Hank Azaria Was Scared to Be a Dad…And Still Is

He told Bennington that he continued to talk with friends, colleagues, anyone who had any advice about how to figure it all out, throughout the pregnancy.  They all told him that it was going to change his life, and that it would be difficult, but that he would end up  loving being a dad.  None of the advice, however helped answer the question of “how.” He got his answer when his son was born ten weeks early,  weighing only two and a half pounds.  His wife had pre-eclampsia, and he talked about what that meant, and what it meant to him:

It means the blood vessels in the womb are constricted and so the baby’s not getting enough nutrition.  It’s also fatal for the mother.  The only cure is c-section for baby and momma.  Baby’s gotta come out.  It was scary and rough and my son was in the NIC U– the neonatal intensive care unit for seven weeks.  Thank god he’s fine, but being scared like that about his health– it was like God saying, ‘you want something to cry about?  I’ll give you something to cry about….and then the fact that he was okay, made me so grateful that all of the selfish things I was worrying about, like being up late and screaming and whining and dealing with a kid, seemed fine.

It’s four years later now and his son has changed his life.  He’s gone from worrying first about himself, to worrying about his son.

Your first thought when you’re faced with maybe my kid’s not going to be okay, is…’how’s he going to deal with that?  Like what’s his life going to be?  Then your second thought is, ‘what is my life going to be dealing with that.’  …But the fact that my thought was for him first, I think that might have been the first time in my existence that my thought was for somebody else.

And along the way he’s gotten to talk with a lot of famous dads about their own views on being a kid or having kids.  Like Mike Myers, who described being a dad like the way you fell in love when you were 12, and had an intense crush that you don’t really experience again as an adult in a romantic way.  Or Bryan Cranston who talked about the worry and fear that comes along with loving your kid.  He spoke with Richard Kind about whether its good or bad to  force your kids to stick with lessons.  And he spoke with Kevin Bacon who talked about the first time he let his kid’s hand go crossing the street.  Or Tim Robbins who would never let his kid play in the street the way his generation did.  Or Phil Rosenthal who had to be careful what he asked for as a kid because his mom had been in a Nazi concentration camp when she was young.

And yet, despite all this hyper-examination of parenting, at times throughout the interview Azaria seems almost longing for the less complicated way in which his own parents approached having kids.  “Helicopter parenting,” he said, “has become another pitfall of our generation,” and he refers to his parents methods with admiration:

I got very humbled as a parent because a lot of the things that generation did actually had a wisdom to it. They weren’t all over us. Thus we got self-reliance fairly young. And they expected us to find our own way which is a tremendous gift you can give a kid. Even family meals– which was so important to our parents’ generation. …My point was our parents’ generation were more comfortable with discipline. We are not. We’re like the first generation that wants to be liked by our kids more than our kids care about us liking them.

Azaria isn’t likely to run out of material for his show any time soon.  Just when you have early adolescence down to a manageable set of issues, you get a new series of questions about growing up.  So far he has formed a few conclusions, like “I don’t want to raise myself..I don’t know how I would deal with me,” and  his realization that “if you don’t know as a parent, it’s okay to say I don’t know.  there’s a lot of information you can get online and talk to people about it.” But more than answers, he has questions and plans to continue to keep asking and answering questions about being a dad each week.

You can watch a new episode of Fatherhood every week on AOL. You can hear this episode of Unmasked with Ron Bennington as well as others exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.  Unmasked airs weekly on Raw Dog SiriusXM Comedy Hits 99 on Saturdays at 8pm Eastern on Raw Dog SiriusXM Comedy Hits 99 with replays on Sunday at 3pm and 9pm Eastern.