Finley: On Fatherhood
Long ago and far away, Father’s Day was celebrated as a special day for Dad with his favorite meal generally accompanied by the traditional gifts of a shirt, tie, belt, or wallet. As a son giving these gifts, and later as a father receiving them, it did not fully dawn on me what they really symbolized – honoring the father’s central role as the family breadwinner, the family member who brought home the bacon.
All of this has changed, of course, as society and the economy have changed. Today Father’s Day and fatherhood itself are under fire on multiple fronts and with multiple losses, not only for children and fathers, but also for society. Consider three: male unemployment, divorce, and non-marital childbearing.
Male unemployment today is higher than female unemployment while not coincidentally female educational attainment is higher than male educational attainment. Combined, these gender gaps portend a family gender role reversal with uncertain consequences. Specifically, for eons, men have supported women for love, sex, companionship, and for being good mothers to their children. Given the current reversals, will women support men for love, sex, companionship, and for being good fathers to their children?
Second, although sound social science research clearly indicates that children want a father in their lives, these three trends auger against the fulfillment of children’s wishes. The strongest evidence comes from the children of divorce. Multiple studies from multiple perspectives all reach the same conclusion: children of divorce not only miss their fathers but they also want legislatures and judges to change family law and family court practice so that they can have a loving and nurturing father involved in their lives.
The third challenge to fatherhood is non-marital childbearing. In the 1950’s, only four percent of children were born out of wedlock, while today it is about forty percent — a tenfold increase. While there is no “natural law” that children born out of wedlock should be at higher risk of losing contact with their fathers than children born within marriage, there is a very clear informal “social law” joined by formal “family law” jointly dictating that father absence increases with out-of-wedlock births.
For society, unambiguous research indicates that children of divorce and of out-of-wedlock births are at a much higher risk for a host of negative personal, social, health, work, welfare, and criminal outcomes than children whose fathers are heavily involved in their lives. Additional research shows that fathers are superior to mothers in curbing high-risk sexual and health behaviors in adolescents and young adults. Society thus has a vested interest in preserving fatherhood.
Like the children of divorce, the fathers of divorce also suffer from the severing or marginalizing of the father-child bond. Divorced fathers are worse off than divorced mothers on virtually all indices of personal, social, work, and health well-being. Strikingly, divorced fathers commit suicide at rates of eight to ten times greater than divorced mothers.
Insight into the emotional losses of a severed father-child relationship comes from the classic song Big Yellow Taxi. For many separated children and fathers, “… you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone” really rings true on Father’s Day.
For those fortunate enough to have a father, share this Father’s Day with him. For those who have lost their father through divorce and the family court system, contact him in the spirit of regret and reconciliation. For those who have lost their father through estrangement, contact him in the spirit of acceptance and an understanding of the issues of his time and generation. For those who have lost their father through death, consider placing a single red rose and contemplating his contribution to your life.
Fatherhood as an institution will not disappear. Like Liberty, however, the price of fatherhood is eternal vigilance. Let your vigilance this Father’s Day shine a new light on your father-child relationship and reinvigorate it.
Gordon E. Finley, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychology at Florida International University in Miami.
Submitted by the author, to the Federal Observer for publication, June 19, 2010.
Great TRUTHFUL article you wrote – very astute obversations. If I was to point a finger at all this, I would start with Dr. Benjamin Spock back in the 1960′s. Among other things, he, as you will recall, advocated not spanking children for fear of damaging their ego’s. My parents would have turned over in their graves, had they been alive, to read all the nonsense Spock spewed in his books. We must be allowed to discipline our kids AT HOME without fear of reprisal. I also received two paddlings in school with a large wooden paddle and it didn’t hurt my ego one bit. Just my hind end. But each time, I learned not to misbehave. My parents always told me that if I got a “whipping” at school, I was going to get another one when I got home. And so it was. But I learned. And that’s what its all about – learning and respecting your parents and elders.
We have allowed the un-news media, the Hellewood crowd, and the pubic fool system to indoctrinate our children into believing that they must rely upon great leaders to run their lives and that they are nothing but evolved slime which has no more value than the desert rat. There was a time when the women did not consider themselves to be nothing more than a bitch dog in heat and that she should allow any dog which marks her doorstep to mount her. The LIBERAL concept of a “man” is based on how many women he has mounted.
We are far overdue to recognize that the family is hated by the left wing goofs because they know that a strong cohesive family structure is difficult to lead into the abyss to join them. The family is the foundation upon which nations are built and therefore in the LIBERAL mind set it must BE DESTROYED. To many that Obomination which occupies the oval office is their savior and they therefore put that poor sick and misguided individual in charge of the nation and their lives because the liar told them that he would take care of them for the rest of their worthless lives.
I am happy to see that the Obomination has shaken the people so hard that they are waking up to the fact that the LIBERAL model for women and men is a road to destruction and that their future is in their hands. Nice to see that some have realized that you CAN fight city hall and you can get the miscreants out of their cushy jobs and put them in the market place to seek a productive job for the first time in their life.