Today is Father’s Day, a holiday that was officially designated in 1972 via a proclamation signed by President Nixon.
If you are spending the day with your father, and/or your children, I wish you a wonderful day with great memories. Take a picture or two, and save it. Life is short and these moments are fleeting. Savor them.
Father’s Day is on my mind, naturally, but my thoughts are rather scattered, so here’s a smorgasbord.
Dads Matter. A Lot.
About 1 in 4 American kids are fatherless, and the consequences of this are massive, and universally negative. Fatherless children do worse in school, are more likely to commit crime, more likely to live in poverty, more likely to fall victim to predators. Fatherless girls are more likely to get pregnant as teens. Fathers are a protective buffer against nearly every negative child outcome about which we have data.
Because our culture devalues and demoralizes men, many fathers don’t know how important they are. If you are a father, or might be one day, please click the above links. Do some reading. Decide that you’re going to find a way to be around for your kids, no matter what.
I grew up in a religious milieu where people tend to marry very young, mostly so they can have sex of which Jesus will approve. Each and every time a male friend is about to have a girl, I give them a lecture. I don’t know anything about the consequences of fatherlessness, or lack of father love, for little boys, but I know a lot about how it affects a little girl. Several of them have told me since that my bluntness motivated them to work through problems in their marriage and stay. Truly, if that’s the only thing I do with my life, it’s been worth it. Educate yourself and then spread the word about how important fathers are and you just might make an enormous difference.
Ongoing Consequences—An Hypothesis As To Why
My childhood was marred by a lack of love and serious abuse from both my parents, but I have suffered a great deal more from the lack of my father’s love. The father hunger has always run deeper and been a much more serious problem. Part of this is because I am heterosexual, so my judgment in assessing males being abominable lends itself to much worse consequences than my equally terrible judgment in assessing females. But part of it isn’t about that at all, and I have done a lot of reflecting on the why there.
Here’s my hypothesis: I wonder if maybe there’s something we just know, something we are wired to react to, on an evolutionary level—the way that we are much more prone, on a walk outdoors, to mistake a stick for a snake than a snake for a stick. Our mothers invest in us by default. The pregnancy, birth, and lactation represent an enormous amount of labor, a deep and intimate connection. There is no such thing as a genetic mother who has a child she doesn’t know about (rare technological scenarios aside).
Our fathers, on the other hand, choose to invest in us. Or they don’t. My mother’s inability to love me has always felt like something wrong with her; caring about my father’s approval and prioritizing her marriage over her child’s well-being has always seemed like her failing, not mine. My father’s rejection has always felt like a deep and meaningful assessment of my worthiness to be loved, a failure that I’m still working to let myself try to stop reversing, to try to stop proving myself, over and over again. No longer proving myself to him—no contact for years, and unlikely to ever have contact again—but to the world, I guess.
This may be my own personal lack of rationality (yes, of course, I do see that it’s irrational to blame myself for rejection that started before I was old enough to warrant any kind of judgment), but I’ve noticed a similar pattern among people I’ve known with extremely troubled parental relationships. It seems to be much more difficult to process and reconcile a troubled father relationship than a troubled mother relationship, so I do wonder if this hypothesis is part of the reason why.
I have a lot of readers now, so particularly if any of you have experience with evolutionary theorizing and thinking, I’m really interested in your take. Hit reply to the email that landed this in your box, or email hollymathnerd at gmail.
This Ain’t It, Chief
On Sunday, June 12th, one week before Father’s Day, I received this email from the Democrats.org site:
This email made me roll my eyes.
There’s a lot of irony in that, because I got it on my phone while I was sitting in my car, in my therapist’s parking lot, waiting to go upstairs for one of the three weekly sessions during which we attempt to make sense of my damage, of the wreckage left behind, in large part, by my father.
Father’s Day is an emotional landmine for a lot of Americans. That much is true.
I understand why Father’s Day hurts, because it hurts me, too. There’s still a part of me that thinks if I was worth loving, I’d be out to breakfast right now, somewhere giving a nicely wrapped present and getting a hug.
But this email? Insulting. Pathetic. And extremely unhelpful.
The world is full of fathers who love their children, and those of us with real and deep father wounds deal with a hell of a lot more than emails. This level of coddling fragility is a little like asking a cancer patient if they want to be warned when a healthy person, someone who doesn’t have to manage chemotherapy appointments and the resulting, constant nausea, is going to talk about food. It’s ridiculous, and the fact that we live in a society where a lot of people probably clicked the link is demoralizing.
Learning to accept responsibility for the fact that our wounds and damage are ours to heal, even though they’re not our fault—this is crucial. Nobody else can do this work, and this is true regardless of how unfair it seems and feels.
Coddling in general isn’t helpful, but coddling to the point of assuming that a mass, mailing-list email is going to be triggering? That’s actively causing harm, in my opinion.
How to Respect Pain in a Helpful Way
A few people asked me about this after I tweeted about the above email. How do they support people they care about for whom Father’s Day is a source of real pain?
Primarily, I would say, to go by your relationship. If this is a real friend, someone you spend time with in person, and if you also have the kind of relationship where you know the hows and whys of Father’s Day being difficult for them, you probably know them well enough to know if they would respond to a conversational opening. If they would, an offer to talk about it if they want to, with no pressure implied, is a fine approach. If this is not someone you know for real, and especially if you don’t know the details, respect that and don’t push.
Should you avoid any discussion of Father’s Day? No. But if you have a particularly good Father’s Day and make some deeply meaningful memory with your father, sharing your joy with someone else is just being considerate.
The War on Masculinity: Resources
I believe that the war on masculinity in our culture plays a role in the crisis of fathers in our country. The current madness around transing kids, for example, wouldn’t be happening if more men were stepping up and saying no. If you are interested in learning more about fathers, men, and masculinity in general, which is one way to equip yourself on how to fight back, I recommend the Disaffected Podcast, where the current societal entrenchment of toxic female-typical behaviors is regularly called out. Dr. Jordan Peterson offers a lot to help men step up and become the fathers their children need, including this video. And the DarkHorse podcast, with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, did a great segment on fatherhood in episode 131.
When President Nixon signed the proclamation fifty years ago, he probably didn’t have any notion of what Father’s Day would turn into. He certainly wouldn’t have guessed that it would turn into something where a major political party would invite its members to opt-out of messages lest they be triggered.
Our society and culture are in an absolutely astonishing freefall. The values that have made the West great are under relentless attack. We have a lot of work to do, in many domains, to save the free world. Fathers have an important role to play in all of it.
Happy Father’s Day, dads. Enjoy your day, rest and relax, and then gear up.
We—the collective we—need you now, more than ever.
I’m glad I remembered to start going through your old posts again.
This one is excellent. It made me realize that I’ve had a subconscious desire for several decades to be a father. But it took the better part of my life to fully understand that neither marriage nor fatherhood is practical for me.
This may be what is behind my tendency to behave in a fatherly way toward so many younger people. An unfortunate side effect of this is that many girls and young women have developed a crush on me. So it is a blessing that I have a moral compass and virtually no libido.