Mother’s Day is the day of the year on which the most phone calls are made. Father’s Day, is the day of the year on which the most collect phone calls are made.
Even as we are prone to treat dads as wallets, dads they are a changin’. Walk through any supermarket, park, or playground on the weekend. It’s no longer a challenge to spot dads with children … one minute playing, the next minute teaching. Go to a home with a stepparent. Chances are 85 percent the stepparent is a dad – usually giving time, money and love and asking only for love in return.
In the last 20 years the percentage of single dads has almost doubled, from 10 percent to 19 percent of all single-parent households. Moms moving out of the home has been a headline-creating revolution; dads moving into the home has been the quietest revolution.
This trend will continue. A 2000 Harris Poll found that “young men in their twenties are seven percent more likely than young women to give up pay for more time with their families.” A full 70 percent of men vs. 63 percent of women. Give up pay? Men? A generational shift without precedent.
What does all this mean? Will the first third of the 21st century be about men becoming more equal partners in the family just as the last third of the 20th century was about women becoming more equal partners in the workplace? Most probably. In fact, it is improbable that mothers will make much more progress in the workplace without dads sharing more responsibilities in the homeplace.
Dads are, if you will, in the infancy of their revolution to re-enter the family, this time not only as money raisers, but as child raisers. Not to out-do mom, but to do with mom.
Perhaps there is no better day than Father’s Day to understand what all this will mean. More precisely, to appreciate exactly what dads do that contributes to our children’s lives – contributions that even dads don’t know they make. The news is good.
Girls’ difficulty with math and boys’ difficulty with verbal skills are legendary. The solution to both might have less to do with scholarship money than with father involvement. In the area of math and quantitative abilities, the more involved the dad is, the better both daughters and sons do. Ditto for boys’ increase in verbal intelligence. And the amount of time a father spends reading to his daughter is a strong predictor of his daughter’s future verbal ability. So both sexes improve in both sets of skills when fathers are more involved.
Researchers find that women who grow up successful in their professions tend to have two things in common: fathers who respect and encourage them and male mentors.
We now know that father involvement is more important than the quality of the school or the amount of money a family has in how well a child does both academically and socially. Which makes the implications for social policy staggering.
A close relationship with dad is the most important preventive medicine to avoid the cancer of a troubled childhood. The most important factor by far in preventing drug use is a close relationship with dad. Ninety percent of homeless or runaway children are from fatherless homes.
In a study of teen-age mothers in inner city Baltimore, one-third of their daughters also became teen-age mothers. But, not one daughter or son who had a good relationship with their biological father had a baby before the age of 19. Connection with dad leads not only to preventing daughters from becoming pregnant prematurely, but also to preventing sons from creating pregnancies prematurely.
We all care about preventing rape. Eighty percent of rapists who are evaluated as raping out of anger and rage come from father-absent homes. Overall, 65 percent of juvenile prisoners were brought up without dads. The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency reports that the more absent the father, the higher the rates of violent crime.
Isn’t crime, though, also due to poverty? Not violent crime. When children in homes with fathers with more income are compared to the children in homes with fathers with less income, there is no difference in the rates of violent crime. The difference in violent crime rate could be predicted only by comparing the children without fathers at home to the children with fathers at home. The implications for prevention of violent crime are staggering.
At what age does dad’s influence begin? An Israeli study found that the more frequently a father visited the hospital of an infant who is prematurely born, the more rapidly the infant gained weight and the more quickly the infant was able to leave the hospital. In a study of black infants, the more interaction the boy had with the father, the higher his mental competence and psycho-motor functioning by the age of 6 months.
Psychologists at the National Institutes of Mental Health have found that boys who have contact with fathers display a greater trust level even by the time they are 5 to 6 months old. For example, they are friendlier with strangers and more willing to be picked up. They also enjoy playing more and are more verbally open. Verbal competence is, of course, an area in which boys normally trail girls.
Two types of dads receive almost no recognition: single dads and stepdads. Single dads in the year 2000 are similar to female doctors in the 1950s – both are pioneers, exceptionally motivated and usually very good at what they do. Around the world, children brought up by single dads fare very well, in part because they usually also have a lot of contact with their mom.
Stepdads support children without child support. They support with love, time and often money. They support without possessiveness – children who are not “theirs.” They usually deal with children who want their biological dad back, and who fear that stepdad will take mom away. Yet millions tiptoe through the minefields, advisers to mom with neither pay nor authority.
How children benefit from dads
Attention Deficit Disorder plagues American children, especially boys. The American solution has been Ritalin. A large Danish study finds that children living with only their dads were only half as likely to experience problems with concentration as children living with only their mom. This is especially remarkable since many children living with dad initially do so due to problems with one or more of the 4 Ds: developmental delay, drinking, drugs or delinquency.
We usually think of empathy as something transmitted via the mother. Thus one of the more surprising findings about father involvement is that the amount of time a father spends with a child is one of the strongest predictors of empathy in adulthood.
Empathy is perhaps more at the heart of family stability and love than any other quality. I’ve never had a couple come to me and say, “I want a divorce; my partner understands me.” Children who don’t feel understood seek another world at the point of a needle; become rebels with false causes; join gangs or cults to get the respect they didn’t get at home, or just disappear into a bottle. Even at work, it is rare for us to sue someone from whom we feel empathy.
A second personality trait I did not expect to be associated with dads was assertiveness. I thought of dads as doing more roughhousing, which I feared might lead to more aggressiveness. Yes, dads do facilitate more roughhousing, including more tossing of the children in the air. But children raised by single fathers were less aggressive and more assertive than those raised by single moms. Assertiveness without aggressiveness is one of the key qualities to being successful at work – and certainly crucial to being successful at work without being a failure at home.
The big question is what dads do to generate these outcomes. This is news even to dads themselves. …
What do dads do that benefits children?
Ironically, roughhousing is one of the ways both assertiveness and empathy get transmitted to a child. These forms of play seem to improve child development in three major areas: the management of emotions, the development of intelligence and academic achievement. Let’s look at the management of emotions.
A child not used to roughhousing will usually bite, kick and be physically violent when something doesn’t go the child’s way. Roughhousing creates an opportunity for the father to stop the playing, explain what is unacceptable and why. The child learns when “enough is enough,” or self control. The child has an incentive to learn because each time it does not, the playing stops.
The roughhousing seems to assist both girl and boy children to discover what they can achieve, which methods of assertion work, and how to deal with success and defeat – all of which are important components of identity, and prerequisites for success.
The assertiveness is not learned from roughhousing alone, but by the enforcement of boundaries during the roughhousing. Dads and moms both set boundaries with their children. Dads tend to enforce them more. Getting the child to treat boundaries seriously also seems to create empathy. Teaching the child to treat boundaries seriously teaches the child to respect the rights and needs of others. Thinking of another’s needs creates empathy. A child who learns that consequences are always negotiable focuses on how to manipulate the best negotiation – or on its desires.
One of the most powerful contributions many fathers make to their families is as a coach, or informal playmate/coach. The most important lessons seem to come from team sports – not gymnastics or tennis, but a sport in which almost every play requires cooperation to improve one’s chances of winning.
Most parents know the infinite number of ignored lectures and good-will that is burnt-up trying to get a child to think of its sister’s or brother’s desires. Team sports teaches this while creating good will. With each play a child experiences how to win by making her or his own desires or immediate gratification secondary to a team’s. Instead of parent as lecturer/teacher, team play’s “teachers” are the ostracism or praise of peers; the agony of defeat or the joy of victory. To learn this while creating lasting childhood memories is a blessing.
Fathers’ role as playmate, coach, roughhouser, teaser and safety net in the game of life, then, leads to a plethora of character-building experiences that good dads contribute without even knowing exactly what they are contributing.
Father’s Day seems a perfect day to both discover the contribution and acknowledge the discovery. And, in the process, to acknowledge dad.
Warren Farrell, Ph.D., is a San Diego-based author of “Father and Child Reunion” (2001), as well as the international best-seller “Why Men Are The Way They Are” and “Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say,” a Book of the Month Club selection. He has taught in five disciplines, including at the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Diego. He is the only man in the U.S. ever elected three times to the Board of Directors of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in New York City. Dr. Farrell can be reached virtually at
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