Daddies are important, part 1

Daddies are important, too

                I talk to too many people who seem to think that father’s are merely a supplemental adult in a child’s life.  We need to explore how this concept was created and how we can stop it.  Really, we need a national, ongoing conversation on the matter, and I am eager to be a party to this conversation.

How this situation was created:

                We need to figure out how we arrived at this moment in time.  Although I could examine the changing role of each parent through the centuries, we need only go to the middle of the last century to figure out how tour family constellation got created for the modern era.  About 50-60 years ago, just after World War II, men were coming home from war and taking over the available jobs.  People were eager to get back to normalcy and create nuclear households after a decade of depression and a half decade of war.  In their idealized version of the new world, women were in charge of the home and men were in charge of the workplace.  The good ol’ boy network was full of boys, and women had a hard time finding a way to get ahead at the office.  Men were expected to be the providers, and if a woman had income, it was expected to be supplemental to her families’ needs, not essential to putting the roof over their heads.  It is no surprise that everyone assumed, when a couple was getting a divorce, that the mother would get custody of the children and the father would have to continue to support the children until they were through school (college or high school, whichever was expected in their family) as well as support his ex wife throughout her life until she got re-married and had a new man to support her. 

                That configuration worked well on the surface only as long as all parties threw themselves into their roles, but a lazy homemaker or rebellious and resentful breadwinner would through a family constellation into oblivion.   Family problems were kept behind closed doors, so we do not have a count of how many families this did not work for, but the eventual rise of domestic violence awareness shows us that one of the biggest indicators of a family at risk for violence is an inequitable distribution of tasks, and one of the biggest reasons women are reluctant to leave an abusive situation is financial need (arising from not having been self-supporting in their own careers).  While many see those days as idyllic, the “Leave It To Beaver” family constellation was not as frequent as we dream.  Baby boomers who grew up during that time worked hard to change the way this worked, whether it was to compensate for knowing their mother was never fulfilled with her lack of career, whether it was to compensate for their father’s inability to connect with the family, or to release themselves from the traditional requirement to get married before becoming intimate or setting up shared households.   The people who lived through those seemingly idyllic times, worked hard to change the ultimate configurations of their own lives.   

Women have worked very hard to gain recognition in the workplace and we have been, for the most part, successful, taking positions in management and even breaking through the glass ceiling in many ways.  For some reason, we did not immediately adjust household duties to match the new reality that women were not spending full time at home.  About 20-30 years ago, women were all over Phil Donahue (for the youngsters out there, he was a talk popular show host) and Oprah Winfrey shows talking all about how they were now gaining power in the workplace but their husbands were not taking over to do the chores at home.   The lines were drawn in the battle of the sexes of the era, and if a woman wanted to take a turn about being a “mean girl” with her husband, all she had to do was roll her eyes when he started talking about doing chores.  “Mr. Mom”, “Mrs. Doubtfire”, and a host of other movies made it clear that men were only capable of handling household chores in a bumbling, comical and nearly dangerous way.   

                So the modern young husband of the 1970s, 80s & 90s listened & took pains to take responsibility for a reasonable percentage of the work in the household.  There remain some common areas of division of labor.  As I’ve talked to my clients about how their marriages are configured, it seems that men usually handle the car and larger home maintenance duties, women usually handle the baby care and shopping, and there has been a division of labor on the issue of laundry, cooking, cleaning.  Most households no longer expect the same standards of cleaning as was once expected of the homes we grew up in, the weekly dusting and vacuuming may have been put aside in favor of making sure the kids made it to all their extracurricular activities, and we have been more careful in our generation to book our kids for lots of extracurriculars, taking to heart the advice that a busy kid is less likely to get into trouble.  My generation has been known for over-involvement of parents who, rather than tell the kids, “go outside and play”, would hover over them like a helicopter in an effort to make sure nothing bad ever happened. 

In this brave, new world where we have re-defined our expectations of family, the only thing that really divides men and women is the biological function of pregnancy and breast feeding.  Men even have the opportunity to take parental  leave from work to bond with their children as women had been doing for years.  Women can bring home the bacon while men cook it up.  Dads can bathe a child, change their diapers, take their turn in the car pool, and serve as the parent organizer of the kids’ club events.   

                So far, so good.  But we have not gone far enough in changing the expectations associated with gender.  The changes I described have improved the quality of life, but one last vestige of the old system is the marginalization of fathers as having primary importance in their children’s lives.  Nowhere is this problem clearer than when we’re looking at families who are trying to co-parent even after they are no longer romantically linked.  As of the day of separation, many people assume that Mom will have control of what happens with the children.  Some mothers use the opportunity of controlling the children, to continue to exercise control over their ex.  It’s not so surprising that fathers react badly to having their children held hostage, used as little ATM machines or weapons in the relationship war.