On this Father’s Day, thank you to the dads who care

I ’m not a grandfather yet, despite my constant nagging.

The sensitive subject tends to strike my son with temporary deafness at the tender age of 27. But I’m both a dedicated father and a proud stepfather with almost three decades of experience of fatherhood.

Being a stepdad must be the most difficult, thankless task on earth and these guys do a wonderful job. They step up to fill the boots of a biological dad who either can’t or doesn’t want to be the father he was supposed to be.

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The same can be said of a grandfather who acts as a male role model. But the sad truth is that stepdads and grandfathers are substitutes – they can’t replace a biological father, no matter how hard they try.

I have seen it in my own stepson.

He appreciates the contributions his grandfather and I make to his upbringing, but he deeply resents the fact that his own father is absent from the most important moments of his life.

In our country, we have a sky-high percentage of deadbeat fathers who play no or hardly any role in the upbringing of their own offspring.

A young woman who works with me asked me for advice recently, as she was about to go on her first official date in a few years.

I outlined the conduct rules of appropriate behaviour, including: “If he opens the car door for you, thank him politely.”

“No man has ever opened a door for me …” she said. I was shocked. Opening doors for women was one of the first things my dad taught me.

As he explained it: “It shows that you had a father who cared about the kind of man you are.”

My own father was the most special man I have met. Thanks to him, I consider fathers who play a pivotal role in their children’s upbringing as the vertebrae in society’s moral backbone.

Sunday, on Fathers’ Day, I’ll be privileged enough to enjoy the company of my daughter, the four-year-old Egg.

We’ll eat too much and share childish jokes and laugh a lot. But I’ll also sit down to measure my success as a father.

And I’ll open at least one door for a woman. Because I had a father who cared.