Chronicling life as a new father to his beautiful firstborn child – daughter Thea – Chris Kerr’s goal is to provide all men experiencing fatherhood for the first time with some invaluable tips and tricks as they are learned – the hard way. This week – Chris talks about the overwhelming desire dads feel to protect their children, and how to strike the right balance.
Everything and everyone is a threat. That is what my brain tells me whenever I take Thea out of the house. If you looked at me pushing the pram, you would think I was Head of the Secret Service tasked with guarding King Charles himself. I see everything. The man with his hood up walking towards us. The car that is going 1mph above the 20mph speed limit. The pigeon who waddles a little too close to the pram. Even you, sweet old lady who just wants a little look. Please back off behind the imaginary 10-metre radius of safety until someone swabs you and confirms you are virus-free.
Until Thea was born, I was a very relaxed, chilled out kind of guy when walking around. I couldn’t care less what was going on around me, but in the weeks since she was born, I have given hundreds of people a stern look to warn them not to get too close. I have shaken my head disapprovingly at grown adults who ride scooters around us. I even walked up to a car stopped at traffic lights, got them to roll down their window and duly had a go at them for revving their car too loudly and scaring Thea. Who is this warrior – and what has he done with the old me?
The answer to that question is explained nicely by science. In the book, The Male Brain, the author Louann Brizendine sets out countless studies that show the protective instinct is actually the result of subtle hormonal changes that occur in the months before and after the arrival of our newborn child. These changes, coupled with the immense sense of love and responsibility we dads feel towards our son or daughter, leads to a stronger desire and ability to defend our families from threats like dinosaurs, tigers, and space-invading grandmas.
Whilst this protective instinct is the norm for fathers, it is very important that you and I control it and not the other way around. The desire to protect is, in part, fuelled by a fear that something bad could happen to your little one without you. A small dose of fear is good – it heightens awareness and your reactions, but if fear is more overwhelming than that, it can be detrimental. You will know that the scales have tipped towards that latter if you feel so overwhelmed about going out with your baby, you avoid going out at all, or you are too easily angered or overreact to perceived threats, a bit like I did in the examples above!
If this describes your situation, let me reassure you that you are not the only one and there is always a reason for it. More common causes include the overwhelming feeling of being responsible for someone so fragile in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (vuca) world and past experiences like the sudden death of people we loved, sometimes before there time, which make loss feel like a real possibility rather than something that just happens to other people. For me, it was the latter – and I realised as such when I caught myself saying, “I love Thea so much, it hurts.” What made it hurt? The worry that I could lose her.
The good thing is, once we realise what is driving us, we can do things to get our protective instincts working for us again. We can take a breath, bypass our emotions and tap into the logical part of our brains which tell us that we don’t need to be 007 to keep our daughter safe. We just need to be adults. Well, at least until they grow into teenagers, anyway.
Tip of the week: Looking after a little one is a 24/7 role. What are you doing to look after yourself too?
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