write or wrong:
I hear what you are saying about your husband. The truth is that both you and your husband remind me of how my own parents reacted to me. Let me just tell you a few things.
Of all my uncles, I have only one who ever took me aside. He told me that he saw my problem and he offered to do whatever I needed to help. He was the first person to give me some validation in the problems I was struggling with and show that he cared without being pushy. Granted he didn’t really know how to go about helping me, but its been over 15 years later and that short one hour talk is still with me. To me its no coincidence that despite having very wild kids, they all grew up with barely a thought to leaving the derech of their father.
A story I heard second hand from someone who knows the family, is that there was a chassidishe boy from Boro Park who went OTD. One Shabbos he was watching TV and a neighbor walked in. Within the year he was back in Yeshivah, because as he said, he was so afraid of hurting his father from going off.
For men, it can be very easy to not learn how to show our true feelings. But as in these two cases, the dividends of being able to show the love that a father feels in the face of pain, can pay off a thousandfold.