Commentary: Rethinking fatherhood
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| Published on Monday, June 22, 2009 |
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By Dr Isaac Newton
“Welcome to the fraternity of paternity,” were words of comfort that a close friend spoke, when I had given birth to a brand new season in my life. Up to that point, I had simply skirted around the thick forest of fatherhood. But I had not entered into its intriguing unknown.
With considerable urging, family and friends, many of whom had crossed the border from maleness into fatherhood, had listened to me ponder fatherhood responsibilities and anxieties, with refreshing exuberance and razor misunderstood wit.
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| Dr Isaac Newton is an international leadership and change management consultant and political adviser who specialises in government and business relations, and sustainable development projects. Dr Newton works extensively in West Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, and is a graduate of Oakwood College, Harvard, Princeton and Columbia. He has published several books on personal development and written many articles on economics, leadership, political, social, and faith-based issues. |
Their wisdom of the vastly different worlds that separated maleness from fatherhood, and the varied motivations that drive one and guide the other, was extraordinarily thought provoking, sometimes with lots of good, belly bearing jokes, yet always poignant.
To them, I had the making of a great father, but maleness with its competitive drive, its dinosaur desire for victories, its ambition for self-centered achievements, and its rough edges of toughness, had to be transformed by that divine appeal of selfless compassion-an ingredient that defines fatherhood at the core.
Unlike healthy mothers, who begin to care and connect with their offspring from the moment of conception, the route to becoming a father is paved with disturbingly painful emotions ranging from feelings of fear and a sense of intrusion to developing bonds of self sacrificial love.
This journey is not automatic. It is frightening and frustrating. But it could become an unforgettable experience, when fathers get involved in the daily tedium of changing diapers and spending sleepless nights to comfort the new born.
Fathers must be willing to give baths, participate in child play, feed, read to, sing for, hug, and guide the character development of their children so that they grow “ in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man”.
The way to a son’s heart and a daughter’s soul is through many small acts of kindness and consistent but simple bouts of loving discipline.
By so doing, fathers provide a model of manhood that their children can emulate. And this model must be grounded in selfless compassion riveted in spiritual ideals.
Selfless compassion is not a disembodied abstraction.
It is a radically different way of being a father. From this vantage point, children -- boys and girls -- are given the tools to become well adjusted individuals. They are also able to live meaningful lives and engage in uplifting behaviors that lead them to become honorable adults, successful professionals and effective citizens.
This ingredient—selfless compassion -- as I have seen in my dad, is best manifested when children are rebellious, when they put their dads in harm’s way, and when in sacrificial love, fathers confront their children’s waywardness with non judgmental counsel, gentle rebuke and, a critical but sympathetic call to live their destinies, as if nothing else matters in the world.
Yet the changing role of fatherhood seems much a part of men’s past without necessarily having the power to deny us a better future.
There was a time when fathers could get away with 30 percent involvement in their children’s lives while leaving the other 70 percent up to mothers. Those days are gone and gone forever, especially if fathers are willing to face the future with hearts tuned to raising strong and steady men, worthy of taking unto themselves virtuous wives and erecting healthy homes.
But no positive projection of a renewed future will lesson the pains of motherhood, unless men face squarely, the psychological enslavement, troubled legacy and intergenerational dysfunctions that pervade fatherhood especially within certain sections of the black community within and outside the Caribbean.
There is a need to find a midpoint analysis and appropriate forms of interventions that incorporates personal responsibility to irrevocably change fathers’ lot in life.
There is a greater need for a consciousness at the communal level, to combat socialized oppressive mindsets and histories of disempowerment that negatively confused so many fathers’ identities.
Or else many boys are going to continue to be victims of miserable existence unleashed by toxic fathering, and exploitative parenting. Yet, I think, positive role modeling is one relevant response to the plight of fathering.
Such role modeling reconciles the burdens of maleness with the imperatives of fathering from a posture of caring compassion.
Perhaps throughout the year, fathers should be seeking to correct the bitter cruelties, devastating blows, abusive tendencies, and brutal circumstances that they have often inherited and sometimes unknowingly perpetuated, and confront their individualized and collective failures, so that Fathers’ Day, ultimately prevails as an occasion to promote our victories, in the shadow of mourning our failures.
I am sure you know of many fathers who triumphantly donned the responsibilities of parenthood--walked with the shield of masculine faith, faced the harshest of challenges, willing to stand for their beliefs, and regardless of the price, produced wonderful children -- boys and girls. They have given us a rich heritage of parenting.
The courage and dedication of these fathers has inspired me to live a more conscious existence. Ultimately, I am convinced that the meaning bestowed to fathers, is what each man makes of it.
Proactively, one way of learning responsible fatherhood is to extract from our fathers and grandfathers all that is positive and decent about manhood and all that is necessary to support and compliment womanhood.
Being a great father also implies role modeling respect for women in general and our spouses in particular, to the point that fathers demonstrate the essence of spiritual leadership—which is, to die for the women and children that we love, without having to think twice about it.
This means that much needed time-out with the boys can not be at the expense of vital time-in with the family -- a temptation that too many fathers fall prey to.
In this selfless compassion model of fatherhood, neither abuse in any of its forms nor sexual predatory tendencies with all its false enticement is considered a justifiable excuse. These negative versions of socialized behaviors are self- destructive to holistic manhood, and must be flatly but bravely rejected by all men of substance.
Like demanding women, inspiring and impossible to dismiss, fatherhood combines the preposterous energies of maleness with the steady commitment and enlightened understanding that being a provider, requires much more than giving their offspring material plenty.
It demands a kind of vulnerable passion, which acknowledges that shared parenting is being emotionally available and psychologically in harmony with their children’s needs, in spoken words and exemplary deeds.
In the eyes of my father, his children felt his love, and knew that the life he gave us was the one he had taught us how to live. His maleness became our morning star, but his fatherly love was our high noon sun.
What I admire most in my dad is that he is a promise keeper. He is cherished for what he delivered as much as he is valued for his silence. He is fond of saying, “a word to the wise is forever sufficient but a book to a fool is eternally inadequate.”
Once I decided to challenge him, after he submitted his parental advice, “So what it is going to be son, a word or a book?” I said, “Dad, a book is full of many words, so I will choose both/and, instead of either/or.” He smiled, before dropping this insight on me, “Isaac it is a mind on a page that matters, not so much the words but the thoughts that drive them.”
Fatherhood is as essential to the growth of children as motherhood is critical to their wellness. Far too many men nurse relationship-destroying egos tied to masculine insecurities and far too many males are jailed behind iron bars because of negligence and or wayward decisions.
But the good news about the bad news is that just as many men have squared their shoulders, braved the storms of family life, and stared into eyes of their children without one thought of ever shaking their responsibility.
Most unfortunately, fatherhood is still viewed more readily through emptiness and brokenness than through masculine charm and love.
We need to accent countless stories that are ripe with images of fathers that nurtured and love, prayed for and played with their children. And show how fathers’ hopes were not denied because they found healthy models to merge the struggles of maleness with the challenges of fatherhood.
In a son and father setting earlier this year, when my dad reached his eighty third birthday, my brothers and I sat by his side with the knowledge that prostrate cancer had fully ravished his body, and that his doctors had given him limited time to live.
As he unburdened his soul, my brothers and I wished to catch legacy lasting nuggets of wisdom to be passed down to the next generation.
The dismal weather outside was no match for his cloaked but penetrating spirits. Yet in a moment of humor, my younger brother inquired about the secret of being a better father than he.
Dad remarked, “Sons, take all the errors I made and stay away from them, take all the good I did and improve them, if you want to teach your sons to become far better Newton-men than I was, strive to surpass the ideal father you wanted me to be.”
Afterwards we teased our brother that he had chosen a taller order than he was obviously ready for, by trying to box with dad. He shot back, “I asked the question not just for me but for you too as well.” Looking at us with serene seriousness, my younger brother said, “Did you guys get it?”
I wasn’t sure, if dad had given us a challenge to embrace in our daily lives, as opposed to an insight to be passed on to the next generation or both. But given the emotional texture of this occasion, I wasn’t up for a stirring debate.
Later in deep reflection, it dawned upon me that introspective determination, consciously designed to embody the ideals of manhood one day at a time, is, the secret for handing down to posterity, superior versions of fatherhood. This must be done through the sacred task of raising each child to be comfortable in the castles of their skin.
Quoting from the Best of Bits and Pieces, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen (A Third Serving of Chicken Soup for the Soul), share this wonderful image of fatherhood:
“Everyone needs recognition for his accomplishments, but few people make the need known quite as clearly as the little boy who said to his father: “Let’s play darts. I’ll throw and you say ‘Wonderful!’”
I know for sure that thinking about fatherhood on a daily basis, for the sole purpose of becoming the best father imaginable is an ideal worth honoring. It is an act of celebrating what it means to rethink fatherhood-- in sickness and in health—for better or for worse—for richer or for poorer.
Look into the mirror; are you the type of father you want your sons to become and the kind of man you want your daughters to marry? Even if your daughter brings home a young man ninety degrees south west of the man that you are, will she still be able to raise a successful family?
The father that you are and will become is likely to be the father that your son/s will become and the kind of male figure your daughter/s are likely to choose to father your grandchildren. Rethinking fatherhood is as personal as it is communal, as serious as it is spiritual, and as empowering as it is destructive.
My friend, Kem Tonge shared that he has experienced being a father as “the most exalted of all vocations—rivaled by none, unmatched by any…it is the most sobering responsibility of all, for a generation either rises or falls on it. It is the funnel for generational transfer of Godly approval.”
Happy Fathers’ Day to would be dads, fathers, and grandfathers! | | | | Reads : 628 | | | |
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