Growing up in the 50s and 60s, the importance of fathers was basically to be the "bread winner" and to provide food, clothing and a roof over the top of our heads. A father's self-value was closely tied to "what he did". And men's success and value was measured in society by what they accomplished in their work. Two phrases were commonly spoken to children (especially boys) as they grew up: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and "When are you ever going to amount to anything?". I vaguely remember my mother, when I finished medical school, saying something like, "Now you have become a man."
Consequently when I became a father, I thought my job and my part of the marriage was to be the bread winner. When children came along, that was my wife's "job" as I was busy getting a pediatric practice off the ground and running. Fortunately for me, I married a woman who had other ideas, and those ideas began a long process of learning why men (and a high percentage of women now) have two jobs - the one they go to and the one they come home to, the latter being equally if not more important than the first. The job we come home to is the privilege of being a partner in a marriage and a father to (not of) our children. Most of us fathers cannot start to compete with our wives in terms of the amount of things that are done everyday to make the family and our children a success. But in big picture of how our children succeed in life, fathers may in fact be the parent, who by presence or absence (either physical or mental or both), can absolutely change the life of each child for the better or for the worse.
My perception is that large majority of babies come into the world knowing that their mother unconditionally loves them. We see this love as we look into our mother's eyes while being fed, and we feel it in the way she holds us and murmurs to us. And somehow we have probably already started feeling this love even while inside the uterus. So our mom is considered a constant in our life and this is known in neurobiology as secure attachment. Her love and attachment provide us with a basic feeling of security during the first year of life.
But during this same period of time there is another person who comes into our life who also holds us and talks to us (usually in a slightly less gentle voice) and on occasion even feeds us, though not in the same snugly way. This other person, our father, is our first outside contact with anyone who is not a given or a constant, and during the first year we must evaluate how this person feels about us. In a way, we are trying to determine if we have self-value and we are also trying to confirm that the feelings we received from our mother about our wonderfulness were accurate. If our father is there and interacts with us frequently, we begin to accumulate repeated evidence that we have value and that we were accurate in our interpretation of our mother's actions and feelings.
As we go through the next two toddler years, we have more and more opportunities to interact with our father (especially since most fathers like more physical types of interaction). If our father is there for us (physically and mentally), we gradually come to realize that he also
unconditionally loves us and we develop a comfortable secure attachment to him as well. And subsequently we wind up doing certain things in life with our mother and other things with our father and girls do shopping with their mother and boys do more physical things with their father (generalizations, of course). This all sounds rather obvious and fairly simple, but it is a lot more complicated than it sounds because of the variables which can change what happens in drastic ways. But for the purpose of this discussion, I want to just talk about some observations I have made regarding girls whose dads were not (or were not emotionally able to be) in their lives and regarding boys whose dads were or weren't in their lives both physically and emotionally.
The initial scenario that I became aware of was girls who fathers left their life and the family in the first year or two of life. These girls did not have that other person to reach out to seeking responses that would confirm their self-value. Two things in general would follow in their lives. They often made poor choices of males to date and to marry; and when their first baby was born they would have great difficulty allowing anyone else to care for the baby and sometimes greater difficulty in allowing the baby to attempt to solve any of his own problems (self-soothe or self-calm). These babies often had significant excessive weight gain and very often had long-term sleep problems. My interpretation has been that these women were desperately seeking "that other person" who would confirm their self-value and in their hurry to find such a person they settled for the wrong men. Then when they married and the baby arrived, here was "that other person" who every minute of every day looked into the mothers eyes and completely fulfilled her need to be valued. This feeling was so intensely needed by these mothers that they wanted all of these good feelings and were not willing to share the baby with others and answered the baby's every peep because it was a chance to receive more of these value feelings. Even, if by chance, one of the girls had married the right other person, problems could still arise because of not wanting to share the baby and becoming enmeshed with the baby thus preventing fathers from becoming attached.
A second time in girl's lives when their father is extremely important is as the approach and go through puberty. It is very essential at this time that a girl's father acts like and tells her that he still unconditionally loves her as she changes from a girl to a young lady. I have known several women whose fathers were not able to be emotionally present during these crucial years. Fortunately most of these women were able to realize on their own, after a few "not the right guys", that they were wonderful; and then found the right man and now are happily married and have children whose father is physically and emotionally there. Other girls were not so lucky and continued to make bad male choices. I have always said that Las Vegas is the capital city of women whose fathers weren't in their lives. It's very sad.
In boys lives, physical or emotional absence of a father, seems to have effects mostly on behavior. It could be referred to as a form of attention deficit, and I have even had pre-school age boys who were "kicked" out of school for behavior and the underlying problem was a missing father. The pattern that I see in teen years, when we all search for our identity, is boys who start to wear the costume of making fun of others. They cover up the feelings of not thinking they are wonderful by trying to bring down others kids to their level. Later as boys without fathers go on into the working world, it appears that they often are very compelled to climb to the top of the work ladder, as if the higher they go and the more they succeed, the more they are proving to their father that they were "worth his time"
The hardest part of this whole subject is the fact that every father is set up by all the generations of fathers before him (and mothers) to either have the tools necessary for attaching with babies and considering family as his most important job or to not have these tools. One of the most important tools is the ability to listen as children say what they have to say and to appreciate what it looks like when they are "acting their age". These tools can be acquired after getting married and after having a baby, but like all life lessons, they are easier to learn before we are stressed and sleep-deprived with a new baby. The important thing to know is that we can acquire the tools and we can break the cycle from generation to generation. We have such vast new information about how each baby stores memories about self-value and we have a chance as new parents to present life to them in a way that is hard to misperceive. This is certainly one of my passions in life and I am always available to discuss the subject and attempt to guide any new parents toward helpful information and resources. These are my individual thoughts about this subject as observed over 36 years of practicing pediatrics.
There is a book on the Sea View web site (www.seaviewpeds.com) about this subject by Daniel Siegel entitled:
Parenting from the Inside-Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive.
ON THE WEB:
http://www.fathers.com/documents/research/2009_Fathering_in_America_Summary.pdf
http://www.fathers.com/
http://www.fatherhood.gov/index.cfm
