‘My children’s happiness gives me comfort’ - Phillips says unconditional love the most rewarding part in fatherhood
Published:Sunday | June 21, 2020 | 12:00 AMLivern Barrett - Senior Staff Reporter
For Dr Peter Phillips, there is no second-guessing what has been the most rewarding aspect of fatherhood.
“Just the love of my children. The unconditional love,” said the leader of the Opposition and president of the People’s National Party (PNP).
Phillips, a towering figure on the Jamaican political landscape for decades, has fathered six children – four boys and two girls – from two marriages.
He never considered fatherhood a difficult challenge, neither did Phillips see himself as a strict disciplinarian, but the 70-year-old politician said he is happy with their growth and development and the paths they have forged for themselves.
“Our responsibility as parents is mainly to provide guidance for children. Their lives belong to them, come from God Almighty … . All I want for my children is their happiness,” Phillips told The Sunday Gleaner last week.
“Once they seek it in ways that are wholesome and don’t impinge on anyone, and sometimes the way how they would do things is not the way I would do things, but just to see them go through life and seek their understanding, their happiness, and their careers give me comfort and happiness,” he added.
The PNP president admits to trying to talk his oldest child, Mikael, out of entering the rough-and-tumble world of politics.
“I never tell him to choose politics. Truth be told, I probably did the opposite … because there has been a growing cynicism that has taken up a lot of people’s minds, so I had to persuade him to do the hard-nosed evaluation.”
Mikael, who is now the member of parliament for North West Manchester, remembered being confronted by his father after PNP supporters in East Rural St Andrew asked him to consider representing the constituency.
“I remember him coming to me and say he heard I had an interest … and I said, ‘Nothing like that’, because I knew what his response was going to be,” the younger Phillips said, bursting into laughter.
Dr Phillips, however, confessed that he now considers it “a huge honour” that his eldest has chosen to emulate him.
The opposition leader became a father for the first time at the age of 21 and fathered his last child “in my 50s”.
The man who has served at nearly all levels of the Jamaican political executive admitted that “later rather than earlier”, he began engaging more in activities that served to strengthen the bonds with his children.
Not doing that earlier, he acknowledged, is one of his biggest regrets.
“I made it a habit, later rather than earlier, that after key exams like CXC (Caribbean Examinations Council) and things like that, I would just take the youth dem and we go away, sometimes overseas, and spend a week, just human being to human being,” he told The Sunday Gleaner. “Just watching a movie, going to different cities, reading a book or just rap … spending a time with no agenda except to be together.”
It’s something he wished he had done sooner.
“I think the first time around, I would have wished I had an understanding and made more efforts to do the things I am talking to you about now, in terms of bonding,” he said, disclosing that he was his parents’ only child.
He said his recent health scare caused him to have an “honest” discussion with his children about mortality and life.
The PNP president got philosophical discussing the prospects of raising a child in modern-day Jamaica.
The main challenge, he suggested, is to help a new generation that is searching for meaning in life “to withstand the kind of crass, materialistic interpretation of life, which measures the human being, not by the content of their character, but by the extent of their accumulation of things”.
“To get the younger generation to ask the questions, ‘What kind of society do I want to live in?’, ‘What is my relation to my brothers and sisters in the society?’ is the challenge I see as a parent, but without preaching or [being] holier than thou in the relationship,” Phillips said.