Fatherneed

"The title often raises an eyebrow. What do you mean? Do children really need fathering? The answer is yes. By the age of six weeks, infants already respond differently to their fathers than they do to their mothers. There’s a predisposition to engage differently with men. Whether you’re Darwinian or Lamarckian, you have to ask the question: What’s that information doing in the child if it doesn’t matter? Why has it been preserved over 400,000 years? Then you watch what happens to children who don’t have fathers or fathering and you see the hunger that they feel. James Herzog, an analyst in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote a wonderful book called Father Hunger . Jim articulated, I think beautifully, the inherent hunger that children have for the fathering experience. If children don’t have a biological father available, they look for fathering from the men in their lives, and often make a very strong bid towards someone that the mother will allow in their lives to get some fathering – that roughhousing and exposure to real world frustrations that they seem to be able to use in their lives. “It is a pretty well-accepted fact that we have not supported paternal engagement to the extent that would be helpful to our children. We’re getting better at it now” Fatherneed was about waking up to that need in children and in families. It was about following up with families where the father was the primary caregiver over the first critical years, families I wrote about in The Nurturing Father . What happened to those children? What happened to those marriages? The fact that those children are doing so well and that there have been relatively few divorces raises interesting questions. I have no question in my mind that the so-called “fathering revolution” is a secondary phenomenon to the feminist revolution of the 1970s. Men have had to adapt to change in the workplace and at home. Many of them are awakening to the idea that they would like to father much more actively than they were fathered. They would like to do it more consciously and with more support. It turns out that most women think that’s a pretty neat thing. I’m interested in where this next generation is going to go. Not as much as you might think. The nature of the relationship and the sensitivity the father has towards the child matters a lot more than whether the child is of the same or a different gender. I suffer from knowing too much about states of mind to treat it as a simple construct. But fathers who, for example, are suffering from postpartum depression – and they do to a much larger extent than most people are aware – feel useless and have a hard time engaging with the child or responding to the child’s bids for nurturing. Fathers’ rates of postpartum depression are about half of what women’s are, which is more than what most people would guess. Women have rates of postpartum depression of around 8% in most international studies, and it turns out that men have rates of about 4%. Any risk factor that the father carries – psychological risks such as substance abuse or mood disorders – are also going to affect the job he is able to do."