Out of Left Field: Fathers are evolving into good dads

Michael Dinnocenzo

This truth is self-evident: Fathers are indispensable. For years, I heard a dynamic, bright elder remind his adult children: “Without me there would be no you.”

Paternity has varied over recent decades. The good news is that men have been moving beyond narrow patriarchy and making significant contributions as fathers/parents. Those who live with their children in two-parent households are most advantaged as, indeed, are those children.

Childrearing is likely to be most efficacious when both parents are caring, attentive, committed to each other and effective role models for their youngsters.

It has not always been thus. Four decades ago, Dustin Hoffman starred in the film “Kramer vs. Kramer.” He justified absences from wife and children by saying: “What do you expect?  It’s a jungle out there and I’m bringing home the bacon.”

In the early 1960s, anthropologist Margaret Mead said most men would be finalists for Absent Father of the Year contests. She elaborated that “housewife” was a reasonable term for women more associated with their home than with their husband.

Gail Collins effectively charts emerging family and gender themes in her superb book, “When Everything Changed.” Women’s “rights” were redefined as women’s “liberation,” and probing inquiries were launched, not only into “the feminine mystique” (Betty Friedan’s title), but also — albeit more slowly — into the “masculine mystique.”

As women found their voices in consciousness-raising groups in the ’60s, they contended that “the personal is political,” and pushed for equality in society. Less known now, and at the time, were the men’s C-R groups, usually involving spouses of liberated women.

It was an encouraging sign that husbands and fathers were willing to adopt the feminist C-R model to examine their own lives. Nearly half a century ago, a few dozen of our North Shore brethren (from Great Neck, Roslyn, Port Washington, Westbury, Manhasset) were so engaged.

Like the women’s group they often began examinations of sexist stereotypes by completing two sentences:

1) As a man I must . . . .
2) As a woman I could . . . .

The women’s groups made the gender substitution to examine what they were obliged to do as females and what they could be free to do if they were males.

Ripple effects from these groups — as well as the plethora of social changes depicted by Gail Collins — prepared husbands and wives, fathers and mothers to relate to each other — and their children — better and to make choices beyond old gender boundaries.

So, the male who felt as Dustin Hoffman did in “Kramer” that his essential role was as a provider could think more deeply about the nature of work and how it related to other central values for family and self-fulfillment.

Of course, neither males nor females could always control how and where they would work and the income needed properly to support a family. As the great writer and historian Studs Terkel emphasized, “Most people’s jobs are too small for their spirit,” and livable wages are not easy to sustain.

Still, as more men and women had raised their consciousness, they could seek better choices to foster the relationships and lives they desired. Also, as Gail Collins showed, emerging generations of fathers and mothers could build on the experiences and knowledge of their elders, making choices that freed them from masculine and feminine mystiques.

A striking theme for the early men’s C-R (and later) was challenging the view that men were always supposed to be strong and not show emotion or weakness: real men don’t cry. The process of self (and group) explorations enabled men to get more in touch with their feelings and become more open about showing emotion and warmth — all to the good for wives and children.

New Yorker Eve Merriam was in the vanguard of describing changes that would enhance fathers and families when she published “After Nora Slammed the Door” in 1964. Merriam’s reference point was Ibsen’s 19th century “A Doll’s House” in which husband Helmut says to his wife Nora: “Before all else you are a wife and a mother.”

Nora responds: “That I no longer believe. I believe that I am a human being just as much as you are, and have the right to become one.” Nora takes the shocking action of walking out on her husband and two children.

Merriam creatively explores various options, but concludes that the best answer is a “double unification” in which men and women fashion satisfactory home lives in harmony with satisfactory work lives, and do so with family support.

We have continued to move in that affirmative direction (I was a car driver for Margaret Mead in 1962 — I’m sure she’d be pleased by father and family developments).

A striking sign of the changing times was the full page story by Lisa Lerer in the New York Times (June 16), “Trying to Show They Can Be President and a Good Dad” (“Men on the campaign trail are facing a challenge long familiar to women: How to balance politics and parenting”).

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