Il padre educante (e creativo), ieri e oggi

Abstract

The historical, social and cultural evolution of the family helps us to understand better the figure of the father in terms of a “change”: within a system of relationships more complex than ever, due to the changes of morals and habits observed from the second half of the last century, the father is called to undertake an educational role that still has to be defined. The contribution given by different inter-disciplinary works, all merging into a logical and complex pedagogical framework, describes how the father figure is a cultural – and not exclusively biological – construction, evolution of a quite recent process, that marks the psychological birth of the feeling of fatherhood, which requires a relational investment not only of a material nature, but also emotional. This new horizon implies a future projectuality of the father’s role, performed with a different way of living the relationship parent-son, in which the value of the example, as a fundamental educational medium (history gives us the relational and educational experience of the apprenticeship carried out in artists’ ateliers), becomes a proof of creative and authentic life. The father, therefore, in an environment that is neither permissive nor authoritarian, but democratic, overcoming the many dichotomies of the present time, has the chance to redesign a relationship in which, as a creative individual who fulfils himself (in a Maslowian sense), he is able to retrieve the pleasure of living the relationship with his son.