I know a lot of readers and commenters advocate avoiding children and family. I can understand why they do so, having survived a brutal divorce myself. Sometimes the fear of losing one’s children is so painful that one gets the feeling that it would have been best if they’d never been born at all. This pain is all the worse for men who really love their kids, so I suspect that some of the men we see condemning marriage and family in the strongest terms are the men who were hurt the worst by the loss brought on by divorce.
There are also men who saw the writing on the wall early on and avoided family, because they weighed the consequences and made a decision based on their best interests. It was probably a wise decision. There is no guarantee for a man that he will grow up with his children these days, and there is a good chance that he will be financially ruined if he loses them. Divorce carries a double penalty for men these days: first comes loss of loved ones, and then comes loss of property, wealth and financial freedom. It’s a severe blow, as attested to by the elevated risk of suicide for men (but not women) following divorce.
Rationally speaking, it would be very difficult to make a case for having children today. There’s no farm to work, they can’t be employed at a young age in the family business, they probably won’t support a man when he’s old, and they get in the way of many of life’s pleasures, both great and small.
However, for some of us they still mean a great deal. Despite all the trouble and heartache, fatherhood is a cherished role for millions of men. Men regularly follow their ex-wives around the country to be near their children, often incurring great hardship in doing so. I recently read about a man living in a tent – he had lost his license, and then his job, because of child support arrears – in the town his children lived in. He had given everything up to be near his kids, and was being punished by the state for doing so. Despite enormous financial and sometimes criminal penalties, men still struggle to be fathers.
One might ask “Why?” What’s the point?
Too often we are treated to saccharine notions of fatherhood. The man throwing a ball to his kid in the park, or the beaming father at his daughter’s wedding. This all makes for good TV, I suppose, but it goes so much deeper than that. Our relationships with our parents reach to the very core of our humanity, and are intertwined with our ideas about our origins, purpose in life and legacy after death. Being a child or parent is such a fundamental concept that it infuses all religions and permeates our creation myths. It is the inescapable metaphor for the beginning of all things.
I’m convinced that this fundamentally human world-view is at least partly instinctive. Children understand the relationship between parents and children before any others. It is the standard by which they measure all other relationships throughout life, and the basic concept upon which they build their understanding of society.
But as fundamental as parenthood may be, fatherhood is the more tenuous of two basic parent-child relationships. It is a fragile flower – a gift to humanity – that sets us apart from the beasts of the field. Anthropologists like to speculate about what it is that makes us uniquely human. Could it be language? The use of tools? The ability to plan ahead? All of these things may set us apart to one degree or another, but fatherhood surely is just as important as any of them. Whether one believes that humans evolved from troglodytes or were created in God’s own image, we can all agree that the human father-child bond is unique. In most other species, what sets sires apart from other males tends to be that they avoid killing their progeny. However, these beasts seem to have nothing more than a built-in tolerance for their offspring. In humans, there is mutual recognition of a special bond. That human fathers and children have a close, unique relationship is a very rare, special thing in the realm of life on earth.
So rather than argue about the benefits or drawbacks of fatherhood, I think we should take a step out of the debate and acknowledge that fatherhood is simply an integral part of ourselves as men, whether we have children or not. It is in our nature, and it influences how we relate to the world around us. The domestication of animals, the birth of art and material creativity, and the fostering of civilization are all fruits of the paternal nature of the human male.
In short, fatherhood is what makes us human.
