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Home › Articles › Fatherhood › Daddy Play With Me!

Daddy Play With Me!

An Excerpt from the book Hidden Messages: What Our Words and Actions are Really Telling Our Children (McGraw-Hill, 2000)

By Elizabeth Pantley

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After letting his wife know where he's bound, he leans down to plant kisses on his daughter's soft cheeks. "Be right back, punkin'," he says. And he leaves too quickly to notice the silent tears that begin to run down those same cheeks so hastily kissed, soft cheeks that are soon buried in pillows. When Jeff returns, she is asleep, dreaming of moving out and becoming a neighbor who could ring the doorbell, call Daddy on the phone, and send e-mails to him.

The Hidden Message
"You are not as important to me as the mail, the messages, the dinner, the phone call or the neighbor. I love you, but I'm too busy for you – and there's always later, there's always tomorrow."

Think About It
Children perceive time, and what we do with it, differently from the way adults do. By about age 30, we adults barely notice the passing of mere seconds. In the currency of time, they're pennies, hardly able to buy anything of value. For little ones, however, every moment is weighty with possibility and so passes heavily and slowly. Consider, for instance, the evening we just witnessed – it passed particularly slowly for the little girl but blew past the man who is her father.

Seconds become minutes, of course, and minutes become hours. Almost imperceptibly, hours become decades. One day, Jeff may indeed turn around to play with his little girl, only to find a young woman too busy tending her own life to notice – after all, she has learned by his example. What a common tragedy! Ask any parent of grown children, and he or she invariably will attest to how fast it all goes. As the popular maxim forewarns: One comment you'll never hear on a person's deathbed is "I wish I'd have put in more overtime." Instead, we all know the final plea is for more time with those whose love fills and sustains us. The hard truth is that we have only a relatively small sliver of time in which to give our children the gifts of our experience, patience, wisdom and heart.


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