Choosing Comfort or Courage

One of NFI president Roland C. Warren’s new sayings is, “Every day, a dad must choose between courage and comfort. Because to be comfortable is never courageous, and to be courageous is never comfortable.”

I recently watched a movie that depicted a father’s transition from choosing the comfort of pursuing career success to the courage of being an involved father. Granted, this was an Eddie Murphy film, so it was more hilarious than sentimental, but it had an inspiring message that reflects the tension many dads feel between work and family.

In Imagine That (2009 – Nickelodeon Movies), Eddie Murphy plays Evan, a financial advisor who has had phenomenal success in his career but has been pretty much absent as a father. It’s Evan’s week to have his daughter Olivia, and fulfilling his obligations as a father is an inconvenient hassle that he fears could derail his chance for a promotion - until he discovers that the security blanket that his seven-year-old daughter uses to visit her imaginary princess friends could be the key to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Olivia’s princesses magically share with her accurate predictions about stock futures and investment firm collapses. To get these unconventional insider tips, Evan has to enter Olivia’s imaginary world and, in the process, he fluctuates between genuinely bonding with his daughter and taking advantage of her to promote his career.

Olivia’s mother confronts Evan’s self-centeredness with a line that many dads need to hear: “You have two jobs – and one of them is being a father. She needs to know that you care just as much about that job as you do the other.” Ultimately, Evan realizes that being Olivia’s dad is more important than achieving financial success, even though that means walking away from some great career opportunities.

A couple months ago, I blogged about another father-friendly film that deals with the tension between work and family. The producers of these two films are tapping into a common problem that dads face. In National Fatherhood Initiative’s 2006 study, Pop's Culture: A National Survey of Dads' Attitudes on Fathering, the top obstacle that dads listed to being a good father was "work responsibilities" and #2 was media/pop culture. Given those two stats, and the fact that many media depictions of dads present them as a bumbling idiots, it’s refreshing to see films that portray dads making the courageous – but uncomfortable - choice to put their kids first.