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This, a companion post to Ideal Motherhood and Modern America, draws again from The New York Times. In initially combing the online archive for articles on which to base this essay, I had two realizations:

  1. There are fewer fatherhood-focused articles than motherhood-focused articles (or, at least, fewer articles published in The New York Times). Moreover, of the fatherhood-focused articles available, some dealt not with the experience of being a father so much as how that experience affected or influenced other parts of a man’s life, such as his earning potential.
  2. There are more fatherhood-focused articles written by women than there were motherhood-focused articles written by men. A few were good reads [1], but I wanted perspectives on fatherhood from men and fathers, just as I had sought perspectives on motherhood from women and mothers for the previous essay.

Why the discrepancy in representation? I suspect that it is somewhat related to the greater association of womanhood with motherhood than manhood with fatherhood and/or to the lesser conversation had about fatherhood overall. According to one author, referencing a 2005 review, about 50% of the literature on child and adolescent psychology from 1997 to 2005 made no mention of fathers and, prior to 1970, less than 20% of the research on parent-child bonding accounted for the male parent [2].

In the end, I had seven articles to work with, a mix of personal accounts and reviews of others’ experiences:

Views on Fatherhood

Fourteen years passed between Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004) and the sequel, aptly named The Incredibles 2 (2018). Fun and nostalgic, I’ll admit that I didn’t like The Incredibles 2 as much as the original overall, but individual elements were excellent [3]. One that I especially liked was the solo parenting time that Bob Parr, aka Mr. Incredible, had with his children Violet, Dash, and Jack-Jack. He takes on this responsibility when his spouse Helen Parr, aka Elastigirl, is called back to the field to help Winston and Evelyn Deavor, a brother-sister business team in the former’s desire to see superheroes made legal again. (In The Incredibles, superheroes are outlawed after a heroic but catastrophic mini-adventure by Mr. Incredible at the beginning of the movie.)

The bumbling father is a standard trope of American television. We have Wayne Szalinski in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), Homer Simpson of The Simpsons (1989-forever), Coraline’s father in the stop-motion horror film Coraline (2009), and Phil Dunphy in Modern Family (2009-2020). Another trope is the strong, stoic, and silent father, like Stoick the Vast in the How to Train Your Dragon series (2010, 2014) [4], Tim Lockwood in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009), and Massimo Marcovaldo in Luca (2021). I don’t name these tropes to condemn them, but to draw attention, through a sample of media, to how some fathers have been recently interpreted.

These two views are expressed by the authors of our NYT articles, either in observing their own fathers or in processing the cultural conversation surrounding fatherhood. On fathers as the less competent parent, Dedan Bruner, an attorney and writer, reflects on the lower expectations placed on fathers compared to mothers. “The bulk of the nurturing, and most of what we consider ‘raising’ a child,” he observes, “is said to be the work of mothers. Dads ‘provide,’ give the occasional bit of ‘fatherly wisdom’ and do all the ‘outside stuff,’ like camping” [5]. 

It’s thought that parenting just comes more naturally to women than to men and, moreover, that mothers are more emotionally suited to it. Long-time NYT columnist Frank Bruni speaks to the schooling he received as a child about the differences between mothers and fathers:

A mother’s love was supposedly automatic, unconditional. A father’s love was earned. Mothers nurtured, tending to tears. Fathers judged, prompting them.

And while mothers felt pressure to lavish time and affection on their children, fathers could come and go. As long as they did their part as providers, the rest was negotiable.

Frank Bruni, “Building a Better Father” (The New York Times, April 9, 2016)

These assumptions about fathers, alongside other social forces, have the not-uncommon effect of socializing men to play a marginal parental role [6].

This is where I like the depiction of Bob Parr in The Incredibles 2. When Helen leaves, each of the children has a problem for Bob to untangle: Violet’s love interest Tony Rydinger doesn’t remember her, thanks to a memory wipe done by Bob’s lawyer to protect Violet’s superhero identity; Dash is struggling in mathematics; and Jack-Jack is discovering that he has a bucketful of superpowers, including laser vision and self-duplication.

Bob struggles to parent without Helen at the start; in The Incredibles, we see that Helen is a stay-at-home parent while Bob works outside the home. In the first movie, Helen has to holler for Bob’s help when Violet and Dash are squabbling at the dinner table. Presumably, Bob has less hands-on parenting time with the children, so he hasn’t “trained” as much as Helen, the primary caregiver.

However, The Incredibles 2 doesn’t go the forever-incompetent-father route. Bob eventually hits a rhythm. It’s rough going at first not because he’s a father, but because he hasn’t had to parent Violet, Dash, and Jack-Jack to the degree that Helen has.

A few of the contributors, in addition to acknowledging the common view of fatherhood as a marginal role, admit that their view of fatherhood was further colored, often negatively, by the interactions with their fathers. Bruner’s father, for instance, was largely absent from his life; he had early on separated from his mother and started a new family [7]. The story of an absent or neglectful father was echoed by Lamont Chandler, whose father was not present at all for his father; by Tim Cullinan, whose father up and left for the airport one day and never returned; and Lee Fennimore, whose memories of his father are few and vague [8].

For another example, Nick Flynn, American writer, playwright, and poet, explains that he approached the idea of parenthood with caution because of the “complicated relationships” his mother and father had with being parents [9]. Specifically, Flynn’s mother left his father shortly after his birth on account of his alcoholism, which eventually led his father to incarceration and homelessness.

Experiences of Fatherhood

There was a remark I heard sometime ago about Mother’s Day messages versus Father’s Day messages (and I paraphrase): On Mother’s Day, mothers are praised. On Father’s Day, fathers are preached to. For one, it’s “You’re doing great;” for the other, it’s “You need to do better” [10]. The injustice of these messaging differences aside, across these articles the men with children expressed a commitment to being more involved in their children’s day-to-day lives. 

For men who barely knew their fathers, like Lamont Chandler, it was important that they were not only present for their children, but also that their children knew who they were [11]. Bruni remarks that men in general, compared to previous generations, are spending more time examining their paternal feelings and failings, wrestling “soulfully with what kind of father he is and means to be” [12].

While men face continued pressure to excel in their work lives [13], there is a growing expectation for men to make room in their professional lives for their children [14]. For Erik Vance, an award-winning science journalist, making room meant completely flipping his career focus. When his wife was expecting their first child, a son, he swore that fatherhood wouldn’t change him; he would keep at his environmental journalism and exploring, and this kid would have to adapt to his lifestyle.

Vance came to discover, though, that life couldn’t return “to normal” upon the birth of his son because his field of priority had shifted. While his son did not, in fact, adapt to his adventuring lifestyle, “he didn’t stop me from exploring. He showed me a whole new world of stories to discover. My life has swiveled from a constant search for inspiration to a constant effort to inspire the little person I helped make” [15].

In addition to this change in expectations is an expansion of opportunity. One example is baby formula. Nathaniel Popper, finance and technology writer for The New York Times, veers off his usual column course to share his experience bottle-feeding his infant son. His wife had tried breastfeeding, but the milk supply was insufficient and, after much consultation and machine pumping, they decided that their son needed formula. A source of distress at first (were they failing as parents?), Popper came to appreciate what the formula enabled him to do.

While commercial infant formula has existed in some form since the 1860s, not until the 1950s in the United States did the chemical understanding of human breast milk become refined enough to formulate a recipe that met all nutritional requirements [16]. During the twentieth century, there was tension between marketers of infant formula and proponents of breastfeeding, particularly in the 1970s through 1990s. Since then, the rate of formula use has increased, indicated by statistics on breastfeeding: about 90% of U.S. women in the twentieth century compared to 42% in the twenty-first [17].

Pre-formula, Popper remembers that, when his son cried in the night, his wife was the first to respond, on the assumption that the boy was hungry. Since transitioning to formula, Popper also moves automatically toward his son when he cries. “Now, I was just as capable of feeding him as she was,” he explains, and this gives him greater agency and confidence in parenting [18]. Because of this additional, intimate time he has with his son through bottle-feeding, Popper also notices that he has become more in tune with his boy’s rhythms and needs.

Accompanied by this cultural shift for fathers as parents – or, perhaps, prompted by it – is recent research in sociology, psychology, and other humanities subjects on the importance of fathers in the development of a child’s well-being, expounded on in works like journalist Paul Raeburn’s Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We’ve Overlooked (2015). On the book’s conclusions, one writer summarizes:

[F]athers matter most, of course, in childhood, when the seeds of many future traits are planted. Mr. Raeburn quotes a wealth of studies linking paternal involvement to a child’s intellectual, emotional and social development. Children who grow up feeling loved and nurtured by their fathers, he notes, have comparatively higher self-esteem and are at a lower risk of developing mental illness later in life. A caring father, many researchers have suggested, is as important as a loving mother to a child’s long-term welfare.

Alex Stone, “In Defense of Indispensable Dad” (The New York Times, July 14, 2014)

Conclusion
It remains the case in the U.S. that the “involved father” is a person who garners much comment while the “involved mother” is taken as a given. As evolving definitions of masculinity make room for caretaking and nurturing by fathers and research demonstrates more and more the pivotal role that fathers play, the view of fatherhood – what it is, means, and entails – is adjusting and expanding. The authors of these New York Times columns demonstrate this in telling their parenthood stories and comparing and contrasting them with memories of their fathers growing up [19]. To quote one of the parents, Dedan Bruner, in closing: “Being there and being engaged matter most” [20].

Footnotes
  1. See, for example, “Andy Cohen Is Tired of Being ‘Dad Shamed’ by ‘Momsplainers’” (March 16, 2019), by Elizabeth Holmes; and “Don’t Call Him Mom, or an Imbecile” (February 23, 2013), by Hannah Seligson.
  2. Stone, Alex. “In Defense of Indispensable Dad.” The New York Times, July 14, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/science/in-defense-of-indispensable-dad.html. 
  3. This opinion has not, of course, kept me from re-watching The Incredible 2 more than once.
  4. He doesn’t communicate with his son Hiccup much in the first movie, at least.
  5. Bruner, Dedan K. “‘What Kind of Father Will You Be?’” The New York Times, April 18, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/parenting/what-kind-of-father-will-you-be.html. 
  6. Stone (2014).
  7. Bruner (2020).
  8. Pappu, Sridhar. “Three Former Skater Boys Confront Fatherhood.” The New York Times, May 1, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/fashion/mens-style/fathers-parenting-skateboarding.html.
  9. Flynn, Nick. “Across the Threshold of Fatherhood.” The New York Times, June 18, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/fashion/20Love.html. 
  10. Similar: Jon Acuff, “The Wild Difference Between a Mother’s Day Sermon and a Father’s Day Sermon” (Stuff Christians Life, June 22, 2010), https://stuffchristianslike.net/2010/06/22/the-wild-difference-between-a-mothers-day-sermon-and-a-fathers-day-sermon/. 
  11. Reminds me of the line from the 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness: “…my children were gonna know who their father was.”
  12. Bruni, Frank. “Building a Better Father.” The New York Times, April 9, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/opinion/sunday/building-a-better-father.html.
  13. Parker, Kim, Juliana Menasce Horowitz & Renee Stepler. “2. Americans see different expectations for men and women.” Pew Research Center, December 5, 2017.  https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/12/05/americans-see-different-expectations-for-men-and-women/. 
  14. Vance, Erik. “Becoming a Dad Meant Losing My Edge.” The New York Times, June 18, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/parenting/fathers-day-identity.html. 
  15. Vance (2020).
  16. Greenfield, Beth. “The fascinating — and controversial — history of baby formula.” Yahoo! Life, May 20, 2022. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/fascinating-history-of-baby-formula-231353714.html. 
  17. Stevens, Emily, Thelma Patrick & Rita Pickler. “A History of Infant Feeding.” The Journal of Perinatal Education, vol. 18, no. 2 (2009): 32-39. https://doi.org/10.1624%2F105812409X426314. 
  18. Popper, Nathaniel. “What Baby Formula Does for Fathers.” The New York Times, February 23, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/opinion/sunday/formula-breastfeeding-fatherhood.html. 
  19. For non-anecdotal evidence, see Livingston, Gretchen & Kim Parker, “8 facts about American dads” (Pew Research Center, June 12, 2019), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/12/fathers-day-facts/; and Taylor, Paul, Kim Parker, Rich Morin, D’Vera Cohn & Wendy Wang, “The New American Father” (Pew Research Center, June 14, 2013), https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2013/06/FINAL_Fathers_report.pdf. 
  20. Bruner (2020).