FATHERHOOD AND THE EVERYDAY LIVES OF MODERN MEN: UNITY OR CONFLICT?
by Maksim Kostenko
The materials for this presentation were gathered in the course of research conducted for a project entitled “A Study of Men and the Practical Organization of Crisis Centers for Men in Provincial Areas of Modern Russia,” which received financial support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The first problem is that the adult male today plays his part primarily in the professional world, at work, and also in providing for his family. Since the bearing and nursing of children creates the pre-eminent link—the one between mother and child—the man, lacking those biological functions, has to specialize elsewhere, on a more experimental plane.
Yet the man’s professional role is also being eroded. Losing a job or being forced to change jobs (which sometimes requires a scale-back of ambitions) is becoming a permanent part of the life experience of a steadily increasing number of men, while simultaneously the competition between men and women over jobs is heating up. (This situation first emerged in the mid-twentieth century, and caught men somewhat by surprise at that time.) And the competition for jobs has “infiltrated” the family. Families in which both spouses work (the “two-career” family) represent a fundamentally new departure, in which the balance of familial power has shifted, as have the areas of family conflict.
Since Russian society is hanging on to certain obsolete cultural norms and notions about the role and place of the sexes, men’s human rights in the free choice of career, line of work, personal safety, and full self-realization in the family and in parent-child relationships are being violated.
The man feels that he is a father only when he can bring in money, because that is the main thing expected of him, with his participation in childcare and his children’s upbringing being increasingly pushed to the sidelines. A man in financial difficulties often does not know what to do with himself in the home, since, in the consumer society that is now emerging, men are more and more the target of a consumerist attitude that makes them the source of, and conduit for, consumer benefits.
The formula of man-as-breadwinner has been taken to a logical absurdity. The urge to retain their position as chief providers, come what may, places men under extraordinarily fierce psychological and economic pressure, and the loss of that position not infrequently leads to alcoholism, life-threatening professional and even criminal behaviors, and suicide.
Contemporary market relations are characterized by a total fixation upon material security and by a minimum amount of time remaining for fathers to spend on family relationships. There is, as a rule, simply no time for nurturing activities. The postulate that the man’s main responsibility in the family is to bring home plenty of money, with great regularity, impacts negatively upon his ability to discharge his parental functions, because in order to meet those expectations, the man has to devote almost all of his time to work. As the father’s income rises, his contribution to upbringing usually falls.
But the children, unfortunately, may not understand that their father leaves at dawn and returns at dusk because he loves them so much and wants them to have a good standard of living. Social psychologists frequently encounter people who are painfully certain that they were deprived of paternal love. And many men regret having been absent when their children were small and are devoting enormous efforts to constructing relationships with their now-grown offspring.
Several studies have, however, demonstrated that the father’s role in the upbringing of his children is of no small importance. The science presently identifies three basic viewpoints on the problem of father-child relationships. The first holds that the father is first and foremost a source of punishment and discipline. The child’s dread of his powerful father eventually causes him to adopt the moral and social norms that make him “a person among people.” Sociologists and psychologists feel that the fear of a father’s punishment forces the child to imitate that father, in order to convince himself that he is just as strong. And that imitation is responsible for the transfer of societal norms and values from generation to generation.
The second viewpoint is that the child’s (most often the male child ’s) imitation of the father is a basic phenomenon that requires no further explanation. The son imitates his father because that is a convenient way of learning gender-appropriate behaviors, just as a daughter imitates her mother. For a daughter, moreover, the father is the vehicle of male qualities upon which she will focus later in life. It is therefore evident that if a child is to develop normally, both the father and the mother need to be present.
The third viewpoint holds that the father’s place is not within the family but, as it were, on the boundary between family and society. For the child, the father is an intermediary between the family and the world. He represents society in the family and the family in society, and his duty is to lead the child from the small world inside into the big world outside. The father is crucially significant to the child’s development from birth: he is the first external object perceived by the infant and an early model of identification. Fathers facilitate the process of mother-child separation, thereby accelerating socialization. But as fatherhood progresses, the father is also susceptible to sociopsychological crisis.
A huge number of problems arise if the parents, primarily the father, disregard the conduct of their children or do not pay enough attention to their upbringing. Fathers basically spend all their time at work and come home tired and with only one goal in mind—to rest and recoup the energy expended during the day, even though, as study data have shown, many men would gladly work fewer hours but are prevented from doing so by economic considerations. In the mid-seventies, American children averaged a mere 12 minutes or so a day with their fathers.
Several Russian studies have demonstrated that only about 5% of the men surveyed are involved in their children’s upbringing and discuss problems and conflicts with their wives. This points to alienation between men and their families.
Modern fathers are one and a half times less likely than mothers to monitor their children’s studies and four times less likely to discuss school and friendships with them, and also spend less time talking about plans for the future, the choice of profession, etc. Both boys and girls are more open with their mothers, who are thus more apt to become their children’s role models. Research performed in the early 1990s in Russia and some European countries has shown that Russia has the highest percentage (11%) of family men who are unambiguously focused upon their work, compared with 5% in Germany, 4% in Poland, and 2% in Sweden.
Russian men twice as frequently describe themselves as unhappy with their relationships with their children and wives, yet are four times more likely to agree that “the father’s involvement in childcare causes a lot of problems” and to describe the period when the child was young and the wife was on maternity leave as a particularly trying time fraught with frequent conflict.
For all that, though, more recent studies have established the existence in Russian and Western society of two mutually contradictory directions for the male personality to take. On the one hand, there is a strong vested interest in career and in the status of a highly qualified expert, which tends to reduce a contribution to their children ’s upbringing that was already not great. And, on the other, there is a readiness to abandon career and further education, temporarily or altogether, in the children’s interests.
The second problem involves gender roles. An important juncture in a man’s life is his socialization into the role of father. Men transition from the state of “not-father” to that of “father” with no preparation—unlike women, who have nine months to ready themselves for motherhood (an arrangement made by Nature). Psychological maturity, which is not always concomitant with being of marriageable age, plays a major role. The primary and most important quality of a good father, according to Dr. Allan Fromme, is to be a fine male role model, and a man acquires that quality long before he becomes a good father. Fatherhood is a stage in a man’s life, one of the times when he recognizes how significant and important he is and how largely responsible for what happens in his life and now also in the life of his child.
Being a father also means having the desire and ability to interact with the child. Unfortunately, there is no magical way of conjuring up success in that; the nature of the father-child interaction normally reflects the basic traits of the parent’s personality. Fathers are not all the same, that we know. But the fact is that the traditional male role impacts negatively upon fatherhood and that androgynous fathers are both more active and more consistent in their dealings with their children.
A man knows that his paternal outcomes are in no way contingent upon his emotional engagement and his personal qualities, and that the child is, first and foremost, the woman’s problem. In that sense, the anti-feminine norm, like the norm of success, prevents him from achieving full self-realization as a father. While tenderness, engagement, constant emotional support, and the frequent need to hug the child and tell him that he is loved are a very important part of a person’s parental functioning, many men have a complex take on those and similar actions, since they associate them with the feminine and their socialization has taught them to avoid any displays of femininity. As a result, many people grow up not knowing whether their fathers really loved them or not.
The acquisition and retention of the status of husband and father has evidently become a serious societal problem, since life outside of the family also connotes life outside of parenthood. That is why it is important to remember that being a wage-earner is just one of a man’s functions and does not constitute his entire essence as a person, and that fatherhood is an equally important function. But international and domestic law, which is so protective of motherhood, does nothing to motivate fatherhood, thus discriminating not only against women but against men too.
The assignment of women to the private sphere and of men to the public sphere tends to alienate men from the family, the most vivid practical example of that being what happens to the children after a divorce (when the father’s parental rights are curtailed). Additionally, family law says nothing about a man’s long-term responsibilities, in terms of rights and duties, when he becomes a father.
It is to be hoped that the dawn of the twenty-first century will mark the beginning of a change in the role of the father in Russia, steering him toward greater involvement in the affairs of his family.
We are witnessing an evolution toward a new style of fathering, in which young fathers are as committed to child-rearing as their wives, in a fundamental contrast with their own grandfathers.
Modern fathers are far more plugged in to their children’s upbringing, spend more time with them, and are taking on some of the maternal responsibilities. Men are no longer afraid to be seen as thoughtful and affectionate caregivers, instead of just breadwinners. Many view the time they spend interacting with their child as a respite from numerous complex problems, including marital friction. Young men have begun, far more than their fathers did, to associate their self-realization with family life and less with raising their profile at work. It can even be said that they no longer want a family just to reinforce their societal status but actually want to be part of that family.
Fatherhood as a societal institution has undergone profound changes in recent decades. One quite frequently hears that men are needed only for conception (and, with the use of modern reproductive technologies, not even then), and there are, of course, women capable of giving their child a comfortable lifestyle with no help or material support from a man. But no material well-being can offset the psychological problems caused by the absence of a father. The father has his own specific role in the family, which is to be a man, a husband, a male parent, and that entails accepting responsibility for showing the child how to approach life as a man, how to emulate him in feeling and deed.