Yahoo! News Message Board - How "Daddy" affects your job: psychologist

I sent this message that I wrote on the Yahoo Message Board today in response to the article about daddys affecting children's lives:
I want to share this because I often think that men do not realize just how important they are to their wives and children, and how what they do affects their children for a lifetime. When I was ten years old,my daddy said to me, "go move the big truck to the back yard." He was talking about the big farm truck not the pickup. I had never driven before in my life! I had no knowledge of how too. My heart leaped into my throat and I almost said, "I cannot do that--I don't know how" but my daddy was not the kind of man one could talk back too. I figured the consequences of talking back and refusing to do what he told me were probably a greater risk than driving the truck. So I got the keys, sat in the driver's seat of a truck so big I could hardly touch the brake or acclerator, and I prayed, "Lord, help me please, I have to get this done". I sat there and I worked the gears back and forth trying to figure out how to make it go. At first I couldn't move the gears, that clutch thing, you know.It seemed like I sat there for hours, trying to figure the way to make it go, without turning the key. I noticed the clutch, thinking what is that, maybe it is the solution. I pushed it in, nothing happened, so then I tried pushing it in and moving the gear shift--success. So then I got the courage to turn the key and the truck lurched inch by inch into the back yard. When I went back in the house, hours later, my daddy said,"did you move that truck?" I said "yes Sir, I did." He acted as if it was no big deal, but I had been terrified of killing myself in the truck by accident, or destroying the truck by driving it into the tree that was in the back yard, or not being able to make it go, or any of a dozen events that a child's mind can imagine.
It was an event that totally shaped my life because my daddy let me drive a truck that costs more than $75,000 at the age of ten,when insurance was not mandatory, with absolutely no instruction on how to do it.He had confidence in my intelligence and figured that I would figure it out and he was right. It instilled in me much confidence and courage, become I had learned early on, that given enough perservance I could teach myself almost anything, and succeed.
Years later when my oldest daughter was in college, I told her this and I told her that I was more terrified of failing my daddy, [and causing him to punish me] than of harming myself or the truck. She said to me, "think what his confidence in me had done in my life" and I stopped to reflect on it. My daddy had almost an iron-cast conviction of right and wrong and he never waivered on truth--he was like the rock of Gibraltar in some ways, absolutely unswerving from right as defined by God, not tolerating a permissiveness or tolerance of breaking his laws. My daughters could see how profoundly he shaped all of his children, how his discipline set boundaries for us, so we were not uncertain about what the rules were, or how to please him. It made it much easier for me to also obey the Commandments of God, because God is The FATHER in heaven and HE has rules, and those rules establish the boundaries also.
My daddy died in Dec 2004 and I am still very sad about it. I miss him and his steadfastness. I pray to see him again in heaven some day.
---If you want to read the Yahoo message board, go to www.Yahoo.com, and click on news, find the article listed in the title of this posting, and click on the "discuss" section at the end of the article. There are many postings on this topic from people all over.