the kid walks away feeling as if they're glad they asked for your help. So another thing for moms is that you can make room for dad in your family, or you can keep filling the space yourself.

When we encounter this [00:20:00] pattern in parent coaching, a lot of moms have a moment where they recognize that they have been the gatekeeper It's not been conscious or malicious, but functionally, they have been sort of managing Dad's relationship with the kids, editing his input. Unconsciously, they have been protecting the kids from his roughness, which contributes to framing masculinity as toxic for them subconsciously.

She's been protecting the father from the kids' feelings, and vice versa. The price of all that gatekeeping is Mom is emotionally exhausted, and the kids don't have direct access to their father and full knowledge of his love for them. So sometimes the most important move a mom can make in this work is to step back and let the dad and kid figure something out together without her in the middle of it, even if they do it poorly a few times.

Part of the reason that I take this work so seriously of repairing relationships between fathers and [00:21:00] children is because I've been on both sides of it. I grew up as a daughter who did not have a father, and as a woman who married a divorced dad, I've watched up close at home what it looks like when a father is in the room and is doing the work of being a present and loving father figure.

A good dad is not replaceable. He's a particular kind of presence in a child's life. When that presence is missing or sidelined or treated as expendable, the child grows up with a hole inside, even if she doesn't have language for it. The kids that I get to know through my work with their parents, that is the trans-identified adolescents and young adults whose parents come to me at their most desperate moment, are often missing the strength and love of a supportive father figure.

If you are a dad listening to this and you've been on the periphery of your family for years, I want to leave you with this. You can start offering that presence that's been missing [00:22:00] this week. Your kid needs you, even if everything they've said for the past three years suggests otherwise. So come back into the picture, Dad.

The way back is hundreds of small steps Little moments where you decide on purpose to be in the same room as your kid, even when she might act like she wishes you weren't there. Your trans-identified kid won't listen to reason because reason isn't what they need right now. They need a parent who knows how to communicate in an empathic yet strategic manner.

ROGD Repair gives you over 120 lessons in the psychology and communication tools that actually work when normal parenting doesn't. Plus Repair Bot, your 24-7 AI coach trained on my entire body of work, ready to help you navigate tough moments in real time. Visit ROGDRepair.com and use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take half off your first month.[00:23:00]

Thank you for listening to You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist. If you enjoyed this episode, kindly take a moment to rate, review, share, or comment on it using your platform of choice. And of course, please remember, podcasts are not therapy and I'm not your therapist. Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for this awesome theme song, Half Awake, and to Pods by Nick for production.

For help navigating the impact of the gender craze on your family, be sure to check out my program for parents, ROGD Repair. Any resource you heard mentioned on this show, plus how to get in touch with me, can all be found in the notes and links below. Rain or shine, I hope you will step outside to breathe the air today.

In the words of Max Ehrmann, with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful [00:24:00] world.