… the benefits are great. Can we regain them?
(c) 2018, Davd
Let me begin by saluting my father, a truck driver and semi salesman during my childhood, and my grandfather, a master electrician and battery expert for a major railroad. Neither was perfect. Neither needed to be, to do me immense good. I doubt i could have lived as good an adult life (which was not perfect either) nor even lived as long1, without the nurture of them both during a hard childhood.
It is not 100% proven — nothing is 100% proven — that Mother’s Day much outranks Father’s Day in public respect; but it seems safe to say that is “virtually certain”. Likewise, looking at divorce and custody law and practices, (e.g. Brown, 2013, Nathanson and Young, 2006) it seems virtually certain that motherhood has immensely more bureaucratic and legal respect than fatherhood.
The difference has consequences, and over-all, they are bad.2
So far, “science cannot say” whether, once weaned from the breast, a child needs mother or father more. As an educated guess, one might estimate that girls need a mother more, boys, a father — but that does not apply to all girls and all boys; rather, it might apply “on average”.
Because divorce courts and bureaucracies are biased in favour of mothers (Brown, 2013, Nathanson and Young, 2006), being a father is no longer a matter of willingness and fidelity, as it was for most men when i was a boy. This is doing immense social damage, which has been documented (e.g. Finley, 2010). It is a “correctional truism” that very few boys with good fathers go to prison. It is a “social work truism” that fewer girls with good fathers get pregnant in their teens, go on drugs, or catch STDs. A mother who wants her children “off drugs”, free of STDs, teen pregnancy, and criminal experience; can do more to achieve those worthy goals by sharing their nurture with a father, than by worldly success (never-mind fashionable attire or location).
Why so? Why are fathers—resident, participating fathers—effective at keeping children out of prison and trouble more generally? Armstrong (2008: 12) states of the words Duty, Obligation, and Honor: “I’d read them in books. But I’d never used them, and certainly not as a reason for having done something.” She goes on to write that she was quite surprised that most men do give great weight to these words, and don’t much trust the minority of men who do not. On pp 44-5, she specifies that women lie when they say “I care about you”; and as context for her surprise that men care about duty, obligation, and honor, she remarks that her reason for spending a no-fun day to please her mother, would have been that Mother would be mad at her if she didn’t (2008: 11).
To summarize Armstrong’s observations: Men put principles first, women put feelings first — and this attested in a book written by a woman, entitled, Making Sense of Men. (Seems to me she found men’s principle based reasoning makes more sense than women’s feelings based motivation — but did she notice?)
Glubb (1978: 24) observed a cycle common to the 13 empires he studied3, all of whose lifespans approximated 250 years. He wrote of the common nature of that cycle: ” The life-expectation of a great nation, it appears, commences with a violent, and usually unforeseen, outburst of energy, and ends in a lowering of moral standards, cynicism, pessimism and frivolity.” (1978: 23)
“… Decadence is due to: Too long a period of wealth and power, Selfishness, Love of money [and] The loss of a sense of duty.” (1978: 24)
If indeed the United States is experiencing decadence4, and Canada is part of its empire, then the easiest explanation for the present lack of respect for fatherhood and the principled virtues it brings to child rearing, is that such is normal to decadence. Normal is not always good. Decadence, cookie advertising notwithstanding, is a bad thing.
For Father’s Day, more steak is advertised (and the expectation is that father will cook it.) for Mother’s Day, more candy is advertised, and Mother’s Day is the biggest business day for restaurants (Wikipedia, 2018). Steak is healthier than candy, cooking for the family is more efficient and frugal than “dining out”5.
Steak is good — Respect is better. Best of all, is to put fatherhood to its natural, good work.
References:
Armstrong, Alison, 2008. Making Sense of Men. Sherman Oaks, California: PAX Programs Inc.
http://www.avoiceformen.com/mission-and-values/about/
Brown, Grant A., 2013. Ideology And Dysfunction In Family Law: How Courts Disenfranchise Fathers. Calgary and Winnipeg: Canadian Constitution Foundation and Frontier Centre For Public Policy
Canning, Dr. Greg, 2012. “Girls behaving badly”. A Voice for Men website.
Catton, William R., Jr., 1967 “Is it worth it: Some social costs of economic growth in the Puget Sound region.” University of Washington Alumnus (Winter) 20-25
Catton, William R., Jr. 1980 Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Urbana, London, and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Paperback 1982
Dafoe-Whitehead, Barbara, 1993. “Dan Quayle Was Right” Atlantic Monthly, April.
Finley, Gordon E., 2010. “On Fatherhood.” Men’s News Daily, June 16. Prof. Finley has published considerable research on fatherhood, and this text has more authority than many.
Glubb, John Bagot, 1978. The Fate of Empires. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd.
Hancock, Kerry Dale, Jr. 2007. “Children Without Fathers: Statistics,”
Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systiic Discrimination against Men. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
National Restaurant Association, 2006. “Mother’s Day Dining Fact Sheet” 28 April. Mother’s Day is the most popular day of the year to dine out, with 38 percent of consumers reporting doing so. (Cited in Wikipedia, 2018)
Wikipedia, 2018. “Mother’s Day.” page last edited on 14 May 2018
Notes:
1. At 76, i have so far lived approximately the mean male lifespan for my birth year.
2. Some of the citation urls in the text may have left the internet since i verified them during 2011-18. They all were valid when collected. It is unfortunate that the Internet is less durable than a paper book — and one might wonder if Canada’s Government reliance on the Internet, which is not even under Canadian Government jurisdiction, is a sign of decadence.
3. The United States of America was the 14th, and it had not completed its lifespan by 1978.
4, 1776+250 = 2026.
5. The custom of taking Mother to a restaurant seems to derive from mothers being the principal cooks in American (including Canadian) families. Commuting to paid employment, especially during the generation of time from [approximately] 1950-75, made cooking more a mother’s work than it might have been naturally.
