For Indian Fathers
For Fathers
Let me guess. You clicked on this link but you’re slightly uncomfortable. Indian men don’t usually look for parenting help. Parenting is something women discuss in WhatsApp groups. Men provide. Men solve problems. Men don’t sit in someone’s office and talk about feelings.
I know this because I lived it for four decades.
The Script We Were Given
If you grew up in a middle-class Indian family between the 1970s and 1990s, you were likely raised on a script that went something like this:
Study hard. Get a job. Get married. Have children. Provide for them. Don’t cry. Don’t complain. Don’t show weakness. Respect your elders. Don’t question authority. Success means money. Love means sacrifice. A good father is one who puts food on the table and discipline in the house.
Nobody told us that a good father might also be one who listens. Who holds his son when he’s scared. Who tells his daughter she can say no. Who admits he was wrong. Who says “I love you” not at his child’s wedding but on a random Tuesday.
We weren’t taught any of that. And we can’t give our children what we never received ourselves. Not without conscious work.
What Makes This Different
I am not going to hand you a Western parenting framework and tell you to apply it to your Punjabi household. I have read the books — Ginott, Siegel, Miller. They are brilliant. But they don’t know what it’s like to grow up in a joint family where your grandfather’s word was law. They don’t know the weight of “hamare zamane mein.” They don’t know the invisible codes of izzat, face, and family duty that every Indian father carries.
I know them because I carry them too.
What I offer is parenting guidance rooted in the world you actually live in. Not the sanitised world of Western self-help, but the real world of in-laws, social expectations, tuition pressure, competitive relatives, marriage negotiations, and the quiet desperation of a man who works 12 hours, comes home exhausted, and is told he’s not involved enough.
What Fathers Usually Come to Me With
“My son doesn’t listen to me.” — Which usually means: my son doesn’t talk to me, and I don’t know when that stopped.
“My daughter is too emotional.” — Which usually means: my daughter expresses what I was never allowed to express, and it unsettles me.
“My wife says I’m not involved.” — Which usually means: I am present but not participating, and I don’t know how to participate because nobody modelled it for me.
“I don’t want to be like my father, but I keep becoming him.” — This is the one that cracks everything open. This is where real work begins.
How We Work Together
We meet online or in person. We talk. Not about strategies and techniques — about your actual life, your actual family, your actual father, your actual childhood. Because the answers to your parenting questions are not in a blog post. They are in the patterns you inherited and haven’t yet examined.
I am not gentle about this. I will push you. I will name things you’ve been avoiding. I will not tell you what you want to hear. But I will also not judge you, because I have been exactly where you are. I lost my father at 18, and I spent the next three decades unconsciously repeating the very patterns I blamed him for.
Every father who reads this and recognises himself in it has already taken the hardest step: admitting that something needs to change
The next step is easier. Book a discovery session →
