Father’s day is almost upon us. What do you do to celebrate dad? Do you have traditional father’s day things or is it a wild card every year?
Typically on this podcast, we’re talking to an audience of moms, but we do have fathers who listen! (idk if it’s like a nudge from their wives or if it’s a personal decision?)
Today we thought we’d give some airtime to dads, and moms can feel free to forward this one along if you like.
Fave question: Before you know if something is working, you need to know what it’s for. So, what are fathers for?
John Stonestreet: Dads are crucial. We’ve known this for a long time. For example, former president Barack Obama, despite advancing many policies that undermined the family, remained an outspoken voice on the importance of loving, involved fathers. According to all the evidence, he was partly correct. Kids need their fathers, but do best when their fathers are married to their mothers.
Earlier this month in The Wall Street Journal, Jennifer Breheny Wallace surveyed the overwhelming and decades-long scientific consensus that fathers and fatherly love are irreplaceable in the lives of children. For example, a 2021 study from the Journal of Family Psychology found that warm and caring dads predict better mental health outcomes for children. Both boys and girls with such fathers experience “fewer weight concerns, higher self-esteem and fewer depression symptoms.”
The connection between physically present, emotionally available fathers and mentally healthy kids is so strong that researchers have termed it the “good father effect.” A recent review published in the journal Children surveyed nearly four dozen studies on the father-child relationship. In Wallace’s words, these studies conclude that,
Fathers who were involved in caregiving and play, and who reacted with warmth and greater sensitivity to a child who expressed emotions, were significantly more likely to have children with better emotional balance from infancy to adolescence.
Such emotional stability in turn predicted “higher levels of social competence, peer relationships, academic achievement, and resilience” among kids.
If it is indeed true, as all the evidence shows, that a dad’s love has such incredible power to set children on a healthy trajectory, why are our laws, our culture, and so many of the movements that shape both, so intent on denying the need for fathers? The redefinition of marriage, the rise of in vitro fertilization and surrogacy for same-sex couples, the embrace of gender ideology that treats men and women as interchangeable, and especially the acceptance of unmarried parenthood, all ignore or reject the centrality of a father and mother committed to one another and to their children for life. In fact, there have never been more people or resources so invested in “alternatives” to the family.
What drives these alternatives has never been the lack of evidence, but an unwavering commitment to sexual autonomy and an unwillingness to submit our lives, our sexuality, and our moral choices to God’s design for the family. Which means the evidence will continue to accumulate, specifically of the immense destruction our collective choices wreak on the lives of children who are deprived of their need for and right to their fathers.
As G.K. Chesterton said, “The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.” And, all of the available evidence suggests, the lives of children in the process.
https://breakpoint.org/the-undeniable-importance-of-fathers-for-now-and-eternity
In an interview w/ the NC Family Council, Nancy Pearcey, author of The Toxic War on Masculinity, noted:
The reason I wrote a book on masculinity is because right now boys having it worse. Boys are falling behind at all levels of education. It’s starts in kindergarten because they don’t have the same fine motor control. So, they cannot operate scissors, and already in kindergarten, they feel like they’re falling behind. And all the way through grade school, in high school, boys are doing worse in test scores and in grades. In college now, I don’t know if you know this, but it was a surprise to me: 60% of college students are now female, 40% are male. And in Graduate School and Professional School now, there are also more women than men.
So, women are just pulling way ahead. And then, as adults, men are falling behind both where they used to be and in relation to women. They’re falling behind in the sense of being more prone to drug and alcohol addiction, more prone to crime, 90 some percent of prison inmates are male, they’re more likely to be homeless than more likely to be in a mental institution, and they’re dropping out of the workforce. It is not showing up in the unemployment statistics because they’ve stopped looking for work. But when researchers look deeper, they now tell us male unemployment is at Great Depression-era levels. And that was a shock because we all remember what a crisis the Great Depression was, but male unemployment is at that level now. And then also male life expectancy has gone down. A magazine called The New Scientist was reporting on the statistics, and it said, the major demographic factor now in early death is being male. So that’s why I wrote a book on men because I think it is time for us to have some compassion on boys and men and ask whether there are some programs that we should institute that will be specially geared toward them.
Our Modern Family is a New Invention in the Scheme of History
In my book, I start with the colonial era, which was largely Christian. And so, there were Christian concepts of masculinity at the time. Even secular historians acknowledge that. One secular historian writes, in the colonial era, the definition of masculine virtue was duty to God and man. Very much formulated towards duty and being responsible for the common good of the family and the community. And so, what happened, though, again, it’s the Industrial Revolution. And that was a turning point. Because after that, there arose a stark difference between public and private, right. As long as economic productivity was done in the home, there was not a sharp divide.
But now you started to have factories and offices and financial institutions and universities and the state. And people began to argue that these large public institutions should operate by scientific principles by which they really mean value-free. Which is what we hear today, right? Don’t bring your private values into the public realm. And since it was men who are working in that public realm and who are getting that secularized education, they did actually become secular before women did. So this was part of the problem, too, is that they began to be less bound in conscience to biblical principles. And they started following with secular ideas of masculinity. And you know what happened in the 19th century? There was a huge increase in crime, gambling, drinking, prostitution, the number of brothels mushroomed. So, a lot of the problems that we associate with the 19th century were because men were becoming more secular. So, you’ve really put your finger on what’s the most important issue, which is men lost their understanding of a biblical view of masculinity.
She continues:
We’re so used to fathers being out of the home that we no longer realize what a shock it was when the Industrial Revolution first took men out of the home.
In the 19th century, there was a huge outpouring of books and articles that lamented missing fathers.
In 1842, an article in Parents Magazine said the greatest “source of domestic sorrow” is “paternal neglect” “The father, … toils early and late, and finds no time to fulfill his duties to his children.”
A book said, “It is one of the misfortunes of our American way of living that the head of the house, the father—he who is the support, the mainstay, the highest central figure—should be scarcely able to live with his family at all.”
The president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union said father absence was the central problem facing the family.
She wrote, “God is the father, but how many families there are where the prototype of the divine is practically absent from Sunday to Sunday.”
Father absence affected especially boys. They no longer had a close-up model of what it means to be a man. A sociologist writes, “For the first time in American history, young men experienced an ‘identity crisis.’
With their fathers out of the home most of the day, boys lost their most important connection to the world of adult men, and for the first time were being raised mostly by women.
And lest you think Pearcey is saying that women should just stay home and have babies, she elaborates on what women were doing:
Women have always been wives, mothers, and managers of the home. But before the industrial revolution, the home was the center of economic production, so working at home meant being a partner with her husband in his craft or trade.
Women also had their own economically productive work—baking, brewing, gardening, canning, candle making, spinning, and weaving.
It was the industrial revolution that took women’s traditional work out of the home. They also lost access to crafts and trades where they had once worked alongside their husbands: A historian writes: “They vanished more or less entirely from a number of occupations; they appeared less frequently in public records as printers, blacksmiths, arms-makers, or proprietors of small business concerns.”
In short, women no longer commanded a range of home production processes. They were reduced from producers to consumers, becoming economically dependent on the wages of their husbands.
As Dorothy Sayers writes, the Industrial Revolution took all the productive tasks that women used to perform out of the home “and handed them over to big industry, to be directed and organized by men at the head of large factories. Even the dairy-maid in her simple bonnet is gone, to be replaced by a male mechanic in charge of a mechanical milking plant.”
Questions from Your Kids
I’d venture to say that most men who struggle with being dads or who struggle in their marriages are men whose fathers didn’t affirm them (or didn’t affirm them in ways they felt/heard). Very likely, those same men may also be subconsciously (or consciously) seeking that missing affirmation in their relationships, jobs, and other areas of their lives.
I’ve heard from a good number of men who, when asked about their dads, say “oh yeah, I had a great dad, a great childhood. I loved my dad. He was a great provider, etc…” And they really do believe that and it’s true. But if you dig a little, in some more vulnerable moments, they admit to some significant times when they felt they didn’t measure up, or were ignored or not important. I think we all probably have moments/stings like that from childhood because parents aren’t perfect and we all mess up.
I do think there’s more of an awareness these days with young parents/families. We are more likely to peel the onion of our lives, seek counseling, and dig into figuring out why we react the ways we do. What’s behind the curtain? While our parents from a difft generation are a lot of times uncomfortable with that sort of thing. They learned to get on with things in a practical way and not stop to dig around… Talk to your parent or grandparent about traumas or any of today’s buzzwords and they’re likely to try to listen for awhile and then change the subject…. “I think I’m gonna go start dinner.” Or, if you’re on the phone, they’re like “I’m gonna let you go now, honey.” That’s not all bad either!
But since we’re living today in 2024 – we are more comfortable with looking behind that curtain. Some of us.
In the interest of being proactive and aware of how our actions affect our kids, let’s look at our kids’ questions for a minute. If your child is verbal and anywhere between the ages of 2-13, the questions are a mile a minute. (At puberty they slow down as the hormones hit and kids might withdraw more.) We’re not just talking any questions—like why is ice cream cold kind of stuff—but questions laced with a deeper question.
Dad, did you see me throw that ball? Dad, can I go to the store with you? Can I help? Dad, feel my muscles. Dad, watch me run. See how fast I can go. See the road I built? Watch me cannonball into the pool.
They’re regular, every day questions. What they’re really asking is:
Do you want to spend time with me? Do you think I’m strong? Are you proud of me? Do you love me?
If they asked you THOSE questions outright, you’d probably drop everything–your phone, your computer, you’d turn off the mower or lay down whatever you were in the middle of and give them a big hug and say, YES. Yes, of course! You’d likely want to make sure they had no doubt about how you felt.
What’s your first inclination when your child comes up to you and says, “Dad”? (this goes for moms too). Is it to brace for interruption? Is it a tinge – just a teeny bit of annoyance? Is it a sigh and then you put aside what you were in the middle of? I can’t right now, I’m busy?
What does it signal when you put aside “the thing” when your child approaches you? What does it tangibly and concretely demonstrate when you turn to them and see them with your eyes and say “Yes, buddy?” Think back to how it would’ve felt to have had your own father do that to you . How does it feel when we know God’s ready to do that for us? Yes, daughter? Yes, son?
I read something recently in Elizabeth Elliot’s book, The Music of His Promises: Listening to God with Love, Trust, and Obedience. It was a short meditation on the idea that Jesus was never busy. She writes:
“To be busy is to be engaged in an occupation which makes it inconvenient to be disturbed.” So wrote Janet Erskine Stuart, a woman with ceaseless demands on her time and strength, inasmuch as she was the Mother Superior of an English convent. She followed her Master in this. He was at the disposal of His Father at all times and therefore at the disposal of all whom the Father sent to Him. There was never a sign of moodiness, selfishness, offense, boredom, or busyness. He never made a fuss about anything. This spirit of peace can be in us who are in Him. We can learn to see every minute of our day as His, not ours; every task to which we turn our attention as belonging to Him, not to us; everything tht interrupts “our” work as His work which must take precedence. Knowing where we come from and to Whom we are going relives us of the anxiety that makes us so fussy and so hard to live with.
Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the pace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:5-7
I’m also reminded of the admonition to fathers in Ephesians 6: Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Paul wouldn’t have told fathers to NOT provoke their children to anger if they weren’t doing it. We talk about besetting sins of personality types, but I think there are also potential weaknesses and traps of sin for each gender.
We see this attitude that men are supposed to have again in 1 Peter 3 in a section on submitting to authority. Paul says that we have been called to this kind of behavior, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, so that we might follow in his steps. And then he gives specific instructions to husbands: “Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you[a] of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.”
That phrase “in an understanding way” means knowledge gleaned from first-hand (personal) experience, connecting theory to application; “application-knowledge,” gained in (by) a direct relationship. Husbands should not only understand their role in terms of loving their wives as Christ loved the church, but also they should put this knowledge into practical obedience by knowing their own wives and honoring them.
There’s reading about swimming. Having a theology of swimming. And actually jumping into a pool. There is knowing how to parent from reading a book and there’s getting up in the night to feed and change your baby. There’s playing with them when you’re tired instead of putting them in front of a screen. There’s knowing and there’s KNOWING.
Fathers, there is a theology of discipline and instruction and there’s the actual disciplining and instructing. How are you doing in that area?
So… will it traumatize your child if you really ARE busy and can’t respond immediately? Likely no. But you WILL have missed an opportunity for assurance and affirmation.
Questions sometimes have deeper meanings.
Weekly Walks
We’ve talked about dads trying to schedule date nights with each child as a way to have a standing platform for connection. This is a great idea and it’s not expensive or elaborate.
One way to do this is to have one evening each week to take a short walk with your child. If you have a dog, take him along. It might just be 15-20 minutes. It shouldn’t depend on the weather. Dog’s gotta pee. If you haven’t done this before, expect some whining or complaining or resistance, especially with older children. …. But keep it up. Make it a standing appointment. Tuesday night after dinner, dad walks with Shelby. Wednesday nights it’s Austin. Like the couch time concept, they will warm to it, and come to expect and enjoy it. It will be an open window opportunity where your child knows they have dad to themselves –what a special kind of joy that is—and can talk about things.
It’s also easier sometimes when you’re both facing forward doing something together (like a walk) for conversations to arise.
OPEN WINDOWS
Speaking of open windows, these as we know likely arise at bedtime. On the walk or date night or at bedtime, here are some great things to lay on your kids:
I love who you are.
You’re exactly what this family needs.
You worked hard on _______ today.
What’s one thing you’d like me to know?
I noticed you being (kind, generous, patient….) when you _______.
I love to watch you ___________.
Do you have a question about anything?
You keep trying. You keep practicing.
DIG DEEP
I saw recently a dad having a conversation with his son that I thought was a beautiful example and lesson. He and his son had been out all day doing landscaping work. It was hot. They’d dug holes and pulled weeds, picked up all the trimmings, and laid mulch. If you’ve ever done that sort of work you know how dog tired you are at the end of the day.
They’d pulled up in the driveway at home and the son was maybe 9-10. Dad says, we’re pretty tired, arent’ we? Before we go inside, let’s think about what’s in there. You have 3 little brothers… one of them is gonna want me to throw a ball with him. Another will want to tell me about his day. The baby will probably be crying—it’s that time of day. And your mom may be in the middle of cooking dinner. She’ll need some help with the table.
DIG DEEP. As tired as we are, we gotta dig deep so we can be there for everybody in the house. That’s SUCH a great lesson!!! What a beautiful example and what a gift that dad gave his son through (1) saying that OUT LOUD to him and (2) making him feel like we’re on the same team here…I can count on you to do your part, (3) being the kind of dad who lays aside self for others…being the spiritual leader in that way.
LOVE THEIR MOM
Just to reiterate: the greatest gift you can give your children is the security and example of how you love their mom.
Blessings upon all the hard-working, showing-up, on-purpose kind of dads!! If one of these points struck you as a good idea, take that and make it your own. If your own dad didn’t tell you, you have what it takes! You can do it!