Printed: 7/7/06
The late anthropologist Margaret Mead once said that “fathers are a biological necessity but a social accident.”
She died in 1978, but the woman was a prophet when it came to reading the culture. She could have been describing the 2006 viewpoint, except that 21st century science is busily rushing to eliminate the “necessity” part.
Already, 30,000 children are born in America every year to women who were artificially inseminated with sperm from an anonymous donor. Roughly half of those going to sperm banks are single women and lesbian couples, according to CBS News. Who needs a man around to time contractions anymore?
But I’ve never believed the din of voices in our culture that insist children can do fine without fathers, that moms can do both jobs and the kids won’t know the difference.
I know that many women raise fine children on their own, and I’m not belittling their struggle or sacrifice. But I’m convinced there is a hole in every child’s life that only a father can fill. I believe it because years of research and societal breakdown say so, and because it’s been my personal experience.
Our culture loves to portray fathers as either (a) deadbeats (b) expendable or (c) moronic. Name one TV dad whose views are treated with genuine respect by his wife and kids. For that matter, name one TV dad who deserves to be treated with respect by his wife and kids. The primetime cartoons are the worst. Would anyone want to model Peter Griffin on Family Guy?
But once a year, every June, the spotlight swings in the other direction. For the couple of weeks or so before Father’s Day, the focus turns to the dads who are (d): none of the above. The guys who help with homework and throw their backs out riding the kids around the house and have wedding pictures hanging in the hall.
The guys who come home to their wives every night and are a daily constant in their children’s lives.
Sure, Father’s Day is a commercial homage aimed at ringing cash registers. But it’s become the one time of the year that society concedes the value of fatherhood – and those category (d) fathers deserve the tribute.
I know; I lost my father to leukemia when I was 12 and he was 37. I felt like I’d died with him. For seven years, my mother raised three kids on her own. She moved us into a garage apartment behind my grandparents’ house, went back to college, and worked part-time at the local high school. She will always be my hero for the way she soldiered through those first, horrible years of grief.
She remarried when I was 19, to a man very different from my father. It was his first marriage, and he acquired two teenagers and an eight-year old with that wedding ring. I guess, in a sense, he was a social accident – but he was a (d) kind of dad. He moved me in and out of three dorm rooms and four apartments with a U-Haul trailer, a mid-sized sedan and a hand truck. He helped me buy my first car, drew patient routes on maps I never read and once drove two hours to come get me when I ran out of gas with no cash, credit cards or idea where I was.
“Can you see a street sign?” he asked when I called collect from the public phone beside the gas station.
“Yes. It says Main Street,” I said.
Sigh. “See if the attendant will come to the phone.”
He walked me down the aisle at my wedding and sat long vigils at the hospital when my first son was born 12 weeks premature. He never missed a grandchild’s birthday until two or three years ago, when congestive heart failure made the drive from Savannah too hard. But he’s going to Edisto Beach with us in two weeks, oxygen tanks and all.
That’s what a father does. Yes, a mother can, too, but it’s not the same. There’s a mysterious comfort, a confidence, that fathers bequeath to their children. They parent differently, researchers say. They’re more physical and less intimate, they encourage problem-solving, they’re better at teaching emotional control. And studies show such father-child interactions are crucial to a child’s ability to develop strong, fulfilling social relationships later in life.
Which may be why children who grow up fatherless are more likely to have behavioral problems, go to jail, abuse drugs or alcohol, and become unwed parents themselves.
Turning the cycle around will be a daunting challenge. But we can start, as a society, by praising rather than lampooning category (d) fatherhood – and making that more often than two weeks in June.
