June 2012
Paths of Fatherhood
A Tribute on Father's Day
by
drD with Dr. Nancy Ann Davis
"A man in the home is worth two in the street."
— Mae West
A half century ago, we might have been excused for believing that fathers were a natural component of human families. In the 1960's only 5% of American children were born to single moms, reflecting a norm that went back as far as anyone could remember.
Currently, some 40% of children in America are born to single women. [1] Of those born to married parents, 40% will experience a divorce, usually with the mothers as the primary residential custodian. Of children with custodial mothers, only one-third see their fathers as often as once a week,[2] and contact tapers off over the years. Ten years after a separation, two-thirds of children have virtually no contact with the men who were once their fathers.[3] So just over half of American children born today will be raised in matriarchal arrangements with only a sometime father or no father at all.
Fathers are fast losing ground amid the escalating barrage of complaints about men in general and fathers in particular. Motherhood is a biological necessity, at the heart of the family. Fatherhood, on the other hand, relies on a combination of personal preferences, social pressures, and a host of unknowns. When the two parent family unravels, it is usually men who vanish and families revert to the more primal mother–plus–children arrangement.
What is a father, and why is fatherhood falling apart? We begin here with a most familiar case and branch out from there.
Features of fathers
(1) A father is ordinarily the biological inseminator, which is our principal standard , although fatherhood is considerably more than mere insemination and not all inseminators are fathers.[4] Yet the genetic contribution is vital, in that we are naturally more inclined to love and support family members those who are genetically related. Moms and dads everywhere are willing to sacrifice a great deal more for their own biological children than for biologically unrelated youngsters.
We want to see the inseminator as the father, and traditionally we required a man who inseminates a woman to marry her and to take on the responsibilities of fatherhood. In the absence of a relationship with either the mother or her child, we refer to a sperm provider as the "biological father," meaning that he has contributed a set of genes and little else.
(2) A father has an alliance with the mother and is bonded to her. Indeed, a man's initial connection to an unborn child is often through his love for the mother. Men who maintain a committed relationship with the mother are the mainstay of fatherhood and contribute willingly, while men who do not bond with the mother or who separate and divorce are often inconsistent or absentee fathers, meaning hardly fathers at all.
(3) A father resides with his children and is an integral member of the family. Living with children means participating in their lives. Unfortunately, men who have only infrequent contact fail to bond properly with the children, and men who bond but are separated from their children often lose the bond.
A continuing partnership with the mother in an intact family vastly increases the chances a sperm contributor will mature into a real father and remain a real father. Unfortunately, the converse is also true. Men who provide sperm but do not partner with women and do not reside with the children seldom become participating fathers in the usual social relationship sense. We want them to be fathers and expect them to be fathers, hardly considering that they do not experience the conditions that ordinarily transform men into fathers.
Uncommitted men are broadly condemned for their irresponsibility and referred to now as "deadbeat dads," although many were only casual sperm contributors to begin with and never dads at all. Sperm contributors are still called "fathers," as a way to hold them responsible, but are no longer integrated into the family and remain very much outsiders. The government can force these men to pay for the insemination, but it has no means to turn casual inseminators into authentic fathers.
Far from being a law of nature, fatherhood appears to be an opportunistic arrangement entered into for its survival advantages. Most birds bond together in mating pairs, and the benefits are obvious. A Snowy Owl mom who sits the eggs must rely on her mate to hunt and provide the supplies. Snowy Owls are wonderful parents. They swallow their own hunger and allow their body weights to drop by as much as a third as they provide food for their ravenous youngsters.
Among mammals, in contrast to birds, pair bonding is relatively uncommon. While an egg must be incubated, a mama mammal carries her unborn youngsters inside her belly, remains mobile, and has an on board supply of nutritious milk to feed her young after birth. So while the mating birds who fail to bond would have few or no surviving offspring, most bachelor mammals pass along their genes just fine.
Humans are primates, of course, and pair bonding occurs in no more that six percent of primate species. Gibbons mate for life, and a family consists of a bonded adult pair and their juvenile offspring. Family members stand together and use hooting calls and menacing gestures to announce their presence and to warn trespassers away from their precious fruit trees. The bonded pair appears to be a halfway step between stag arrangements and the active participation we expect of our own human fathers.
Long ago, male hominids were stag, interested in the females but not in the offspring. Out on the Savanna some four or five million years ago, our ancestors were up walking on two feet with their hands free to carry the camping gear and the groceries. A million or so years after that, hominid brains began to increase in size, from the one pound mini-calculator similar to that of a chimpanzee to the sophisticated three pound wonder brain that is standard equipment in the modern human head. The larger brain takes longer to mature, so human infants became increasingly helpless at birth and took considerably longer to venture forth on their own. Our ancestors began pairing up together two or three million years ago, by various estimates, forming families headed by bonded parents.
While a father and mother working together should provide about twice the resources as a mother going it alone, the cumulative results could be more than that. If a mother could subsist on her own, the extra resources a second parent provides are available for comfort, security, and most importantly, for innovation.
Bonding also provides the basis for extended family relationships. Siblings from bonded parents are full brothers and sisters, not half-siblings, and a father can bring with him paternal grandparents and the whole list of paternal aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, cousins, and so on. Related family members are more inclined to ally together and to cooperate for their mutual benefits.
Bonded to a family, the males of the species became progressively more involved in supporting the females and in raising the youngsters. These bonded males became our first fathers, providing more for the youngsters and also gaining the additional respect from the mothers, which would surely translate into additional romantic invitations and thus additional progeny. By choosing contributors over slackers, our mothers themselves selected personal traits which helped cultivate fatherhood. Relatives also supported contributors over slackers and stood adamantly against men whom they considered "users."
Our ancestors continued as hunter-gatherers until the arrival of agriculture(about ten thousand years ago). Unlike hunting, which was sport, or gathering, which could be pleasant, clearing the land and manhandling an ox and plow across miles of furrows required endless hours of strenuous toil.[5] Agriculture, of course, provided the abundance of food that supported larger populations, freeing men to specialize and join together in productive ventures that would grow into what we now call civilization. Men gradually signed on to the harder workloads as a way to support their wives and children but demanded fidelity, to ensure the rug rats a man supported where his own rug rats and not those of another man.
Survival advantages
Bonded parenting just makes senses. Raising children is always a challenge, and two parents should have about twice the resources for the job as one parent alone. Two heads, two hearts, two sets of hands, and the possibility of two pocketbooks provide a real advantage over just one of each. Children with fathers do better by almost any measure, be it emotional, social, academic, or legal.
We are now the dominant species on the earth, which we can attribute to an upright gait which leaves our hands free; to the use of tools; to high intelligence; to language; and to our extraordinarily complex social arrangements. Pair bonding, of course, has been a principal aspect of our social fabric.
Parenthood itself makes men more productive. Men ordinarily work more hours and earn more after they become fathers, while new mothers tend to work fewer hours outside the home and earn less.[6] Fathers with young children are four times more likely to work at least fifty hours a week outside the home than are working mothers with young children.[7] Married men ordinarily bring their earnings home, and marriage usually affords mothers the choice to spend more time with their families.
Married men attain faster wage growth in their first ten to twenty years of marriage, compared to men who are not married. Being married increases by almost 50% the chances that a recently hired man will attain a high performance rating. One research team concludes that "marriage per se makes [male] workers more productive."[8] Men who become widowed, separated or divorced lose their productivity bonus, suggesting that pair bonding surely contributed to the higher productivity.
Men who are expected to be good providers are considerably more marriageable. By one survey, the men who get married over the course of any given year earn about 50% more than the men who do not marry.
Men who have made the transition to fatherhood tend to be highly protective of their families. While we often associate domestic violence with fathers, the reality is quite the opposite. The combination of marriage and fatherhood offers the strongest protection against violence toward women and children.
Over the twenty years up to 1992, the rate of violent crimes against women was 43-45 per thousand for unmarried, divorced and separated women, but only 11 per thousand for married women.[9] Married women benefited from a fourfold reduction in violence compared to their unmarried counterparts.
And the same holds for the children. Children without fathers are much more likely to be physically, emotionally, and sexually abused than are children living with two natural parents. A 2005 review finds that children living in a household with a step-parent or live-in boyfriend are close to forty times as likely to be injured or killed as are children living with two biological parents.[10]
Unraveling
The human species traveled a long way on fatherhood , where the added resources lifted mothers, their children and whole societies from meager subsistence toward innovation and abundance. So why is Western society sliding away from fatherhood now?
The Industrial Revolution introduced the machines that do the heavy lifting, so brain power now replaces brawn power in production and opens multiple opportunities for women. Birth control now allows us to limit the size of families, so women tend to have fewer children and are freer to work outside the home. And when marriages unravel, the children are usually awarded to the mothers while the men become outsiders.
Fatherhood appears to have vanished among man's best friend, the dog. Fatherhood is typical in the Canidae animal family, which includes wolves, coyotes, foxes, jackals, and African wild dogs. Among these carnivores the male of the pair hunts and brings home warm meals for his missus and their pups..
Our most beloved of the canids is none other than the family dog, which was domesticated possibly fifteen thousand years ago from an offshoot of the gray wolf. While the dog comes from a family of highly honorable paternal ancestors, the domesticated dog shows no interest at all in any paternal responsibilities.
So, what happened? Over the generations of domestication, our benevolent human ancestors would feed a hungry mom, replacing fatherhood among dogs and making it unnecessary. This allowed the male dogs more time to chase the stray females who wandered by with the "come hither" perfume. The welfare benefits provided by humans were sufficient for mom and pups, and the fathering tendency fell out of the doggie communities.
Given that it happened among dogs on welfare, could we not expect it as well among humans on welfare? Government support means that a participating father is no longer a requirement, and the social expectations change according.
While we bemoan the shortage of good fathers among us, the government is surely negligent toward fatherhood and often openly punitive.
In cases of divorce, the courts have been traditionally chivalrous and often grant the women custody of the children along with financial support. As of the 1990's, mothers have been the primary custodians in about 65% of divorces and men the primary custodians in 10%, and the rest in various forms of shared custody arrangements.[11] Many otherwise suitable fathers are relegated to the standard every other weekend visitation and one evening a week, and struggle to remain real fathers but become mere visitors. More joint custody arrangements would reduce legal wrangling, give children more time with both parents, and would surely give fathers the opportunity to show they can remain fathers.
A pregnant woman is now granted the unilateral right to terminate her unborn child or not, as she chooses, without consideration for the man who contributed to its creation. Surely some arrangements might be made to compensate the woman who carries an unwanted child, so that an aspiring father who genuinely wants his child need not see it terminated.
In our earlier years, children were often raised communally, with assorted grandparents, uncles and aunts, and older siblings all involved, and the rest of the community stepping in when necessary. Today, with so many children raised by television and the shopping mall, the fatherless family is hardly a step forward. And while it is easy enough to condemn men, this Father's Day we take a chance and suggest that our culture would do better to find ways to support fathers and to provide the legal machinery that would support men who remain real fathers.
Fatherhood seems to have provided a significant benefit in the evolution of mankind and the creation of civilization. Why should we take our chances with a fatherless America?
Happy Fathers Day!
Adapted from You Still Don't Understand by DrD and Dr. Nancy Ann Davis.
See website at masquerades00.com
See website at masquerades00.com
[1] The 40% for 2007 is from National Center for Health Statistics, March 18, 2009, Contact: CDC National Center for Health Statistics, Office of Communication, (301) 458-4800; See also Mike Stobbe, 37% of U.S. Births Out of Wedlock, AP, Nov 21, 2007, for 2005 statistics.
[2] F. Furstenberg, C. Nord, J. Peterson, & N. Zill. "The life course of children of divorce: Marital disruption and parental contact." American Sociological Review, 48, 5, (Oct. 1983), 661.
[3] Furstenberg & A. Cherlin, Divided Families: What Happens to Children when Parents Part (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991), 35-36.
[4] .Blankenhorn also sees an alliance with the mother and physical presence in the family as the two essential conditions for an inseminator to be a good enough father. See Fatherless America.
[6] Furstenberg, Jr. "Good Dads—Bad Dads: Two Faces of Fatherhood," in A. Cherlin (Ed.), The Changing American Family and Public Policy (D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 1998), 195. As cited in Maggie Gallagher, The Abolition of Marriage, 178-179.
[7] Anna Quindlen, "Public and Private Men at Work." New York Times, 18 Feb. 1990, 19.
[8] Sanders Korenman and David Neumark, Does Marriage Really Make Men More Productive? Finance and Economics Discussion Series #29 (Washington DC, Division of Research and Statistics, Federal Reserve Board, May, 1988). As cited in Gallagher, 1996.
[9] U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Highlights from 20 Years of Surveying Crime Victims: The National Crime Victimization Survey, 1973-92 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 1993), 18. Statistics includes females 12 and older. See also D. Blakenhorn, Fatherless America, 32-42.
[10] . See: David Crary, "Cohabitation called dangerous to children." AP, Nov. 18, 2007.
[11]. Based on 1995 figures. John Guibaldi, D.Ed., "Child Custody Policies and Divorce Rates in the US." 11th Annual Conference of the Children's Rights Council, Oct 23-26, 1997, Washington, D.C.
