Fatherhood

8 Reasons Why Fathers Matter

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A few years ago, I asked one of my good friends an interesting question. I was still reeling from my experience in family court and wondered why anyone would think that I wasn’t essential for the proper rearing of my two children. The assumption seemed to be that after a divorce, the mother gets the children, pays child support, ‘visits’ his kids every other weekend and everything was just fine.

Well, it wasn’t just fine with me and I wasn’t going to allow that to happen to me. I did what I had to do and I am a prime example of what ALL fathers can do when confronted with unilateral divorce. I knew how much my mother and father meant to me and I was not going to allow any court system, under any circumstances to separate me from my kids. It just wasn’t going to happen.

I asked myself, and then most of my friends, what do fathers bring to the table that mothers generally don’t? What is it about fathers that makes us different that mothers? It appears as if many people just don’t know the answer to questions like this.

After five years of thinking this through and doing some research, I uncovered so much information that I have decided to spend the rest of my life dismantling the misconceptions and myths about men, fathers and masculinity that have been infiltrating our culture.

Here are just a few reasons today’s fathers tend to make distinctive contributions to their children’s lives:

1) Fathers play differently:

Psychologist John Snarey wrote in his book, How Fathers Care for the Next Generation: “children who roughhouse with their fathers… quickly learn that biting, kicking, and other forms of physical violence are not acceptable.” One of the best ways for fathers to bond with their children is through rough and tumble play. Studies have shown that there are definite differences in the ways father and mothers play with their children. Fathers generally use a more physical style of play that benefits children in a variety of ways, including enhanced cognitive ability.

2) Fathers provide emotional stability:

When fathers are involved, children develop a sense of emotional stability. A strong trusting relationship is developed over the years and children genrally don’t fear abandonment. Fathers that listen and support their children when they experience joy, sadness, fear and frustration raise children who have higher self-esteem than children whose fathers are less involved. 

3) Fathers encourage risk taking:

Children need a balance of protection and reasonable risk taking. Fathers often encouraged to take risks. Go to any playground and observe the difference in what mothers do and what fathers do. Who is encouraging kids to swing or climb just a little higher, ride their bike just a little faster, throw just a little harder,or get up immediately after falling to the ground? Who is encouraging kids to be careful? I see it every single day. Mothers tend to protect and dads encourage kids to push the limits.

4) Fathers promote a healthy gender identity:

Lets just face a glaring fact – men and women are different. Fathers can help their children, especially boys, develop a healthy sense of what it means to be male. We eat differently. We dress differently. We deal with life’s challenges differently than women. Boys and girls benefit from having healthy role models of both sexes. Several studies have shown that mothers and fathers socialize their children in different ways and girls and boys who grow up with a father in the home are more familiar and secure with the world of men.

5) Fathers communicate differently:

Mothers tend to find themselves generally in a more nurturing role. Father’s talk tends to be more brief, direct and to the point. Fathers also make greater use of subtle body language. Mothers tend to be more descriptive, personal and verbally encouraging. Children who don’t experience both styles of conversation as they grow may be at a disadvantage as they grow older because they will not have experienced each style out in the world as a child.

6) Fathers discipline differently:

Educational psychologist Carol Gilligan tells us that fathers stress justice, fairness and duty (based on rules), while mothers stress sympathy, care and help (based on relationships). Fathers tend to observe and enforce rules systematically and sternly, teaching children the consequences of right and wrong. Mothers tend toward grace and sympathy, providing a sense of hopefulness. Active fathers play an important role in teaching their children proper behavior by setting and enforcing healthy limits. this creates a healthy and proper balance with the discipline style of the mother.

7) Provides your child with greater financial resources.

Families with an active father in the home are better off financially. Two incomes are always better than one. Children raised with fathers are more likely to have direct access to resources that support healthy development, such as food, clothing, shelter and quality medical care. The unfortunate reality is that income in homes with single mothers is, on average, less than half of that of married couples with children. Father-absent children are more likely to live below the poverty line than children in homes with both parents.

8) Physical protection

Fathers provide a visible source of protection and strength.Fathers protect against harm. Children will learn to trust the safety of a father’s presence.

 

As noted sociologist David Popenoe explains,

Fathers are far more than just ‘second adults’ in the home. Involved fathers – especially biological fathers – bring positive benefits to their children that no other person is as likely to bring.8

The Review of General Psychology wrote:

Many studies conclude that children with highly involved fathers, in relation to children with less involved fathers, tend to be more cognitively and socially competent, less inclined toward gender stereotyping, more empathetic, and psychologically better adjusted

Fathers are essential to the lives of children. It is baffling why people still feel that fathers are not necessary.

Uncategorized

Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues

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I’m writing in Camille Paglia for president in 2016 whether she runs or not.

An Excerpt from this article: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303997604579240022857012920

The cultural critic on why ignoring the biological differences between men and women risks undermining Western civilization.

In her view, these ideological excesses bear much of the blame for the current cultural decline. She calls out activists like Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi for pushing a version of feminism that says gender is nothing more than a social construct, and groups like the National Organization for Women for making abortion the singular women’s issue.

By denying the role of nature in women’s lives, she argues, leading feminists created a “denatured, antiseptic” movement that “protected their bourgeois lifestyle” and falsely promised that women could “have it all.” And by impugning women who chose to forgo careers to stay at home with children, feminists turned off many who might have happily joined their ranks.

But Ms. Paglia’s criticism shouldn’t be mistaken for nostalgia for the socially prescribed roles for men and women before the 1960s. Quite the contrary. “I personally have disobeyed every single item of the gender code,” says Ms. Paglia. But men, and especially women, need to be honest about the role biology plays and clear-eyed about the choices they are making.

Sex education, she says, simply focuses on mechanics without conveying the real “facts of life,” especially for girls: “I want every 14-year-old girl . . . to be told: You better start thinking what do you want in life. If you just want a career and no children you don’t have much to worry about. If, however, you are thinking you’d like to have children some day you should start thinking about when do you want to have them. Early or late? To have them early means you are going to make a career sacrifice, but you’re going to have more energy and less risks. Both the pros and the cons should be presented.”

For all of Ms. Paglia’s barbs about the women’s movement, it seems clear that feminism—at least of the equal-opportunity variety—has triumphed in its basic goals. There is surely a lack of women in the C-Suite and Congress, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a man who would admit that he believes women are less capable. To save feminism as a political movement from irrelevance, Ms. Paglia says, the women’s movement should return to its roots. That means abandoning the “nanny state” mentality that led to politically correct speech codes and college disciplinary committees that have come to replace courts. The movement can win converts, she says, but it needs to become a big tent, one “open to stay-at-home moms” and “not just the career woman.”

Read more HERE

Society

Male and Female Brains Really Are Built Differently

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Seriously, do people really think our brains are the same? Wow. Stephen Pinker tells it like it is:

From The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker:

“Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature. The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety. The second is that humans possess a single social motive—power—and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups—in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender.

“In embracing these doctrines, the genderists are handcuffing feminism to railroad tracks on which a train is bearing down.

Neuroscience, genetics, psychology, and ethnography are documenting sex differences that almost certainly originate in human biology. And evolutionary psychology is documenting a web of motives other than group-against-group dominance (such as love, sex, family, and beauty) that entangle us in many conflicts and confluences of interest with members of the same sex and of the opposite sex.”

“Gender feminists want either to derail the train or to have other women join them in martyrdom, but the other women are not cooperating. Despite their visibility, gender feminists do not speak for all feminists, let alone for all women”

 

Are these people serious?

An excerpt from this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/male-and-female-brains-really-are-built-differently/281962/

Ready your knowing smirk, because here comes a scientific gem that’s sure to enliven even the dullest of holiday parties.

By analyzing the MRIs of 949 people aged 8 to 22, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania found that male brains have more connections within each hemisphere, while female brains are more interconnected between hemispheres.

Yes, take that, Mike from IT! It, like, so explains why you just dropped the eggnog while attempting to make flirty conversation with Janet from Accounting.

Just kidding; we still have no idea why men or women do anything in particular. But the study, released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is interesting because it is one of the first to discover differences in the brain’s structural connectivity in a large sample size of people from a variety of age groups.

Male (upper) and female (lower) brain connections (PNAS)

By analyzing the subjects’ MRIs using diffusion imaging, the scientists explored the brains’ fiber pathways, the bundles of axons that act as highways routing information from one part of the mind to the other. After grouping the image by sex and inspecting the differences between the two aggregate “male” and “female” pictures, the researchers found that in men, fiber pathways run back and forth within each hemisphere, while in women they tend to zig-zag between the left, or “logical,” and right, or “creative,” sides of the brain.

Because female brains seem to have a stronger connections between their logical and intuitive parts, “when women are asked to do particularly hard tasks, they might engage very different parts of the brain,” said Ragini Verma, an associate professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the report. “Men might over-engage just one part of the brain.”

This could mean, for example, that men tend to see issues and resolve them directly, due to the strong connections between the “perception” and “action” areas of their brains, while women might be more inclined to combine logic and intuition when solving a problem.

Their less-interconnected hemispheres might prompt men, for example, to be, “going along, executing things very skillfully and maybe not taking into account that someone didn’t [do something] because they were having a bad day,” Verma explained. Meanwhile, “gut feelings, trying to join the dots together … women are known to be very strong in that.”

The differences were less evident in young children, but they became prominent in the scans of the adolescents.

Child (B), adolescent (C), and adult (D) brains (PNAS)

Scientists have long known that male and female brains are distinct, but the degree of these differences, and whether they impact behavior, is still somewhat of a mystery. The field has repeatedly unearthed seemingly solid clues that turned out to be red herrings. In August, for example, a study in the journal PLoS Onechallenged the long-held idea that male and female brains exhibit differences in “lateralization,” or strengths in one half of the brain or another. And past books on the “male” and “female” styles of thinking have been criticized for only including studies that reinforce well-known gender stereotypes.

At the same time, there’s plenty of evidence that male brains are from Mars and female brains are, well, from a different neighborhood on Mars. Researchers already know, for example, that men’s brains are slightly bigger than women’s (because men’s bodies also tend to be bigger). Male and female rats navigate space differently. Women taking birth control pills, which alter estrogen and progesterone levels, have been shown to remember emotionally charged events more like men do in small studies. Migraines not only strike women more frequently, but they impact different parts of their brains, too.

A study published last month in the journal Nature Communications found that genes are expressed differently in men and women throughout the brain. One reason autism rates are higher among males, the researchers suggest, could be because a form of the gene NRXN3 is produced at higher levels in male brains.

And past research has shown that, across cultures, women’s brains are more functionally interconnected when at rest than men’s are, on average. This and similar findings have been used to support the idea that women are “better at multitasking.” And indeed, a study released late last month by researchers at the University of Glasgow in Scotland found that women do have an edge when it comes to switching between tasks rapidly, ostensibly because, back in the cave, we had to keep an eye on the kids while we … did whatever else it is that cave housewives did.

Read more HERE

Relationships, Society

Do women really make men better or do men make WOMEN better?

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Interesting:

This idea that a womanly presence can soften the menfolk has a long history in literature and myth – remember Pocahontas interceding before her father for John Smith’s life? But it is strange – and not necessarily positive – to see it borne out by science.

But what about the other piece of the puzzle? Amid all this careful detailing of how exactly women influence and modify men, what’s the word on how men amend women?

I went around searching for studies, but all I uncovered were more pieces like the Atlantic’s. Did you know that, when women are around, men find it easier to run; they eat more calories; they talk more; they take more risks; and they experience more “cognitive impairment?” Did you know that men donate more to charity when a beautiful woman is watching? That men try to save money in the company of available women? That men with daughters vote more liberally? That having sisters predisposes men toward generosity?

But what about how having sons might affect the business practices of female CEOs? Might being observed by a guy make a woman run faster, take greater risks or donate more money? Information about whether, for instance, girls speak up less in co-ed classrooms is out there, but it doesn’t get nearly as much play in the press – and the framing is almost always “this is how women react to their own awareness of a man’s presence.”

So what does this mean? Is it somehow troubling that we rarely encounter studies that use ladies as experimental subjects, and guys as inputs? Or should we embrace our status as independent variables (which sounds exciting, like a mix between a Beyonce song and a spy mission)? Does our independent variable-ness speak to our girl power, or to ongoing male power? Someone should do a study.

Read more HERE