Like Father, Not Like Son

An excerpt from "The Children We Left Behind," by Adam B. Coleman

Book excerpt

LIKE FATHER, NOT LIKE SON

An excerpt from The Children We Left Behind, by Adam B. Coleman

Adam B. Coleman

Editors’ note: Adam B. Coleman’s new book, The Children We Left Behind: How Western Culture Rationalizes Family Separation & Ignores the Pain of Child Neglect, is now available for purchase at Amazon or directly from WrongSpeak Publishing. Please enjoy the following excerpt, which appears in the book as Chapter 14.

We all have a choice as to how we conduct ourselves throughout our lives, and it astounds me when people fight this concept of being participants in our choices.

I’ve met adults who move about this world as if they just ended up where they were without any involvement in their outcome. As if one day they woke up covered in mistakes, denying they’re the designers of them.

We’ve allowed many of these irresponsible adults to play the game of plausible deniability with their own lives to avoid being accountable for their own detrimental results.

These adults become parents who teach their children the same irresponsibility, causing them to continue the cycle of parental failure for generations to come.

Children like me, who their fathers abandoned, have two choices: They can be like their father, or they can learn from his errors.

Because we don’t have a child-centric society that prioritizes the needs of children over the needs of adults, we forget what it was like for us as children.

The pain of being forgotten by your creator isn’t at the forefront of your mind when you’re in bed with someone who’d be a terrible parent to your future children.

Your lust for acknowledgment by someone who you’re attracted to is far more intoxicating than considering the potential outcome that this person of the moment may be attached to you forever through a child.

In that moment, did you not have a choice? Could you have chosen someone better to procreate with?

I know, I know: You were in love and weren’t “thinking.” Your emotions cloud your judgment, and you can’t control who you love, right?

These are the lies we adults tell ourselves so we can pretend we are slaves to our momentary desires and act as if we can’t help craving poisonous individuals.

We talk as if life happens to us and not the other way around. We are performative space cadets moving around an adult orbit with no say in where our gravitational pull will take us.

And when the mother or father finds their footing on planet Earth with a child in their arms, they’re suddenly shocked that the person they procreated with isn’t suitable to coexist within their new parental environment.

They’ll lament to their friends or rant on social media about how their child’s mother or father is trash, yet disregard their involvement in digging through the garbage to find them.

Who we decide (keyword is “decide”) to lay down with reflects our standards. We chose this person to be sexually vulnerable with for a reason. If you chose trash, it’s because you accepted trash into your life, believing it was the best you could attract.

When you hear this type of insult, your instinct should be to ask, “Why do you like trash so much? I mean, you picked them!”

This is one of many ways people avoid accountability: They blame their child’s other half when they had a hand in choosing them and creating this eternal connection.

When my son was born, I chose to break the cycle of abandonment that I lived through as a child. I was 21 years old and didn’t know exactly what it meant to be a man, nevertheless a good father.

But what I completely understood was what a lousy father looked like, and my father became an example of what I should avoid becoming.

At the bare minimum, I knew that a good father doesn’t abandon his children and leave them questioning if they are loved by the man who made them.

There were going to be areas where I fell short and struggled as a father, but one area that I never lacked was my presence and love for my son.

These were promises I made to myself in the hospital while holding my son for the first time. As a new father, your life completely changes, and what used to be important to you now takes a back seat to what this innocent child needs from you.

I was determined not to let abandonment become a family curse that passed from one generation to the next. It was an inhumane concept of having this pure child who I nestled in my arms to be inflicted with the same agony I endured.

After my son was born, I thought about those moments of rejection and my father’s absence when all the other boys around me had their fathers.

I recollected the feeling of rejection when my father was nowhere to be found when I was at my lowest point. The child inside of me couldn’t let me become the perpetrator of what I complained about my entire life.

I’ve experienced the affliction of realizing your father doesn’t prioritize his involvement in your life and comes across as a biological stranger who can’t even pretend to want to acknowledge you longer than a couple of days at a time.

I would have to be a monster to stare into the face of something incredibly helpless, like a newborn, and purposefully want to wound him with my neglect.

I was nervously in love with my son, wanting to give him something greater than what I possessed at that moment, but I was unsure if I could live up to what he deserved.

I had spent so many years fearing rejection from everyone I loved; part of me worried that my own creation would also reject me.

His mother named him Daniel and made his middle name a reflection of my first name. Namesake, blood, and unconditional love now bonded us.

But how was I to raise a boy to become a man when I didn’t know how to become one myself? Children look up to us, expecting us to have all the answers, but I was unsure if I would properly direct him onto the path of manhood.

I was spawned from a man who didn’t love me based on his actions or lack thereof, and I had become accustomed to not expressing my affection over the years.

There is something special about children. They have the magical ability to soften your hardened heart, turning it into mush when they smile at you and extend their tiny arms.

As abnormal as it may sound, my son was the first male I had consistently hugged. I don’t remember ever embracing my father, even on his rare visits.

With every warm embrace, we solidified our unbreakable bond, and when we were apart, I missed him like he was a part of me.

After my son was born, I became more empathetic and emotionally vulnerable. Since my son was born, and to this day, I can’t watch anyone cry in person or on television without wanting to cry along with them.

For a little while, I thought something was wrong with me when I would watch a heartfelt moment on television, and their sadness was transmitted to me, causing me to want to bawl my eyes out.

I would later discover that involved fathers experience hormonal changes and develop more estrogen, a natural preparation for caregiving.

Within the first six months of their child’s birth, men have elevated levels of oxytocin, which causes them to seek physical contact with their infants and feel emotionally closer to their child.

Our children, indeed, change us biologically. Daniel transformed me from a selfish young man who felt directionless in life to a father who welcomed sacrificing for the betterment of his offspring.

My son would become the first and only male I would ever fall in love with and willingly sacrifice my life for his safety.

It is an indescribable feeling to know for sure that even the risk of death is worth facing if it means giving your child even one day of prosperity.

I didn’t have a father to guide me towards a purpose in life, and I was aimless in my teenage years. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to be or how I should approach life in general.

But when my son opened his eyes to this new world, I knew my sole objective was to improve myself and my circumstances so my son could reap the rewards.

It meant acknowledging where I was faulty and attempting to improve myself so that one day, I could provide my son with the manual for success as a man.

While most parents are infatuated with the baby years, when their children are in their “cute” phase, I was excited for him to become a teenager.

When I shared my excitement about a teenage Daniel, people would often look at me in disbelief, unable to understand why. However, I knew precisely why they recoiled at the thought of the teenage years. The teenage years are when you start to see the results of your parenting from when they were infants. If you needlessly spoiled them when they were five, you can’t be surprised when, 10 years later, they have unrealistic expectations.

Many parents fear the teenage years because they fear facing the areas where they have failed to prepare their children for the world.

You don’t spoil a child because life is unpredictable. Creating a world where everything always goes as they want will only lead them to disappointment.

If you refuse to discipline your child when they are small, you can’t be shocked when they don’t listen to you, standing eye-to-eye with you.

It might appear cute when your toddler is sassy, but if you don’t correct that behavior, it will become a habitual response to your necessary authority.

Children don’t respect a parent who cares more about the path of least resistance and seeks friendship with their child. Do not misunderstand:

There is a difference between being a child’s parent and being their friend.

I have no authority over my friends, and when I devalue my natural status as a parent to be equal with my child, I’m teaching my child not to listen to my rules and demands for their benefit.

Being a parent is more profound than being a friend. Parenthood has more substance than relegating yourself to the fleeting status of friends. You have friends that come and go, but you should embrace the permanent status of a parent.

I always understood that I was raising a future adult and needed to prepare them for the world in the most age-appropriate way possible.

I was excited for him to reach his teenage years because then I could apply the wisdom he would use for the rest of his life.

I wanted to be the son who wasn’t like his father, so I provided Daniel with adequate knowledge and guidance to navigate this unforgiving world.

I knew what it felt like to be lost in my teenage years, unsure how to carry myself as a young man and lacking a male figure to emulate for my success.

Your hormones are constantly changing at that age. You’re trying to figure out who you are and where you fit into society. You’re too naïve to decipher if the people around you possess good intentions or if they’re pursuing malicious activities.

When I was a young man, people I thought were my friends and girls I was infatuated with considered my kindness a weakness and took advantage of my desperation to be loved.

It wasn’t a typical situation, but many people in my youth only associated with me because I could provide them with something other than friendship.

Without proper guidance, I walked right into their traps, and it hurt tremendously when I realized that I was only a pawn in their manipulative game.

Similarly, I didn’t want to give Daniel the false impression that these people don’t exist in our world or remove any obstacles for him to climb through.

It’s a delicate balance between preventing our children from experiencing unnecessary harm and having them go through the coals, knowing that their burns will be temporary. Still, their memory of the heat will never fade.

I knew multiple times that my son’s outcome wouldn’t be positive, but I wanted him to experience it firsthand and learn for himself.

My job isn’t always to keep him safe. Sometimes, I introduce him to harm that I know he can overcome. This is how we teach them to be resilient.

But the difference between Daniel going through his first break up and me going through my first break up was that he had a father who told him it was okay and that there was nothing abnormal about experiencing his depressive emotions.

Daniel had a father who saw the sadness on his face created by heartbreak and would talk to him until his frown disappeared.

We overlook how important it is for young men to know that how they’re feeling isn’t abnormal and that there isn’t anything wrong with them for how they feel.

You can’t replace a man who empathizes with your momentary trauma while simultaneously rebuilding your self-esteem so you feel confident enough to attempt it again.

I knew that it was imperative not to let him go down that dark wilderness of deep depression by falsely concluding there was something inherently defective about him when faced with rejection.

A good father helps to save his child from themselves, and I wish I had a father who could have freed me from those mental traps when I was growing up.

I didn’t have all the answers; I still don’t, and the truth is, no one does. But I believe the difference between a good parent and a bad parent is a good parent fears being a bad one, while a bad parent doesn’t give their actions a second thought.

I’ve seen parents fixate on trivial situations involving their children and immediately label themselves bad parents when they accidentally get it wrong. However, the fact that they are trying their best and are mindful of their approach to their children makes them good parents.

The ultimate measure of whether you are a good or bad parent is your child. Do they show genuine respect and appreciation through their behavior?

Our kids are hesitant to be honest with us and may not always verbalize where we fall short, but you can see the culmination of your efforts in how they handle what life has thrown at them as they grow.

A routinely disrespectful teenager wasn’t created overnight; they’re a human manifestation of repeated parental shortcomings.

In our accountability-deficient society, parents avoid seeing their reflection in their child when it’s ugly. They often refuse to take ownership of their participation in raising such an ambivalent monster, as if their child was raised by wolves in the wild instead of inside their house.

Parents recoil when you dare tell them that if their child is a menace, it’s because they failed them, but they will accept all the platitudes if their child is angelic and successful.

Call me an extremist, but I don’t think there are good children or bad children; there are only good parents and bad parents. Minus some horrible external incident that traumatizes your child, you’re partly responsible for the men and women they become.

They are born naïve and require years of training to learn how to become a healthy and functional member of society. The idea of blaming a child who knows no better over the adult who does sounds incredibly insane to me.

Your children are like information sponges, watching your every move, copying your mannerisms, and implementing your stress responses.

You can’t blame them if they behave atrociously when they’ve been staring at you for years.

We don’t even see it from the child’s perspective, either.

Imagine growing up in a home where your parents act in a particular way. You naturally take on how they behave or respond to how they treat you like they would, but then the adults say you’re the one with the problem.

If your child is ambivalent, rude, and generally unpleasant to be around, maybe they got it from you. It’s possible they’ve been watching you for years, have adopted your lessons by example, and now you see yourself in them.

Or maybe you’re not a terrible person, but you enable awful behavior. When they tested you at a young age, which is quite typical for a child, you caved and repeatedly gave them leniency over discipline.

If my son grew up to be a menace to society, choosing to steal from mankind and inflict pain against anyone who stands in his way, I would concede that I failed him as a parent.

Yes, as an adult, he would be directly responsible for his actions and receive adequate punishment by law enforcement and greater society.

However, I’m the one who was supposed to tirelessly teach him a solid moral framework, rewarding him when he exemplified the good and admonishing him when he teetered into the bad.

When my son was young, around four or five, he pushed a random girl at Chuck-E-Cheese because he was upset. We didn’t give him a pass and chalk it up to “kids being kids.”

We made him immediately apologize and scolded him to correct his behavior, so he understood early on in life that it is immoral to harm other people just because you’re upset or didn’t get what you wanted.

Yes, he was sad because he felt he had disappointed us—and he had. You can only disappoint someone who has high expectations for you, and it’s evident that many parents expect very little from the child they’re raising.

Sometimes, you must tell children something 10 times before they completely understand the consequences of not listening to your warnings.

And children will test you repeatedly. But you, as the adult in the room, aren’t supposed to succumb to the fatigue of being repetitious with your discipline for your child.

They require consistency, which means you can’t pick and choose when you want to act like a parent.

It should be your honor and duty to correct them immediately or risk raising a future adult who fails to abide by the rules of engagement in the adult world because you were either too lazy or scared to act as an enforcer within your household.

Children can also sense when you’re not fully committed to your word, and they’ll take your weakness as a sign that you’re a movable object that will reposition itself when faced with pushback from a child.

Weak parents are as strong as a bridge with brittle pillars, and no one feels safe trusting their lives depending on such a dilapidated structure.

You must exert loving strength in your words for your child’s benefit, or else a man or woman with a badge or gavel will do it for you.

Early on, I learned from my son that if I communicated with him more and practiced assertive discipline, he would respect me even more for how I treated him.

If I told him “No,” he knew I meant it and didn’t pester me to try to change my mind. That pestering is a test of will; if you cave, you lose.

However, I would later explain to him why I was so assertive with my decision.

Too many parents negotiate with their children when you’re supposed to be a leader who dictates the trajectory of their family. These parents fear giving directions to children who require it and often place them on a pedestal, acting as if their word is of equal strength as yours.

In a work environment, would you trust the knowledge of someone with a couple of years of experience over someone with two decades of experience? It’s unlikely.

So why would you ask a two-year-old to join the negotiating table over what they should eat, where they should go, and how you should parent?

By all means, talk to your child and hear what they have to say. But don’t treat them as autonomous individuals who get to decide every facet of their lives when they lack experience and can’t fully comprehend the consequences of exercising the role of decision-maker.

When you do this, you burden your child with a job they are unprepared for and should never have been assigned to. If I had left things up to my son, he would have eaten a pound of macaroni and cheese daily and wouldn’t have realized why his stomach constantly hurt.

You can only know your child if you invest your time in them, and my father didn’t do that with me. I was treated with the care and frequency of a timeshare property instead of the attention that goes into a permanent residence.

I learned early on that the sins of my father do not determine my approach to being a father, and just because I wasn’t loved doesn’t mean I must neglect expressing it with my son.

Now, my son is in his early adult years, using the lessons and wisdom I bestowed to conquer the world confronting him.

It took me a long time to realize how much joy my father missed out on. The joy of teaching a child and watching them put it into practice. That feeling of having your child hug you with no strings attached.

My father never got to take pride in what I’ve become as I do with my son. Beyond being disappointed in my father, I feel sad for him, too.

I would not be the man I am today if it weren’t for learning the lessons of my father’s shortcomings and the birth of my son. I feel incredibly blessed to be his father, and there is no dollar amount or selfish desire for which I would trade my status as a loving father.

Nothing I’ve ever purchased has brought me as much joy as watching my son grow into an even greater man than I am today.

He is the better version of me, someone I’m immensely proud of, and I know that the world is better with him in it.

I have always taken risks, sacrificed, and made mistakes to improve my son’s circumstances.

I know one day, Daniel will read this chapter. My message to him is this:

I’ve always loved you. The moment I held you for the first time, I knew nothing else mattered except to make sure I protected you from the generational curse of abandonment.

I have never heard my father say, “I’m proud of you,” so I am attempting to say these words to you and show them to you through my actions.

Some fathers never get to fully express their love to their children and understand the work it takes to protect their children from adult matters.

Life wasn’t easy, but it was worth going through because you mattered more than my comfort. With all the complicated and unfortunate situations I went through while you were growing up, I’d do it all again because it was the necessary journey to create the man you are today.

No matter what you experience, I will always be beside you to help and guide you. You’ll face unfair situations, and what you want will not always come to fruition. This is life.

But understand that I will always be there for you in both the good and bad times of your life.

I want you to understand that if I can endure everything I’ve faced and still be resilient, you can, too. I’ll forever be proud of you.

– Your Father

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Adam B. Coleman’s The Children We Left Behind: How Western Culture Rationalizes Family Separation & Ignores the Pain of Child Neglect is available for purchase at Amazon or directly from WrongSpeak Publishing.

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Adam B. Coleman is the founder of WrongSpeak Publishing. He was born in Detroit and raised in a variety of states throughout America. He writes openly about his personal struggles with fatherlessness, homelessness and masculinity. He advocates for the right of all to speak freely and is attempting to change the narrative and the way we discuss narratives by being honest, humble, and resolute. His book, Black Victim To Black Victor: Identifying the ideologies, behavioral patterns and cultural norms that encourage a victimhood complex, appeared in 2021.

Adam’s essay “Black Intellectuals Are Black America's Conspiracy Theorists” was published in the Journal of Free Black Thought and he has appeared on the Free Black Thought Podcast in an episode titled “Victor Not Victim.”

Adam maintains a Substack, Speaking Wrong at the Right Time. Follow him on X: @wrong_speak.