What's a Parent's Role?

Take our Authoritative Parenting Test

Find a family therapist near me

Lived experience refers to the embodied awareness we gain from firsthand exposure to situations or events.

We often invoke lived experience to acknowledge psychological harms caused by human suffering.

Lived experience is just as crucial to understanding deep human connection.

One possesses nothing unless one has experienced it in reality. A purely intellectual insight is not enough, because one knows only the words and not the substance of the thing from inside. —Carl Jung

Three and a half years ago, when I was 58, my daughter Elli was born on Father’s Day, 2023. There is, of course, only a 1 in 365 chance of a child being born on Father’s Day, so the timing of Elli’s arrival was something special.

Up to that point in life I’d never been superstitious. We all experience rare events, like the crash of United Flight 173 in my Portland neighborhood when I was a boy. Such happenings, however unusual, have to be witnessed by someone, so why not me?

Still, I couldn’t shake the notion that Elli’s Father’s Day birth carried meaning beyond coincidence. As the days passed, I came to see it as a call for transformative action.

I’d faced a disturbing dilemma for years. Though I was at the height of a successful academic career, addiction, marital strife, and decades of misguided ambition were taking more from me than a career could deliver. Without reprioritizing, I knew Elli, sooner or later, would be raised without her father. I couldn’t imagine her experiences of future birthdays or Father’s Days.

What Science Tells Us About Fatherlessness

We’ve all heard the statistics. One in four children are raised without their father—a rate that’s doubled in my lifetime. Both boys and girls are affected, sometimes in similar and sometimes in disparate ways. Boys show more aggression and delinquent behavior, and report wanting more guidance as youth.

Girls engage in more self-harm and suicidal behavior, and experience teen........

© Psychology Today