Sure, everybody loves the typical three line haiku every seven-year-old boy prints on his father’s day card. The boy makes a big show of reading his “I love you dad” in front of the breakfast table, eagerly awaiting his mother’s oohs and ahs and his dad’s approving hug. But even though men claim to care much less about loving attention than moms, the fact remains that dads expect something along the lines of a poem or handwritten card on top of the gifts they get in mid-June.

Sure, everyone in the US will say that a kid’s last minute burst of loving creativity is the best way to show somebody you care, whether it comes through a handmade card, origami flower or another trite adaptation to “Roses are Red”, but I’ve always thought that the more dads expect these kinds of efforts from their kids the more the kids don’t feel the love that was supposed to inspire them to add “handmade” to their Father’s Day recipes in the first place.

As a boy I did all three of the above: making pop-up cards from folded construction paper, using my birthday origami kit (nerdy, I know) to make speckled-purplish violets lovingly shaped with a #2 pencil, and writing a collection of limericks with awkward rhyming schemes. The first year I made a card for my dad I did it out of genuine excitement and interest, gaining my dad’s extreme happiness and affection. The precedent had been established. The next five years of making stuff for Father’s Day came with my dad’s increasing quasi-dependence on my creating something new for him every year. The last two years he would come up to me and ask me, “So did you make my card yet?” three days before the special day. And at the same time his expectations of father’s day love increased, my enthusiasm for always doing something “special” for my dad slumped.

It’s not that I don’t love my dad. My dad is amazing, I love the heck out of him, and we’ve had lots of fun together over the years. You might call me selfish for not wanting to make a little something to celebrate Father’s Day with, but that would be missing the point. Showing care for a loved one isn’t something that should be expected as a responsibility. The more people consider the Father’s Day poem a critical part of a child’s Father’s Day responsibility the more trite and meaningless it gets. Do we really want kids making stuff for their dads out of habit, necessity, or even fear of being chastised? Love between a child and a dad can’t be simply expressed through a repetitive task that more and more kids dread to finish. It’s something special that should come from the heart, no matter how it chooses to manifest itself.

Happy Father’s Day!