Leave that boy alone!

It’s never an easy job for a father to raise his boys, but that difficulty can only be grasped by fathers who actually raise their boys. 
"Are you implying that there are fathers who have no clue about raising their males?" You ask,  "O yes, I am, and; I am not flinching." There are fathers who think that raising the kids is about paying the bills, sending the boy to school, ensuring that he doesn’t go naked by keeping clothes on his back and maintaining the roof over his head. Well those things are good; but they won’t raise your boy. You must do the raising. If you are a single parent, it makes the raising even more complicated because mothers have a strategic role to play in the raise. And when you keep telling the boy where you expect him to arrive at and never work with him with a well designed map on how to get there, you are not raising that child. You see, constantly, you point at the top of this imaginary ladder and continue to scream it into his ear, telling him that failure to get to that last horizontal member of that ladder would make him the worst child a parent could ever wish for. So, I ask, ‘do you expect him to jump to the top of that ladder?’  You reply, ‘no, I don’t’;  but your son is waiting for you to teach him how to steady himself on the floor, how to ensure that the ladder is well secured to avoid a fall and then, how to make the first, calculated first step onto the first horizontal member of that ladder. But his first teacher is missing in action – the one who should be his number one teacher expects him to be a master at things that the same teacher has never taught him!

When you visit your mistress, you continuously play with her son, you invent new plays, you persuade him to play with you even when he would have preferred to play with his peers. You do all that because you want that mistress to think that you would be a really good father if she gives her consent to marry you so that you can ask that "good for nothing wife" of yours for a divorce; ‘good for nothing’, according to you; although at one time, she was good for many things when you called her twice every day, wooing her to be your bride. But now, the last time you played with your own boy is some two years ago. This boy of 9, cannot understand why other dads can play football with their kids while his father frowns at him when he plays. If you always frown at that boy, you are not raising him; if you only smile at him, you are not raising him, if you frown more than you smile, you are not raising your son; if you smile more than you frown; you are raising him.
 

Stop expecting your boy to help complete the aspects of your childhood dreams that you could not attain – that boy is not you. ‘But he is my son’; yes, I know he is, but that does not make him you. 
"Are you telling me that I do not have the right to encourage my boy to imbibe my better qualities?" You query, ‘O yes, you do’, is my candid answer. But there is a world of difference between trying to help you son pick up your good qualities and trying to get him to live the life you could not live. It is your responsibility to guide that boy; and guiding, my friend, does not begin when he is a teenager. Guidance must begin when he is a toddler. If your boy’s biggest dream is to become exactly like you; bravo. If he dares to be positively different, let him be. The only time you should be concerned is: if in trying to be different, you notice him erring and moving away from good to bad. 

I give you a biblical example. Zechariah was a quintessential High Priest; he held one of the highest offices in ancient Israel, he was a celebrity - one of the few people who could enter into the Holy of Holies on behalf of the nation. His son, John the Baptist, would not even aspire to enter the outer court (there was the outer court, the inner court and the Holiest of all; in ascending order of magnitude and grace); he preferred, to stay in the wilderness, and in that wilderness where he was dressed in Carmel’s air as against his father’s excellent priestly apparel; ‘there went out to him, all Jerusalem and all Judea and the regions round about confessing their sins’. And what’s more?  Jesus, the Master, went there to meet John the Baptist; imagine that Zechariah had tried to get John to become a priest like Himself! You see, both father and son were celebrities, truly godly men, but yet plainly different. Zechariah played his bit: he raised his son to follow the true God, and then encouraged and allowed him to pursue his personal goals. 
Common, leave that boy alone!  Talk to your boy, talk with him, listen to him, play with him, teach him, tell him truths early, pray for him, discipline him, be his friend - his first best friend; be his mentor, don’t be his dictator; so please leave that boy alone – but now; keep that boy close to you!