I shame the matriarchy

on the one hand, one could immediately invoke "WATM" (What About Teh Menz). on the other flipper, why not examine fatherhood as a more-or-less-feminist issue? does the institution of fatherhood shore up myths of patriarchy and make them more real? do modern fathers really buy into all that crap?
 

Fatherhood is vitally important to the healthy upbringing of children. I don't care how politically incorrect it is to believe that. Men bring a different dynamic into the raising of a child, both mothers and fathers provide unique learning experiences. Look at parts of our culture where active fatherhood is held in contempt. Go into the prisons and ask how many inmates were raised by 1 parent, and how many had actively involved fathers.

/rant

sorry. I've raised 3 boys and am working on the 4th. They need their father. Feminist/Patriarchy Haters can take a flying leap, where fatherhood is concerned.

That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
 

To offer a slightly different slant...

I don't have kids, but really I still am one (I'm eighteen just barely), and everyone I know is still a kid, too. And a lot of them didn't have fathers in the traditional way, and a lot of them had fathers in the bad kind of traditional way (read: totally emotionally checked-out).

So I think, basically, the more responsible adults committed to loving and raising a kid, the better. Period. I think men can make wonderful caregivers and fully meet their kids' needs. I think women can do the same. I think everyone is in a much better boat if you've got at least two people definitely sticking around.

But as for "fatherhood"? I think it's a load of gender essentialist crap if you're using the word to mean anything other than simply, "parenthood by a male" distinct from "parenthood by a female" for purely biological reasons (and sometimes not even that, i.e. adoption). (Maybe in our hypergendered society kids are more likely to identify with a parent of their sex, but I think most of the time humans transcend that kind of thing in their real-life relationships.)

So while most prison inmates are probably going to tell you that they didn't have an involved dad, I'd bet not a one is going to say, "I didn't have a dad, but I did have two very involved moms, and a whole community of loving role-models!"
 

Yeah, fatherhood is a feminist issue.

Seriously. Even without considering emotional baggage, it's pretty clear that feminists need to talk about fatherhood. The disparity between maternal responsibilities and paternal ones is a major cause of the pay gap, so if you could 'fix' fatherhood & paternal rights, the gap would narrow pretty much overnight. It's also a cause of the power gap - all this blathering about how parliamentary jobs aren't 'family-friendly', as if families are solely the responsibilities of women and male politicians should be cheerful about being up debating til 2am.

As for fatherhood being important to the child, I wouldn't call that politically incorrect; in my experience the proudly politically incorrect types prefer to marginalise fatherhood and focus on blaming the mothers for everything and pushing anyone without a mother straight out of the airlock. (rant rant rant). But:

Go into the prisons and ask how many inmates were raised by 1 parent, and how many had actively involved fathers.

I'd like to ask you to please stop assuming that single-parent families=single-mother families. Single-father families are enough of a trainwreck as it is. (my own father was no kind of caregiver, but he was the only parent I had after age 11, and I find the assumption that single parent=single mother is, if nothing else, annoying as fuck. I'd be really interested to see some stats on how kids like me turn out - if we really are jailfodder, if we're more likely to have mental health issues, etc etc.)
 

(hey, check out rootie - she said something controversial!)
 

so, Daisy Bond - you're of the "it takes a village" persuasion, and you're saying it doesn't matter who the adults are, but the more the merrier?

am I reading you right?
 

I'd like to ask you to please stop assuming that single-parent families=single-mother families.

that's a really good point.
 

Well, to clarify, I'm saying it doesn't matter who they are on the axis of gender. Other characteristics (like say, whether or not one is an abuser) certainly matter quite a lot.

Aside from that, I think you're reading me right.
 

A question for Rootie and Daisy - I don't really know how else to bring this up, so I'll stick with personal-is-political:

How am I going to keep myself out of jail? How are you, as fellow members of the human race, going to keep me out of jail? Jail is expensive, and if I'm in it and you're not then you'll be paying for my board and lodgings there, so I think you really ought to be worrying about this one.

It's true by every available statistic that kids do better with more than one parent, knowing that isn't a lot of use to anyone who got dealt that hand. You can't stop anyone from being dealt that hand, either - there have always been single parents and always will be single parents. Blaming one or other of the two genetic parents for the lack does not make up for it; and many single-parent families are wrought from disaster, where there simply isn't anyone to blame.

So the situation has a markedly negative effect on my life chances. Is that just tough shit, then? Am I meant to just work through this stuff by myself here, try to unlock the box from the inside, and stay stuck inside if my own efforts aren't enough to get me out of here? If there's a 'unique learning experience' you get from having a mother, does that make me permanently defective?

(honestly, I'm often tempted to believe the answer to that is 'yes', but it's not 'yes because there's this unbreakable law of nature', it's 'yes because the society you live in sucks'.)
 

yeah, and: also two parents doesn't necessarily equal one man, one woman...
 

So I think, basically, the more responsible adults committed to loving and raising a kid, the better. Period. I think men can make wonderful caregivers and fully meet their kids' needs. I think women can do the same. I think everyone is in a much better boat if you've got at least two people definitely sticking around.

But as for "fatherhood"? I think it's a load of gender essentialist crap if you're using the word to mean anything other than simply, "parenthood by a male" distinct from "parenthood by a female" for purely biological reasons (and sometimes not even that, i.e. adoption). (Maybe in our hypergendered society kids are more likely to identify with a parent of their sex, but I think most of the time humans transcend that kind of thing in their real-life relationships.)

So while most prison inmates are probably going to tell you that they didn't have an involved dad, I'd bet not a one is going to say, "I didn't have a dad, but I did have two very involved moms, and a whole community of loving role-models!"

Word.

Mind you, I think probably having a variety of caring people around, including adult males, can only be a good thing; but I don't think the nuclear model is the only or even necessarily the best one.

and honestly I don't think it's "holding fatherhood in contempt" that's at the root of the problem here, although I've no doubt that some men/fathers have some legit stories to tell in that regard. The nuclear family was already a much-pared-down version of the traditional extended family. What about grandmothers? What about uncles and aunts and cousins? What about neighbors?...
 

I also think one very involved and caring parent--who has the material and emotional resources to do the job of parenting -somehow-, as it is a fulltime job--is a helluvalot better than a whole shitload of really dysfunctional people.

i do think community is important too, though.
 

yeah, and: also two parents doesn't necessarily equal one man, one woman...

Word. Doesn't even have to be a romantic couple - I know a few people who were raised by a mother and an aunt, or a mother and one or both grandparents, rather than a mother and a father. It's awesome that there's a growing interest in gay families, but (Venn diagram time) queer issues don't necessarily overlap with non-heteronormative family structures.
 

Hi Thene,

Those are some intense questions. I'm not quite sure why you're asking me, but I'll try to answer. This comment is enormous.

I really, really am of the "'it takes a village' persuasion," as antiprincess observed. Not only do I think kids are better off with two very involved adults, I think they're better off with three. Or four. Or even more. And if/when I have children, I'll practice that idea to the fullest extent possible.

So. People ending up in jail in big numbers is a huge social problem; inadequate familial support systems are part of this problem. Racism and poverty are also part of this problem.

If I could I would eradicate racism, poverty, and inadequate support systems. I can't do that. I personally can't even offer someone who's been a victim of those problems much more than "tough shit" and "good luck."

I'm a big supporter of large-scale programs to help people in shitty situations. I'm a big supporter of every kind of effective initiative you could dream up to help keep people out of prison, to help people have a good experience in school, to help people get housing and medicine and everything else.

But what am I, personally, going to do to keep you out of jail? Besides vote?

Not much.

Now, if you were, say, a good friend of mine, things would change some. I might want to offer you love and support and solidarity of whatever kind I'm able.

But when you get right down to "the situation has a markedly negative effect on my life chances," I can't undo the reality of your past, nor can I undo the reality of the statistics on the matter.

Now, it' just one factor, mind. Everyone is born into many situations, with many personal characteristics. You already know I don't think there's a "unique learning experience" only a female parent can provide (except maybe nursing? ha). Even though I think there maybe be unique and important experiences associated with having a community, I don't think you're "permanently defective" if you didn't have one.
 

But when you get right down to "the situation has a markedly negative effect on my life chances," I can't undo the reality of your past, nor can I undo the reality of the statistics on the matter.

That's kinda my point - no one can, so 'it takes a village', which I think is an admirable mission plan to have starting out, isn't helpful to those who happen to lack one. It could even be read as 'my kids will have a village and be fine and not go to jail while those kids over there who never had a village are going to rot.'


I'd have hopes for those large-scale programs myself, but what I know of such social interventions is just of the one initial problem; access. It's usually impossible for children to access social care alone - instead any extra help they're to be provided with has to be accessed by the mother/father, who may feel too threatened to do this, or may not regard it as necessary, or may simply feel too weighed-under to feel up to inviting intervention into their lives. This all started with AP asking if parenthood was getting harder; how easy do you think it would be for a lone mother or lone father to say 'I'm not giving my children everything they need to have, so I must accept the help of strangers.' And if they don't say that, the kids don't get it. So I never got it. I really wish I had but in order for that option to work out, you've got to get other shit out of the way first.
 

(btw, I was asking you simply because you'd said it took a village - some people just have this one, rundown cottage, and I wanted to know how you felt they ought to deal with that cottage if that was where they found themselves.)
 

<(btw, I was asking you simply because you'd said it took a village - some people just have this one, rundown cottage, and I wanted to know how you felt they ought to deal with that cottage if that was where they found themselves.)

Oh okay, yeah. That totally makes sense.

That's kinda my point - no one can, so 'it takes a village', which I think is an admirable mission plan to have starting out, isn't helpful to those who happen to lack one.

That's definitely true. It hadn't occurred to me to think about it that way, probably because I have one.

It could even be read as 'my kids will have a village and be fine and not go to jail while those kids over there who never had a village are going to rot.'

Ack!

My whole feeling about the benefits of a village has to do with people basically choosing the opposite of all that bootstraps crap and getting that real responsibility means responsibility for one another, for our resources, our shared space. So. My intentions with those ideas are the opposite of that interpretation.

But I'll confess to being pretty stumped about what to do about those kids, really. You've got excellent points about social programs.

My feeling is that the shifts that have to happen in our culture to really address this problem (and most others) re so enormous I don't know where to start. But I don't want to cop out like that.

Do you have any thoughts about ways to help those kids that might work?
 

Pardon me whilst I throw a bit more grist for the mill into the mix;

What about, for example "putative father's registries" which amount to anytime a man has sex with a woman he essentially has to register with the State- and give HER name and date they had sex over to the State in order that he might later claim paternity rights of any resultant child? Otherwise the mother can do things such as relinquish custody of said resultant child (in hopes of eventual adoption) without his knowledge, leaving him with no paternity claim/no legal leg to stand on.

And what of those fathers who did not register and now in some states have no legal recourse? Who for example were unaware of Putative father's registries, had no idea she was even pregnant, and had no idea that he had a child out there, until one day, somewhere in that process or thereafter, he learns of the child's existence, and finds himself without legal recourse?

Naturally, variations on this can also occur even if she decides to parent the child without him, but adoption creates all kinds of "special" cases.

Therein, Feminist analysis is certainly critically important as it rapidly becomes a twisted ball encompassing issues of class, power, consent, what constitutes a parent, is parenting a one time act or an ongoing status, as well as State entanglement within the sexual lives of those within its borders.

Abortion access and lack thereof- and the parties to those processes are certainly intimately entwined in all the above, and with both Feminism and Feminist analysis.

Want more? What of families where the father is more of a parent to a child than the mother?

Or what about divorces wherein the mother is making more money than the father? Or uses the child as a means of control and manipulation? How do we as Feminists come to terms with both mothers and fathers in some of these circumstances?

What of IVF kids? Kids as resultant of surrogacies? Emergent technologies? What does fatherhood mean in such?

Are fathers mere 'drive by sperm donors' as some in the adoption business have referred to them? Or do issues of genetic heritage, family history, and desired involvement, sometimes thwarted matter to some?

So yeah, your question entails multiple perspectives- that of the parents, or those not biologically related who may 'parent' a child, permutations on the State, broader community, as well as the child and their relation or lack there of the 'father'. Don't even get me started on theological concepts of fatherhood and how such shape modern American culture and expectations!

Or what of kids from the legalized infant abandonment laws/Babydump laws/Baby Moses laws wherein ANYONE, parent or not, can anonymously leave a newborn (in most cases) places like hospitals, fire stations, and in some cases churches,or even, the dreaded "with any responsible adult", and their relationships and lack thereof to parents of biology or adoption, or ongoing fostercare?

(Baby Moses laws are recipes for utilizing a State created system to hide abuse, permanently disappear the infants in custody disputes, etc.)

Then, you want a real brain twister, take a good long look at Les X en Colere/Angry X, the (one time) children of France, born of anonymous births and then placed for adoption.

While originally created as a pressure valve to release pressure of infant abandonment and the practice of trapdoors at convents etc, it was a core tool of the Vichy government's attempt to hide the parentage of children born of (occupied France's) women and Nazi soldiers. Under the system of anonymous birthing, not only is the one time child's father unknown, but the mother can also be 'erased'.

Personally, I'm firmly convinced Rootie's "they need their father" is sheer unadulterated grade-A crap- while she may feel that way about her own kids, universalizing such sentiments out to ALL kids is pure hubris.

To then further couch such hubris into some sort of "vitally important" component/prerequisite for "healthy upbringing" of (ALL) children is then to take her personal beliefs and attempt to wrap them in the psuedo-scientification of general "health".

She can premptively dismiss those holding other opinions as (mere) "political correctness", (a tool often used to silence those who disagree) but the fact remains, over-generalizations and tactics such as these are just that, overgeneralizations and tactics.

Sure, the personal is political, but the personal is almost never universal.

But then, she and I are coming from shall we say, rather different perspectives.
 

It could even be read as 'my kids will have a village and be fine and not go to jail while those kids over there who never had a village are going to rot.'

which is, of course, nonsense.

"village" kids can rot just as thoroughly.

which leads me to speculate as to whether the whole "single parent home" thing is a factor in court cases. do "nuclear-family" kids get more chances to stay out of jail than single-parent or non-"traditional"-family kids?

assuming their "lives of crime" begin when they're kids, of course.
 

Don't even get me started on theological concepts of fatherhood and how such shape modern American culture and expectations!

actually, that sounds really interesting.
 

you know - I feel like an idiot but I had no idea this was going to get so personal so quickly.

I really should have known that.

but we've been talking about motherhood here for a coupla months, and with relatively low controversy levels. so I didn't expect it.

everyone has raised some really good points, and there's lots here for discussion. I feel confident that none of you will go out of your way to hurt or humiliate in the service of making your point.

all that said - do no actual fathers read my blog? you know, if we have pointed questions about the nature of fatherhood, it would be helpful to actually ask an actual father.
 

"village" kids can rot just as thoroughly.

which leads me to speculate as to whether the whole "single parent home" thing is a factor in court cases. do "nuclear-family" kids get more chances to stay out of jail than single-parent or non-"traditional"-family kids?

assuming their "lives of crime" begin when they're kids, of course.


Few things all wrapped up here:

a) for the most part, word.

b) there's no clear causal relationship there, really - it could be that there's an underlying thing (poverty, for instance) that can cause both family breakdown and criminal behaviour.

c) I was kinda using 'jail' as a metaphor. I don't seriously expect I am going to jail. I do however have a set of problems I might not have had if I'd had two parents. But what Rootie said about jail is statistically true.

d) do "nuclear-family" kids get more chances to stay out of jail than single-parent or non-"traditional"-family kids? IMHO yes. As soon as my two-parent family became a single-father family, I started skipping school. The same week, even. Two parents are way better at keeping kids out of trouble - both through supervision and through simple emotional presence. If you've only got one parent to shame, especially if your relationship with them isn't so great, the stakes are far lower if you fuck up. Obviously there exist people from two-parent families, or from villages, who fuck up, but I the chances of it happening are lower.

e) assuming their "lives of crime" begin when they're kids, of course
Why so? Suppose, for a moment, that Rootie is right about each parent providing unique learning experiences. The lack of that learning experience does not magically get righted when someone turns 18. People can get by with their burdens for ages then eventually come up against something that makes them break.
 

My feeling is that the shifts that have to happen in our culture to really address this problem (and most others) re so enormous I don't know where to start. But I don't want to cop out like that.

Do you have any thoughts about ways to help those kids that might work?

Nope. No, I'm going straight for the copout. Society is fucked. I'd like to see more tools in the hands of the kids, though. Even just counselling or advice kids could access without having to go through their parents to do so.
 

"(hey, check out rootie - she said something controversial!) "

and it worked, too!

(last nights comment brought to you by a very large bottle of Pinto Grigio)
 

AP- how about some input from a "real" father, since you asked.

I agree in principal with all that has been said here about "the village" and how multiple parents don't have to be of different genders. I do believe, however, that each adult caregiver or parent or whatever you want to call them has to serve a different role in the family dynamic. There are 2 basic roles-
1)nurturer- which has traditionally been filled by the mothers/women in our culture. This is as it sounds- the one who makes sure the child is kept healthy and nurses wounds be they physical or emotional.
2) disciplinarian- which has traditionally been filled by the father/patriarch in our culture. This is neccessary to prepare the child for life in the real world, where everyone else is NOT concerned with their self esteem and feelings.

In my humble opinion, these 2 roles MUST be filled in the family dynamic, but it is not neccessary they be filled in the traditional female/male fshion.

The role of "provider" is a side issue, and someone must in fact provide but believe it or not my Southern Freewill Baptist Christian Reagan Conservative self has no hard opinion about which 'parent' it is who provides. Either is perfectly capable of doing so, and each family has it's internal characterisitcs which indicate which is the best choice in their situation.

"The Village" also helps, but is not as neccessary in my world. I was raised by a village which included the absolutely best role models for what Grandparents should be ever (don't bother arguing with me that your grandparents were better cause they weren't). I also had 2 uncles and 2 aunts who helped me to see the reasons behind my father/disciplinarian's actions. Their role was to help me step out of my own skin and look at the situation objectively, and not be so blinded by my rage at what was being done. There a lot of roles to be filled by 'the village', but they can be filled by school teachers, nurses, neighbors, or the 2 old men who play checkers at the court house as well as grandparents and uncles.

Are y'all ready for a shocker? Our kids will tell you that Rootie is more of the disciplinarian in our house, and I am more of the nurturer. We're both comfortable with our roles, and our kids are only a little fucked-up so it must work at least partially.

Now on to single parent situations:
(Warning: generalizations ahead. I know that what I am about to say isn't true in every situation.)

Statistics will tell you that a majority of prison inmates did not have a prominent male in their upbringing. Do I think that having their father involved would have kept them out of jail? NO! I think it is more a case of social situation. Their mothers chose to make a baby with some unsavory character, which leads you to believe she also makes other unwise choices, and are often too young to understand what it means to raise a child since she herself is still a child so she lets the world around her calibrate the child's moral compass and things get worse from there.

I have known many good, well adjusted people who come from single parent situations. 2 of my current managers come from such situations, one whose father was killed when he was 3 and another whose father abandoned him, his mother, and brother when he was 2 then wanted to become involved in his son's lives when they became adults (telling them he loved them but just couldn't handle the pressure and responsibility). I hired a young woman out of college in 1997 who was raised by a single father from the time she was 6. She is now the head of one portion of the Everglades Restoration Project.

There are a lot of others who aren't so well adjusted. The difference? Hard to say.

I will also say that I have seen as many bad, amoral kids come from affluent 2 parent households. Why would that be? My OPINION is that one or the other or both of the parents were too wrapped up in their career or societal situations to fulfill their roles as parents.

I don't speak up often, mainly because once I get started it's hard for me to stop.....
 

Now, the short version:

Our role(s) as parents are simply:

Keep them healthy and nourished and grow them up.

Calibrate their moral compass. Whether they choose to follow that compass on a path of our liking is their decision.
 

SD: I can see your point about needing both nurture and discipline. What I'm wondering is whether it needs to be even that clearly delineated, although I appreciate your point that it doesn't have to be the traditionally gendered breakdown. In other words, does one person have to be "the nurturer" and the other "the disciplinarian?" Or can it not be that both or all parental figures provide a mix of nurturing and discipline?
 

yeah; there are a couple of different concepts swirling about here. One is something we talked about in child development class: a breakdown which I like because it divorces it a bit from the gendered or even number of parents thing.

You have:

the authoritarian model;

the laissez-faire model;

and the authoritative model.

"Authoritarian" is pretty much what it sounds like: very strict and harsh, heavy on the discipline and punish, light on the affection (probably), lots of rules, lots of respect for hierarchy. Yer classic Victorian household, say. Or what Alice Miller talks about as the classic model for German parenting in the period when Hitler grew up (which is why, in her opinion, he had so much appeal).

"Laissez-faire" is more like the stereotypical hippie approach--the household in "Running With Scissors" would be an extreme example. But it could also just be: absent parents, physically or emotionally or both. They could be kind or harsh in personality, but mostly just...distant. don't really pay attention to the kid's comings and goings. I have a close friend who grew up like that; his mother died and his father sank into a morose depression, leaving the kids to basically raise themselves. In at least one of the cases it -really- didn't go well. It wasn't really any more affectionate or "nurturing" either, though.

So, "authoritative" is sort of like the littlest Bear: "just right," or in psych-y terms, since no one's perfect or should be, "good enough." A balance between direction and...give the kids room to make their own mistakes and learn from them.

(There was also a less-used-term for a fourth model, but I've forgotten what it's called or what it's supposed to be about exactly).

Now, actually there's nothing in all this that necessarily talks about how much -nurturing-, at least in the sense of "affection," physical and otherwise, attention to the kid's feelings, and so forth, is a part of it, although it's sort of implied that an authoritarian family probably won't be so affectionate or empathetic to the kids' inner life; and a laissez faire family, the implication is that no one's really paying enough attention to the kid to call it any sort of "nurturing."

But really this is mostly focused on the "discipline" aspect, that is, what the optimum amount of structure is for the growing kid. The general idea is that all kids need -some- structure, and ideally freedom increases as the kid ages and completes various developmental "tasks" (there's a whole set of terms, rootie probably knows all this stuff): this is what "growing up" is all about. Ideally.

As far as the -nurturing- part, though, if we're going to take it to mean more narrowly what is often referred to as "touchy-feely stuff:" that kind of brings me, at least, back to "fathers."

Specifically, what I'm wondering is whether part of the problem is that for men especially, it's traditionally/often not considered as important that they either nurture or be nurtured. You know: touchy-feely is for -girls-.

Traditionally this was bound up with harsh discipline, the "making a man" process.

In the past x decades, I think on the whole the U.S. has become a lot more lax about "discipline." This is sort of--sort of--the thing the mens' rights sorts are always fapping on about: where are the fathers of yesteryear? Gone all gone. Instead we have Homer Simpson and Al Bundy. They may be male, but they're not -grownups.-

So, there's that. Which might be a separate and real thing, sure.

But that still doesn't address the problem of: men aren't supposed to really "be in touch with their feelings," be too physical, especially with other men, and so on and so forth. Which is probably where I part ways from the MRA types (well that and they tend to be raging bigoted assholes with serious personality problems): they're still very wedded to the "traditional" distant authoritarian patriarchal ideal (in theory. In reality I think a lot of them just want to be Al Bundy without even the mockery and minimal expectations that goes with it), not really tweaking that there's a -reason- so many people have come to the conclusion that Father Knows Best isn't actually all that swell in practice, a lot of the time; and no, it's not because the ev0l cackling feminazis just want to TAKE OVER THE WORLD, PINKY!!!
 

There a lot of roles to be filled by 'the village', but they can be filled by school teachers, nurses, neighbors, or the 2 old men who play checkers at the court house as well as grandparents and uncles.

Absolutely.
 

BD- I believe there are individuals out there who can fulfill both roles, but they are very rare. Having raised 4 kids now, I am convinced that kids, very young kids in particular, do not see shades of gray. It is in fact black and white to them. They have to know the black and white to start to understand the gray areas. Now, with that in mind, imagine the confusion when the same parent who hands out discipline is then the one who salves the "wounds" caused by the discipline. It is extremely difficult (not impossible) to have credibility in both roles. All of us have tendencies in our personality to either be a nurturer or a disciplinarian. And when you have to be both your heart will be in one but not the other. My observation has been that when one person tries to be both, when the kids get to be adolescents and teens the parent has lost the credibility in both roles. Is it the single parent's fault? I would hesitate to say so generally, but I'm sure there are circumstances where a lack of interest from the parent causes the loss of credibility.

I see the same dynamic play out in the work place. My supervisors have to work shoulder to shoulder with the manufacturing associates, and play the role of the nurturer training them then picking the pieces up after discipline is handed out. The department managers and plant managers have to be the disciplinarians, then I have to be the ultimate bad guy who fires them when they no longer respond to management.

Somebody has to be the "heavy"
 

Hmm.
 

consider this -

how many children born between the years 1935-1945 were rendered fatherless by The War? how many of them wound up incarcerated/otherwise damaged?

SD - do you dig being a father? was it a role you had to grow into, or adjust to - or did you just jump right in? did you find a lot of folks judging you on your parenting gangsta? did anything surprise you?
 

He's a better father than I am a mother. He knew what to do with the babies the minute they were born. I, on the other hand, had to grow into it. Except that he wouldn't wake up in the middle of the night unless I whacked him.
 

So if one parent is always, always the nurturer, and the other is always, always the discipliner, what happens to the kids if they wake up one morning and find that one of their parents isn't there any more?

That's my concern with role-based parenting, whoever takes on whichever role; only about half of children reach the age of 18 with both their genetic parents still standing shoulder to shoulder, so the chance of some sort of role upheaval occurring is extremely high. I believe that having more balance between the two, far from being confusing, would actually make for a more stable upbringing. Even a couple that does last the distance will sometimes find that one of them can't perform at a given time. I always figured one of the points of having two parents would be so someone can always pick up the slack if the other falters. How does that affect the children if the roles are so rigid?
 

"how many children born between the years 1935-1945 were rendered fatherless by The War? how many of them wound up incarcerated/otherwise damaged?"

This will sound cliche', but those were different times. I have read a report on this very subject (I am a HUGE WW2 history buff and have 2 cases of books on the period) and the conclusion was that most of the U.S. kids made fatherless by the war had either a grandfather or a stepfather to step into the role. Consider, however, that those were among the kids who came of age starting around 1960 and led the way into the undisciplined, casual sex, recreational drug culture. Connection? You will have to reach your own conclusion. Today's "fatherless" kids oftentimes have no one to fill the void.
 

So if one parent is always, always the nurturer, and the other is always, always the discipliner, what happens to the kids if they wake up one morning and find that one of their parents isn't there any more?

a very good point.
 

Crap- AP I wrote a full point by point reply to your list of questions and Blogger ate it!
 

"do you dig being a father?"
Oh yes. Now that the older boys are becoming men, it takes on a new feel, but I have (for the most part) enjoyed the ride.

"was it a role you had to grow into, or adjust to - or did you just jump right in?"
I just jumped right in, only to discover the water was HOT! Like everyone I entered it with preconceived notions which were quickly dispelled.
Coming from a large extended family I knew fairly early that I wanted to be a Dad one day. When my engineering school classmates would talk about graduating and buying a Porsche or Corvette, I would talk about wanting a station wagon and enough kids to fill it up. If health issues had not intervened we might have had as many as 6 kids.

"did you find a lot of folks judging you on your parenting gangsta?"
We were very strict when it came to behaviour in public. If one of the kids had a tantrum or otherwise act up in a restauraunt I would take them to the car and spank them. After 1 or 2 instances all I would have to do would be ask 'do you want to go to the car?' I was lectured several times by strangers who witnessed the ritual, but by the time they were pre-adolescent we were constantly told what good kids we had.

"did anything surprise you?"
Not until #1 started his rebellion. Without airing too much laundry, I was in many respects a single parent for 2 years, starting when #3 was born and #1 was 4 years old. I quickly got to the point where nothing surprised me. But then again, I have always been one of these people who are difficult to surprise.

Proverbs says something to the effect of "teach a child the way which is right, and though he may stray from it when he is older he will return to the way which is right"

And that is really all you can do.
 

This comment has been removed by the author.
 

I will state that my point of view is based on a very narrow field of personal experience. I am one of 14 grandkids born to 5 kids on my mother's side. Of the 19 mariages, there have been no divorces. How did we manage that? I don't know, except that we were all raised to pick mates on criteria other than how cute or how much fun someone was on a date.

So, that was said to let you know I realize I have a very narrow perspective on single parenting.
 

Yeah, I think it's a truism but probably one that should be restated: the personal is REALLY political, here. "I" statements are yr friend, peeps.

me, I'm not a parent, so I'd be largely talking out of my ass when it comes to rearin'. otoh mental health on both an individual and structural level (god that sounds pretentious) is something I'm always interested in; and yeah, I see this question about fathers and their role as about that as much as anything else.
 

"So if one parent is always, always the nurturer, and the other is always, always the discipliner, "

It doesn't work like that. It's more a matter of tendency than absolute. I tend to be the disciplinarian, but I have been known to provide comfort. He tends to be the nurturer/teacher, but has been known to punish. If there's one absolute in parenting, it's that nothing is absolute.
 

Belle: "In other words, does one person have to be "the nurturer" and the other "the disciplinarian?" Or can it not be that both or all parental figures provide a mix of nurturing and discipline?"

I think both/all can provide a mix. That's what we do, and it seems to be working OK. With my and my husband's personalities, there's no natural split in terms of one person being a nurturing type and the other being a disciplinarian. It's based on the situation. There are some situations in which I'm stricter and some in which he is. She has the structure of knowing approximately which those are going to be.
 

"and if fatherhood really is as important as those folks are claiming, how does it happen that so many men abandon their children, whether physically or emotionally?"

Re physically, the mom has nine more months to bond. The dad can catch up, if he's around, after the baby's born. If he isn't, he never will.

Re emotionally, some men (and often their wives are complicit in this) delude themselves that their breadwinner role is the most important part of their identity. So relaxing that goal a bit and balancing with more time spent with family doesn't seem critical. Where the financial contribution is one-sided, it is easy (though not inevitable) for that person to convince himself that this is where his time is best spent. And I say "himself" because a female breadwinner is unlikely to convince herself of this.
 

It doesn't work like that. It's more a matter of tendency than absolute. I tend to be the disciplinarian, but I have been known to provide comfort. He tends to be the nurturer/teacher, but has been known to punish. If there's one absolute in parenting, it's that nothing is absolute.

Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at. and that maybe people might change and/or adapt to circumstances as well.
 

"Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at. and that maybe people might change and/or adapt to circumstances as well. "
When the boys were little, my job was to keep them from killing themselves or each other, and to teach them how to behave in public. SD helped with this, but his emphasis was a bit more on how to take risks and explore their world. The roles overlapped a bit, and still do.
AS our kids have gotten older, the dynamic has changed, because their needs have changed. Since I have never been a boy, there are certain aspects of the condition I don't really understand (such as puberty), from their perspective. SD however, totally gets it, and knows how to relate to them when certain situations arise. At this point, he teaches them how to be men, I teach them how to relate to women. We both teach them how to be decent, responsible people (or, we try to, anyway)

Because we share the responsibilities, and know what each other's strengths are, the whole parenting situation is easier for both of us. This is my whole point about why I think 2 parents are important.

I believe fatherhood is important because once you discount fatherhood, it's just a small step toward discounting manhood, and c'mon, that's half our species. Men are important, every bit so as women.
 

So how do you teach someone 'how to be a man', or 'how to be a woman'? (I'm wondering what it is that us one-parent kids have missed here.)
 

Thene, I've never been in a single parent family, so I can't answer to how it's done. Obviously it IS accomplished, but I can only operate from the 2-parent paradigm. It's not a very concious sort of thing. I don't wake up in the morning and decide that today I'll educate my sons about how to choose tampons, nor does SD get up with the intention of teaching the difference between .30.06 rifles and .30.30's. He teaches what he knows, I teach what I know. That those things tend to be traditional male-female roles I think is incidental. We both do things that are traditionally other-gendered, and the kids learn from this as well.
The main point is that it is simply easier to raise children when there's 2 adults participating fully in it.
 

AP, I have a bit I want to say about this, but I think it is too large to be contained in this margin; I'll put it in my to-blog list and probably write it tomorrow.

Myself, I get cranky at the "children need a mother and a father" thing mostly because the overwhelming majority of the time I see it it's thinly veiled homophobia. Children need adults in their lives, adult role models; unless they're being raised in a closet, they will have extended family, neighbors, family friends, teachers, etc. to provide some of those role models.

(Or, more cranky-whimsically, if children need a mother and father role in their immediate families, then in the modern day they clearly need a company man dad and a sensitive new age dad and a professional working mom and a stay at home mom ... at minimum.)

To summarise some of what I want to write briefly for this space, thought: one of my major terrors on the subject of being a parent is going crazy and emotionally abandoning my first child like my grandmother did to my mother and my mother did to me. This has a ... complex interaction with my perspective on fatherhood.
 

Children need adults in their lives, adult role models; unless they're being raised in a closet, they will have extended family, neighbors, family friends, teachers, etc. to provide some of those role models.

Are those people going to be equipped to be role models? And will the child be equipped to use them as role models? The nuclear model is strong, and (IMLE) it's extremely hard to substitute a parent for a nonparent in any respect. Even if a child needs to see someone in that light, would that someone accept that responsibility, or even know how to? In my case, the answer was almost, almost always 'no'.
 

Myself, I get cranky at the "children need a mother and a father" thing mostly because the overwhelming majority of the time I see it it's thinly veiled homophobia.

Yup. I know rootie well enough that I know that's not what she's about, but I have to admit that if someone I didn't know had said that first comment, I'd be bristling and snarling pretty bad.
 

thene: well, I wonder how much that has to do with specific cultural and regional settings as well. F'r instance--and admittedly this is also a generation ago, things have become generally more fragmented still, but--my mom grew up sharing a bedroom with her grandmother, her mother's mother. And her other grandmother was constantly in and out of the house as well. But her maternal grandmother was almost certainly at least as important a "guardian, role model" figure for her as either of her parents, I would say.

and then of course the fact that they were not well-off and living in a crowded urban center as well as continued uh "family values" from the Old Country.

on my father's father's side of the family, I have a whole lot of Russian cousins who've come over relatively recently from the Soviet Union. They're much more closely knit as an extended family than anyone I know who's been here for a couple of generations. (My grandfather was an immigrant himself).

I think the binary thing trips people up as well. It could be one, it could be two, or it could be more, actually.
 

thene: well, I wonder how much that has to do with specific cultural and regional settings as well.

Word.
 

Well, I also think that "the nuclear model" is batshit insane, something that has the clear effect of stretching parents past their capability to cope if strictly adhered to. My parents certainly did not adhere to it closely; most of my friends with children are not adhering to it closely; I do not intend to adhere to it closely, and by some standards not at all.
 

"Well, I also think that "the nuclear model" is batshit insane"

The modern day, 2 working parents kids involved in 19 organized activities nuclear model I will agree is insane. The old model however is the only sane family model there has ever been.
 

Oh sorry that was me above. I thought I was signed in.
 

well, again, -which- old model? because the "nuclear" family as most Americans think of it isn't actually all that old. viddy: for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family

In India, legislation promoting the nuclear family has been decried as eroding the traditional Hindu joint family.

A Hindu Joint Family or Hindu united family (HUF) or a Joint Hindu Family is an extended family arrangement prevalent among Hindus of the Indian subcontinent, consisting of many generations living under the same roof. All the male members are blood relatives and all the women are either mothers, wives, unmarried daughters, or widowed relatives, all bound by the common sapinda relationship....
 

The "leave it to Beaver/ Father Knows Best" Model.....
 

This comment has been removed by the author.
 

Good grief.
Be it known that while SD and I agree on many and most things, we are not always of exactly the same mind on some things. Be it also known that he loves to stir up trouble.
 

The old model however is the only sane family model there has ever been.

what do you mean, the "old model"?
 

I think it is probably good to have at least two responsible adults, at least one of each gender, taking care of every child. I say at least two because just one is probably too much to handle alone and at least one of each gender so each child sees that both men and women can take care of children and form a bond with them.

For me, fatherhood isn't just vitally important - it is the MAIN important thing in my life. I could not imagine not being with my daughter. I am her primary caregiver during the week. I drop her off and pick her up from daycare. I feed her dinner. I give her her bath. I put her to bed. I snuggle with her, read to her, hold her when she is scared, play with her, laugh with her, watch movies with her. I enjoy being with her so much I look forward to being with her again when I'm not with her. She is the center of my life right now. My wife is there as well, and my wife spends more time with her on weekends (when she's not working), and of course we all spend time together on the weekends. But during the week, it is mostly just me and my daughter. And she has brought such joy to my life just thinking about her makes me smile. She needs me and I need her and that is what family is about.

I'm with rootie - anyone who says fathers don't matter or are not important for raising children can take a flying leap.
 

It is sort of a raw deal that in order to be considered (by The World) a "good father", all a fellow really has to do is show up.

is he around, even sometimes? then he's a hell of a dad. it doesn't matter what the children are up to - as long as he's not across state lines, he is considered a "good father".

but to be considered a "good mother" - holy crap!

are your children perfectly clean at all times? well-fed, but not too fat? happy, but not too blithely cheerful? polite but not robotic? vivacious but not too loud? smart but not creepy? active but not hyper? creative but not weird?

any deviation from what is defined as "normal" (this week) is attributed to bad mothering.

but there's no such thing, really, as BAD fathering (except in cases of abusive behavior). there's only ABSENT fathering.

the criteria for "good mother" changes too fast for me to keep up.

and, god bless him, but I know that Antiprince, to be seen as a standup guy and good father, only has to show up, whereas anything little Mary Wolfgang does, says, wears, draws, writes, breaks, vandalizes or blows up will be examined with a fucking microscope for signs of bad mothering.

a drag.
 

hey, check it out - another father weighing in.

hi, dbb!
 

"but to be considered a "good mother" - holy crap!"

It has been my experience that the judgement toward mothers- being perfect and all, comes primarily from other mothers. Just another aspect of woman vs woman in our society. I am sure someone will try and refute that, but that is my experience of 20 years of parenting, with 4 kids.

The only way I survive the whole motherhood tangle is by associating myself with people who do it the same way I do, who's houses are just as messy, who drive old cars and not big honkin' SUV's, and who have no qualm about giving their kid mac n cheeze from a box instead of carrots, grapes and brie. And we ALL had cheap crappy strollers.

I also know there is NO WAY I could have done any of it without the partnership of a good father. Not just some guy who shows up and gets kudos for that, but someone who is deeply involved in his kids' lives. Now, that's me, I need a man in the house because I don't like women much. If 2 women can raise a child effectively, more power to them.
 

So how do you teach someone 'how to be a man', or 'how to be a woman'? (I'm wondering what it is that us one-parent kids have missed here.)

I'm not really the child of a single parent, since my parents were divorced and my mom ensured I saw my father until he made it more difficult for me to see him (I'll give details if people want, but it's a bit of a derail), but my mom was concerned about my brother, in particular, getting male attention on a regular basis due to the custody arrangements.

She got him into boy scouts and became friends with the scout masters, making sure he had plenty of both male role models and male friends.

I kind of wish I'd had something similar. I glommed onto male teachers rather a lot for a while, trying to refather myself, but the rejection of me by my father beginning at puberty... it's left scars. I may have SEEN him regularly, but he didn't FATHER me very much, if that makes any sense.

It hurt. It still hurts a bit, so this is a sensitive spot. ^^

Mom was both the nurturer and the disciplinarian, but she didn't "punish" us. We got logical consequences for our actions. So far as I recall, she did both even before the divorce. My father "punished", but only my brother - he beat him when he was defiant.

The nuclear model is strong, and (IMLE) it's extremely hard to substitute a parent for a nonparent in any respect.

I very much disagree with this. My grandmother was horribly abused at her parent's hands and she reparented herself with the parents of friends. I was deeply hurt by my father and I reparented myself via teachers and other males who came into my life and were in a position of authority. When one has been hurt, and one doesn't want to repeat that pattern and re-hurt onesself over and over again trying to "fix" abusive or neglectful parent(s), one does what one has to do.

I think the nuclear family is horribly weak. It's like a redundant power supply - first electrical system goes offline, and you're at emergency power; second one goes off and you're fucked. A system that has no redundancy (two caretakers are needed for an optimal situation so two individuals are provided) is bound to fail repeatedly - and does, quite frankly - all the time. That isn't to say people shouldn't have nuclear families - gods forfend - and hats off to parents who pull it off (hands Rootie and SD her hat ;) ), but I don't think it's reasonable to call it "strong".
 

I apologise for my crappy way of wording things - when I said the nuclear model was strong, what I meant was that it's a powerful assumption and that it's got a buttload of social and legal support, so much so that the 50% of children who don't reach 18 in continual two-parent families are regarded as the anomalous ones. (for instance, I've never had this whole reparenting conversation before. Ever. You'd think it would be a normal, and vital, part of social discourse but noooo). I don't see it as strong in a structural sense - I love your power supply analogy there.

Perhaps it's another of those social differences between the UK and the US, but reparenting wasn't something I ever managed to do. I glomped on to all sorts of adults, but never more than casually. It's good to know that some people are equipped to do that, but I think expecting everyone involved will have the right tools for that is a dead end. I can certainly see ways in which the shape of society repels the idea - heck, even if I had managed to reparent myself to a sympathetic teacher, I'd still have gone home every night to an angry father, a meal that no one else was going to cook, and a younger sibling no one else wanted to care for. It's wangsty to contemplate, but in even in purely practical ways replacing a missing parent is not straightforward. I can see how replacing a parent-as-role-model could be easier, but I think the practical aspects of living together as a family strongly reinforce that process.
 

Hmmm. I can only speak about it as a child of a father (and stepfather).

I think I was *probably* raised more in a "village" model. When my parents divorced [I was 2], they both immediately moved back in with their parents, so at any given time during the breakup I was in the company of both women and men as I was growing up. My dad moved back out of his mother's house when I was 4, I think, and moved closer to my mother's new location (with my stepfather, who she married when I was just about to turn 4).

Always, I remember my mother being the disciplinarian. My stepfather wasn't *distant* - I mean, I certainly knew he loved me - but even now that I'm on pretty good terms with all of them, I consider him... taciturn. Not stoic (I think I may be one of the few people that's seen him break down several times), but taciturn. Which is funny, because according to my mother, he's quite a talker at parties.

On the other hand, he has a temper. Even now, if he's frustrated about something, you can hear him swearing about it and throwing things from miles away. He was never violent or anything like that towards me, but it was frightening to be around him when he was angry. So I tended to avoid him. I consider myself mostly raised by my mother (who combined almost sickeningly-sweet nurturing, occasionally, with good practical sense, most of the time, and violent outbursts, rarely but unforgettably).

Meanwhile, my bio-dad I saw every second weekend, and he was kind of my confidant. Doing badly in school (a sure way to piss mom off)? Confide in dad. Coming out? Confide in dad (and I STILL haven't done this with either my stepdad or my mother - I confided in dad a DECADE ago).

Dad was almost like a grandparent in the way most people think of them: they spoil you rotten, you don't get to see them often, and they're good for a cuddle when Mom's being mean.

Looking at him now, though, because I work for him... he's really, truly married to his work. [And I don't just say that because I don't see what he sees in my stepmother.] I mean, he obviously cares for my brother and sister, and does everything he can for them, but I think that he's kind of looking with some relief at the time when they'll be adults on their own terms, making their own rules.

He's raised them -well-, mind you. They're studious (my sister moreso), athletic (like him; I stopped caring around puberty), as far as I know they have a good concept of money... they have a lot of baggage from my stepmother, though.

Which sounds horrible and like I'm blaming the woman, but... she's overprotective, shopaholic, obsessive about her weight, prone to love/hate switcheroos, disdainful of too much education... a whole bunch of things.

At least with Dad, you always knew where you stood: punishments were explained, and if you didn't do something UTTERLY stupid, he wouldn't yell. (I can remember the number of times he yelled at me or spanked me, and it was not many - but, like mom's outbursts, they were memorable.)


I think both my fathers are important to me and the way I grew up, but ultimately, they were/are people too, with their own demons and such.

The best I think you can hope for out of ANY parent is that they do their best not to vent their shit on you, and make sure you're capable of taking shit when people (including them) inevitably DO vent it on you. I think that comes down to moral compass, self-confidence, and trust that [even despite your failings, because I seriously doubt any kid over the age of 10 thinks their parents are utterly perfect] that both of you are reliable enough to lean on in times of hardship.
 

Sweet Daddio was raised with a very large extended family- 14 cousins,5 aunts and uncles who participated in everyone's lives, both parents, very involved grandparents. I have 1 brother, no cousins, extended family was seen 1 week every 4 years. I like his version better. In his family, there are NO divorces, several adoptions, and grandparents are just part of every day life. In my family, what's a grandparent? What's an uncle? None of my aunts married or had kids. I like the village model, I just don't know how to use it.
 

Since your post invited fathers to respond, I'll speak on my experience.

I have both sons and daughters, and my family is fairly traditional in that I am the primary breadwinner, and my wife is the primary homemaker.

Do I feel like my children benefit from this arrangement - absolutely. My kids are teenagers now, and as teenagers are want to do they have no use for me or my wife, and are probably embarrassed by our very existence. And that's just the same way I felt about my parents at that age. It is quite natural.

But the one security my children have, and the one fact they'll know as part of their life is this. There was an adult male that was a) willing to take a bullet for them 2) there was an adult male willing to devote his life working to put a roof over their head, and working to see that they had a chance at a better life. 3) There is an adult male who considers them the most important blessing in his life. That is the benefit of Fatherhood, and that is a benefit not received from more distant, less involved "male role models."

This is not to say that other family arrangements are not loving and beneficial for their children.

Why do men become distant dads or deadbeat dads? Because fatherhood is difficult and scary, and many men are unable to see a lifetime commitment all the way through. In a society of freedom, where men have other tempting options, it is hard to see things all the way through.
 

Just thought you might find this article relevant to your discussion:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20071006/us_time/fatherhood20
 

Hi, STF! thanks for dropping by!

In a society of freedom, where men have other tempting options, it is hard to see things all the way through.

well, sure. however, I'm not sure that today's "society of freedom" is fully responsible for distant/absent fathers. my father's father was seldom home, and even then seldom sober (this was in the 40s and 50s, the purported golden age of responsible family life). my maternal grandfather's father was remote and hostile, when he was even home (that would have been during the early 1910s and 20s).

not saying the plural of anecdote is data, but I really have to wonder whether our vision of "traditional fatherhood" is at all even close to accurate. I do question whether our "society of freedom" today (such as exists for some people) is really to blame for the sorry state of fatherhood when the sorry state of fatherhood seems to be woven throughout modern history.

and thank you, anon, for the link. why not give yourself a name and stick around a while?
 

Some men have options now. To the extent they can devote more time to the job, they can make advancing their career their primary focus, rather than a means to support their families. They can get obsessed with climbing the ladder, and forget their families need their physical and emotional presence.

Some men get tempted by the lure of other, often younger, woman. It is tough being middle aged, feeling that life "passed you by." Hard to resist having irresponsible fun again. Acting like a teenager again.

Some men just can't see it all the way through, because it is hard.

And as you point out, alcohol was always there. Now you have drugs too.

Some men find the new expectations on being a father hard. You used to be considered a "good father" if you just put money on the table. A lot more is expected now in terms of time home, helping with the housework, care of small children. And even doing that as the primary caregiver, very often. Not all men take to that easily.

And to a very great extent, the ideal father is a myth, a very ancient archetype that few men have ever lived up to perfectly.
 

I also agree with you on the sorry state of fatherhood in the modern era. Looking back in my family, I see some of the same distance and hostility you describe.

Part of me wonders if its the division of labor and physical distance. I'm thinking of farming. very hard, backbreaking work - but the work was generally shared equally between mothers and fathers. Both work incredibly hard - and the children often did too. But maybe I'm just picturing another myth!
 

I'm thinking of farming. very hard, backbreaking work - but the work was generally shared equally between mothers and fathers.

there's no doubt that the split spheres that occurred during the industrial revolution contributed to the emotional (and physical) distancing of fathers from their children.

maybe it's no good romanticizing the myth of peaceful agrarian family life - but it at least feels more healthy to me than the Leave-it-to-Beaver nostalgia that poisons American culture these days.