Fatherhood

The father factor: What happens when dad is nowhere to be found?

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This is an excerpt from the first article in a four-part series, written in partnership with TheAtlantic.com, examining the role of fathers in American families.

The dad factor

“I think there’s consensus that cultural and family factors are causing children’s family lives to be more unstable than in the past,” said Andrew J. Cherlin, author of “The Marriage-Go-Round” and director of the Hopkins Population Center at Johns Hopkins University. Experts debate whether recent cultural shifts or economic changes most undermine family stability, but, said Cherlin, “most who I respect believe both are at play.”

Most children weather family turmoil and wind up OK, said Cherlin, who coined the term “family churn” to describe what happens to families as couples split, often moving dad out of the home and a new man in. A study in the Journal of Marriage and Family said children in such homes experience an average of more than 5.25 partnership transitions. That’s tough for kids who are used to having their own fathers within reach.

“Dad also helps with impulse control and memory and enhances a child’s ability to respond effectively to new or ambiguous situations, for boys and girls,” said Warren Farrell, author of “Father and Child Reunion.” Children who are close to their fathers tend to achieve more academically, while kids with absent fathers are more likely to drop out. Fathers are the biggest factor in preventing drug use, Farrell said.

Burgos said one of his biggest challenges growing up without a father figure has been impulse control and anger management. He had no guide to teach him effective ways to handle frustrations — and he’s had a lot of them in his young life.

The time a dad spends with his children is a particularly strong predictor of how empathetic a child will become, according to a commission of experts who wrote a proposal asking President Obama to create a White House Council on Boys and Men. The group, which Farrell helped assemble, compiled research showing infants with dads living at home were months ahead in personal and social development. Children who lack contact with fathers are more likely to be treated for emotional or behavioral problems. Girls with absent or indifferent fathers are more prone to hyperactivity. If dad is around, girls are less likely to become pregnant as teens.

As early as 1993, studies showed that dads also influenced whether their sons became teenage fathers. A Temple University study found no boys born to teen mothers became teen fathers if they had close relationships with their biological fathers, compared to 15 percent of those who didn’t have that closeness.

“None of this implies men are better as dads than women are as moms,” Farrell and the commission emphasized. Children need both.

But dad’s place is not always secure. The commission report said, “The U.S. has done a better job of integrating women into the workplace than in integrating men into the family — especially into the lives of children in the non-intact family. We have valued men as wallets more than as dads.” The result is “moms feeling deprived of resources and dads feeling deprived of purpose and children feeling deprived of the full range of parenting input.”

Read the rest here: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865597043/The-father-factor-What-happens-when-dad-is-nowhere-to-be-found.html?pg=all

 

Fatherhood

Why the number of single dads is on the rise

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This is an excerpt from the second article in a four-part series, written in partnership with TheAtlantic.com, examining the role of fathers in American families.

There are a few reasons why the state push for joint parenting is resulting in more single dads.

1. It empowers fathers to ask for more, and believe they deserve it.William Fabricius, Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University and chair ofArizona’s committee on child custody statutes, says that most men want to share parenting time equally, but assume courts have a strong maternal bias.

“Dads think that the courts will favor mom, and so they will settle for less parenting time,” Fabricius said. “They see other dads in the neighborhood who spend time with their kids every other weekend, and assume that’s the way it is. They don’t ask for more parenting time because they don’t think it’s the norm.”

Since only 5 percent of child custody cases ever make it to trial, these perceptions of the norm are important. If men realize that courts are granting more parenting time to fathers than they have in the past, fathers will be more likely to ask for more time with their child, and fight to get it. Men used to assume that there was no way they’d get custody of their kids, and that maybe it was for the best.

“When most of my friends started having kids 10 years ago, they all used to say, ‘I don’t know how to take care of a kid,’ and ‘that’s not what men are supposed to do,’” said Malliet.

But now attitudes are changing. More fathers are starting to believe that they have something important to contribute to their children’s lives. There might be a steep learning curve to single parenting, but men are much more likely to push through the three-in-the-morning screaming fits if other people — particularly the courts — think they can handle it.

2. Sharing is complicated. Joint physical custody can be a headache for two people who just don’t want much to do with each other anymore. It involves seeing your ex on a regular basis and living nearby so that your child can stay in one school.

“If you ask a woman what kind of custody deal she wants, she’d probably say that her first preference is for her to get sole custody, her second preference is for the father to get sole custody, and her third preference is joint custody,” said Margaret Brinig, the Fritz Duda Family Chair in Law at the University of Notre Dame and co-author of the Oregon study. “Most people don’t want to share.”

On top of their own personal issues with shared parenting, divorced couples might also worry about how it will affect their children. They don’t want their kids to feel confused or disoriented when they pack up and move to a different house every week.

These hesitations create an interesting paradox: legislation that supports joint physical custody is actually promoting single fatherhood. If fathers are empowered to ask for more parenting time than they’ve had in the past, mothers may be more likely to give up their part of the custody.

With the courts putting more faith in single fathers, Malliet thinks the next big hurdle will be those fathers having faith in themselves. Single dads are more easily discouraged than single moms, he says, because men suffer from a lack of parental training. While women often grow up tucking their dolls into bed at night, young men are rarely conditioned to take care of someone else. This lack of experience can make single dads begin to doubt whether they are really cut out for this, after all.

Read the rest here: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865597044/Father-figures-the-rising-number-of-dads-who-do-it-all.html

Society

Ban Bossy: Does it have the facts straight?

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Ban Bossy’s star-studded brigade to empower girls to lead has garnered lots of media attention. But does their leader, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, have all the facts? The Factual Feminist takes a closer look the data, and finds what we should really be banning is poor research.

Society

The Everyday Sexism campaign risks making all sexual advances ‘misogynist’

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The campaign against everyday sexism has shown that a deeply unpleasant vein of misogyny still runs through our society. But in highlighting the antisocial, misguided behaviour of some unreconstructed individuals, it is important to be aware that such behaviour is not representative of most men’s attitudes. More worryingly, from the perspective of a progressive sexual politics there is a danger that the campaign is promulgating a view that any direct sexual advance is tantamount to harassment. If directly propositioning somebody for sex is automatically condemned as misogynist, as the campaign appears to assert, then the movement risks being highly counterproductive to the feminist cause and playing into the hands of the sexually repressive, patriarchal ideology that feminism strives to counter.

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The liberal left should be envisaging a society where adults of both genders are comfortable both making and receiving straightforward sexual propositions. Indeed, surely the feminist movement should be encouraging women to practice such directness of approach, since leaving the initiation of any kind of romantic encounter to men means that a keystone of the patriarchy remains unmoved.

The behavioural codes of contemporary society already make it extremely difficult for both men and women to approach strangers with a view towards making sexual advances. This should be a source of regret to us all. There is no shame in feeling and expressing sexual attraction, and we should be promoting conditions that give rise to as much mutual sexual pleasure as possible. After all, it’s one of the greatest pleasures life offers. And it’s free! Of course, this very freedom exemplifies why unencumbered sexual pleasure presents such a problem for those who would support the sexually repressive ideologies that still prevail today.

We can all agree that aggressive, lewd behaviour is deplorable. But what lies behind some of the crude and boorish conduct catalogued by everyday sexism is repressed sexuality. It is only by becoming more sexually liberated that those energies might come to be expressed in a respectful way. To promote the outright condemnation of any and all direct sexual propositions would be a disastrously regressive step for the feminist movement. It is a clear indication of how much ground the left has ceded in the recent decades that any of this needs restating at all. Whatever happened to the sexual revolution?

Read more HERE