Regardless of the debate on how tough (or not) love should be, the absent fathers issue seems like something concrete and impactful that we should be trying to address.
There is a general corruption of the concept of masculinity in American culture. It’s similar to what’s happened to the symbol of the American flag, but more insidious.
When I say masculinity, or masculine values, what do you think of? When you think of someone who values their masculinity, who do you perceive? Now do the same for femininity. Which model is healthier?
Men and women have, on average, physiological differences. These differences are pronounced in puberty. That’s when these frameworks matter the most; they thus must be embedded in childhood. There is no right answer, I think, but there are right questions that boys dealing with a burst of testosterone should ask themselves. That we’ve ignored or even repressed that seems to link both failures in boy and fatherhood.
It also seems to naturally extend to trans and non-binary kids, another situation we are culturally bankrupt in addressing. Boys understanding and speaking to their feminine sides is, ironically, a classically masculine strength in the way women understanding and acting on their masculine sides is, traditionally, a classical sign of motherhood and through that feminine strength. (The linking of feminine strength and motherhood is obviously dated, though as someone who lives in bear and moose country I can see why it was originally embraced.)
Sure. Enduring this kind of misogynistic classification of their womanhood when they don't have a child (regardless of the cause). The idea that someone isn't "feminine" or "strong" if they haven't pushed a child through their vagina† is complete and utter horseshit.
† Take note sometime of how much crap women who get c-sections will get from society.
That the US flag is routinely desecrated by reactionary conservatives up to and including police departments in the form of thin blue line, punisher flags, Molon labe lapels etc to explicitly advertise anti-American ideals seems at least as likely to be the cause of growing anti-flag feelings as any liberal agenda.
Masculinity can be wholesome or toxic.
Femininity can be wholesome or toxic.
Which one is discussed more, by a literal order of magnitude? [1]
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Toxic%20ma...
When it came to handling the things that go bump in the night, a social species with thumbs, a bit of fire and a few sharpened sticks went a hell of a long way.
And after bumping back for long enough, we were the only monsters left standing.
I think that one of the problems with toxic feminity is that it's a quieter and less explosive form of destructive behaviour - but it's very much a real thing.
As a weird little note regarding society's tolerance of the hatred of men, "misandristic" isn't even worth inclusion in the spell checker's dictionary.
What happened was the government has successfully co-opted the social contract between men and women so women now can reap most of its benefits while men carry most of the risks. That doesn't make things all hunky-dory for women, but it certainly doesn't do men a whole lot of good when some of their biggest assets in a relationship are stripped away and redistributed, without accommodating that in some form.
Meanwhile, society has done very little to put men in a positive light or encourage women to accept the 'new man'. If anything, it has done the opposite: women seem to respect men less than before, and men are expected to be more competitive than ever before, even on aspects which are practically immutable. Now society is slowly showing signs of how dysfunctional things become when men aren't incentivized to be men, while women aren't taught to respect the 'new man'. The men quit trying, the boys get stressed out, and the women run around asking the government to fix it somehow. Virtually no one is happy, and Socrates is rolling in his grave.
Not what I said; men are still needed - but it's been a damned long time since we spent our nights waiting around the fire in case of tiger.
I think it's the opposite. During the prehistoric times most food was actually gathered by women IIRC, and both sexes could use fire to scare away predators, so men were relevant for breeding nearly exclusively.
Today we have far more risky activities where men dominate, such as high-rise towers construction, firefighting, law enforcement, security, sailing etc etc.
The simple truth is that men handled the vast majority of situations where combat was required - we're bigger, stronger, faster, more aggressive.
Our aim is better, and (best of all) if half of us die it doesn't severely impact intergenerational population levels.
Women may have gone gathering, but men went hunting.
Fire fighting is some scary shit - but our ancestors took on short faced bears with sticks.
I think you greatly overestimate how much combat people faced during prehistoric times. Population was distributed sparsely, most food was gathered, not hunted, and was abundant, and you don't fight predators to scare them off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare#Paleolithi...
In fact, I'm damned near certain of it.
~Modern humans have been around 30 times longer than that.
I'm not fighting tigers but the women around me sure are happy when I can carry something alone they struggle to do with three of them. There's a significant difference between a direct display and a bunch of commercialized abstractions. All those abstractions make people forget the value others have. We just so happened to push a lot of those abstractions onto men and the value they tend to bring as men.
The most interesting part was not how much women failed to survive, and how successful men were (which makes sense, as men are designed for survival), but the feeling of how much easier in that world is to show the need for masculanity (which is mostly not needed anymore).
Evolution doesn't only "design" a single sex for survival. (With the possible, arguable exception of some insect species.)
Women are structured as a compromise between their own needs and the needs of their children.
If you think for an instant that men and women aren't optimised for very different scenarios, then think harder.
Seriously, you can tell just by looking at us.
Or do you think that child bearing hips and big vulnerable mammaries are useful things to have in situations that call for physical action (other than birthing and feeding infants)?
As I understand it men have greater strength because they are optimized to fight other men for reproductive opportunity. This doesn't increase their opportunities for survival since fighting other men can get you killed. It increases their opportunities to reproduce.
Our advantages in a hostile environmental come from building tools not physical strength. If physical strength was important a male human would not be 5 times weaker than a gorilla.
So no, I would not say men are "designed" to survive on an island better than women, or whatever. They are designed to fight other men in a zero sum game.
> So no, I would not say men are "designed" to survive on an island better than women, or whatever. They are designed to fight other men in a zero sum game.
False dichotomy. Also, what fraction of explorers do you think were men? Pretty much fucking all of them.
We don't get pregnant, so having children is not a physical inconvenience and (as I mentioned elsewhere) half of us can die without impacting the next generation's population.
If you think that men and women had the same evolutionary imperative to develop the skills required for navigating strange environments then you're not adequately considering the innumerable trade-offs involved.
No, they die far more often. Because they enter unknown risky situations.
Humans explore in search of new lands and resources, and in search of safe paths.
When they take the more vulnerable members of the tribe, they generally have a better idea of where they're going, what the path is, and what risks are involved.
If a path is too dangerous then they don't tend to take pregnant women and small children.
So because it is primarily adult or adolescent males that go on the more risky adventures, they're the ones that have the costly adaptations required to maximise the likelihood of survival.
Have you ever made a tool with your hands? Physical strength--especially grip strength--not just dexterity, is required for tool making. There are no vices or pliers in the Wild.
Men have a huge advantage in grip strength, and hence tool making. This study[1] suggests that elite female athletes in athletic disciplines that require grip strength only rank in the 25th percentile of grip strength when compared to men as a population.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591
I suspect any of the western desert women would merrily laugh and wiggle their little finger were they to hear you speak.
If you look at the series, they took 14 random people for each group and gave them 2 days of survival training and basic helper tools.
Just looking at how the men killed the crocodile in a team work with their bare hands first time in their life without any help from experts looked awesome.
I don't think of anything aside from obvious physiological differences
> but there are right questions that boys dealing with a burst of testosterone should ask themselves
I mean, everyone's different, different personalities, different trials and tribulations of life. I have no idea how you can generalize across all teenage boys without making a bunch of stuff up
I really struggle to understand this question. Between masculinity and femininity is there one that is supposed to be obviously healthier?
If we go by what the marketing is pushing it's a toxic tarpit on both sides (see The Rules vs The Game).
Why is romanticism the only way to "invest in bonding"?
There seems to be a large subset (maybe very large?) of the population where the only way to bond on some level is sex.
Sure, you can, and should, keep working on repairs and rebuilding, but that's additional work on top of all additional work on top of actual work of living in modern society. Not everybody, always, has energy for that, and you need 2 for that or it just doesn't work. Hence the difference of what looks nice on paper and how things should be, and how they actually are.
That ship has sailed. We live in a culture that not only has doubled down on the idea that the happiness/romance of the marriage is far more important than children, but even tells us that the marriage itself must dissolve when unhappy or this will do damage to those kids.
Imagine going to work and telling a coworker that your marriage is a disaster, but that you and your wife are considering staying together for the sake of your kids. What would your coworkers say? Do any of us know anyone that we believe might tell us "hey, that's a good idea, and I hope it works out that way for you"?
It shows us where our priorities as a society and culture lie.
Even if someone could intellectually admit that this assertion of mine was correct, it has inconvenient implications. The larger culture war around us relies on the idea that children simply aren't important to a marriage.
I also discovered that without my mom screaming at him several times a day, my dad was a much better person, and without my dad having the option of being a lazy sack of shit (to this day he has never changed a diaper), he decided to start actually trying at being a dad. I only wish they had divorced sooner.
Divorce is wonderful. I've known a lot of people who probably shouldn't have gotten married but not one single time have I known people who gotten divorced and though "gee they really should've stayed together".
People who were doing it for the sake of the children wouldn't admit it to anyone, for fear that their children might overhear whispered gossip, thus defeating the whole purpose.
In modern media, woman are nearly always portrayed positively. Woman are always the 'girlboss', who need to show they are equal or superior to men. Practically, every male space has been feminised.
Current culture doesn't really respect Men.
[1] http://jezebel.com/294383/have-you-ever-beat-up-a-boyfriend-...
Can you give some examples? I'm really struggling to understand this point.
Sure, a good relationship might not resemble the hollywood ideal very much, but "duty to the family" leads to misery for a lot of people, and kids don't grow up happy and well adjusted when mom and dad are very unhappy with their lives and each other.
I think this is important because the "absent father" is often used as an excuse, when it rather represents the last breached line in a long list of failures of society, which have ripped boys from the men who would look after them.
(I admit that there's likely some who won't like hearing this, as it cuts against the grievances of those who find pride in specific fatherhood ("I will raise MY child.") and see society's manner, or the dissolving of the nuclear family into a larger community unit, as working against that.)
Joseph Campbell emphasized the idea of the “second father.” A mentor who takes a young man further than his father can.
A father has to love you, but the second fathers love has to be earned. Think NCOs in the military, coaches, sensais in martial arts.
We aren’t just missing fathers, we’re missing second fathers.
Not many people would describe a gunny sergeant, or football coach, or the guy who runs the local Karate America as a second father.
If you include foremen, clergy, and union bosses as second fathers, a man living in 1960 could expect to spend his entire life under the tutelage of second fathers.
Traditionally masculine institutions like the military, workplace, and churches have renounced their “second family” status, and tried desperately to feminize to appeal to women.
What sorts of institutions offer “second fathers” to young men now? Predatory ones, like far-right groups. And some sports.
Edit: there are plenty of institutions that market themselves as second families - tech companies for example. But they tend to eschew masculine gender roles.
Must it be institutionalized? Can't this be encouraged without some one-sized-fits-all framework? I learned from a lot of guys in church related groups, yet with so much garbage messaging it made me hate myself. Also encountered some very good guys in school, forums, and LAN gaming, and without the religious strings attached.
Institutions encourage “second fatherhood” as a means of passing in the patterns of behavior.
That behavior might be killing opposing militaries, educating future generations, or religious worship.
So I think there’s a strong obvious link between institutions and second fathers.
I am Gen X, and I think one of the social institutions which has quietly vanished before I could quite get to it was the old Roman concept of "patronage." Without understanding I was doing it until embarrassingly late, I spent a lot of time looking for those second fathers, the mentors, the patrons. What broke it for me was someone who was clearly suited for the role, and had benefited from it himself, but was simply too self-involved to pay it forward, as it were. I realized that the Boomers as a trend just weren't thinking patronage or even the idea of planting trees they wouldn't see grown.
So, no mentors for me. Nor am I, sadly, in the position to be much of one myself. I can at last see myself doing it and cut that off at the pass.
If the "wrong" groups have something to offer in the way of second fathers, maybe their values aren't as bad as expected. Nobody wants to even consider that. If only The Bad Guys are making sense about some issues, what else might they be correct on?
Some of those “wrong groups” are just flat out scammers and charlatans though - see those “alpha male” influencers hawking their courses or whatever. They are taking advantage of a need in others to enrich themselves without really giving a damn about their charges.
I’m sure both have had some moderately useful things to say at some stage of their life for some folks, but a quick look at their Twitter profile tells you everything you really need to know now.
Like, we're talking some amount of genuine brain damage damage which he's just stuck with now.
Twitter was also just not a good place for him at all. Some people just get sucked into that sort of stuff, even though it's terrible for their public image, and even though there is so much more they could be doing. Anyone remember how people made fun of eg. Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson for being obnoxiously atheistic on Twitter? Yeah, it's a bit like that.
This is an in person relationship.
You're thinking institutions, when I mean uncles and grandparents who live down the street, or even with the family; trusted neighbors (perhaps distant relatives); teachers who can afford to live in the same neighborhood; local workers and entrepreneurs who are included in neighborhood life; and so on.
Divorce is ultimately at the root of so many social ills but it's verboten to even mention
You just did.
I find it curious, though, that a number of commenters seem to focus almost entirely on the "present" aspect and not on the crucial emotional investment aspect discussed in the article: "when fathers are present and emotionally invested in children’s lives", the title of which says "what boys really need is emotional support from their dads".
Presence alone is not necessarily helpful, and indeed can be harmful, as demonstrated by countless abusive parents. On the other hand, an emotionally invested parent can make a positive impact regardless of whether they're married.
>You just did.
And now his comment is grey.
It's not, as far as I see now.
Anyway, downvoting on HN is not the same thing as "verboten". Downvoting is a feature of HN that is supposed to put higher quality comments higher up and lower quality comments lower down. (I'm not saying it works, but that's the theory.)
Some marriages are, certainly, but all divorces are.
Divorce is frequently mentioned but as usual life is a compromise.
I was reading recently about suicide and depression numbers for women, especially, going down significantly when divorce became socially acceptable.
I disagree on that point. It takes a village to raise a child, and a large enough extended family has space for all sorts. Not everyone is called to the married life: I agree that divorce is a problem, but divorce rates would go down quite a bit if those for whom marriage is not compatible with their personality didn't get married in the first place, and there was a space for them to thrive within the family/community.
> but divorce rates would go down quite a bit if those for whom marriage is not compatible with their personality didn't get married in the first place, and there was a space for them to thrive within the family/community.
Being single is as socially acceptable as ever (in fact, it is slowly but surely becoming the default) and I see no sign of things improving.
More communal countries, both in Europe in Asia, still have some personal contact: From a pharmacist to an ice cream man, a town or a neighborhood can have community, and with that community come the children seeing those workers as people, and having a relationship with them. When most business is done on foot, people see each other down the street, or in the park, and there's a chance of community. With suburbia an cars, all social contact takes effort: Community get expensive, and few pay the price.
But those third place institutions have been gradually replaced by the internet.
Quite the contrary, it seems that those who would modify and engineer culture have been pushing on everyone the idea that men are fungible. That step-daddy, or mommy's new boyfriend, or all the men in the hippy commune are adequate substitutes... and it seems like that's just never the case (at least not often enough to count on).
It may just be down to math. All those other men who might substitute just have their own lives. Your grandpa likely has other children and other grandchildren. Their focus is diluted. Uncles might be trying to raise their own families. Step-dad just thinks your inconvenient and a competitor for the attention and resources of his own children, either from a previous marriage or after he knocks up mommy.
And if that's not bad enough, think about the circumstances we tend to see in these situations. Mommy (and it's usually her, isn't it?) just doesn't get along with the rest of her extended family. Not only is she demanding extra attention for her own offspring, she's showing them all how bad she is at judging character, at planning her life, etc. It's a high risk investment in a person who doesn't look like a good investment at all, for someone they already have negative feelings for.
There is no society or commune to take care of the immediate needs. There can be large families that offer a very good and secure support network and there are families that form clans. In that it seems to be a very neutral influence.
> I admit that there's likely some who won't like hearing this
You have to advertise this larger community unit a bit because I don't really see it aside from the latter example. The time of the utopia commune parenting with the weird third party uncle was never very popular and most importantly, not very successful.
Father that take pride in parenting will get much better results and to say that is egotism seems like a very sad and reduced perspective.
You need both. Fathers that take pride in parenting their own kids, and the random neighbor kids, and their sister's kids, and their friend's kids when they happen to be around. And other parents that support said fathering.
A totally disinterested father cannot be replaced by a broad functional community. A functional community cannot be replaced by a highly invested father. They simply fulfil similar but differing needs.
You could say the village is made up of fathers (and mothers, etc.) who take pride in parenting.
So people leave and only the closest family members and friends remain in contact. Even with Facebook. I believe this is a main driver for why you generally don't see large families in the western sphere anymore.
Was your dad mostly absent, over-working, or what? Or emotionally invisible?
In the nearly 40 years since re-establishing contact with my bio dad, he hasn't exactly proven himself as a role model. He falls into the "woe is me" category of low income people. He always finds excuses.
Real Question: If your step-father was an "alcoholic racist fuck", why did your mum marry him and stay with him? Please, please, don't read this as an attack on your mum! People enter and stay in relationships for a long list of reasons.
I was so lucky to have great parents, but my dad was mostly commuting during 8-18. I know he cared about me deeply, but his job and commute made it very difficult to spend a lot of time with me.
I didn’t quite believe it at first. Over time it has become abundantly clear. Boys without dads, not even someone to step in to support them, are often swimming upstream at best.
And its not just physically absent fathers, those working long hours constantly (under false premise of 'providing for my family'), or for some other messed up reasons are simply not there often enough, physically or emotionally, often cause all this.
Its a vicious circle too, people take this baggage with them into their own relationships which suffer then, and cycle repeats. Lack of trust, running away from solvable issues, sleeping around etc, I've seen it all and some more. Some of my relationships failed exactly due to women on the other side not being able to deal with exactly this baggage, to the point I gave up on trying to fix other people's lives, because you basically can't anyway.
Where would we even start? The only circumstances where we could hope to do anything at all are those where it's either not a problem, or is still only a minor one... if daddy's doing 20 for murder or dealing at the kilo level, are we supposed to let him out so he can sing lullabies?
There exists an entire class of problems that people only seem to comprehend the causes of once those same problems have escalated far beyond the capacity for comprehension to allow us to fix them. Perhaps the universe hates us. Or maybe we just deserve it.
Another set of approaches would be to fund pro-natal/pro-family initiatives such as child income tax credits, to make it easier for fathers to participate in family life; at the margin economic instability drives families apart among other things. (More paternity leave (and better maternity leave while we’re at it) would help a lot here too).
I think you can look to other countries for examples here, Scandinavian countries for example have much better pro-family programs we could copy if we were really serious about this.
Society itself doesn’t prioritize upbringings of children
Today, most people work long hours away from their family (both men and women) not to buy another ski trip but just to keep a roof over their heads and feed their kids. How can all of us find our way back to family business?
Of the divorced couples I know with children, the mothers were awarded custody in every single case, often over the strenuous objections of the fathers and other family members like grandparents (and in one case, even in the face of documented abuse by the mother).
I feel like studies on the effect of children who grow up with a missing parent need to somehow control for couples who split because of mental health issues. Otherwise, it's studying not the effect of the absent parent, but the effect of the behaviors of the parent who was granted custody, and some of those behaviors may strongly correlate with not being able to maintain a marriage or other partnership.
I’m not finding great primary sources, but here’s some articles on it https://legaljobs.io/blog/child-custody-statistics/ https://www.liveabout.com/child-custody-there-is-no-gender-b...
I think people also maybe aren't primed to think of this in terms of "What percentage of people who contest custody receive custody, by gender?" They're just thinking to themselves "Of the couples I know who are divorced, in what percentage does the woman have custody?", and that is going to be very large because a very small percentage of men contest custody. Anecdotally, almost every divorced couple I know has had child custody with the woman (I am in Australia, for the record). The much smaller subset of "divorced couples where I know the father contested custody" are two father's with custody and one mother. Obviously, those are also the only divorced couples I know where the man has custody - no court is going to give custody for a child to someone who doesn't want it, ideally. I also know a lesbian couple who've gone through a custody dispute but I don't believe that really has any impact here.
Couldn't that be confirmation bias - if you don't think you are going to win, and it will cost lots of money - why fight?
Which is why when fathers fight for custody they may win more - because they have a stronger case.
Confirmation bias is defined as "the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories."
What you're describing is not confirmation bias, because there is no "new evidence" which one could interpret as confirmation of their existing beliefs or theories. If the father doesn't even try to obtain custody then they haven't discovered anything new that would reinforce their existing beliefs.
Are you doing something other than assuming that 'caring' is the primary factor?
Last time I looked at data about this, it appeared that even a poor father who was present was better than no having a father in the home. If I remember right it was measuring the likeliness of a teenager to end up in prison. If there was a segment of fathers that were worse than not having a father, I don't think it shows up in any study I've seen.
Gilder's Wealth and Poverty book cites a lot of studies and examples showing how society has changed in ways making it harder for dads to stick around with everything from how drug policies are enforced to the way that welfare resources are allocated.
I think their point is that those bad fathers don't show up, because they don't care about their children.
Even if this would be the case, we should allow those fathers to spend more time with their kids. For example, it is very difficult for a man to find a part-time job. Most companies take "I also want to spend some time with my kids" as "I don't really care about the work I do". You can care about the work without wanting to devote your entire life to it.
You're looking at the drug war, high school graduation rates, ability to find a job, attached to teenage pregnancy, lack of commute options, and below living wage - likely connected to public health issues including water treatment, sewage, inneficient or unsafe homes (hook worms, sceptic, HVAC)
So instead of a 1 time $10k (which is delusional) think marijuana being legal, healthcare and childcare being affordable, public transport - or at least not a food desert in a walkable community, and $15+/hr 30+ hour weeks at a single employer.
But the good of the children is part of why past societies have incentivized keeping parents together to care for their children and maybe we've gone a bit too far in the other direction, away from a happier medium.
Stigmatizing divorce does absolutely nothing to make fathers emotionally invested in their kids. If anything, it can make them resentful of their kids.
The article was about how boys need emotional support from their father. A father who is present and married but still demands that his son "man up" and bottle up every problem is of no help.
Why would you be totally absent from most of their lives?
A parent doesn't need to be around all the time. In fact, they shouldn't be around all the time, otherwise they're "helicoptering".
Interestingly, only a few years ago, Bill Cosby himself made an impassioned plea to address these issues. He saw it a lot.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Cosby_sexual_assault_case...
If anything, it makes it even more poignant. Haven't you ever seen a man in prison, pleading with his son not to turn out like him? Does the father's murder conviction undermine his admonition against violence?
Did bill cosby ever take responsibility for being one of the most prolific serial rapists in history?
>>Haven't you ever seen a man in prison, pleading with his son not to turn out like him? Does the father's murder conviction undermine his admonition against violence?
Except, as others would argue, a more similar analogy would be a man in prison continually protesting his innocence. In that situation, I'm not sure that the man would be telling his son to do anything differently without an admission of guilt, except perhaps to be very cautious in their dealings with women. The point remains that the drama and conviction(s) surrounding Bill Cosby's numerous sexual assaults caused him to be an ineffective messenger even if the underlying message remains sound.
You literally cited his personal experience in your original comment, and thought it relevant enough to take up one of the two sentences in it, so I don't see a problem with the response.
The man is a self confessed serial rapist. Maybe look to almost anyone else's opinion on the importance of father figures.
However, the problem about Cosby, and the general "men need to step up" crowd is that frame the issue of absent father as a moral and character issues. Never going deeper to understand if there were external constraints pushing those men out.
We shouldn't completly alleviate those absent father from any responsibilities for their choice, but we should also look at the cause and condition making those choices so prevalent.
I'm much more involved in my children's day-to-day lives than my father was in mine.
But I'm a software engineer who has worked from home full-time for the last 7+ years. Yes I lock my office door for several hours a day, but I'll pop out every now and again and say hello, it is easy for me to do school drop-offs/pick-ups sometimes, or take them to appointments. My commute is zero, so as soon as I'm done for the day, I'm there for them.
My father spent most of his career as a manager/executive in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. You can't manage a manufacturing line without physically being there to respond when things go wrong. Before that, he also worked as a manager of analytical chemistry laboratories, and you can't really do that remotely either. Even when he got senior enough that he didn't physically have to be there all the time, he told me that if all the people under him had to be there physically, from a workplace politics viewpoint, he had too as well. At one manufacturing plant he was managing a few years ago, the IT staff were demanding to work from home, but he was pushing back against their demand, because he was worried about how it would look to the manufacturing staff for whom that couldn't be an option.