Father's Day: What it takes to be a modern-day dad

Many Kiwi dads on Sunday morning would have woken up to Father's Day cards calling them the 'best dad ever'. But what does it actually take to earn that title, for real?

And how have father-child relationships changed over the past half-century?

Victoria University psychology professor Dr Marc Wilson says father-son bonds were likely emotionally stronger than they were for past generations, becoming more like those shared between mothers and daughters.

"The gap has grown smaller over time as the way that we think about the paternal and the maternal role and what it means to be a father and what it means to be a mother - what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman has changed somewhat over time," he told RNZ's Sunday Morning.

"So I think we live in a world where men are told to express themselves a little bit more than perhaps they used to previously."

It was not always easy though, with the pace of technological and societal change getting in the way of just spending quality time together, he said.

"But I do think that the speed with which technology has changed means that we do have things that don't easily have a direct analogue to 10, 20 30 years ago that do make it harder for not just parents, but probably adults to keep up with what is changing.

"As a result, we potentially have less in common with our children now than we might have 30 years ago. I think that we lived in more similar worlds, and some of this comes to the way that we think about the kinds of activities that fathers and sons might have done back 30 years ago compared to now.

"I mean, it's still true that probably fathers are more likely to go to the rugby with their sons than perhaps their daughters, and certainly more than mothers might be with their sons, but I think… gaming is a really good example of that.

"I was a teenager at the time when people started playing computer games, and I was very jealous of next door for having an Atari game console, and I know that there's a certain amount of education that sons have to do for their fathers when these kinds of generational shifts come along."

One suggestion he had was not to worry too much about setting up specific bonding activities with your kids.

"I'm a big fan of the notion of quantity time. I don't like the idea that we should be setting aside small but precious moments of time that we go and do special things with our children. I think that our children get an awful lot out of seeing us move through our everyday lives.

"Some of the students in my research group have been looking at the way that our relationships with our parents influences our ability to manage stressful situations, and it should be no surprise that young people who feel that they are strongly attached to their parents are more likely to be able to deal with life's challenges, in part because our parents are our role models for how we move through the world.

"I think that my children, most people's children, learn at least as much from watching what happens when the car breaks down on the way to the dairy, as they do from those amazing opportunities to go and see a musical or go to the rugby or whatever it might be."

At the very least, he said to make sure your children know you are thinking of them.

"So, for example, dropping a text or dropping an email or having just a quick phone call to say, 'Hey, I was just thinking about you.' 'I wonder if we can catch up sometime soon,' is a really, really important type of thing to do.

"And again, it comes back to this idea that it's not just it's not just quality but quantity. It's not just the special things, but it's actually the relatively mundane things as well. And rather than saving everything up for a chance to tell someone that we love them, show them that in many different small ways very good."

Sunday Morning host Jim Mora asked Wilson if he was allowed to ask just one question of his dad, what would it be?

"I'd probably ask him what does he know now, that he didn't know when he was my age. I mean, we have the sense that we know it all from a very early age, and I've been in a situation where we've all been - in situations where our parents or other adults have said, 'You wait until you're older.

"But it's also the case now that you know, I'm in middle-age now and we make the assumption that our development stops maybe from from our early 20s or when our frontal lobes are fully developed around about 25. But actually, I'd be really interested to know what he has learned since he was my age."