Father's Day

Father's Day is a good day for reflecting on what it's all about, and one important aspect is teaching. We teach our kids all the time, from the ABC's to what's right and wrong. But no one knows everything.

The Washington Post yesterday had an article entitled
Father Knows Best?. It's all about how dads, instead to asking someone, make up answers when their kid asks them something they don't know (in this case, things about airplanes and rockets). (Probably this is related to the stereotype of men who won't stop and ask for directions.)

That reminded me of one of my all-time favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips: Calvin and his parents are in the car and drive over a small bridge with one of those truck weight limit signs next to it, and Calvin asks how they know what the weight limit should be. His dad goes into a long explanation of how they drive an empty truck over the bridge, and then add more weight and drive it over the bridge again, and keep doing that until the bridge breaks; then they re-build the bridge! Calvin's fine with that, but his mom says to his dad, "If you don't know the answer, just say so!"

More seriously though, being a good father and teacher means knowing when to look up something you don't know (and teaching your kid to do so - remember the encyclopedias we had as kids?).

Of course, the most important thing that we can teach our children is that God created everything and that He loves us as a father. And if there's something we don't know, there are places to look it up and people to ask - we can't just make it up.