This fine piece is by Paul Nathanson, co-author with Katherine Young of the pioneering works Spreading Misandry and Legalizing Misandry (Ottawa Citizen, 6/23/09).  On the occasion of Father's Day, he writes about his own father, the unique role fathers play in children's lives and the barriers western societies have placed between fathers and children.

Nathanson says that in childhood, he preferred his mother who gave him unconditional love, to his father who made demands, and whose love at times seemed contingent on his meeting them.  But that very form of paternal love had its effects on Nathanson in later life, as he describes.

But it was Dad who first taught me to be independent -- that is, as I eventually understood, to think for myself but within a larger moral context. He taught me to become more fully human, in other words, not to embrace either conformity or "autonomy" (an overused and misused word these days).

Still later, as a fully mature man, Nathanson experienced a kind of rite of passage that only his father could have provided.  It's the type of event that tribal cultures are wise enough to ritualize but that western societies leave to inadvertence.

One day, in the middle of some argument, he suddenly turned to me and said, "Paul, you're a learned man." Okay, I was much too old by then for those words to give me a sense of self-confidence. But we both realized immediately that this was a moment of profound fulfillment; a father had symbolically conferred manhood on his son.

Nathanson contrasts motherhood and fatherhood.  In the process, he gives support to the by-now-well-known social science finding that mothers and fathers parent differently and the different styles complement each other in the child's maturation and personality development.

Fathers, unlike mothers, must require their children to earn love -- respect, which is a form of love -- in order to leave home mature enough to give and receive it as adults. And fathers, unlike mothers, cannot measure their effectiveness adequately in terms of immediate emotional gratification.

And,

In short, fathering is inherently more complicated, more ambiguous, and more perilous (though not, of course, more important) than mothering. It requires a massive cultural effort to promote fathering and not merely to bribe or threaten fathers into providing material resources.

Of course, it is that very "massive cultural effort to promote fathering" that so many individuals and organizations  are trying so hard to accomplish in the face of much push-back from anti-father forces and a largely indifferent press and political establishment.  One result is,

Boys now learn directly or indirectly, that there will be no room for them as men in family life and that they will therefore have no moral stake as men in the future of society. If that isn't an ominous sign, what is?

That's a good question.  The separation of children from their fathers is arguably the single worst development in our society over the past 40 years or so.  Its dislocations run widely and deeply.  They touch every part of society and culture.  We know the benefits of father-involvement and the detriments of father absence, and yet we plunge ahead as if we don't or it doesn't matter.  We're like sleepwalkers in traffic.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Fatherhood. You can trackback from your own site.