The Nurturing Father Is A Role Reinvented
Contrary to conventional wisdom, fatherhood has just as significant an impact on the mental and physical health of many men as career achievement. New parenting research shows that fathers who are highly invested in their work, but who also care about their children and spend significant time with them, have an important effect on the emotional well-being of their sons and daughters, and on their own emotional well-being.
According to the research findings of William S. Pollack, Ph.D., assistant clinical professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Ronald Levant, Ed.D., the most promising direction for redefining masculinity - freeing men from the John Wayne and Iron John myth of the fully autonomous man - is in reinventing fatherhood.
The new-model father is on display at any airport today. One spots his toddler first, grandly held high above the crowd, his little legs clasped around Daddy’s neck. Daddy’s stride is sure, proud, infallible. These daddies are different. They are discovering a secret that women have always known: The easiest way to feel loved and needed and 10 feet tall is to be an involved parent.
Most of these reinvented fathers are in their 20s and 30s. But many are Start-Over Dads in their late 40s and 50s, raising second families.
In group interviews I conducted with men all over the country, the same sentiment was repeated: “I don’t want to have the relationship with my children that I had with my father.” These men want to be seen by their children not as remote disciplinarians but as friendly, trustworthy and kind.
Pollack proposes that boys are put at risk by premature separation from both their mothers and fathers. Mothers are supposed to push their sons toward a clear-cut separation. Already hurt, boys are doubly wounded when their fathers are unable to assume the nurturing role.
The reason so many men feel emotionally frozen, even through they want desperately to connect with their own children, Pollack contends, is fear of re-experiencing the repressed pain or sadness or depression that they buried in their hearts when their own parents pulled away.
Men can come to recognize that the way to find the father they lost is to find him in themselves and then give him to the next generation. “Fathering is one of men’s greatest opportunities for personal transformation,” states Pollack.
How do men already in their middle years or older accomplish this transformation?
They have to be willing to suspend decades of cultural conditioning and learn how to be nurturers as well as providers. They learn the language of the heart; they try to feel what a child feels, before doling out correction or punishment. They have the great opportunity to offer their children much of what they failed to receive from their own fathers, and in the bargain, they are likely to salve that old wound and boost their own self-esteem.
Start-Over Dads often become besotted by the offspring of their middle lives. It feels good to make up for the “lost opportunity time” when the children of their first families were young. Dads of all ages are finding out how good it feels to be depended upon not just instrumentally, but emotionally.
And now we learn that being a success as a nurturing father is actually good for a man’s mental and physical health. Studies on fatherhood at Wellesley College Center for Women find that fathers who get along well with their children are better insulated from the emotional ups and downs of work and careers. Moreover, says research director Rosalind Barnett, “the better the quality of your relationship with your children, the fewer physical health problems you experience.”
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate