It’s good to be like a friend to your child, but a father needs to be much more than that.
It’s good to be like a friend to your child, but a father needs to be much more than that.
N ot long ago, when I was at the neighborhood playground with my kids, I shamed myself by saying something to my son that I had promised myself I never would.
I called him buddy. My own son!
You may be wondering, what’s so bad about that? Plenty of fathers call their sons buddy. That’s true, and I’m sure most of them are good fathers. Maybe you use that term of endearment with your own son, in which case I say to you what Rodney Dangerfield says when Ted Knight doffs a rainbow fedora in Caddyshack: “It looks good on you though.”
But calling my sons buddy was a transgression against a central principle of my philosophy of fatherhood, something formed long before I ever became a father myself. That principle is this: buddy is lame. It is what a pushover dad, the kind who is too desperate to be on his child’s good side, who’s too weak to deny him anything and says things like “He and his friends are going to get drunk anyway, they might as well get drunk in my basement,” calls his son.
“Buddy,” this father asks, “what did we say about chainsaws in the house?”
“Hey buddy,” this father pleads, “if you don’t unlock your sister, you might lose your Porsche privileges for tonight.”
I trace this prejudice to my formative hours in front of television and movie screens in the mid-1980s. There was a Playskool’s My Buddy, a toy for boys who were jealous of their sister’s Cabbage Patch Kid doll and wanted their own version with red overalls and a denim cap on top of what was surely a bowl cut. The jingle that played during cartoon commercial breaks is seared in my memory: “My Buddy — wherever I go, he goes! . . . My Buddy and me!” This was in the running for the most annoying jingle sung by little kids until Kars4Kids pulled up and blew the competition away. More to the point, the toy and its jingle confirmed the supremely dorky connotations of buddy.
Parents in pop culture who called their kids buddy, pal, and the like did not fare well. A clear sign that Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) was going to get away with murder was when his dad (Lyman Ward) called Ferris “pal.” This was the parental equivalent of putting a “Kick Me” sticker on his own back. The year before, in the second episode of the sitcom Growing Pains, Jason Seaver (Alan Thicke) takes his son Mike (Kirk Cameron) to a Bruce Springsteen concert. A local TV reporter covering the event asks Jason whether Mike is his son. “The big fella here?” Jason replies. “Not only is this my son, this is my best buddy!” Mike stares into the camera, mortified, as Jason proceeds to kiss him on the cheek.
Mike is embarrassed because his father is overdoing it. Calling his son his best buddy and big fella are all in keeping with him taking him to the concert to begin with, because Mike really wanted to go with his friends — his actual buddies. It’s one thing for Boomer parents like Jason Seaver and Tom Bueller to have been more affectionate and attentive than their parents had been. But this chummy stuff was a bridge too far.
This is why calling your kid buddy has always seemed to me like an overeager effort to be friends with him. It’s good to be like a friend to your child, but a father needs to be much more than that, too. You’re not likely to correct your bud’s bad behavior. You’re unlikely to remind your pal to do his homework or punish him if he doesn’t. That’s why I’ve always found the term patronizing, too: it puts you at your child’s level when you both know you’re one of the most important authority figures in his life. These principles apply to other terms of familiarity, including sport, slugger, all-star, and champ. But buddy is the one you’ll hear the most.
It’s strictly a father-to-son phenomenon. Fathers rarely call their daughters “buddy,” and girls don’t call their friends that, either. That’s why Playskool’s version of the My Buddy doll for girls was called Kid Sister. Dads are likely to call our daughters honey or sweetheart. The term of endearment to avoid for girls is princess, though for the opposite reason as buddy: it spoils the kid by elevating her. Not to mention what it does for your own ego. Who died and made you king?
My preferred term for my sons is old-fashioned and literal: son. It’s clean, it’s efficient, and it confirms how special that relationship is. Your son will have other buddies. Few people can call him son and really mean it.
The funny thing is that it wasn’t long ago when men would call any boy “son.” Fathers called their sons son, and so did coaches and the fathers of your friends. It wasn’t like every adult male was walking around like Foghorn Leghorn, puffing his chest out and intoning, “Looka here, son!” (For what it’s worth, the best Southerner to imitate when saying son is Jerry Reed at the beginning of “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot.”) But it was much more common than it is today, when nobody calls anybody son and everybody calls everybody buddy.
I had been under the impression that everyone of a certain age held a shared understanding that it was cringe-inducing to use buddy so freely. Like the way we all knew that once you lost a certain amount of hair, it was better to shave it all off instead of succumbing to the delusional belief that you were fooling anybody with a comb-over. Clearly, I was wrong. A whole lot of dads my age and younger think that calling their sons buddy is a sweet and affectionate way to refer to their son, a way that captures their relationship and the love between them. And I’m sure that they’re good fathers and that their buddies are happy boys who’ll grow up into well-adjusted men.
Now that I think of it, the next time I address one of my boys, I think I’m going to call him . . . bruh or dude or anything but buddy!