What Prevents Dads from Being Involved? 
by Warren Farrell, Ph.D.

On one level, father involvement is the quietest revolution. On another, its quietness has prevented a revolution.

Dads were quieted by thousands of years of being selected based on their
willingness to die on behalf of others, but not cry on behalf of
themselves. Spies are taught to self-destruct before they self-reveal.
All this makes for a pretty quiet revolution. A self-help book that
reaches out to Dads often watches Dad commit suicide before he walks
down the self-help aisle.

Only dads themselves can lead the charge to change this, but the process
will be slow, because dads are usually selected by women who are
choosing men who will earn enough income to create options for the
woman, not for themselves. Men are reluctant to change what they think
brings them love. Nevertheless women also want men's love. So men's
first confrontation is learning more about how to love, so women will
value men's love more.

Men's second barrier is comprehending why the industrial revolution led
to many steps backward for fatherhood but has, nevertheless, laid the
foundation for many steps forward. If we can find the steps ...

The "Catch-22s" of the Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution meant that a dad who raised food on the farm
could no longer raise his family as effectively as a dad who raised
money in the city. On the farm, family and food were raised on the same
soil. Industrialization meant that the family was raised in a house
while the father raised money in a factory. For fathers,
industrialization meant isolation from his family.

Industrialization created the "Father's Catch- 22": a dad loving his
children by being away from the love of his children. The better he
"loved" them as a human doing, the worse he loved them as a human being.
Fathers had always been human doings, but industrialization magnified
the problem.

Marx identified the alienation from self and work that industrialization
created. Practically speaking, though, it was much more an alienation of
males from self and work than of women from self and work. And more of
fathers than of mothers. In fact, it allowed women to become the
nurturing specialists. And, because the larger the man's family, the
greater the alienation, the more children, the more alienation.
Industrialization created the alienation of dads proportionate to the
degree that they were dads!

The Industrial Revolution, then, took men's occasional absence from home
--- previously needed only in wartime and for hunting --- and made it
the norm. This increasing division of labor magnified the division of
men's and women's interests. It magnified the belief in the maternal
instinct and the reality of the distant father. Prior to
industrialization, divorces usually led to children living with dads.
But not after.

"The Father's Catch-22" was compounded by "The Husband's Catch-22." Few women fell in love with aspiring househusbands. Even if the
househusbands were reading Dr. spock. So a man learned early in life
that a good career was a prerequisite for a good woman's love. That had
always been true, but industrialization now magnified the degree to
which he needed to be away from a woman's love in order to receive the
love of a woman. Or, as a husband, he needed to be away from his wife's
love in order to be loved by a woman who would be his wife. Thus the
"Husband's Catch 22."

Both Catch-22s delivered to men the same message: Receive love by being
away from love. The Industrial Revolution accentuated both "Catch-22s"
and thus deepened men's unconscious fear of spending too much time with
the people they loved for fear of ultimately losing their love.

The Industrial Revolution not only deprived the son of his father as a
personal role model, but deprived the son of his father as a
professional role model--- he was no longer his dad's apprentice. In
contrast, daughters still had their moms as both personal and
professional role models.

While the daughter experienced her mom's teaching and her mom's
temperament, industrialization created two "Sons' Catch-22s": First, he
experienced his mom's teaching ("be neat" and "don't play rough") and
temperament, but to find love, he needed to be more like his dad.
Second, the more successful his dad, the more he should emulate him, but
the less he saw of him. These are what I call "The Son's Catch-22s."

Children and wives began to blame the father for his absence. No one
understood that Dad's absence was his form of slavery, his commitment to
providing the family's "financial womb." Had he been unwilling, his wife
would never have selected him to begin with, and thus the children
wouldn't exist to register their complaints!

That's the bad news. The good news is that industrialization began to
sew the seeds to reduce the division of labor. Which would, in turn,
begin to sow the seeds to bring the father back home. How?
Industrialization produced enough appliances and conveniences to allow
the woman to work outside the home, enough cost to need the woman to
work outside the home. Thus industrialization initially reinforced the
division of labor, and then created the conditions to reduce it.

However, before this created a father and child reunion, it led to our
sons being deprived of yet a third role model: male elementary-school
teachers. Prior to industrialization, the boy also had mostly male
elementary-school teachers. But industrialization increasingly produced
female elementary-school teachers. Why? Dad was still the primary
breadwinner so Mom needed a work schedule to be compatible with the
children's school schedule

Industrialization's good news for fatherhood is that it laid the
foundation for technology, and technology is increasingly allowing the
father to once again raise money and family "on the same soil."
Technology is creating the conditions for a father and child reunion. It
allows for home offices on cheaper, more rural land, freeing him from
paying the price of a home in the suburbs; freeing him from commuting in
rush-hour traffic; freeing him from suits and, nowadays, from
sexual-harassment lawsuits. Most of all, though, he has had decades to
discover what happens to children when Dad is absent. Men, like women,
respond to being needed. And now technology is allowing him to have the
need for his love be under the same roof as the need for his
productivity. Welcome to the Era of the Fatherhood Juggling Act!

The biggest barrier to helping men love will be expecting men's money...

The Banker Barrier (or the "Daddy Track")

"A father is a banker provided by nature." - FRENCH PROVERB

Nothing threatens a father's involvement in the family more than his
obligation to be the family's "financial womb," creating "The Father's
Catch-22": loving the family by being away from the family. It is the
irony of traditional fatherhood: being a father by not being a father.

Creating fatherhood means creating a major psychological shift. Both
sexes find it's difficult to fully share the psychological
responsibility for the other sex's traditional role-especially when the
other sex is around. Just as mothers take on twenty-four-hours-a-day
psychological responsibility for the childcare --- even in homes in
which the father is spending more hours with the children---fathers
similarly still retain a twenty-four-hours-a-day psychological
responsibility for the family's "financial womb---even if the mother
happens to be making more money at some given moment in time.

Even in Sweden, where men are offered paid paternity leaves of six
months and media campaigns show sports heroes tending their young, only
22 percent of Swedish fathers take the leave, and their average leave is
not six months, but forty-seven days. Why? Because even in Sweden. Men
know they will jeopardize their career advancement and therefore
jeopardize their wife's and children's welfare (and therefore, possibly
their wife's love) if they go on the "Daddy Track." It has become easier
for Swedish men to take longer leaves because the government plays
substitute husband so well for women in Sweden that women can afford to
live with, and marry, men who earn less. Which is why the amount of
leave time Swedish men have taken to be with their children doubled
between the seventies and eighties.

In the United States, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993,
providing for up to twelve unpaid weeks off to care for a new baby or
seriously ill family member, has been used by a half-million men and 1.4
million women. But for the most part, dads use accumulated sick days
instead leave days. And overall, women are still 135 times more likely
than men leave the workplace for family reasons.

I hope this social backdrop allows fathers and mothers to see that we've
all been caught in a system dictated initially not by the needs of men,
or of women, but by both sexes' needs to survive, and that more recently
we've been caught in the transitions that have resulted from that system
succeeding. Our desire to do more than survive included the desire for
freedom to exercise options---from divorce to raising children without
Dad. To give ourselves permission for that, we changed our image of
father from "father knows best" to "father molests." The same German
colleague who sent me the cartoon above also sent me another from Der
Spiegel (roughly the German equivalent of Time magazine) in which the
child says, "Mummy, please tell me something about Daddy," and the mom
replies, "No, no, dear! No horror stories before sleeping."

This daddy-as-nightmare image is ubiquitous in industrialized countries,
to such a degree that the only way we can now envision Dad with our
children is if Mom is unable to be available.


Warren Farrell, Ph.D. is the author of Father and Child Reunion. He is
also the author of Why Men Are The Way They Are; Women Can't Hear What
Men Don't Say; and The Myth of Male Power. He resides in Encinitas (San
Diego), California, or, virtually, at www.warrenfarrell.com. © 2001