By: Faraz Rabbani

While growing up, fathers can seem rather annoying to their children. My father didn’t really seem to do all that much, but expected all these seemingly unreasonable things from me. Why, I’d wonder, why?

Now, with children of my own, my father seems a much smarter parent than I thought he was. Maybe he was on to something.

It would annoy me to no end, especially when I was in high school and later in college, that anyone who was home was expected to have lunch and dinner — and on weekends, breakfast — with the family. Non-presence was a non-option.

We had been raised to listen to our parents, and this expectation would be enforced without recourse to any disciplining (besides the fatherly frown when my sister or I tried to opt out).

It would annoy me to no end that there was usually no opting out of less-than-exciting “family outings,” some of which were just bland trips to boring uncle-types with their predictable conversations (and, yes, great food).

It would annoy me to no end that the entire family was normally expected to go on “family shopping trips” for nothing more exciting than buying the weekly groceries.

Some other things weren’t so annoying, but they didn’t seem related to good parenting in any way — at least back then.