Real Boys

by William Pollack

  The poignancy of the story comes in the solution that Bill found for himself and for Alex. With a little bit of friendly encouragement from me and a lot of love and support from his wife, Bill decided to buy a potter’s wheel and kiln and to enroll in an adult-education course for beginning potters. He also decided to involve Alex in his learning process, so that Alex could feel free, in the afternoons after school, to spend as much time as he wanted making pottery using the wheel and the kiln. Before long, father and son were spending many an evening in the family “pottery basement” turning out a variety of team-produced ceramics. Now Bill has not only soothed much of the hurt about how his father treated him as a child, but also developed a well-deserved sense of pride about how he was able to overcome his own irrational feelings about Alex. Above all, he and his son have found a hobby at which they both excel and one that they greatly enjoy doing together.

  THE MARKETPLACE’S MISTAKE

  Of course, it’s not only a father’s internalized feelings that may hold him back from connecting emotionally with his son. Society’s traditional expectations of men and the way many workplaces are still run can also often make it difficult for men to even find enough time and energy to be with their sons. Despite a father’s best intentions, society sometimes makes it very difficult for a father to stay closely involved in raising his children. Workplace family programs continue to be primarily aimed at women, and when opportunities for choosing family over work are offered to men, they often demur for fear—based on real experience—that opting to use such “family-friendly” benefits will blacklist them for a promotion or raise.

  When my daughter, Sarah, was born, only ten years ago, I was working for one of the seemingly more flexible institutions—a teaching hospital associated with Harvard Medical School—where at that time there was no “paternity leave”—in fact, no policy at all for new fathers. I remember my relief when through the underground grapevine of male clinicians, I learned I could take sick time to be involved in my child’s birth and early development.

  Indeed in one recent study, it was found that men with MBAs who work just two fewer hours per week to help share in child-rearing duties get raises that are 20 percent lower than men who sacrifice their sons for work. Such society-determined systems discourage most men from taking the nurturing plunge, and must be changed if we are to raise the type of healthy, loving boys we want for the next generation.

  Other external situational factors can also separate father and son. For instance, when the family model is less traditional—for example, when mom and dad have divorced and dad lives elsewhere—satisfying the yearnings between son and father can, of course, become even more complex. It has been estimated that for the children of baby boomers, 59 percent of their sons will live without their fathers for at least part of their childhoods. In 1990 more than 36 percent of all children were living apart from their fathers, and among those fathers who did not have custody of their children a majority began to lose touch with their sons within three years after moving out of the home, sometimes abandoning them completely. In a study by the Census Bureau it was reported that in 1994 over sixteen million children were living with only the mother, and 40 percent of those kids hadn’t seen their fathers in at least a year. Even within traditional, intact two-parent families both fathers and sons complain about a lack of enough quality time together.

  But lest we become overwhelmed by some of the negative implications of these statistics, there’s also much good news to report. For instance, if past research showed that most fathers spent significantly less time with their young sons than mothers did, the trend is now moving toward expanded commitment, with a greater than 20 percent increase in fathers’ overall family involvement over the past ten years. Today fathers spend approximately 30 percent of their time (as opposed to mothers’ 70 percent) on family-related activities. And if when analyzing these statistics, one factors out the amount of time that mothers spend on family chores not directly related to child care, such as washing baby clothes or shopping for food, it turns out that fathers’ actual proportional involvement with their children is now even larger.

  Perhaps of greater importance, it appears that more and more fathers—even if they still have limited time away from work—are making significant strides in relating closely and connecting emotionally with their sons in the time they do have available. My research shows that for many fathers still struggling with the balance between work and parenting, what ends up mattering the most is not necessarily the quantity of time they get to spend with their children but the quality of such time. For example, many fathers who were highly involved with and satisfied by their work—what I call “job-satisfied fathers”—were able to affect their sons’ self-esteem and emotional stability directly and positively. One young attorney in my study, extremely busy and pressured to make partner, always set aside time for dinner with his young son on Wednesday evenings and breakfast on Sunday mornings. It was a special “daddy-son” time as sacrosanct as any religious ritual and never violated by anything other than an extreme emergency or illness. Although there was no doubt for either of them that more hours spent like this would be even better, both father and son came to feel a special bond through this biweekly men’s dining club for two. Because such job-satisfied fathers spend quality time with their children despite their outside time commitments, these dads are able to make an enormous difference in the overall well-being of their sons.

  PRIMARY FATHERS: WHEN DAD IS NO. 1

  Another interesting contemporary trend is the growing ranks of fathers who are not only active family team members but the primary parents. Kyle Pruett, a child psychiatrist at Yale, studied a number of these primary nurturing dads and their families—where fathers stayed home and moms went to work—for over ten years. His findings were striking: in observing these very active primary fathers, he discovered the formative emotional impact that one man, a father, can have on another male, his son. First, he found that even more than traditional dads, these primary caregiver dads used play as a way to teach valuable moral lessons, ideas about respect, and rules about handling emotion and dealing with loss. He discovered that boys who have such a high dose of “loving” from their dads seem to identify early with this nurturing role and thus themselves show more caring behavior toward friends and siblings.

  These boys, Pruett found, also experience a different type of primary discipline. As one boy in his study remarked, “When I’m being a pain to my little brother or not listening to her, Mom says, ‘How do you think that makes me feel’?” The boy’s mother, in other words, personalized how the boy’s behavior could affect her. She asked a question that focused on how unhappy she might feel if the boy continued to tease his brother or to fail to listen to her. By posing this question, she was thoughtfully nudging her son to think about how he would affect her world if he continued to misbehave. The boy’s father, by contrast, focused on what the here-and-now consequences of the boy’s behavior would be for others. The boy explained: “Dad tells me to stop because it looks like I don’t love my brother or care about my mother’s feelings. . . . Sometimes Dad just says ‘No,’ while Mom gets all emotional.” Unlike his wife, who related the boy’s behavior to her own emotions and used a question to push the boy to examine his motivations, the primary-care father in Pruett’s study employed what seemed to be a practiced, matter-of-fact way of reproaching the boy. With a few quick words from father, the boy appeared to understand that he would need to adjust to his “real” world.

  These boys with an extra dose of dad also seem to be more relaxed about gender roles, feeling less afraid to bend traditional rules about masculinity while maintaining a confident sense of self. Apparently because their fathers had such a strong and consistent presence in their lives, they were more sure of themselves as boys and thus felt freed from wearing gender straitjackets. When this set of boys in Pruett’s study was in preschool, for instance, they seemed to be equally comfortable staying in the dol
l corner with the girls or playing in the block room with the boys. Also, as they grew up they were able to keep girls as close friends, not needing to exclude them from “all-guy play.” One middle-school boy remarked: “I love to see the ways boys and girls talk about stuff in different ways. . . . It’s just neat.”

  This impressive maturity and flexibility about gender didn’t seem to cloud these boys’ clear sense of identity. “As a group,” Pruett explains, “they tend to be more in touch with who they are . . . [and have a sense of] self-assurance of being accepted for who they really are.” So, quite to the contrary of our myths about boys and men—especially the myth that so much male “rubbing together” would somehow create fires of toxic aggression—boys with fathers as the primary parents may actually be much more calm, flexible, and empathic than boys without this extra dose of dad.

  ACTIVE FATHERS, LUCKY SONS—THE WIN-WIN BENEFITS OF FATHERING

  If one piece of good news is that active, loving fathers have a lifelong positive impact on their sons’ development, and that fathers as primary parents seem to raise eminently well-adjusted, self-confident boys, another is that these loving men themselves seem to derive ample benefits from their endeavors as fathers. Just as nurturing, generative fathering offers a powerful alternative to the limited love and support boys tend to experience in their outside emotional lives, research now shows that being such a father also has substantial positive repercussions for the men themselves. In our study, fathers who could give their sons even a small portion of the kind of caring, time, and love they had longed for from their own dads—but often did not receive—got a great personal emotional boost of self-esteem. They were giving something to the next generation of boys—a legacy—and repairing something from their own boyhood simultaneously. It was a second chance for male-based caring and love.

  One father described it this way: “Being a . . . [father] has helped me get away from a self-centeredness. My sense of identity feels complete now.”

  Another father who had received very little love from his own dad explained: “Getting up to change my son’s diaper in the middle of the night . . . it makes me feel like a hero.”

  And as a third father—whose own workaholic dad was “never home while I was awake as a child”—said after he had made the decision to work three-quarters time: “I feel like something empty inside has now been filled with my son. At least my child will know his father!”

  My research shows that in taking their sons’ emotional development seriously, active fathers not only satisfy their longing to do better for their sons than their own fathers did for them, but also bond with their wives in a new and different way—sharing a task for too long considered feminine, valuing it together, and putting their own masculine value-added spin on it as well. Their wives tend to see them as more relaxed and loving, and their sons have the positive experience of observing dad—an adult male—enjoying what society often tags as “girls’ or women’s work.” And in families where dad is both present and participative, there are generally more hugs and play.

  But I believe that no matter how influential the scientific research, no matter how meaningful its impact on the psychological development of one’s son, the fact of becoming a sensitive, playful, outgoing father—a different kind of dad—is ultimately mediated by a father’s “generativity”—the pure psychological pull that fathers feel toward their sons. This is a way that nature has of joining the need many men have to experience the “selfish joy” of being a nurturing father with their immense natural capacity to love and support their sons and thus to provide abundantly for the next generation of men.

  The confluence of these fatherly drives—of feeling the intense need to love and generously offering that love—can work out quite well. Not only does nurturant fathering help boys develop intellectually and improve their later academic and professional performance, and not only does it provide a second chance for adult men to break through their own gender straitjackets, but such loving fathering—such “masculine success”—also appears to redound to the father’s benefit in other important ways. My research shows that loving fathers—especially those with the capacity to balance their sons’ need for autonomy (by letting their boys roughhouse, show aggression, handle tasks on their own) with their need for affiliation (by staying involved in their boys’ play, intervening when their boys become too rambunctious or break family rules, and encouraging relational ties to family life)—were also the dads who were more successful at work. In other words, success at home with the boys also predicted professional success.

  This of course makes sense, since the “new” workplace—just like the “new” two-parent family—is known to demand less hierarchical, more flexible, interpersonal styles for achievement. One succeeds these days with empathic skills that support colleagues and staff and leadership capacities that subordinate self-interest to the goals of the team—all the skills honed by nurturant dads. I’ve even quipped that generative dads may be the best executives we can find in the next century and that perhaps fathers should request letters of recommendation from their sons! Professor Snarey’s interpretation of the long-term Glueck study found similar results: “Having been active fathers in raising their sons, these men,” according to Snarey, “are better managers, shop stewards, mentors—concerned with the . . . [next] . . . generation. This contributes to the life of society and to the survival value of their own particular family.” In addition, these generative fathers of the Glueck study had greater marital stability and experienced greater happiness in middle age. Having successfully negotiated the Sturm und Drang of their sons’ adolescence—remaining connected to the teenage boys despite their adolescent struggles and a tendency to push dad away—these fathers enjoyed better promotions at the workplace, as well as the satisfaction of ongoing involvement as coaches and civic leaders. Indeed, in a large-scale research study on dual-earner couples by Barnett and Marshall at Wellesley College, fathers’ positive relationships with their children was also the best predictor of the men’s physical health.

  There appears to be an important payback system here, a two-way street. When fathers invest early in nurturing their sons and keep at it throughout adolescence and adulthood, not only will their boys be better off emotionally and intellectually, but they, as fathers, will feel enhanced self-esteem, enjoy a critical second chance for father-son bonding, and receive the bonus of increased marital satisfaction and of greater personal and professional success.

  FATHERING PIONEERS

  Men from all walks of life, all social classes, backgrounds, races, and religions are struggling to be generative, connected fathers, to be a new “different” kind of parent. For instance, at the age of forty-nine, Jeffrey Seiler resigned as president of American Express to spend time with his children. Father of four, he let go of one of the most prestigious jobs in the United States to become more of a dad. When he was interviewed six months later, Mr. Seiler was still working hard as a consultant, but could be home “sixty percent more time,” having more dinners with his kids, meeting their teachers and feeling “much more engaged in their lives.”

  And it’s never too late. Glenn McCloud, manager of a Canadian bank, felt he had been away from his sons too much when they were young. So one day he decided that he’d take a full “workday” off per week to be with his boys, now teenagers. He even became active as their Boy Scout leader. In the years that followed, McCloud saw his relationships with his sons grow in strength, and felt better about himself as a father and a man.

  Robert Reich, former U.S. labor secretary, discussed his priorities this way when he left his powerful post to be more active as a father: “There will be ample opportunities for me to sink myself 200 percent into another job. But there will never be another opportunity to be a father to a twelve-year-old and a fifteen-year-old.”

  Peter Lynch, a successful mutual funds manager at Fidelity, explained that even though he shocked the business community with his resignation from
his job, he received “hundreds and hundreds” of letters from other men supporting his actions. Ultimately, too, his decision was deeply personal. On his forty-sixth birthday, “I remembered that my father died when he was forty-six.” He recalled the old adage made famous recently by the late Senator Paul Tsongas: “That no man on his deathbed ever said: T wish I had spent more time at the office!’ ” This change in life also shook loose Peter Lynch’s own father hunger as a motivator to new fathering. His father died when Lynch was only ten: “I have . . . [only] a vague picture of him. He was always a very busy man, a math professor . . . then a senior auditor . . . I didn’t get to do anything with my father. We never went camping or climbed a mountain together. I remember meeting him at the train sometimes and walking with him. . . . Maybe that’s why I take so many photos, because I don’t even have any pictures of him with the family.”

  Charles McDuffie, a divorced African American man who became estranged from his wife and lost contact with his own son, takes part annually in a father-and-son Father’s Day March in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He explains: “I decided to march . . . because I want to assume my duties as a father but cannot be with my son. I think I should help other people’s kids as much as I can because somebody may be helping mine.” An eighteen-year-old, Wesley Braithwaite, marches beside him to show that young African American males want to feel connected to their fathers and the community: “I’m marching on behalf of my neighborhood . . . the crime . . . I want people to see that we all don’t have guns in our hands.”

  Curtis Jones has a sandwich in his hand. Taking part in a special annual Father’s Lunch at his sons’ elementary school, he explains, “More fathers should participate in their children’s education. It’s about time . . . [our sons] . . . see their fathers as heroes, just as they see sports figures.” Co-owner of a small pest-control firm, he adjusts his hours to spend time coaching and reading to the kids at school. The school’s principal, a woman, talks about the importance of a male presence: “We want these men to know the important role they have in their children’s lives and how crucial it is to have male role models in a child’s [early] education.”