Beware the Devouring Father

I have encountered the Devouring Father within me.

He’s been a shadow for a long time, flitting here and there, sometimes growing long in the dark winter days of early fatherhood, but never a permanent fixture. However I met him face to face two years ago, when, while I was working and Hannah was cooking, our children were playing out front.

My six year old son Benjamin was riding his scooter in front of our garage, when a man pulled his car up partially into our driveway. He beckoned to Benjamin to come over, and said he was a friend. Benjamin walked over slowly, and the man gestured at Ben to come closer, to get into the car. Ben was close enough to open the door at this point, listening to the man say kind things about friendship. Moments later Benjamin’s older brother Henry came over and started to pull Benjamin back away from the car and back into their game, and at that moment the man drove away.

Our neighbor (God bless her), had noticed and saw the whole encounter from her kitchen window. The actions and attitude of the man were so forward and disturbing that she called the police as she jumped into her own car, and followed him through the neighborhood until she was sure he wasn’t going to loop back around.

At that same time our boys came into the house and Benjamin told us of a “new friend” he made outside. The details were fuzzy, but it was enough to raise red flags in both Hannah and myself. It was around this time we got a call from our neighbor and she filled us in.

The police ran the plate numbers and found nothing suspicious in the person’s record, and assigned a patrol around the neighborhood. Outside of that there was nothing else we could do.

During this brief afternoon crisis I had my mind flooded with all the things that could have gone wrong.

Ben could have be pulled into the car, could have disappeared forever. He could have been trafficked, killed, abused. My fears and my imagination on the “what could have been” ran rampant, and my shadow grew larger and solidified right before me. And you know what? He didn’t look like the terrifying monster found in the depiction of the god Saturn below:

The Devouring Father I was staring at was kind. The Devouring Father in front of me was terrified on behalf of his children, and thus ready to consume them before anyone else could. As funny as it seems, the Devouring Father looked more like Marlin the clownfish from the Pixar movie “Finding Nemo” than any other depiction of threatening or dangerous monsters.

It was a stream of conscious thoughts:

I need more guns.

No more unsupervised play outside.

We need cameras everywhere.

We need to move to a safer neighborhood.

Benjamin will never be alone again. None of our kids will.

I need more surveillance. More control. More power over their lives.

I became the Devouring Father for a few weeks. I watched everything, there was nothing unsupervised, nothing unsecured in their activities or playdates. It was exhausting, but the alternative I had built up in my mind was worse. It always boiled down to a simple decision – either control every aspect of their lives or risk failing as a father and losing your child forever.

This is the Devouring Father in action, but not necessarily the traditional archetype in its original form. Traditionally the Devouring Father is a father who stifles the growth and success of his children in fear of them – afraid they will rise up against him or excel beyond him. (A perfect example of this is found in Star Wars, where Darth Sidious raised up apprentices only to strike them down before they became powerful enough to overpower him). Today’s Devouring Father has a modern adjustment, inspired by the pendulum swinging heavily away from the Tyrant King’s parenting approach from previous generations.

Today the Devouring Father is not always a brute, not a monster in fear of his own creations, but rather a father fixated externally on what could be, consumed by outside risk and threat to the point where they are devouring their children’s innocence “for their own sake.” This is what makes today’s version of the Devouring Father so pernicious, it’s driven out of a mixture love and concern for the child and fear – fear that the child will hate you, or the judgement of those around you. The archetypal intent has changed.

If we’re not careful these strong (yet tiny) humans we’ve been charged with caring for will become nothing more than lab rats in a generational experiment of “What does a human become when all risk and danger has been removed from their lives?”

So, what to do?

I wrestled with this internally quite a lot. We’ve read the parenting books and listened to the podcasts. We know that well-developing children need autonomy. I know that fathers have a unique responsibility to help our children step out into the unknown and brave the world of chaos, one step at a time. Even knowing that, there’s not a clear-cut answer as to how to do this, at the end of the day you’re going to have to trust your instincts. However if I had to boil it down to three points, it would be the following:

1. Lay down your fear of the world

I feel like our hyper-connectivity through social media and other platforms trigger our archetypal “fight or flight” mode and we find ourselves needing to save our kids from all the impending danger the world is showing us through our high tech scrying glasses. This pulls us into another archetype that fathers embody often, The Hero (we’ll talk more about this one in a later essay). We shift into Hero mode the moment we clock in to work. We provide, protect, we strike into darkness and light the way for our wives and kids. Hero mode is an absolutely necessary paradigm we must inhabit on a daily basis. But it’s not the only paradigm – it has a time and place but cannot be ever present.

A father out of balance risks wearing the Hero’s cape too long, and when worn too long it will cast a long shadow over your wife and children. Worldly fear will push men into Fight or Flight mode constantly and thus instinctually Fathers today often “save” their kids from so many things they should not be saved from, like:

• Boredom
• Social awkwardness
• Mildly risky play
• Consequences
• Frustration
• Conflict
• Failure

It’s your duty to conquer the outer world and offer what you can to your family, but at home your children do not need a Hero, they need a much more integrated father figure at the helm. Heroes save, Fathers raise. Let them feel, fight, and face their consequences and failure, so they can learn from it. To clear their lives of these “problems” would be to cripple their development.

2. Give your kids the tools they need

Autonomy only works in favor for your child’s development if they have the necessary tools to handle it. They need your instruction and your guidance. Show them the wild world, then teach them how to navigate it. This doesn’t have to be complicated, nine times out of ten the best way to teach your children is to just walk the path before them and explain the way as you do so. One of the greatest blessings of little children is the fact that they are generally very interested in just about anything you’re doing at the time. The modern father actually outperforms previous generations in the amount of time spent with children, so this step comes naturally, we just need to ensure that we’re using our time wisely with them. There is so much to say on this one, and for fear of using too many literary references in one article, be the Gandalf to their Bilbo Baggins. Take them on adventures.

3. Trade control for connection

We see this – a lot – in many forms today. Control = safety. It’s marketed to us as a positive actually.

“Track your kid with this app, for safety.”

“Use this gadget or tool, to keep them safe.”

Buy this product, avoid this food, monitor, probe, diagnose, etc. etc.

Modern-day tech giants, lobbyists, marketers all understand the fact that you want to protect your child and will weaponize that instinct against you without losing a second of sleep at night.

For a short while with my own kids I become a dystopian hybrid of 1984 and the Truman Show, wanting to play God and own the entire world they exist in. This is a recipe for destruction.

Use your internal mechanisms to review the options before you, calculate the risk, and allow yourself and your child to venture a little over the line of comfort and safety.

It’s not easy, and definitely not always safe, but fathers need to loosen their grip on their children and let them venture out into the world, a little more every day.

I believe you as a father can feel it. You can feel the edge of comfort when watching how high your kid is jumping on the trampoline, or when they’re walking too close to the campfire. Navigating each situation is up to you – it’s your shining moment as a father to decipher which moments can help your child grow into the man or woman you desire them to be, and which moments they are still not ready to conquer on their own. Trust yourself, and at the same time push your own boundaries of comfort little by little so you and your children can both expand.

We started letting our kids ride their bikes around the neighborhood again. We let them go play without watches or tracking devices and told them to be home by a certain time. And recently, Henry and Benjamin started taking public transit by themselves to the grocery store to pick things up for Hannah while I work. That seems like a major shift from total lockdown mode, but there was a lot of careful teaching, a lot of riding the bus with them several times to show them the routes, how to request a stop, and where to get off, before we let them ride solo.

Bad things still happen, and will always happen. Our children still have scary moments or experience pain/injury due to the risks they take within this level of autonomy. But it’s worth it. Not only for them to grow, but for you as a father to become something greater than a clownfish desperate to protect his children.

TL;DR

Our kids need room to grow and in order for us to avoid getting in their way we as fathers need to avoid smothering them. Let go of fear, and show your kids how to venture into the world, so you can avoid becoming a Devouring Father.

Take some time in the near future and watch Finding Nemo with your kids, and pay special attention to the transformation Marlin experiences while facing his worst nightmare. Also take note of Nemo, who, while away from his devouring father, finds a mentor that teaches him how to take calculated risks, and to keep doing so even after facing danger.

For extra credit, watch Star Wars with the kiddos, and watch one of the most detailed sketches of the Devouring Father archetypes in modern media, the Sith. Jedi teach padawans to become masters, while the Sith apprentices only excel despite their masters.

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“You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”

— Khalil Gibran, Children

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