Last week I took all three of my little girls
into a supermarket, where another man noticed me pushing a cart around with two
kids in it and wearing a third one on my chest in a baby harness. “Superdad!”
he called out, with a thumbs-up. I was rather proud of that since being the
World’s Best Father is a major life goal of mine. Then a woman saw me and
marveled, “Wow, Dad doing the shopping and
the babysitting!” While she certainly didn’t intend that as a jab at my
manhood, I felt a twinge of defensiveness at the implication that I was doing
what used to be disparaged as “women’s work.”
Fathers and mothers through the ages have
generally settled into traditionally different roles in the raising of children
– and, for biological and cultural reasons, that is as it should be. But as The New York Times’ Frank Bruni pondered
in an op-ed last week, fatherhood has changed over recent generations. We are moving
beyond the emotionally distant patriarch of an earlier time (who, like the
male-bonding sexists of Mad Men,
relegated all the childrearing to the mother) to a new era of the unabashedly
caring, hands-on dad. The new fatherhood is “less hidebound, with more elastic
definitions of masculinity.” Bruni called his piece “Building a Better Father,”
but does being a better father mean that a man necessarily becomes less
masculine in the process?
Despite this evolution of fatherhood, the
cultural assumption still tends to be that when dads trespass in the mother’s
domain, it’s emasculating. Cafemom.com, for example, recently gushed that doting father-of-two Prince William “is totally in the running for
being Mr. Mom.” No man wants to be thought of as Mr. Mom.
Bruni, 51, remembers his childhood as a time
when there was an impenetrable wall of separation between the roles of mothers
and fathers, who expressed affection differently as well. “A mother’s love was
supposedly automatic, unconditional,” Bruni wrote. “A father’s love was earned.
Mothers nurtured, tending to tears. Fathers judged, prompting them.”
That was my experience too. The mothers of my
parents’ generation were the homemakers; the fathers were the financial providers,
and they considered that to be the full extent of their paternal responsibility.
My dad, God rest his soul, took virtually no part in raising me and my brothers
apart from throwing the football with us on Sundays.
By contrast, Bruni notes a Pew Research
Center survey which states that
men today spend almost three times the number of hours a week with their
children as they did half a century ago – and still feel conflicted about not
devoting more. He also refers to a new book, Love That Boy by journalist Ron Fournier, who is Bruni’s age. One
of the themes of the book is fatherhood “in the here and now.” Fournier lays
bare his fatherly feelings and failings in a way that would have been
unthinkable in men of his (and my) fathers’ generation. I never witnessed my
father wrestling with any fatherly shortcomings. I never saw him cry.
But today, as the proudest father in human
history, I have become one of what Bruni calls the new “doters and gushers.” Friends
I have bored recently at parties will attest to this. I had lunch the other day
with a more sympathetic friend whose two daughters are the same age as my
youngest ones. We gushed about our kids and talked about how fatherhood changes
a man’s life (for the better, we agreed).
My friend lamented that working long hours
for his family’s future means he can’t spend as much time with them as he’d
like. This reminded me of Frank Bruni’s prominent examples of fathers today who
put family before career: baseball player Adam LaRoche, for example, who walked
away from the Chicago White Sox and a $13 million salary because a team exec
told him that his son could no longer accompany him to daily practice. Republican
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan declared that he would not sacrifice time with
his kids for his colleagues.
Is this evolution, this doting and gushing,
an indication that today’s fathers are less manly than yesterday’s Mad Men? Of course not. Masculinity
should be gauged by a man’s commitment to virtues, not by a pointless tradition
of emotional unavailability or a fear of appearing maternal.
Courage and emotional strength are manly
virtues, however, so it doesn’t help for a man to be so in touch with his
emotions that he becomes quivering jelly when his family needs him to be a rock.
But it is crucial that fathers teach their sons and daughters by example that a
real man, a good father, is unashamed to be emotionally present in their lives
and is a full parenting partner of the mother – not as Mr. Mom, but as
Superdad.
From Acculturated, 4/18/16
