Fathers' Day: Fatherhood and Social Policies in Colorado

The role of fathers in American society seems to be diminishing and, at the same time, the evident harm of his decline is everywhere.

That decline has been recognized here in Colorado with, for example the Governor’s Initiative on Responsible Fatherhood. It has been recognized nationally, as well. See U.S. Dep’t of Health & Human Services Responsible Fatherhood Initiative. Fathers, especially black Americans, are chided for abandoning their children, who are believed to have a certain future of crime and lack of opportunity.  We have newspaper articles that anecdotally acknowledge the father’s importance in a personal context. See, e.g., yesterday’s RMN article, mentioning in  passing, “The child who grieves for her father – gone to Iraq one day, gone forever the next.”

Empirically, we have all the data we could ever want to substantiate the importance of the fatherhood role:¹

85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes (Source: Center for Disease Control)

90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes (Source: U.S. D.H.H.S., Bureau of the Census)

71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes (Source: National Principals Association Report on the State of High Schools.)

75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes (Source: Rainbows for all God’s Children.)

63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes (Source: U.S. D.H.H.S., Bureau of the Census)

In addition to the unspeakable price that the child[ren] must pay for their loss, society pays hefty hidden costs because, as the studies have found, children who grow up with both parents are more likely to finish school, become self-sufficient, and have a healthier lifestyle than those from single-parent homes. See Larry Snyder, Without a dad, too many children fall into poverty (editorial).  If we assume the converse to be true, at best, we have a diminished contributions when these children become taxpayers; at worst, the public foots the bill for social programs (welfare, subsidized housing, WIC, Medic-Aid, add’l unplanned preganancies, etc.).

Yet, at the same time and for years, there has been a systemic overwhelming social agenda to abolish the role of father. Lenore Walker, after visiting one of the early shelters for battered women, wrote in her book, The Battered Woman, “I was struck by what a beneficial alternative to the nuclear family this arrangement [communal housing and child raising] was for these women and children.” ibid at 195.  In Functions of the Family, WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969, Linda Gordon, declared, “The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together…. Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process . . . Families will be finally destroyed only when a revolutionary social and economic organization permits people’s needs for love and security to be met in ways that do not impose divisions of labor, or any external roles, at all.”

It’s time we looked at, not only how these social policies have resulted in today, but why there is continuing effort to undermine and “destroy” the role of fatherhood? See, e.g., Peggy Drexler, Raising Boys Without Men: How Maverick Moms Are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men, (Rodale Press, 2006). And see, e.g., Verizon commercial (bumbling father tries to help his little daughter with her homework and is treated with contempt by both the girl and her mother, who orders the father to “leave her alone” and “go wash the dog”); commercials by Arnold Worldwide for Volvo (in one, a husband looks like a fool in front of his wife, who’s disgusted and marches off; in another a man makes a fool of himself playing with a kid’s toy in a doctor’s office waiting room as a little girl and two women watch him with contempt), Fidelity  (five commercials, four of which mock fathers and men) and others.

Just this week, we’ve seen a series of dad-bashing articles: The Washington Post published an article, Father Knows Best? (“These are ‘facts’ that dads have imparted to their kids. Not a big deal, right? Except that they’re all wrong”).  We have a feature, front-page story from the Chicago Sun Times on a Fathers’ Day round-up of so-called deadbeat dads.² We have more from Time magazine (click here), the nationally syndicated OPUS cartoon (click here), Barack Obama, and others.

So, in Colorado –as nationally– we have those, who criticize fathers for not stepping up to the plate with respect to their responsibilities (hence, draconian child support regulations and resulting in a situation where fathers have responsibilities with no rights), yet we have repetitive court decisions by feminist judges (such as Colorado’s Jane Tidball, Roxanne Bailin, Juanita Rice, Carol Glowinsky, et al), who use “their” courtrooms to reduce fathers to the role of sperm donor and financier.  See also 2000 Colorado Gender & Justice Annual Report (finding, for example, that “a mother will refuse the father’s request for additional parenting time so her child support payment will not be reduced” and, separately, with a special focus on increasing the number of women judges) and the Colorado Governor’s Initiative on Responsible Fatherhood (noting that “Complaints about the court system are difficult to substantiate because the response of the courts depends so heavily upon the nature of the case . . . However, the large number of complaints — by both men and women — about the perceived inertia in the legal system against men as fathers is difficult to discount”).

With these points and questions, I leave you with this article that was published yesterday in the Ottawa Citizen.

Another chance to bash dad
Katherine K. Young and Paul Nathanson, Ottawa Citizen Special

Several years ago, CBS acknowledged Father’s Day, as usual, on its folksy Sunday Morning show. Television critic John Leonard, who is anything but folksy, interviewed two young men about their deceased father.

Far from honouring the latter, though, the sons condemned him as a bad father. Maybe Mr. Leonard was exploiting an opportunity to make men think about what a good father might be. Or maybe he was doing so to make men feel ashamed of themselves.

No one can get into anyone else’s mind, but anyone can draw conclusions from what people say or do. As an outspoken feminist, Mr. Leonard has focused for years primarily on women — more specifically, on the ways in which men (including but not restricted to those who produce television shows and commercials) harm women.

Given the symbolic link between women and children, it should have surprised no one that Mr. Leonard would expand his focus on Father’s Day to include the ways in which men harm children.

Consider the historical context of that episode. After two or three decades, popular culture had transformed public perceptions of fatherhood. The lineage of endearing-but-bumbling (or worse) fathers from Ozzie and Harriet to All in the Family, Home Improvement and The Simpsons had all but replaced the wise-father lineage from Father Knows Best to The Waltons and 7^th Heaven.

During the 1980s (and continuing well into the 1990s), society went through a kind of convulsion, or mass hysteria, over what journalists and clinicians dubbed “recovered memory syndrome.” Incest and other forms of molestation, according to not only widespread public opinion but also expert opinion, were rampant at every level of society. The hysteria died down after a while, partly because very few cases produced convincing evidence and partly because psychiatrists eventually challenged the whole notion of “repressed memories.” But families had been destroyed and laws had been changed to facilitate convictions against accused fathers and the bureaucratic removal of children from their homes.

Another phenomenon has contributed to the decline of fatherhood: the increasing number of single mothers.

Some began to justify their situation or choice by saying that fathers were assistant mothers at best, burdens to women in any case, and potential molesters at worst. With the development of single motherhood by choice, supported by sperm banks, women could now do it all for themselves.

The new gynocentrism was quickly reflected in massively popular shows such as Golden Girls, Designing Women and Murphy Brown. It was reflected also, not surprisingly, in commercials such as the ones for Robitussin cough medicine (“Dr. Mom”), Kix cereal (“Kid tested, mother approved”), and Jif peanut butter (“Moms like you choose Jif”).

The decline of fatherhood in popular culture, despite Father’s Day, presents a major problem for those of us who are convinced by scholarly evidence that fathers do indeed have a distinctive and necessary role to play in family life (though not necessarily one that confers immediate emotional gratification). Both historically and cross-culturally, men have made three primary contributions to society: as protectors, providers, and progenitors.

Now that women are making the first two as effectively as men, which is a good thing, that leaves only fatherhood as the possible source for a healthy identity specifically as men.

How can we stop this decline? We could begin by admitting the need to do so, not only taking seriously the studies on differences between motherhood and fatherhood and on what happens to children (especially but not only boys) who lack fathers but also thinking of ways to place these differences in the context of legal equality.

Whatever its commercial or sentimental implications, Father’s Day is an opportunity to reverse the pop-cultural trend that trivializes or ridicules fathers and the legal trend that reduces them to walking wallets for child support at best and likely criminals at worst.

Katherine Young (a professor at McGill University) and Paul Nathanson (a senior researcher there) are the authors of Spreading Misandry: the Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture.

© The Ottawa Citizen  2007

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references
¹   “The impact of parental divorce and subsequent father absence in the wake of this event has long been thought to affect children quite negatively. For instance, parental divorce and father loss has been associated with difficulties in school adjustment (e.g. Felner, Ginter, Boike, & Cowen), Social Adjustment (e.g. Fry & Grover) and personal adjustment (e.g. Covell & Turnbull). . . The results of the present study suggest that father loss through divorce is associated with diminished self-concepts in children…at least for this sample of children from the midwestern United States.” Thomas S. Parish, Children’s Self Concepts: Are They Affected by Parental Divorce and Remarriage, Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 1987, V 2, #4, 559-562; see also R. Lohr, C. g, A. Mendell and B. Riemer, Clinical Observations on Interferences of Early Father Absence in the Achievement of Femininity, Clinical Social Work Journal, V. 17, #4, Winter, 1989. (• “In an earlier study by Kalter and Rembar at [Children’s Psychiatric Hospital, University of Michigan], a sample of 144 child and adolescent patients, whose parents had divorced, presented [for evaluation and treatment] with three most commonly occurring problems:

63% Subjective psychological problem (defined as anxiety, sadness, pronounced moodiness, phobias, and depression)

56% Poor grades or grades substantially below ability and/or recent past
performance

43% Aggression toward parents

²  Anyone ever wondered why we don’t have round-ups of “deadbeat moms” on Mothers’ Day? See, e.g., Glenn Sack’s recent article, 63 Female ‘Deadbeats’ but Only Dads Are Humiliated on the Pizza Box. (note the number of related articles at the bottom of that page). And see Bartfeld, J.and D.R. Meyer, Are There Really Deadbeat Dads? The Relationship between Ability to Pay, Enforcement, and Compliance in Nonmarital Child Support Cases, The Social Service Review 68(2):219-235 (1994)