Item from the Smart Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics Collection

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The Washington Post, Outlook section, first page
Close, But No Cigar

By Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

Sunday, June 18, 2000

A couple of months ago, amid the Elian Gonzalez controversy, U.S.
Attorney General Janet Reno issued a remarkable statement on the nature of
fatherhood. The United States, she told a news conference, is a nation
"whose law and whose very moral foundation recognize that there is a
bond, a special, wonderful, sacred bond between father and son . . . ."

A tender sentiment? Sure. A true description? Hardly. Reno's statement is
remarkable chiefly because of how thoroughly at odds it is with
fatherhood as we now know it.

America no longer has a "special" model of fatherhood--let alone one
buttressed by legal, moral and religious opinion. In a well-intentioned
effort to
make up for vanishing fathers and disintegrating families, and to give
support to the legions of foster fathers and stepfathers and mentors and
Big
Brothers and role models out there, American law and civil society have
diluted the concept of fatherhood until it is almost unrecognizable. What
began as a conscientious response to a crisis is hardening into something
like the new status quo. We once saw sometime, part-time or
once-upon-a-time fathers as inadequate substitutes for a full-fledged
father; now we are selling ourselves on the idea that they are all kids
really
want or need.

Unfortunately, while fatherhood has changed, childhood has not. Children
still need love, protection, security and, perhaps most of all, stability
in
their lives. Many of the new varieties of fatherhood don't give that to
kids. They're too geographically remote, too emotionally distant, too
legally
fuzzy or circumscribed, or too fleeting to do so.

No one would dream of trying to convince children that their mother could
be replaced by several different kinds of mothers, all playing different
roles at different times in their lives. But that is exactly what we are
communicating to the many children whose fathers are absent, distant or
unknown.

Take a look at the Father's Day cards in any neighborhood drugstore.
There, alongside the classic greetings for fathers and stepfathers, are
cards
aimed at the alternative dads. For the last few years there have been
cards for children to send to fathers who don't live with them. They carry
sentiments like this one: I miss you more than ever Daddy, now that it's
Father's Day/and even though I'm too far away to hug you with my arms, I
just want you to know I'll be hugging you in my heart.

This year, at my local CVS, there are two new sections of Father's Day
cards. One is under a sign reading "Like a Father." The cards feature such
messages as: Just wanted to thank you for all the ways you've been a
daddy. The second section, poignantly labeled "Anybody," contains
greetings aimed at a generic good guy, including one Father's Day message
for the Good Man who spreads happiness everywhere he goes.
These cards suggest that Father's Day might be morphing into Positive
Male Role Model Day. There's even a Positive Male Role Model card for
Mom, A woman who's done all the things a father usually does.

You don't find a parallel range of Mother's Day greetings. Despite all
the dramatic changes in women's lives over recent decades, little has
occurred
to shake what Janet Reno might call the moral and legal foundations of
motherhood.

Consider how different the Elian case would have been if it had been the
boy's father who had died, and his mother who wanted him back. Few
would have questioned the mother's right to her shipwrecked son. To state
what is painfully apparent to many children today, the bond to a mother
is rock solid, but the bond to a father isn't.

Although both motherhood and fatherhood have both biological and
sociological dimensions, these dimensions are virtually fused in
motherhood,
especially during a child's early years. To an infant, a mother's body is
both life and food, nature and nurture. This isn't true of fatherhood.
Biologically, a father is a one-minute parent. (Consider sperm donors.)
Indeed, a man can become a father and be the last to know, sometimes
years after the fact.

What's more, his biological contribution does not naturally dictate his
sociological role. Sociological fatherhood is a lot like being a
designated driver.
Men can choose to take on the role and the effort it involves, either
through the institution of marriage or through other kinds of ties to the
mother and
her family--and they can also choose not to. Because of this more tenuous
connection, fatherhood is universally problematic. All societies face the
challenge of connecting biological and sociological fatherhood in some
fashion in order to make sure children are protected and supported over
time.

Within living memory, of course, there was a single prevailing model of
fatherhood in America. In it, a father was connected to his children by
three
ties. The first was blood, or its legal equivalent, adoption. The second
was a shared household with the mother of his biological or adopted
children. The third was marriage to the mother of these children. In this
model, marriage was the most important of the three because it bound the
other two ties together.

With the new dads, one or more--or even all--of these ties may be
missing. For example, some men have a blood tie to their children but have
never had a residential, marital, or any other meaningful tie to them.
Others have a blood tie to their children but are divorced from the
mother and
no longer share the children's primary residence. Still others are
married stepfathers who live with their wife and her biological children,
voluntarily
contribute to supporting and raising the children but have no blood tie
to them. A fast-growing father group includes cohabiting men who live with
the children but are not married to their mother; some have blood ties to
the kids but others are "stepfathers" who are unrelated. And then there
are
the exes--ex-stepfathers, ex-foster dads or ex-boyfriends--who have no
biological or legal tie to the children but once played some kind of
father
role in their lives. There are also the father figures--mentors, Big
Brothers, coaches, clergy--who have no biological, legal, marital or
residential tie to
the children.

This tangle of father types creates all kinds of problems over
nomenclature--what do you call the man who lived with your mother for a
while and
still comes by now and then to take you to ballgames?--which probably
explains why "Anybody" is a growing niche in greeting card market.

As marriage has faded, fatherhood has split along the seam between
biology and sociology. For example, the state defines the biological male
parent as the father, and if paternity is established--either voluntarily
by signing a birth certificate or involuntarily with a DNA test--he can be
compelled to support his child. Other forms of paternal support and
contact may be desirable, even encouraged, but nowhere does the state
require a biological father to do anything more than enter into a
financial arrangement. This is an essential but breathtakingly minimalist
model of
fatherhood. It defines daddy down to a name on a birth certificate and a
signature on a child-support check.

Other segments of the society, from families to churches to child
advocates, define fatherhood functionally as the provision of constancy,
caring and
affection. Men other than a biological father--stepfathers, co-habiting
fathers, unrelated cohabiting partners, neighbors and male relatives and
friends--can play the role of the social father. So can male mentors who
are not romantically involved with the child's mother but volunteer for
the
role of social father out of the goodness of their hearts.

In a best-case scenario, you can patch together both kinds of fathers and
come close to meeting the requirements of full-fledged fatherhood. A
biological father contributes money and perhaps some time; a sociological
father or two picks up the slack. And, indeed, for some fortunate
children, a combination of fathers adds up to more paternal time, money,
and attention, not less.

But face it--in many more cases, these attempts to attach children to a
variety of fathers aren't panning out. Fathers are now increasingly less
likely
to live with their biological children--35 percent of children today live
apart from their biological fathers. And when they live apart, the
father's
involvement tends to diminish over time. As for the idea that we can
replace biological fathers with father-surrogates, it's a comforting
notion but
recent experience suggests just how hard it is to pull off. Mentoring
programs are particularly struggling to keep pace with growing caseloads
of
fatherless boys, a task requiring endless recruitment campaigns,
background checks and training sessions and still falling short.

As it turns out, finding and keeping a father for every child who lacks
one is a tall order. It takes money and lavish amounts of effort and
invention--not to mention DNA tests, hospital birth registration
programs, child support orders, visitation agreements, public service
announcements and community fatherhood campaigns--to scrape together what
are still more term-limited and fleeting forms of fatherhood.

But more than anything else, this project of trying to cobble together
one father from several kinds of daddies is contrary to what kids want and
need. Anyone who raises children knows that they are natural social
conservatives. They like order (except perhaps in their bedrooms),
stability,
constancy, permanence and the security of having fathers worry about them
rather than having the reverse responsibility of worrying about their
father. And as much as they may benefit from and enjoy their
relationships with other male role models, they aren't likely to confuse
coaches or
mentors with a "real dad." Retrograde as it may sound, most kids still
want one father who fulfills multiple roles all of the time rather than
several
fathers who fulfill a few roles some of the time. But today, too many
kids have to content themselves with a kind of fatherhood that is as
paper-thin
as the sentiment on a Father's Day greeting card.

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project at
Rutgers University, writes frequently on family issues.


© 2000 The
Washington Post Company

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