Enough About Mothers Already! What About Dads?

My hobbies are writing (my work is a hobby), traveling to interesting places with my wife (e.g., Czech Republic, Croatia), trying to get back to the 3-handicap I had at sixteen, daydreaming of being a rock star, and writing rock ‘n’ roll songs (ones that make people stand up and shake like Prince William at a Taylor Swift concert) for my first album when I become a rock star.

So, I was thinking about this week’s essay – the topic of which I shall reveal momentarily – and for some reason Don McLean’s “American Pie” popped into my head (let’s face it, one may not like it all that much, but McLean wrote the most insistent earworm of the Twentieth Century). My brain smashed the two things together and out came… sing it!

It’s too bad, the American Dad

Drove his children to their hobbies

But they all were a drag

His kids are all brats

But he can’t give ‘em back

And this may be the day that he cracks

Yes, this may be the day that he cracks

I’m working on it. In the meantime, I have a theory about American masculinity: Lots of men bought into their demonization by the feminazis in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Hook, line, and sinker, they swallowed the lie being blared through the usual leftie loudspeakers that there was something fundamentally wrong with being male and determined to become un-male.

An un-male is an un-dude. He doesn’t own a gun, for one thing, or if he does, he doesn’t have enough ammo to last ten minutes in a war. His favorite pop stars are Cher and Adele. Get the picture? The un-dude’s greatest impact on American culture, however, has been in parenting, where he is determined to not follow in his father’s footsteps. For reasons he cannot clearly articulate, his father – who never abused alcohol, drugs, or women and was an honored employee – is not his role model. When it comes to his kids, for example, the un-dude eschews the role of disciplinarian. He wants to be his children’s best friend, doncha know. When he gets home from work, he builds LEGO models with his kids until suppertime. Weekends in the un-dude’s family are completely child-oriented.

The un-dude and his wife have an arrangement they arrived at when they realized they weren’t on the same parenting page. She makes all parenting decisions. She may consult with the un-dude on occasion, but rarely gives more than a cursory nod to his opinion. He doesn’t want to discipline (“I don’t want the kids to associate me with punishment”), so his wife handles that, which means she yells a lot.

In their home, the un-dude’s wife is the authority figure, the all-purpose Decider, and the REAL parent. He is a “parenting aide,” and like a teacher’s aide is not a REAL teacher, the parenting aide is not a REAL parent. He is there to follow instructions and fill in for the REAL parent when she needs a break. In short, his job is to “help” and he dutifully respects the boundaries his wife has described for him.

 In 1994, David Blankenhorn published one of the most prescient books of the century: Fatherless America (Basic Books, $22.88). Blankenhorn raised an alarm it’s taken America three decades to wake up to, but he also proposed that the “fatherless home” included the home in which the father strived for a mutually-rewarding relationship with his kids and was sensitive to their “emotional languages.” In the family of that description, Blankenhorn said, the father was actually a second mother.

There’s lots of conversation these days about the fatherless home. What Blankenhorn introduced into the conversation is what I call the “husband-less home”—a home where dad is so caught up in being the best dad he can be that he has forgotten what a husband is supposed to act like.

One symptom of the husband-less home is the joke. A person asks a woman how many children she has and with her husband standing but several feet away mind you, she includes him in the count. It is, hands down, the single most sexist joke ever invented, but the joke contains a latent message that men need to begin contemplating.

If the American family is going to be pulled back from the edge of the precipice on which it now stands, men are going to have to do it. God has assigned them leadership of their families. A man cannot lead his family from the role of dad.

How hard can it be for a grown man to tell his kids, “I love you, but I’m not your friend”?

Very, apparently.

Copyright 2024, John K. Rosemond