It's 12:43 AM. Do you know where your father is?

The older I get, the more I realize how normal my family is. I might even go so far as to say we're abnormally normal, but that'd just be intentionally confusing. Still, sometimes I feel a little bad about just how stable and supportive my home life has been.

A lot of it, I think, is thanks to my father. The stereotypical breadwinner-dad tends to run the risk of being disengaged from his children's lives, but even though my mom stayed home to raise us, Dad was always a part of my life. I probably didn't appreciate it back then, but no matter how tired he was from working long hours, he would always have time to play catch with me or chase me around in the backyard or just sit down and let me tell him about my day.

When I was a kid, my dad was the smartest person in the world. It didn't matter what I asked him, he knew the answer, and could explain it in a way that made sense, but still somehow left me with even more questions. He always encouraged me to learn as much as I could.

One time, we were hanging the laundry up in the backyard, and I was complaining about my 3rd grade geometery. Curves were a problem, you see, because I couldn't just count up the number of boxes inside them like I could with rectangles. He smiled and said I'd have to learn calculus before I could find the area under a curve. I asked if he needed calculus for his job, and he said he did, all the time. So of course, I immediately asked him to teach me calculus.

He chuckled, and told me I'd need to learn algebra first. But for some reason, that flipped a switch in me. "Calculus," "algebra," very foreign terms, but suddenly I wanted to know as much about them as I could. In fact, that was probably the moment when I stopped thinking of school as something I had to do between breakfast and playtime and started thinking of it as something that was making me more like my dad. Making me a better person.

Psycologically, the 'ideal' caregiver for a developing child is one who is responsive to the child's needs and interests while still providing firm guidelines of appropriate behavior. This falls somewhere between two extremes: the permissive parent who lets their child get away with anything and immediately gives in to any request, and the dictatorial parent who decides every aspect of the child's life themselves.

And that's the way my dad was. He always let me make my own mistakes, but if I asked for advice he would always give me his honest opinion. When I messed up, he never got angry, but he did get disappointed, and in some ways that was worse for me. Most importantly, I always knew (still know, now) my father loved me completely, and no matter what I did I wouldn't change that.

I'm probably biased, but I can't think of a better way to be raised, and if I ever have kids, I hope I'll be half as good a father to them as my dad was to me. I was planning to go into a big discussion of developmental psychology and Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg, but honestly I'm not sure any of that stuff can help me explain it any better than I already have.

Anyway, it's Father's Day. Go give your responsible-male-guardian a hug.

Next Time: Probably nothing, since it's Elisa's birthday party. But I'll owe you one.