“BG Mama”—the name of Bulgaria’s best-known online forum for mothers—has long since become a byword. But where did… BG Dad go? Why do we talk so little about the role of the father today? What is that role, really? How has it changed in the age of technology? Can we prepare for fatherhood, and what are the great challenges today in the enormous responsibility of being a dad?
Mihail Stefanov is not only a father; he also knows how to talk about the role. He holds a master’s degree in organizational anthropology from Vienna and Sofia and has created countless online and offline courses on human relationships, productivity and the effectiveness of teams.
“Most likely this is one of the effects of modernity and postmodernity—the tearing apart of bonds of every kind. That’s why one of the most popular genres of literature is about finding yourself. The father plays a key role here: he gives you who you are. He doesn’t give you meaning by explaining it to you—he shows it to you. He lives it, and you see it…”
The series “Digital Children” continues. I’m looking for the important perspectives and useful advice that can help us as parents and adults. Your opinion matters too! Take part in the survey, and let’s paint the picture of parenthood in digital times together.
– “Mama Ninja,” “BG Mama,” “Mayko Mila!” (“Dear Mother!”)—so many hugely successful websites for mothers, and yet fathers seem to be missing from the online space. Why?
– There seems to be a kind of tradition in Bulgaria that
the role of fathers in shaping children is secondary. Just think about our children’s fairy tales.
Where is the father? Nowhere! “The Three Brothers and the Golden Apple.” Or the father leaves them to fend for themselves—as in “Nevolyata” (“Misfortune”), he won’t help them—or he is absent altogether.
Even in Botev—Hristo Botev, the revolutionary poet every Bulgarian learns at school—the father is such a secondary figure. The mother, the grandmother, the grandfather, the kin, but the figure of the father… If someone took the trouble to trace fairy tales, folklore and contemporary culture as well, they would see that it is an almost absent figure, which is very interesting and builds up over time.
– And at the same time we talk about our patriarchal way of life.
– It is patriarchal, but I get the feeling we’re talking about how the grandfather is a better father than the father. Somehow he learns through his mistakes. I can say this even about my own family—my grandfather was a better grandfather to me than he was a father to my father. I don’t know where it comes from, but we have a deficit that seems to be culturally layered.
– But now we’re modern people, we even change diapers, and we still don’t talk much about our role.
– Yes, maybe the social role of the man as someone who takes part is changing, but I wouldn’t say it’s like that everywhere. In Sofia, or at least, say, in our bubble, everyone with two kids, we try to pitch in, to help at home.
Changing diapers, being there, supporting your partner is great. But it’s only a first step—it doesn’t come close to making you an effective father.
Years ago I talked with the editor-in-chief of the publishing house Fyut, and she had a very interesting observation—I don’t know if it has changed since—that books about communicating with your child are bought up to about age seven: everything related to babies and small children. As if after seven there’s suddenly no need—apparently everyone can communicate fully with teenagers, or the books are bought only by people with problems, who are already stuck.
Meanwhile, the topics of communication, of the atmosphere at home,
of the father’s role as a formative factor for identity…, topics that psychology treats so seriously, are quite, quite unfamiliar in Bulgaria.
– I completely share your observations. But is it only in Bulgaria?
– I don’t know, I don’t have a view of other societies. A while ago I came across an article by a Scandinavian psychologist called “How We Raise Ingrates.” It was about the extreme lack of boundaries in Scandinavian families, which
don’t want to restrict their children, try to give them complete freedom—and have the highest rate of leaving elderly people in nursing homes.
Simply because this focus on the child’s ego begins to blur its sense of community, of duty, of commitment to its parents when they grow old.
So most likely this is one of the effects of modernity and postmodernity—the tearing apart of bonds of every kind. That’s why one of the most popular genres of literature is “finding yourself.” People en masse are searching for themselves… Whether through the patriarchal, the roots, patriotism, discovering the secret Bulgarian ways to become successful. Or through self-realization, through something unconventional—but in this search for yourself… the father plays a key role. It’s very interesting, because it is precisely the father who gives you who you are.
He doesn’t give you meaning by explaining it to you—he shows it to you, he lives it.
And you see it; he comes first. We often see the absent father, and in practice that means certain key components of your identity appear that have no way of being formed…
– Shouldn’t this start with us, the fathers? Doing it more consciously, more thoughtfully, talking and discussing what our role is, how we can be useful to this child besides changing its diapers?
– I absolutely agree. I believe that
fatherhood is one of the biggest and most responsible tasks we will face as men.
Of course, that applies to those of us who decide to have children and find the right partner; not everyone has to have children. But for me fatherhood is one of my biggest tasks.
When I found out I was going to have a child for the first time, 15 years ago now, it was a very big deal for me. And I told myself, “I have to start reading, to understand what it is…” You know this well: on the one hand, you can’t understand what it is to be a father before you become one.
On the other, you can think a lot of things through, you can prepare. And also along the way, afterward.
The responsibility of being a person who plays a key role in shaping other human personalities entrusted to you.
They have come into your life, your task is to shape them, and it has to be done well. And you have to know how it’s done.
– This is where reading comes in, which often doesn’t help. On every single thing—purely physical care, psychological upbringing—you start getting lost and tangled in points of view.
– Indeed, first models collide—first we have our own, more traditional ones, the ways we ourselves were raised. Because of global processes, others pour in and are offered to us—for example, we see in movies how Americans raise their kids—and we learn, we follow the example.
The books come from German or French psychologists with a different methodology, Scandinavia, Maria Montessori… And you
start wondering… so which system exactly?! What are we supposed to do with this child?!
But if we boil things down to something very simple—not steps, but principles—there are a few things that are universal.
First of all, the awareness that being a father is an active, responsible role.
And not only for feeding them and their physical survival, but also for building their character, their emotional life, the intellectual and social capacity of the children.
You have to communicate with them, to shape them through communication… because you shape them through not communicating, too! That’s the first awareness.
Whatever you do as a father, even if you leave and run away, you will still shape them. That’s the awareness that is sometimes hard, because you suddenly realize what responsibility falls on you.
– Provided you realize it. The first and most instinctive urge is to run away, one way or another. Or to underestimate it. Or the third—to set out deliberately to shape, to impose, to box them in, to lead them in your own direction…
– Shaping happens in every possible way; control is only one of the directions. A friend of mine, a theologian and philologist, says, “A child isn’t born a blank page for you to write its text from scratch. It’s born with a lot of text, and your role is more that of an editor!” A nice metaphor.
Shaping also happens through personal example.
That’s the second principle we need to be aware of. Our children will watch what we are, and whatever we are, that’s what they’ll become. Later, over the years, they may begin to realize they don’t want to be everything we are. A process will begin, an attempt to set themselves apart. You and I most likely have things where we tell ourselves, “Here I’m like my father, but I want it to be a bit different.”
That’s the second awareness, too: that I will shape more by my example than by talking. If I tell my child, “Apologize, come on, apologize!” but it has never heard “I’m sorry!” from me, the effort will be fruitless. If I tell it, “You will be honest!” while it catches me lying every week…
– For me, another big realization we go through is that you’re in a new situation you’re not prepared for. You think you’ll always be calm, there’s no way you’ll yell at the kids, everything will be quiet and idyllic… and it can’t be like that. They’re children.
– There’s a popular phrase:
“Before I had children, I had seven theories about how to raise them. Now I have seven children and not a single theory.”
But here, I think, comes a feeling I notice more in women—that if you get something wrong in your relationship with a child, it’s a disaster, you’re a bad parent! The truth is that learning to say “sorry” when you get it wrong actually sends the child a wonderful signal.
When you yell undeservedly, take it out on them, that’s not good. But better, after 30 minutes, once it has passed, go and explain, “I’m sorry, I was wrong.” That’s the example I’m talking about.
The idea that we’ll always be calm is an illusion.
Of course, if we yell at them systematically, if we oppress them and show them that this is normal, that’s not good at all. But the idea that I can never lose my temper in front of my child is an illusion. Because that way the child gets used to artificial models that will later have a hard time meeting the rest of the people in the world.
I had a period when I was doing very draining work and coming home tired. I felt that I behaved normally and civilly with my colleagues at work, and then, when I left, the weight of everything that had happened would hang over me and I’d walk into the house like a storm cloud. Scowling, grumpy… I’m not that kind of person in general, but that was the period—the kids are playing and I start snapping. One day I caught myself: the day simply hadn’t been hard and I walked in whistling—I saw the genuine surprise on their faces, I saw them light up. It was a very strange moment, a kind of epiphany. And suddenly I made
the connection between the way I am present at home and the state of my whole household.
After that, consciously—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—I learned to pump myself up a little at the front door, whatever was going on, and put on a more enthusiastic look. Even if my batteries run down half an hour later, my first contact with the kids is much more positive. “Glad to see you,” a hug, some teasing, a joke. Everything changed. Look closely: even your mere presence as a father changes the whole atmosphere. It affects the children.
– But Herr Freud says the father’s only role is to break the bond with the mother.
– I’m not sure I understand what he means. I’ve heard other theses too, along the lines of the only thing a father has to do for his children is love their mother. To me these ideas are… insane.
Statements like these, given at least a little critical thinking, invite serious questions. How does Freud know this? Why does he claim it, on what basis? And did his own father do that? If so, no wonder he thinks so. In other words, we could nitpick a lot, but on the whole… there probably is such a role too. I see a certain common sense in it, in the mother’s excessive clinging to the child, not letting it jump, climb a tree. At some point that kind of attitude begins to stifle the child’s desire for adventure, for exploring the world, for becoming independent, for trying things at the risk of skinning a knee.
Fathers have this balancing role. But saying it’s their only task means ruling out the father reading books with his children, teaching them sports, or drawing with them if he draws himself, cooking together. It means ruling out the father studying with his children. Or, when he makes career decisions, making ones that allow him to be a father. In our culture that’s even harder for women, and it isn’t easy for men either. It sometimes means hitting the brakes on a new position you’re offered because you know it comes with longer hours. Or not buying a new car on installments. These are big sacrifices in a society like ours.
If we think like Freud, it means that
a man whose parenting consists of shouting, “Stop fussing over that child,” is doing a splendid job as a father. Is that so?
– Even these stereotypes are less and less true. I, for example, am much more protective of my kids than their mother is. I realize it’s not right, but this balance isn’t easy either.
– With us it’s the more classic version…
– Clearly, given that your daughters do martial arts at a professional level.
– But I don’t push them! That’s very important. The older one trained in jiu-jitsu, but said it wasn’t her thing, and now she does dance. I have no unhealthy ambition, but I really liked the thought that
today it’s good to deliberately cultivate sensitivity in boys,
because on the whole the culture and the environment teach them something else. And in girls, to cultivate strength and independence, because on the whole the culture and the environment teach them something else.
– I also think the idea that boys don’t cry has been left in the past.
– Since I’m a crier myself, I’ve never gone by that principle. But I see an awful lot of men crippled by an inability to talk about their emotions. Depression is depression, whether or not you admit you have it.
A man’s inability to express, to pour out a negative emotion except through violence, is a big problem.
A father’s inability to talk about how he is doing mentally. A horrifying problem! On the whole, the time we live in carries quite a lot of psychological stress. I dare say, in some respects, more serious than for the people before us. Yes, our work has become physically easier, but culturally speaking, questions like “Who am I?”, “What is expected of me?”, “What does success look like?”…
Once it was relatively clear—you have a role and you must fulfill it. Now the world is big, but—to twist the title of Ilija Trojanow’s novel—salvation doesn’t lurk around every corner, and you’re lost.
An anthropologist back in the ’90s spoke of the “saturated self.” He says a person’s identity is formed through stories. You are the sum of your stories and of the stories about what you might be. But people in the past had a far smaller number of possible stories. Whereas now the stories about what we could be are countless.
The self goes numb from this and freezes. It starts to become very hard for you.
When are you a successful man? When you have lots of money, drive an expensive car, have big biceps, a hot girlfriend, are a top boss at a big company,
or win a reality show and are famous just for being famous? When are you successful, when is your life meaningful?
There’s a friend of mine from Cambridge who studies meaning as a phenomenon. He says, “We are beings in search of meaning.” And that’s magical! But sometimes it gets very hard; many of my friends go through severe crises precisely because of this.
At that moment it’s very hard to be a father. Because one of a father’s tasks is to give direction.
– Sometimes, though, the change of becoming a father gives you motivation—that’s how it was for me both times. Right when my older son was born, I started learning to program. When the younger one was born, I made my website. Somehow you have an extra reason to find your own meaning, precisely because you’ve become a parent.
– These things don’t contradict each other; they’re more like part of the seasons of life. I completely agree with you. I have a very clear memory of how, when my older daughter was born, I started to jaywalk. I stepped onto the road with one foot… cars flying by, but I’d always crossed there. There’s an underpass, but who uses it? Suddenly I told myself:
“Good grief, if something hits me now, what will this child do?”
And I stepped back, and ever since I always take the underpass.
– Do you have criteria by which you could tell yourself, “I did well as a father, I’m satisfied”?
– One of the things that matters a lot to me is that they read and are thinking people, so I expose them to diverse ideas, to diverse worldviews. It’s very important to me that they have the freedom to think, to make decisions on their own and to be critical.
The other very important thing, which would bring me enormous pleasure, is to see that they are countercultural—but not for its own sake. Rather,
when the culture, the mass understanding of value, runs against what they believe in, that they can stand their ground. That they hold firm despite the difficulty.
Otherwise, of course, that they are kind people who make their way through life in a decent and normal way.
As an American philosopher says, in fact all our human striving goes toward achieving things our imagination has sketched out. And we measure ourselves, our success, against the picture in our imagination that we have come to love. That’s what drives us.
– Technology has changed every aspect of life, that’s obvious. But how, above all, has it changed parenting, a father’s responsibilities, the situation in the family?
– It’s hard for me to give a complete answer, but certainly the staring at screens, their invasion of family territory, changes the dynamic. Even just at dinner, if we let them in. Whether it’s the phone screen—the TV was let into our family holy of holies long ago. We often talk more, aloud or inwardly, with the characters on the screen than with one another.
So
the deficit is in conversation. I believe the number of screens is inversely proportional to authentic conversation, to the bond with the father and in the family in general.
My children have very strict limits; we don’t have a TV—a conscious decision. Of course they have a laptop, they have access to the world, but they have a time limit. Very consciously, deliberately, we have conversations about how this affects us—us, the family, them. And it becomes one of those things that I think will turn out healthy, if how we use technology and what effect it has becomes a topic of conversation in the family.
The whole world is in your phone, really. You can do research, talk to artificial intelligence, watch a clip that inspires you. But the skill of judging what helps me grow and what leads to “brain rot” is key today.
Who builds that skill in children? Well, the father and the mother, through conversation.
If my child sees me soaking in social media all day, glued to my phone nonstop… If I let the phone raise my child, then instead of me it’s Nickelodeon, Baby TV and, at some point, TikTok that shape it. At some point I tell myself, “Who are you? Who is this person living in our house whose bills I pay?”
“I don’t recognize him!” Why? “Because he’s so different from me.” Why? Because someone else is shaping him. And then the rows start, the tearing of the fabric of the relationship.
“All you ever do is sit in front of that screen.” Oh, come on, man—where were you for 13 years?
– I see it too; a lot of people do this. And they underestimate that you have only a handful of years, especially with a small child, when you need to give it your time. And that’s a duty, a responsibility, but ultimately a pleasure as well.
– If you make it a pleasure for yourself, yes. But if you feel the baby is getting in the way of living your life, then we come back to my first principle. Lack of awareness of the role, of the responsibility you carry as a parent. The child is not an obstacle.
– Alas, society doesn’t demand it of you either. At most it wants you to take the child to the doctor and to school. If the rest doesn’t come from within, there’s nowhere else for it to come from.
– Exactly. And this whole crisis comes because there’s nowhere for it to come from. In the traditional Bulgarian model of raising children, insofar as we can speak of one at all, we see quite a few good things and quite a few sick ones. But it is falling apart, disappearing; its gravitational pull is no longer so strong.
What model is taking its place? On the one hand, the inner impulse to have children. Wonderful! On the other, once they’re born, you stop at their physical survival, the obligation the state requires of you, as you say.
But shaping them as people, a very important thing, is absent from the conversation altogether.
And these are very painful questions. We have terrible deficits as a society there. I’ve worked with teenagers for a long time; I was 19 when I started volunteering in various initiatives. Twenty years have passed—that’s three or four generations. The situation is brutal! I don’t have statistics, but I see so many absent fathers, children who are neglected. Even if they wear sneakers that cost 300 leva (about $165), they aren’t noticed as people, they have no one to talk to, trust at home is destroyed.
Over the years I’ve seen plenty of such stories, even in families where there’s no violence, no separation, they go on vacation every year, there is financial and social stability. And yet such dysfunctional communication, a complete absence of real contact inside.
It isn’t easy to be a child, to be a young person, to be a parent. A crazy world.
– What has changed most in teenagers themselves over these four generations?
– I’m not one of those people who like to complain about the new generations. I don’t think we have reason to; they’re different, but not bad.
The degree of interaction with technology is definitely a very visible change. Teenagers 20 years ago either had no mobile phone or had just gotten their first one; in 2004 there was no iPhone yet. They were more the generation that had a computer with internet for as long as they could remember, but not mobile technology.
In 15 years they lived through the brutal technology revolution. Whereas for the most recent teenagers I worked with, the phone was a natural extension of their being.
I see that things like attention span are getting worse; the worrying trends are clear. When GPT-4 came out, I watched an inspiring video with the best software engineers and architects in the world explaining how it would make learning easier than ever. All of them people who became what they are because their own learning was super hard. It was so strange to me that they didn’t see the irony…
My daughter uses it in high school so that, for a philosophy project, she doesn’t have to sit and think about it all day but gets it ready-made in 30 seconds. And I say, “But there’s no point in that. The chatbot knows it; you don’t. It can reproduce it for you; you can’t.” “Dad, I don’t have time.” “Why don’t you have time? This is part of learning.” “I have three more tests.”
That’s my anxiety: that we give them the ability to generate intellectual products super easily, when it’s the process that turns you into a smarter person, not the end result. That really scares me…
– Me too. That’s exactly why this site exists, and this series in particular; with the next guests we’ll go even deeper into this topic. Thank you!
So far in the series “Digital Children”:
