Every family differs from another. Although your kids are comfortable with both parents but when it comes to serious instructions, they would still listens to either one of them more and are afraid of what that parent would do if they don’t follow the instructions. It would be a rare case of kids fearing both parents as either one of the parents would be stricter than the other one.
So, being fathers, there are always mistakes made and the first is being too ignorant towards your children’s daily life though you do ask from time to time what’s up with their day, but you never really look into them properly. Sometimes, you might catch yourself repeating the same questions that your children memorize them and answers the same every time. This isn’t right and its time to make a change and reconcile with your spouse about your kids situation and interact more with your kids.
Secondly, most fathers being busy with work would always think your spouse would handle the kids and you tend to ignore the obvious. At times, you might assume good grades means there are no other problems in your kid’s life or when they make mistakes, you tend to overprotect them and defend them that they are right or even under protect them and let them innocently receive the punishment which is unfair. If there’s any favoritism occurring in your family, start by eliminating that and fix things in your family. After all what’s the point of starting a family if it is not to take care of them besides earning for them?
Sometimes, being busy can put you in a situation where you’re too focused on your work that you may bring home work and complete them at home that you forgot about your family. Either way, you may also be too tired to spend some time with your family after work that you just doze off after shower. Now, this is very bad that you’re showing a bad example to your children by not being a good spouse and also father! Your children might start to have second thoughts on your love and attention towards them and your spouse may understand and is able to handle this for a short period of time but not long term. This isn’t healthy at all for any family.
Since you don’t have much time to waste, you basically would set too many expectations for your kids to achieve and some may turn out to be very unreasonable goals. If the results are not what of you expected, this may result in giving your kids a good lecture of their performance instead of advising them and spending time with them to rekindle your relationships so that you’re able to help them. However, if their results are always good, you may be spoiling them with too many material gifts.
Coming to gifts, you may be pampering them with expensive gifts which they would only build puppy love towards it. The next moment they would be expecting a new present without learning how to earn it as some fathers spend on gifts for their children as a token of being so busy and not being able to spend time with them. This is actually buying out of guilt and if you’re so busy make time and do any arrangements if you need to because without a family, there’s no point being so busy at all.
As a father, though mothers are naturally the ones who would take care of the kids, its also part of your responsibility to do so. Raising a family is not a one sided issue but both be it financially or in values.