One of the things that mark a great dad is that he is a bastion that provides security and safety to his family. In the close quarters of family life, a dad plays a key role in ensuring that his children develop the values and mindsets necessary to keep themselves safe from threats, and capable of facing up to new or unexpected challenges.

As we explore the lessons of history and community for the benefit of our families, get to know how dads can function as effective fortifications for the family, building awareness, resilience and resourcefulness to help our children rise up to challenges and challenging times.

Connect Your Children to the Past

In the traditions of man’s early ancestors, dads would connect their children to the ways of survival and teach them to understand and respect the land from where food and other essential materials come from.

Today, we dads have the opportunity to connect our children to how Singapore as a country and community was conceived and built up. Only by knowing that others have made choices and sacrifices to give them what they have today, will they have the eyes and minds to understand how they can continue to make it better, and upon whose shoulders they might stand on to gain that insight.

Therefore, do not neglect teaching them about their legacy. Start with discussing traditional businesses, or about where the chicken in their box of KFC came from, for example. This kind of exploration can be fascinating, and there are many resources you can draw on to make the experience fun.

In turn, your children will be able to enjoy the process of discovering the world with you, learning the value of things and more importantly, the contribution of many hands in trade and industry.

Get to Know Your Neighbours

Teaching our children to ‘love thy neighbour’, addresses the potentially divisive beliefs that still persist today. Those beliefs are sometimes found in even the most ‘enlightened’ members of our community, and can divide our community along the lines of race, class or even nationality.

Dads help to build the attitudes that will serve as the foundation on which their children connect and cooperate with others. Furthermore, dads empower their children to influence their peers - to improve and strengthen the power of our community at every level.

To enable them to integrate into a community, provide children with adequate opportunities to engage and stretch themselves in various social contexts. It could be through a local community centre, school, religious organisation, or neighbourhood interest group.

On the flip side, to empower children to be influencers of community, teach them to reach out to others and actively recruit their friends to participate in local events and initiatives. Encourage them to engage with new people and listen to the diverse voices in a community. Thus, they build mutual respect for the values and practices of others.

Let children be the ones to patch and reinforce the social fabric that makes our communities stronger and more cohesive. There are not only tangible benefits (a more cooperative and pleasant community life); they will also pick up invaluable life and professional skills (people skills and management abilities).

From Nanny State to Daddy State

Singaporeans have the unfortunate reputation of being the products of a derisively-termed ‘nanny state’, where the common, but untrue perception is that things we say and do are what autocrats have ‘engineered’ us to.

To combat this perception, all we need to demonstrate is that we have by our own conscious choice, placed our stake firmly but surely, in our communities. Grow our children into engaged and proactive members of society, who respect both the group and the individual and who stand together for the good of all.

For dads to help our children to establish alliances and kinship is vital to the smooth functioning of our community. At the heart, this is a value that is built from within our families.

“Charity begins at home”, so the saying goes. Therefore where charity is defined as acting on the needs of others, a sense of community is something that dads should want to develop in our children, even as we contribute in our many ways to where we live.

About the Author: The Dads for Life Resource Team comprises local content writers and experts, including psychologists, counsellors, educators and social service professionals, dedicated to developing useful resources for dads.

The concepts that help keep the nation safe are also meant to keep our families, neighborhoods and communities safe. Vigilance, education and cooperation are things that Dads can build in our families. Let's all do it together!

Still feeling defenceless? Talk about the theme of Total Defence here.