Fatherhood: For the Maine Fatherhood Commission

By Rabbi David Eidensohn

            I congratulate the State of Maine for its Fatherhood Commission. Although the Federal Government recognized the crisis in Fatherhood years ago, the states are the appropriate governments to deal it. They will pay for the failure of Fatherhood fiscally and in quality of life. Commissioner Mike Heath asked for my input. I am happy to oblige.

            The Federal government's The Meaning of Fatherhood for Men, presented in early 1997, reported (appendix C), "It is evident that women, and disproportionately men, are increasingly rejecting the conventional roles and obligations of a traditional family. Low levels of financial and social support provided by absent fathers to children have paralleled the rise in divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing. Research has also shown that children are increasingly seen as interfering with the spousal relationship. The rising cost of child rearing appears to be in conflict with an increasing materialism and increasing aspirations for expensive consumer goods. Importantly, adolescent males are significantly more likely than females to value such goods and rate owning such goods as very important, suggesting a higher priority of spending for themselves rather than providing for the expenses of a family."

            It is now several years since the publication of this paper in 1997; what are the trends today?

Between 1970 and 2000, "the median age at first marriage for women increased by 4.3 years to 25.1 years; for men, the increase was 3.6 years to 26.8 years (U.S. Census Bureau)." As people refuse to marry, or hold off on marrying, the biological powers of procreation do not rest. The above (June 29, 2001) survey from the Census Bureau states that from 1970-2000, single mothers increased from 3-10 million, and the number of single fathers went from 393,000 to 2 million. The Federal Center of Disease Control concludes that one of the factors in this is "the steep increases in the number of unmarried women." The study notes that even as unmarried mothers are having more babies, married mothers are having fewer babies.

            From 1970 to 1999, "nonmarital births" went from 200,000 in 1970 to 1.3 million in 1999 (CDC National Vital Statistics Reports Oct 18, 2000 Vol 48, Number 16). This is a six-fold increase in less than 30 years. Can we imagine 1.3 million children born out of wedlock, most of them flung upon the resources of states coping with serious financial problems?

            As marriage declines, the biological issues do not. In fact, stress and anxiety are stilled by consummated sex, and it often becomes a compulsory behavior for people to relieve tension. Thus, the CDC reports "the rate of childbearing for unmarried white women more than doubled from 1980 to 1994."

            What is causing this disaster?

 I remember two visits to the doctor. One, a nurse chatted with me before a procedure, and asked about my family. She then said, with great pain, "I will have no children. I am afraid what kind of uncontrollable monsters they could be." Another time, those of us sitting in the waiting room listened to a receptionist talk to her daughter on the phone. I surmised that her daughter was the "uncontrollable monster" the nurse feared to mother. Modern marriage, children, fatherhood and motherhood are failing.  Children once afforded the greatest pleasure; now they threaten.

            Time Magazine's 2002 April cover story was about successful women who fail at having children, and then of course there are those who fail at getting married. For these ladies, being a bank director is not enough. They race a biological clock and must marry before their supply of motherhood dissipates or is compromised by time. The aging starts at age 27, and by the middle thirties the process is advanced. Yet, this is the time when the woman must power her way into the highest business position or advance to tenure. She has no time for babies. She waits, and one day, finds out she missed the boat. The Time story, based upon a book by a woman who surveyed successful women, quotes fertility doctors saying, "We keep a large supply of tissues for when they break down and cry."

            This sets up a terrible cycle, the final one in the destruction of American family life. The woman knows she must marry quickly to have children, and flings herself upon men, giving and getting nothing. He is "commitment-phobic" and she is scared about her future. The more she gives and gets nothing, the angrier she is. Feminism first tried lesbianism, but when Gloria Steinhem went from "women need men like a squirrel needs a bicycle" to marrying at the age of 67, women realized that they lost. There is no alternative for women without a man, but they want him on their terms, something men have no interest in granting. Defensive men, afraid of angry women getting divorces, child custody and the house, dig in resolutely, refuse marriage, take women and spit them out, and ignore the moral implications.

            Fatherhood is not an endangered species, but there is fatherhood that produces a single-parent home, and a fatherhood that produces a two-parent home. There is fatherhood of parents respecting each other, and teaching the child the glory of married life, and there is fatherhood of parents at war and a child growing up listening to both sides of the story: is the father a brute, or is it the mother's fault? Of course, there is also the fatherhood where the child runs around looking for the biological parent. Will, as trends predict, this become the norm?

Fatherhood is a problem, and so is grandfather hood. In a way, grandfather hood is a bigger problem.  The census bureau reports (August 26, 2002) that:

Ø     5.8 million grandparents lived with their grandchildren under 18 in 2000. I am a grandparent, and I would not like to live with my grandchildren. I haven't the energy.

Ø     42% of the above grandparents supported their grandchildren. The elderly thus consume the reserves they need for their old age, and health costs are spiraling.

Ø     5.4 million children lived with grandparents. It is not fair for children to have to live with grandparents, because children are boisterous and need young parents.

Ø     21 percent of preschoolers in 1997 were cared for by grandparents while their mother was employed or in school. I bet that mother felt great burdening her parents, children, and self.

The government is in no position to help out, because it is a basket case financially.

According to the White House (Office of Management and Budget), we pay $360 billion dollars a year just on interest on the present 6 trillion dollar national debt! We owe an additional 6 trillion for imminent social security payments. Federal earning are only 2 trillion annually.

            One in seven people in America work for local and state government, which local and state government cannot sustain without Federal Intervention, and the Feds are scrambling to borrow whatever they can and constantly raise the Federal debt limit.

            The bottom line is that there will always be fatherhood, but we don't know what kind. Will father be the individual who fathered twelve children from twelve unmarried women and refuses to pay support, or will we have fatherhood in family? The trend is not favorable. Every social and cultural kick at men brings women closer to despair of family, even marriage. Men are reluctant to marry because society is blaming them instead of encouraging them. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, a single woman, complained that ABC has not one family show that she can relate to; ABC programs only radical and dysfunctional family shows. Nobody needs fatherhood more than women. They are the ones who will suffer from insults to manhood. They are the ones who will either live alone, or raise a child without help. A woman may have a husband who fathers her children, honors and protects her, or she may have to suffice with sex and nonmarital children. If the latter is what she gets, the state will have to pay for it. However, no state can afford to be fathers.

            What can the state do to prevent the decline of family, promote the return of responsible fatherhood, and inculcate respect for women?

            The state, in its educational institutions, and in its media programs, must bridge the chasm between the genders, and teach people not to pull apart, but to push together. The state must point out the futility of adversary struggles in a polar marital structure. Some consider our culture now "at war" against traditional masculinity and femininity. Women are measured in some environments by how manly they act, by the masculine roles they fill. Men, on the other hand, must not be men. Some schools even close playgrounds so that boys will not be boys. There is a raging against "phallic influence" from prominent lobbies. However, men will not play the unnatural role society is inventing for them. Men will refuse marriage and family. They will use women as sex toys and babies will be unwanted refuse. America will soon be divided into two camps: a traditional minority of functional families, and a vast majority where men are predators upon desperate women who have millions of nonmarital children. To marginalize men is to ruin family and society.

            The state must recognize that its survival requires a natural, proud and dignified father. The idea that women are enhanced and improved when men are dishonored is wrong. Women are destroyed when manhood is desecrated. We cannot promote the rights of women and children by ignoring the rights of men.

We must reverse the boy's education that consuming is everything. We must teach that giving is everything. A boy grows into a "beneficial provider" and a loving husband and father by being appreciated as a man. Paradoxically, one proud and secure gives, whereas one insecure only takes. Ideally, a boy grows with self-esteem that blossoms into love and family. A boy angry and frustrated because society frowns and complains does other things.

            Marriage means you love someone and something and are prepared to live for it, not take what you can. Take what you can, and live alone. All of us are "married" to society and each other, and we must learn to give and not take. When we give out of love, we get back what no taking could ever achieve. It is deleterious to teach children about consumption and demanding instead of their right to learn and grow.

            Let us recognize the transcendence in intimacy, and not make it into a dirty drug. A woman who creates life is holy. A woman valued only for her geometric form is a thing. Why can't a father be a father? Why can't a father be respected for his role to provide and protect? Why do we force mothers to work until they are exhausted? Why do we have a ten-year-old girl dead because she played football with boys? Why do we have a female navy seaman thrown out of a Manhattan hotel room and killed because she thought she could have a fistfight with a man? Why do we have women crying in the fertility clinics? Why do we have women rejoicing at the divorce she just got, not realizing what that means?

            I am a father, and I am a grandfather. Even as I grow old, my children and grandchildren grow molded by what they see in me. When I die, I will live in them. I am my father, who is dead, and his father, as well, because I have a model, and try to fit into it. If I respect my wife and children, I learned this from my father. Samuel Eidensohn was a brilliant scientist who doubled the capacity of America's submarine batteries, and he married and stayed home at night. No night school, no more degrees, no stocks, no theater, just family. His children are scholars with degrees and publications. Our most important study was how to be a parent. My mother, may she be well, never valued anything as much as her family. My parents had a perfect marriage, until my father died. I never had to study or research how to be a father. It never occurred to me not to be like my parents, even as I fail to reach their levels.

            What do others see? The father who never married? The father in divorce court? The father at the therapist who says it like it is? The dysfunctional father on ABC television? 

            The Federal The Meaning of Fatherhood for Men, Appendix C, page 7, tells us the Theoretical Approaches on fatherhood but admits to failure to answer why family concepts do not work. We will provide the answers. One approach is called, "Structural Functionalism" and it offers a nuclear family in which the father provides financial support and the wife provides socialization and emotional stability of the children. The study asks why men refuse to become family fathers and good providers.

             One reason is that since the fifties consumption has doubled but wages grow very slowly. Doubled consumption requires both spouses to work, forcing the wife to be a "good-provider." This has destroyed the Structural Functionalism of the genders. Marriage is a polarity, and polarity does not tolerate the wrong similarities. Perhaps if more than 14% of American women stayed home to raise the children full time, more fathers and mothers would emerge from our declining civilization. We can pressure women to work and pressure men not to work, but we cannot be viable unless we stop the pressure to be unnatural and instead praise traditional gender roles.

            The federal study next presents Conflict Theory, claiming that marriage is a struggle for power, with men winning by social and economic mastery, while the powerless woman tends the baby. Tell a man this and he won't marry. A father must be encouraged, not insulted. Marriage is a frightening decision, and people harbor doubts. Only when the community is there with warm thoughts and words can people make it. Warning him not to be a man and not to seek power is not going to encourage a man to marry.

            The Federal study then presents Gender Display and Hegemonic Masculinity, a theoretical gender construct that emphasizes the roles and deeds that define masculinity and femininity. A man who helps with children has violated his gender role, and a woman who works has violated her gender role. However, the more powerful and privileged man is sanctioned socially more severely if he raises children. Hegemonic Masculinity means that men dominate and therefore, when they display a feminine gender trait, it invites negative social judgments. However, if the weaker female violates her role and works, she is not judged so harshly.

            I feel this is a sad thing, if it is true. Does society really disapprove of a man helping his wife with children? Is a man limited to activities outside of the home? Is a father a financier or a father? Ideas such as this stifle the natural love of a father for his children. It is another nail in the coffin of marriage.

            Fatherhood is a pole in the polarity of marriage. Polarity in physics is the attraction between two opposites, electrons and protons, which join and assume a true marriage without individual "taking." Two poles can pull apart or push together. The best way to make it work is to disappear in love and self-abnegation, and be awarded the pleasant surprise of reciprocity. This happens, however, only when the pole arrives at the wedding canopy on a cloud of glory. In a society where a man is a king, he can play this game. Modern society doesn't give fathers a chance. It wants the groom to appear not in a cloud of glory, but a fog of fear. The woman has fears as well, as she knows that fifty percent of first marriages end in divorce. She knows that she will lose more than the husband if that happens. The marriage of two frightened people is a disaster.

            The Federal Study revealed a modern man obsessed with consuming and afraid of giving to family. An insecure person takes. Only a happy and self-actualized person gives. Society must decide if it wants fatherhood on nature's terms, or family and state bankruptcy.