The New Parenting Club

OUR NEW SERIES: “OUR FATHERS”
We live in an era of absent fathers. The father is either physically or psychologically absent from our homes and family life, and the philosophers are saying he is gone from our mythic and religious lives as well.
The love unit most damaged by the Industrial Revolution has been the father-son bond. It presented us a new situation, never existing before. In earlier times a boy and his father lived closely together with each other, especially in the work-world after the age of 12. The Industrial Revolution not only took the men out of family life but it was the start of public schooling as we know it, thus taking the children out of family life as well.
This can be considered the beginning of the gradual destruction of the family as a unit. This dilemma continues today with fathers in offices and sons not able to grasp exactly what it is that the father is doing. Even brought to the office what can he show him? How he moves papers? How he works on his computer? How can he explain that what he is doing is important or how it differs from what other men are doing? The German psychologist Alexander Mitcherich writes about this in his very fine book “Society Without the Father.” His main point is that if the son does not understand, clearly physically what his father is doing all year, all day; a hole will appear in the son’s perception of his father. Children take things in physically not mentally; how can the son comprehend his father?
As a result many boys today are being ‘single-parented by the mother even though the father is still with the family.
The great psychiatrist Carl Jung made a very insightful observation: he said that if a male is brought up mainly with the mother, he will take a feminine attitude toward his father. He will see his father through his mother’s eyes. Since the father and the mother are in competition, consciously or unconsciously for the affection of the son, you’re not going to get a straight picture of your father out of your mother. Instead, all the inadequacies of the father are well pointed out. The mother tends to give the ‘sense’ that civilization, culture, feeling and relationship are things that the mother and the son and the daughter have together. Whereas, what the father has may be brutal, unfeeling, obsessed, too rational, uncompassionate or too focused on money-making.
So the young male often grows up with a wounded image of his father – not necessarily caused by his father’s actions, but based on the mother’s interpretation of these actions.
If the son accepts his mother’s view of his father, he will look at his own masculinity from a feminine point of view. But eventually the male must throw off this view and begin to discover for himself what the father is, and what masculinity is.
Of course, it would be much better for the son to have a close relationship with his father from the beginning of his life. One of the main reasons that we favor and applaud the ‘family-bed’ or what today is called ‘co-sleeping’ is that this beautifully compensates for much of the absence of the father and mother in today’s busy and separated life-style. It allows ‘night-time-parenting’ to occur, that is, a time to cuddle, joke and talk with each other when the day’s activities prevent the connection. In this way a father sees his son every morning, getting up with him, and listening to his dreams. To have his son come into the bathroom to watch his father shave and ready himself for the day. Eventually naturally imitating this by himself and learning how to get ready.
More in this series: – “OUR FATHERS” will be presented in the next several Blogs.