The Life of Dad

by Anna Machin

  Jack is a 6-year-old boy and this excerpt is from a poem called ‘Following Father’. Researchers don’t know who wrote it, but we do know it was published in an English temperance journal in the late 1800s, towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, when fathers were significantly more hands-off than today. But despite not joining in the bathing and dressing, feeding and soothing, this poem makes it clear that Victorian society’s vision of the ideal father still had at its core the idea that fathers should shape their children into morally upstanding members of the world. To convey a set of fundamental life lessons that were crucial in a world where even piano legs were a bit too risqué to be on general view. The quotes from fathers that have filled this chapter show this wish still motivates dads today. If you are a father, then regardless of where you live it is likely that you, like John, who shares his aspirations below, want to influence who your children become by communicating values, broadening their life experience and being their role model for life.

  I think what is important is creating an environment in which [my son] feels secure to make good decisions and think things through properly. But it is difficult. How do you help shape an individual so they are prepared to live on their own? So that they know that there is safety if they make wrong choices, that it’s not the end of the world, but that they have to go through the process of coming to their own decisions? My job is guiding, influencing . . . being someone that he will turn to for advice.

  John, dad to Joseph (six months)

  But within some modern societies, the need for a father to set an example and transmit these values is fundamental not only to their child’s success but also, possibly, their survival. All fathers are involved in the socialization of their children; passing on their values and perspectives with respect to the world in the hope that their child will be better fitted to succeed in it. They achieve this through talking, teaching and modelling good behaviours and beliefs. But for some groups of fathers, the desire to do this is grounded in the knowledge that their child will inevitably experience a particular life hurdle, which, if not traversed correctly, could send them on a downward trajectory, even threaten their survival.

  In their 2016 paper, ‘Don’t Wait for It to Rain to Buy an Umbrella’, a team of American social workers, psychiatrists and behavioural scientists, led by Otima Doyle, reported on the conversations they had had with Afro-American fathers of pre-adolescent sons. They interviewed thirty fathers and asked them to respond to the question ‘What values do you aim to instil in your son?’ Their responses, covering themes such as culture, education, responsibility and respect, were overwhelmingly informed by their understanding that the world’s response to their sons would be impacted by their race. From their own life experience, they understood that their sons would be subjected to racism and harassment, and they felt it was their duty to school them in the correct and most constructive response to these incidents. They emphasized that there was a need to furnish their sons with a set of tools to manage racism and to make them understand that they would have to work harder and achieve more than the white guy next to them to prove the racial stereotype wrong. In the words of one father, ‘ . . . the path is hard . . . And we’ll have to also let him know that he’s gonna have to work harder than the other person beside him. And their expectation is that you do not know how to talk. We do not know how to act and behave. And just make sure he knows, you can have your fun, you can talk slang . . . but there is a time and place for it.’ But alongside these doses of harsh reality, there was a real desire to encourage sons to have pride in their heritage and to use it as a motivation to be better. Reggie described telling his son about the history of black struggle within the US: ‘ . . . they died and fought for both you and I. And so it would desecrate them if you fall short of anything other than being a man and who you are, particularly, a black man . . . not only [do] you owe yourself, but you owe them as well. So, stand up and be a man.’

  For these Afro-American fathers, their job was not only to bring up a son who was fully able to succeed in the outside world but to nurture and support a man who could fight the long-held stereotypes and be a proper and true figurehead for their entire ethnic group. Ultimately, as with all dads, these fathers wanted to produce an adult child who was a hard worker, had strong self-worth, respect for others and could be proud of what they achieved in life. Despite many of them not completing school, they instilled in their children the benefits of education, the need to be exposed to many different experiences and the power of formal education as a key to freedom. They wanted them, through both formal and informal education, to escape the bounds of their neighbourhood and become responsible and independent members of society. They just knew that to do this they, as fathers, had an added responsibility to furnish their sons with a set of values and life skills that equipped them to navigate an, at times, difficult and unfair world.

  The majority of academic work on dads and education focuses on the biological father. But as we know from previous chapters, a father is not necessarily defined by his genetic relatedness to the child he nurtures. Indeed, due to cultural practices or life circumstance, a significant number of children grow up without the involvement of their biological father in their life. Who then provides the necessary scaffolding to support these children on their educational journey towards adulthood?

  In 1998, Rebekah Coley was a graduate student from the University of Chicago. She wanted to explore how important biological and social fathers were in the education of the children of single-mother households. She could have gone down the usual route of asking mum or sitting in a corner and observing the family’s daily life, but instead she did something very simple. She asked the child. She gathered together 111 8–10-year-old children, both boys and girls, and asked them to list all the people in their life to whom they were especially close. She then asked them a series of twenty-one questions about their interactions with these people, such as who teaches you, who disciplines you and who takes you out to have fun. Children were allowed to pick as many people as they wanted in answer to each question. Finally, she assessed the children’s behaviour in school and gathered data about their academic attainment.

  What Rebekah found was that, beyond the biological father, none of the children listed more than one other man with whom they had a close relationship, and in the majority of cases, this was their mum’s boyfriend. But these men had a significant impact on the child’s life. While it was the non-resident biological father who had more impact on his child’s academic achievements – and remember, mum has the same impact as dad here – where a social father was actively involved in the regulation of a child’s behaviour, the child demonstrated much better behaviour at school. Despite not being biologically related to the child, these men took on the established fathering role of scaffolding the child’s psychological and behavioural development, allowing them to get the most out of their time at school.

  Coley’s work, and that of others, such as Rukmalie Jayakody, who look at the impact of social fathers in Western families, is important because it acknowledges that there is life beyond the biological dad, particularly in single-mother households. This can be a hard issue for biologically orientated Western minds to grasp, where it is common for biological dad still to be labelled as the ‘real’ father and the social father to be seen as very much the second choice, the reserve option. But just because a child is not brought up by a biological father, this does not mean they do not have a father in their life. Indeed, while it is often accepted that the lower developmental attainments of children from single-mother families is a result of a lack of a male role model, such conclusions often overlook the role of social fathers. Jayakody knows that, particularly within the Afro-American families that make up his study population, the regular absence of the biological father is often counterbalanced by a team of social fathers whose daily presence allows them to pass on vital values and morals, provide educational books and outings and support the mother
in her role. These men can be a boyfriend or partner, an uncle, grandfather or close male friend. What both Jayakody and Coley know is that the father as educator comes in many guises.

  * * *

  Yes, we are learning with Joseph and that is changing all the time, but then you can’t really apply that same learning to the second one because you’re still learning as they grow up. I guess there are the general parenting skills you pick up, but then [there is the question of] how you apply that to different ages and characters. The learning doesn’t come to an end.

  John, dad to Joseph (four) and Leo (two)

  This chapter is entitled ‘The School of Dad’, but it could quite easily have been called ‘The School for Dad’. The relationship between a father and their child is not one-way, from parent to child, but mutual, and this allows for the possibility that as a father influences his child’s development, so a child influences his father’s. Having children sets you on a course of learning that will last as long as your lifetime, as Dylan acknowledges:

  So, the whole parenting thing evolves day to day to day. I’m sure over the next several years there will be more, it will just be ongoing. The learning curve is not as steep as when you first have them, because it was so new and so different, and your life changed immeasurably at that point. There is still an incline, but it is less of a slope. I don’t think I am ever going to be able to put my feet up and say, ‘That’s my parenting job done.’

  Dylan, dad to Freddie (four)

  Many men see the transition to fatherhood as an opportunity to reassess their life, to up their game and reorder their priorities. But once their baby arrives, this process of change continues. The new fathers in my studies comment regularly on the lessons that being a parent has taught them; the value of patience, the power of living in the present and the acknowledgement that lack of sleep is, indeed, an effective form of torture. But these are all the indirect results of having a child. When your child tells you that your behaviour is embarrassing or that those trousers do not go with those shoes, they are directly asking you to change your behaviour or alter your opinion. And this input, welcome or not, will continue throughout your relationship and will become more significant the older your child gets, as they hone their skills of persuasion and coercion.

  Leon Kuczynski, Robyn Pitman, Loan Ta-Young and Lori Harach, from the University of Guelph in Canada, carried out a role reversal and assessed the influence that a group of 8–14-year-old children had on their parents’ development. They asked the thirty couples involved to reflect upon when they had taken on board requests for behavioural change from their children, what this request had been about and which skills or behaviours their children used to persuade them to change. Unsurprisingly, the lessons that children most often imparted to their parents were about fashion and music, health and safety, appropriate behaviour (largely related to not being cripplingly embarrassing in public) and values or beliefs. Parents were largely comfortable with receiving these lessons, more so as the child aged and was deemed to be more competent, and thought they were a valuable opportunity to reflect on their own behaviour and beliefs. Children used a range of techniques to get their parents to change, from thoughtful and eloquent argument to the tried and tested practice of incessant whining or nagging. And the power of your 8-year-old’s large pleading eyes to instigate change should not be underestimated. As one dad of a 10-year-old in Leon’s study put it, ‘What particularly caught my attention was . . . she did put [on] this rather important face and very serious tone in her voice. It was obvious that she was speaking from a position of authority, that she had something important to tell me. Her approach, her manner, made me listen intently.’ While another father was simply bowled over by his daughter’s oratorical skills: ‘ . . . [her] eloquence, her ability to be very descriptive and passionate about her feelings, about what she would see, what she would experience, what she would think . . .’ In being open to their children’s influence, these fathers were taking a step towards allowing their children to be that all-important independent being, the encouragement of which is central to dad’s role. They were showing their children that they respected their opinions, that they acknowledged the need for give and take in any relationship, regardless of the relative status of its members, and that their children were powerful and influential people within their relationship. By doing this, they were continuing the cycle of learning that flows between father and child but also raising their child’s self-esteem and firming up the foundations of their relationship for the long term.

  I think of some of the bad choices I have made in my life! And how difficult that must have been for my parents at times . . . How do you cope with that? How do you enable someone to make their own choices, even when that is hard for you to accept sometimes? I guess it is that tension between shaping an individual, wanting to see all of that good potential come to fruition, but also being nervous that there is only so much you can do. He is an individual who will have his own thoughts, so how can I be a helpful influence, but allow him to make his own decision? I think that must be one of the hardest things about being a parent. Caring enough but giving enough freedom [for him] to make his own choices and mistakes.

  John, dad to Joseph (six months)

  Debates about the extent to which intelligence is inherited continue to rage. But the influence of a father on their child’s knowledge and skills goes way beyond any genes he may provide. Both mothers and fathers contribute to the success or otherwise of their child’s formal education, but in this, as in so much else, their roles are complementary. Fathers have a specific role in modelling the behaviour, passing on the knowledge, boosting the self-belief and creating the environment in which the child can learn. And beyond the classroom, dads are there to provide the skills, beliefs and mindsets that are vital in empowering their children to ride the peaks and troughs of their life’s experience and remain mentally strong, hard-working and valuable members of society. And dads are not immune to receiving a lesson in personal grooming in return.

  CHAPTER TEN

  To Toddlerdom and Beyond

  Dad’s Role in Child Development

  For the vast, vast majority of human history, fathers were believed to have no influence on their child’s development. Their children’s verbal dexterity, athletic prowess, aptitude for music or creative flair were all believed to be solely the result of the strong and exclusive bond between mother and child; her influence alone was key. Obviously, biological dad contributed some genes, but the environment of development was seen to be the most important factor and this was the preserve of the mother as the source of continual care and nurture.

  As an evolutionary anthropologist, I find this scenario more than a little hard to swallow. It denies one of the basic rules of evolution: efficiency. Evolution is obsessed with efficiency; it is the grey-suited accountant of the natural world. It will try to reach its desired end point – always survival of the species – via the most efficient and cost-effective route available. But apparently humans were driven to solve their survival crisis by an incredibly complicated route; by creating the comparatively rare role of the hands-on dad. This meant fundamental changes in human cooperation, anatomy, mating behaviour and life history. Having largely managed to avoid each other, men and women suddenly had to cooperate on something other than sex, male brains had to evolve to teach and nurture, adults had to come to terms with a life course dominated by serial monogamy and the adolescent was born. And aren’t we all pleased about that? This was a massive upheaval and quite a risk. For our species to undergo such a significant change in biology and behaviour, and for evolution to drive these changes, the human father must have had something unique and life-critical to bestow upon his children. He must have a role in their development. In this chapter, I want to explore what that role is, both in the early stages of a child’s life and later, when he or she hits the bumpy road to adolescence. But before we get to that, we need to understand a little about the uni
que way humans organize their lives and why it is only human parents who have to deal with tantruming toddlers and monosyllabic teenagers.

  Energy is the currency of life and ‘life history’ is the term given to the way an individual invests this energy during their life course. All animals have a finite amount of energy to invest and they can do this within three loose areas: growth, maintenance and reproduction. How they choose to share their energy between these three categories will have a profound influence on their life course, including when they are weaned, when they first mate, how many offspring they have at a time, how big they will grow and how long they will live. For example, let’s take two animals at the opposite ends of the size spectrum: the silverback gorilla and the field mouse. We know that, as head of his harem of female gorillas, our silverback has to grow and maintain a massive body to control his group, fight off competing adult males and protect his females and offspring. This takes the majority of his available energy. But because he doesn’t invest in his children, beyond a bit of absent-minded play and the odd tolerated theft of his food, the amount he invests in actual reproduction is thankfully tiny; a few sperm. So, the majority of his lifetime’s stock of energy is invested in growth and maintenance, while only a tiny proportion is reserved for reproduction. In contrast, at the other end of the scale is the female field mouse. This tiny creature is capable of reproducing a mere ten days following her birth and her lifespan is one year at most. She invests very little in growth and maintenance, but her incredibly early age of sexual maturity and her ability to produce as many as fourteen offspring every thirty-five days means that she invests a massive proportion of her energy in reproduction. Unlike the gorilla, who can live until fifty-five in captivity, this little mouse epitomizes the adage ‘live fast, die young’. In contrast, despite the wish of some, who believe they have the soul of a reckless hedonist, our species is definitely on the silverback scale; a slow meander to old age, starting with a vastly extended childhood.