You Still Don't Understand: The Rise and Fall of Fatherhood

Fathers Day is Sunday, 17 June. ?You are more than welcome to post links to the material or to reprint it, but please do not do so until Saturday, June 16, so publication will coincide with Fathers Day.

Enjoy!

DrD

30 Mar 2012

The Rise and Fall of Fatherhood

drD (Richard Driscoll)

"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 human families were meant to include not just mothers and children but fathers as well.? Many of us believed that fatherhood had been, was, and always would be a cornerstone of the human family.? 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.? Twenty years before that, in the 1940's, about 3% were born to single moms.?

????? Now, in the 2010's, some 40% of children in America are born to single women.[1]? Almost half of these moms are in living-together arrangements, which are fragile at best.[2]? Of? first marriages, about 40% will end in divorce, and the mothers are the primary residential custodians in most of them.? Of children with custodial mothers, only one-third see their fathers as often as once a week,[3] 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.[4]? So somewhere over half of American children born today will be raised in matriarchal arrangements with no father or only a sometime father.?

????? 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, and women seldom abandon their children when they have a choice.? Fatherhood, on the other hand, relies on a combination of personal preferences, social pressures, and a host of unknowns.? So when the two parent family unravels, it is men who vanish, and families revert to the more primal mother?plus?children arrangement.?

????? ?As a tribute on Fathers Day, we look here at the meaning and importance of fatherhood through the ages, among our own and among other species as well.? We look for some sense of why fatherhood is unraveling and why so quickly. ?

The benefits of cooperation

????????? 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 benefit over just one of each. By almost any measure, children with fathers tend to do better, emotionally, socially, and intellectually, and children without fathers do worse.?

????? Most birds bond together in mating pairs, but only a few species of mammals so.? Pair bonding among birds provides a tremendous survival advantage.?

????? The Snowy owl mom who sits the eggs has a full-time job due to the frigid temperatures. She must rely on her mate to hunt lemmings and bring them back to the nest for her.? Snowy dad hunts as mom sits the eggs, and during their first weeks after the owlets hatch, after which? the mom will join in the hunt. 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.?

The Evolution of Fatherhood

????? In contrast to birds, pair bonding is relatively uncommon among mammals.? While an egg must be incubated, a mama mammal carries her unborn youngsters inside her belly, remains mobile during gestation, and has an onboard 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.??

????? Including? humans, about six percent of primate species form bonded pairs.?

Survival advantages

Relatively lasting pair bonds became commonplace among our early hominid ancestors about 1.7 million years ago, plus or minus a few seasons, and have remained a standard and typical arrangement since then. So in spite of multiple relationships, adultery, briefer life spans, separations, remarriages, and extra mating opportunities for the top bananas, most of our ancestors who passed along their genes to use were what we today term "married."?

????? Out on the Savanna some four or five million years ago, our hominid 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 beganbegan 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 become even modestly self-sufficient. Most primate infants can cling to their moms at birth or soon after, making them easy to carry. They can also scamper on their own, but not human infants.? So travel among our early ancestors came to require two functional individuals working together, one to carry the infant and one to carry the gear. Who better to provide the assistance than a committed mate?? It was about this time that human groups organized into families headed by bonded parents.

????? A larger brain is a high-energy luxury. The 3 pound human brain accounts for about 2% of our normal body weight but consumes fully 20% of our metabolic energy. So a larger-brained ancestor must find ways to acquire the additional nutrition or starve. The introduction of fathers supporting mothers and offspring surely provided a share of the additional resources necessary for higher intelligence.?

????? While a father and mother working together should provide about twice the resources as a mother going it alone, the cumulative results ?were 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, and a father can brings with him paternal grandparents, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, cousins, and so on.? It is natural to favor your own kin over unrelated individuals, and kin members ally together for their mutual benefits.???

????? We are now the dominant species on the earth, which we can attribute to an upright gait which leaves our hands free; the use of tools; higher intelligence; language; and to our complex social arrangements.? Pair bonding, of course, has been a principal aspect of our social arrangements

Civilization

Bonded to a family,? the males of the species became progressively more involved in supporting the females and in raising the youngsters. Bonding with a female provided a continuing sexual relationship for a man, and protected the children against outsider males who would lust after the female but consider her children unwelcome nuisances. Those bonded males who supported the mother and her children be?came 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.??

Providers

? ??? Parenthood itself tends to make 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.[5]? 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.[6]?? 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."[7] Men who become widowed, separated or divorced lose their productivity bonus, suggesting that pair bonding was indeed an important factor in male productivity.

????? Men who can be 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.

Protectors

Men who have made the transition to fatherhood tend to be highly protective of their families. While we often think of domestic violence beingviolence within a marriage, 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.[8]? Married women benefited from a fourfold reduction in violence compared to their un?married counterparts.[9]

Unraveling

????? The human species has ridden a long way on the traditional family, 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?

????? The Industrial Revolution introduced the machines that do the heavy lifting, so brain now replaces brawn in productive importance.? Birth control can limit the size of families, so women tend to have fewer children and are freer to work outside the home.? Mothers of young children can usually rely on various forms of government assistance, so a man is no longer so vital and many women find it easier to do without one.?

? ??? While rare among mammals, fatherhood is typical in the Canidae animal family, which? includes wolves, coyotes, foxes, jackals, and African wild dogs.? Among coyotes the male hunts and brings home warm meals for his missus and their pups.. Some of these social animals have evolved not just fatherhood but also extended family arrangements. Among wolf packs, the alpha male and female are the only breeding pair, but a second pair may fill in as babysitters.???

????? 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 by 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 among humans as well??? Government support means that a father is no longer a financial requirement, and the social expectations change according.?

Imbalanced arguments

????? Traditionally, men have been considered the heads of households, in what might today? be considered a sexist arrangement. But step behind the appearances and consider the power differences.? In arguments, when interests conflict, researchers such as John Gottman at the University of Washington observe that women usually dominate while men concede, placate, or withdraw.

????? Traditionally, the man was expected to commit himself to the support of his wife and children. In return, so far as he upheld his responsibilities, he was honored as the head of the family. See the trade-off? In exchange for supporting his wife, doing what she and the children require of him, deferring to her when she is upset with him, and usually losing when he tries to argue against her, he was honored as the head of the family.?

????? Such arrangements have something for each. He gets the honor and she benefits from his support. So the superficially patriarchal arrangement benefits women as much as men.

????? In marriages in which the woman openly heads the family, where is the trade-off?? She is officially in charge and she wields much of the covert emotional power as well, leaving him with little respect and little voice. What is in it for him?? Or for her, since she has no reason to respect him?? .

????? The traditional Christian support for men as heads of house?holds has surely helped to rebalance marriages, upholding men who stay and contribute and asking women to appreciate more and criticize less. It makes you wonder if the early Christians were wiser in these matters than our secular skepticism today would have us believe.?

????? Patriarchy is itself a convenient fiction in which the actors stay in character and the audience agrees to accept the production as just what it pretends to be. See patriarchy as an artfully crafted but fragile arrangement, honoring men who stay and support their families in order to encourage them to do so.

????? Today even that courteous pretense is quickly vanishing as patriarchy now refers more to a form of oppression than to a viable trade-off between men and women. So far as patriarchy implies oppression, then it is good riddance to bad rubbish. So far as patriarchy is merely honor bestowed upon men who marry women and support families, we are losing yet another dimension that holds the two-parent family together.? Females prevail in arguments and males withdraw, creating an imbalance that neither one finds satisfying.

????? As women seek more rights, more security, more safety, and more control of their lives, the importance of fathers gets lost in the mix.? Perhaps we can scrape by without so many fathers, for awhile.? But do we really want to chance it???

Fashioning fathers

A father is ordinarily the biological inseminator, which is our principal standard, although fatherhood is considerably more than mere insemination. [10]

(1) The genetic contribution is vital, in that we are naturally more inclined to love and care for those we believe to be our genetically related family members. Moms and dads tend to sacrifice tend a great deal more for their own biological children than for 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 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.? ?We might just as well call the sperm contributor a sire or mate, which are the preferred terms for fatherless species.??

(2) A father has an alliance with the mother in which he marries her or becomes common-law married. 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 ex?perience the con?ditions 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.

Only a century ago, the extended family was the norm. And in our earlier years, children were often raised com?munally, with assorted grand?parents, 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 men and uphold fatherhood,? to bring out the best in ?men.

????? So long as we appreciate men and uphold men in families, we can hope for an improving quality of life for ourselves and the same to our youngsters.

Happy Fathers Day!

Adapted from? You Still Don't Understand? by DrD and Dr. Nancy Ann Davis.?

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[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]??????? Sharon Jayson, "Births to unmarried women hit record." USA Today, Oct. 28, 2005. [3]???? 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. [4]???? ??????? Furstenberg & A. Cherlin, Divided Families: What Happens to Children when Parents Part (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991), 35-36. [5] ???? .???????? 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. [6] ???? .???????? Anna Quindlen, "Public and Private Men at Work." New York Times, 18 Feb. 1990, 19. [7] ???? ?.??????? 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. [8] ???? .???????? 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.? [9] ???? . ???????????? See: David Crary, "Cohabitation called dangerous to children." AP, Nov. 18, 2007. [10] ? .???????? 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.

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