Fatherhood as Crucial

                I’m not going to deny that I had an insanely tranquil, easy childhood. I didn’t have any of the divorce, rape, abuse, or even quarreling that seems to ravage through families across America. I credit my parents … I credit my father. And I am crushed to see fathers protrayed in the media and in broken families across the country as either useless or self-centered. This mentality is leading to a lot of studies on the subject of fatherless homes and the impact fathers really have on children.

                A 2011 article from Child: Care, Health, and Development analyzed over 2000 Chinese students between ages 11 and 23. Over 1000 of these participants did not have a present father, and here are a few points about fathers that the article presented.

                The first observation: “[M]ost peasants have to leave their children in their hometown when immigrating to metropolitan areas … only 10.5% of Chinese rural left-behind children live with their fathers now, and impressively, their fathers were usually absent when they were very young …” In pursuit of work and the capacity to provide for a family, fathers have to leave their families; this is not just the case in China. If a man has a full-time job, he’s away from the home about 60 hours a week. This is almost like being separated from the family. If we are seeing declines in child well-being and have tied that to fathers, I think the best way to mitigate those declines would be to put priority more on the home than the workplace. Although it hasn’t been proven by science that fathers being deeply involved in the workplace is bad, it’s certainly something to think about.

                But the article doesn’t focus on sources of father absence: it focuses on how anxiety and self-esteem are increased in children by the absence of fathers. They chose these two ideas because “trait-anxiety [is] a possible factor involved in harming self-esteem.” Based on this correlation, if anxiety and self-esteem are harmed, there is no doubt that these concepts will influence other aspects of the lives of the children that are abandoned by their fathers. If the results of this study turn out to match with the original hypothesis, then high anxiety and low self-esteem will not be the only negative implications of father absence.

                From the introduction of the article, here’s commentary on why studies about fathers are still being done. “[T]he influence of fathers on the self-esteem of children could be negligible when compared with the mother’s influence.” A lot of the world disregards fathers because mothers have such a great impact on children. I hope we will begin to understand, as more research is undertaken, that fathers really do have an influence, as will be discussed later in this article.

                Ultimately, the most concise result of the study was this: “With regard to state-anxiety, participants who had an absent father had higher scores than participants in all other groups.” This score rating was done with a 1-4 scale, 1 being “not true at all” and 4 being “completely true”. Basically it’s self-explanatory: we see negative effects, if only in this aspect of psychology, as a father and child are separated from each other. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this phenomenon on all levels of child life.

                And here’s an empirical reason why fathers are beneficial: “[T]he findings showed that children who experienced the absence of their fathers had lower self-esteem. One possible reason for this is poverty. Generally, the family managed by only the mother is poorer.” I can see a lot of Americans calling this idea sexist; can women really not raise families as well as men? That isn’t the point: the point is that parents were designed to work in tandem, and in a country like China it is more mainstream for a man to work. There needs to be someone—ideally a nurturer—willing to stay at home and help the children reach a positive point of self-esteem.

                I can vouch for the necessity of fathers from my own experience, as I mentioned earlier. My father was a source of strength, intelligence, and protection in my home. He would persuade school administrators to help my mother with her classroom when they refused to listen to her. He would challenge our friends to mercy fights to teach them how to be kinder and more gentle. He would never spank or hurt us in any way, but pulled us aside when we did something wrong to teach us how to do it right with logic and love.

                I’ve also been blessed in the father-nature of my husband. He’s always been good at loving children; I anticipate he will be effective at bonding with my children in the future. If he weren’t naturally inclined to bond with children, though, I could choose to have him involved every step of the way: I could help him to get excited with me when different stages of childbearing arrived, and I anticipate that keepign the home a fun-loving environment—playing with my kids and being patient with them—would keep him more inclined to stay at home.

                As shown in the study I referenced, not everyone has the capacity to find good men to be husbands and fathers, but I hope we don’t take the roles of husband and father for granted in our widespread culture.