Women Also Need To Keep A Promise

Over the past few months, journalists have asked what I think of Promise Keepers and, more specifically, its notion that men are the rightful heads of families.

“I haven’t had time to think about it,” I’ve pussyfooted, hoping they’d go away.

Journalists, being some of the world’s most tenacious people, haven’t gone away. So I’ve read what I could get my hands on concerning Promise Keepers, talked to some men who have attended Promise Keepers gatherings, and arrived at a few personal conclusions:

Promise Keepers seems to represent laudable ideals and is having a positive impact on the “family consciousness” of the men who attend.

I am convinced that when it comes to politics, the overwhelming majority of men who have attended Promise Keepers rallies are conservative, but I see no evidence that Promise Keepers is a political movement.

Promise Keepers does indeed believe the male should “head” the two-parent family. After nearly 30 years of marriage, my wife, Willie, and I feel that families do not work well by committee, even committees of two. In any given family situation, we’ve found that it’s best if one of the partners is recognized as the legitimate final authority in that particular area, and that when all is said and done, he or she will make the final decision.

Promise Keepers is well intentioned, but it deals with only half of the problem, and in this case, half will ultimately amount to nothing. Yes, the typical male has been lax toward his marital responsibilities. But just as men should reinvigorate the role of husband, women should uncouple from what we psychologists term “enmeshed” relationships with their children and recommit to being wives, first and foremost.

Today’s typical wife, as soon as she becomes a parent, begins to act as if she took a marriage vow that read, “I take you to be my husband, until children do us part.” Women of my mother’s generation (and some even older) tell me that up until a generation or so ago, a wife who became a mother remained first and foremost a wife. If she worked outside the home (not all that uncommon, believe it or not), she was referred to as a “working wife.” The issue of her employment was a marital issue, not a parenting one. If she worked in the home, she was a “housewife” - a wife in the home. Today’s woman, in those same circumstances, is a “working mother” and a “stay-at-home mom.”

The difference in vernacular reflects a shift in the family role to which women primarily assign themselves.

This shift came about largely because as America shifted to a self-esteem-based child-rearing philosophy, women became persuaded that the mother who paid the most attention to and did the most for her child was the best mother of them all.

As a consequence, the mother-child relationship is, more often than not, dominated by the child. Women are by no means to blame for this upside-down state of affairs. They are, however, responsible for correcting it.

Today’s typical husband has become his wife’s “parenting aide,” there to assist her in what she views as her primary family obligations. Their marriage is a Cheshire cat - now you see it, now you don’t. Their children, therefore, lack an authentic model of what being married is all about.

The American family is weaker than ever. More than anything, America needs a family revolution - a retro-revolution, more specifically. It’s not going to happen, however, unless both men and women face up to their unwitting complicity in the family’s decline. In other words, men aren’t the only ones who need to keep promises.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Rosemond The Charlotte Observer