Time: "Happy Father's Day, You Undeserving Goons!"
Posted on 13. Jun, 2007 by Brian Reid in General
Man, I have no idea where to start with Time’s stunning Father’s Day piece from anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, which starts like this:
The folks at Hallmark are going to have a very good day on June 17.That’s when more than 100 million of the company’s ubiquitous cardswill be given to the 66 million dads across the U.S. in observation ofFather’s Day. Such a blizzard of paper may be short of the more than150 million cards sold for Mother’s Day, but it’s still quite atribute. What’s less clear is whether dads-at least as a group-havedone a good enough job to deserve the honor.
And goes downhill from there.
First: At the risk of sounding like I want my journalism all warm-and-fuzzy, what the heck is this magazine doing running a hit piece on dads *this week*? I get that not all dads are doing right by their kids and that there are some real problems there. And I enjoy reading about efforts to correct those problems. Time — apparently — is not. So what’s next for the magazine? A child abuse feature for Mother’s Day? A Christmas cover story announcing that Santa isn’t real?
Second: What’s up with the stats? Yes, it’s true that dads spend an hour a day on what is defined as “child care.” But that’s pretty much where moms were in 1985 (so much for gender differences) and hardly evidence of our innate disinterest in parenting. But rather than calling for more sane work-life policies, Hrdy wonders aloud why monkey daddies make better patients.
Third: While we’re talking about monkeys, I’d like to make a blanket condemnation of anyone who tries to explain extremely complex human social behavior by looking to animals. Look, I know there’s a biological component to all of this. But that is swamped by the social component. The same goes for the study of indigenous people. It’s interesting, but it doesn’t come close to explaining why I make the choices I do.
Fourth: I find it remarkable that you can write a whole piece on fatherhood and not note how quickly it has changed — and generally for the better — in a relatively short amount of time. It’s tough for even the sociologists to keep track of where fatherhood is nowadays, things are changing so fast. Time’s piece utterly fails to even give a nod to those huge changes in social expectations.
I’m sure I could keep going …
[Update: Some really good commentary to this one, including RebelMom. Click on the comments to read more.]
RebelMom
13. Jun, 2007
RD:
You have riled me sex-based discrimination professor-ness up, so here goes…
Why, oh why do you feel so attacked by an article that clearly is not targeting dads like you (and your readers)? The lede even exempts individual dads-it implies that as a group dads are lagging but individual dads may not be.
As such a great dad, I would think you of all people would welcome an article that tells no-so-good dads to STEP UP!
Do you have such allegence to your sex that you’ll defend a dad’s right to have a warm fuzzy father’s day story to make him feel good about his involvement even when he is underinvolved compared to moms?
And as for the work family balance issue, women face it too (and perhaps even more so) but moms as a group still step up to the plate. No-so-good dads need to get over themselves and quit blaming their lack of involvement on everyone else.
And comparing stats from 1985? What? That was more than 20 years ago? The fact that men are when women were two decades ago is adequate progress? Men shouldn’t settle for that-and neither should their partners.
I could go on, too, but I’ll end by saying that RD some days I think you are single handedly responsible for the positive trend in dad stats because of how much you do for our family. (And I love that after 12 years together you can still get me all riled up intellectually). Happy Father’s Day to you and to all the rebeldads out there.
-RM
Kelly M. Bray
13. Jun, 2007
Thank you for thr backhanded compliment to us fathers…I think. Nothing like being damned by faint praise. Are you so allied with your sex that you can’t call a truce in the PC wars for one short period of time. Its bad enough as we get closer to Father’s Day, we can expect the usual insulting ads, jokes, comments, and innuendo. If I could go through just one Fathers Day without hearing an ad like “We have a present for your clueless dad that even “he” can safely operate without accidentally killing you all”, I would be happy. I have not heard an ad for Mothers Day that says ” We have just what your deranged, nagging, controlling mom wouldn’t bitch about receiving”. I would tear apart the rest of this hit piece of a magazine article, but my son is graduating from elementary school in a few minutes. Happy Father’s Day to all.
Working Dad
13. Jun, 2007
This article is a bit odd because it cherry picks some random examples to make such a broad statement. But, she also raises important questions. Why are child support payments so woefully low, dads so often absent, and, why, I would add, is domestic violence so depressingly common? I don’t agree with all of the article’s reasons, but I like the fact the article raised tough questions. Of course, I also agree with RD that dads have made major strides and that this is a key generation in the evolution of gender roles. But we have a ways to go as a culture.
Whatever your thoughts, I echo RW. Happy Fathers Day to all the Rebel Dads.
Jeremy Adam Smith
13. Jun, 2007
I love it when RebelMom and RebelDad have debates on the blog. My wife doesn’t touch mine with a ten-foot pole.
About the article: I also found it to be very confused and misleading. RebelMom has a point about its focus on deadbeat dads, but why didn’t Hrdy (and her editors) write the lede to reflect that? It clearly doesn’t tell the whole story about fatherhood and yet pretends to cast a wider net than it does.
Hrdy is a giant in her field and Mother Nurture is an important book, but as someone who now edits academics for a living, I know that intellectual authority doesn’t always translate into a solid journalism… and solid journalism isn’t necessarily intellectually authoritative. Like RebelDad, I also wasn’t sure how the evidence presented in the piece supported the argument.
I suspect Hrdy turned in something much longer, then Time’s editors chopped it down and revised the lede to make it more timely and provocative-and more stupid.
I’ll grant that it does have value as a corrective to complacency. Dads who abandon their kids are a reality and that story needs to be told. But for me, the piece would have had a lot more value if it had used anthropological research to show how modern Americans can cultivate more caring, involved fathers. As is, I’m not sure what the point was.
alen
14. Jun, 2007
Stats are low, because they’ve been picked to be low.
Have a look at Glenn Sack’s rebuttal
http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=815
alen
14. Jun, 2007
“The lede even exempts individual dads-it implies that as a group dads are lagging but individual dads may not be.”
Oh, how wonderful.
How’s this one for your “sex-based discrimination professor-ness” ? …
It’s not so clear whether women, as a group, have the faculties to compete with their male counterparts in the workplace, although there are the exceptions which have come close to reaching the bar set by men.
scott
14. Jun, 2007
Although I am not a father, I’d still like to weigh in on this debate.
I think Father’s Day (and Mother’s Day) should be about the positive contributions, not the negative. And I think it’s disturbing that Time feels it is ok to publish an article that says fathers are not as important as mothers for Father’s Day. You would never see a similar article about mothers in May.
Rebelmom says that bad fathers shouldn’t have a pleasant Father’s Day because they are less involved then women. So by that reasoning bad mothers shouldn’t get a Mother’s Day but where are the articles and coverage of those women?
And even if the article claims to only be about the ‘bad’ fathers, it lambastes all fathers for not spending enough time with their children.
RebelMom demonstrates the worst part about this: that we have come to accept that fathers (and men in general) are somehow less than mothers. She says that mothers are more involved and are better at handling the work-parenting balance. Maybe so, but I would argue that those are only possible because of fathers who work hard and earn enough for mothers to stay home or work part time.
RebelMom
14. Jun, 2007
I agree with one thing in the recent posts-the media typically portrays moms as better/more appropriate parents (with the occasional sensation news story as the except). That is bad for men. It is also bad for women because it perpetuates the notion that only women can be good care providers. But this doesn’t mean that dads who don’t pull their weight should get a free pass. It means that moms should get called out if they aren’t carrying theirs. The reporters just have a lot more stats to back up the former than the latter. (And the stats only show hours, by the way, not who is “better”-by saying women spend more time that is not saying that women are better.)
It’s interesting to me that some of the posts ignore non-traditional family set-ups, like full-time working moms and/or at-home dads. These posts ignore stats that show (time and time again) that full-time working moms spend more time on average on care than working fathers. (See “The Second Shift” by Hochschild.)
After all of these posts, I end with the same question I started with: why do so many great dads (or men) feel the need to defend dads who aren’t pulling their weight? How does that help good dads? Kids? Women? It baffles me…
jen
14. Jun, 2007
I echo RebelMom’s question: why is this so pissing-off to so many great dads? I’m the first one to say not every mom deserves the brunch & roses on Mother’s Day. And women are notoriously hard on each other when they don’t perform well as parents.
To a certain extent, one reason many women don’t take men as seriously as parents is because a lot of the guys seem to be held to a different (i.e. often unacceptably low) standard for parenting. (Attention, almost every kindergarten teacher: I’m talking to you.) Wouldn’t the dads like to get beyond the eye-rolling and the patronizing attitudes, and really step up? And isn’t this a step towards that?
That said, I’m also not a big fan of her timing. I wonder if fatherhood is still one of those topics that’s deemed only relevant for one week in June?
twiffer
14. Jun, 2007
what bothers me most about that article is this quote “…But all are at least consistent within their species. Why does paternal care in our species vary so much?” um, perhaps because of the following reasons: a) we study human culture and behavior far more than we do that of even our closest primate relations. truth is, we have no idea if there is consistency within other primate cultures (hell, we’ve just finally decided they possess culture). b) humans occupay a vastly diverse ecological range. as far as our knowledge goes, most other animals adapt to new environments by physical means: speciation by natural selection. humans, however, while phyically adapting (a bit: skin color, hair covering/color, stature) also and more important adapt behaviorally. this is the basis of cultural differences. now, yes, there is evidence of cultural differences within other great apes (orangs come to mind). however, even these are confined to variations within an ecosystem, such as a bog-like section of a rainforest. the diversity of environments inhabited by humans leads to the diversity of culture and thus the diversity of involvement for fathers.c) this observations seems based on observations of captive activity. not necessarily a good proxy for wild behavior. there may be more evidence cited, but the way the article is written, i don’t see it.other gripes would be the overall vagueness of the piece. some are good, some are bad. whatever. the stats are overbroad: “Worldwide, 10% to 40% of children grow up in households with no father at all.” what a meaningless sentence. does it mean fathers have no interest and leave, or they have a high mortality rate? plus, the complete lack of stats on mothers.
not an offensive article. just very sloppy and uninformative.
alen
14. Jun, 2007
Many people say that motherhood is a thankless job…
If that’s the case, then what does that make fatherhood, where even on the one day where thanks are prompted; the public reacts even with best of intentions with conditional appreciation (I judge you to be worthy), and at worst with disparaging remarks.
Sandy D.
14. Jun, 2007
Hm, I agree that the timing of the article is not great, and that it seemed choppy. It was still interesting, and looking at other primates and ‘primitive’ cultures is one way to put our own behavior in a broader perspective. You can’t blanket condemn all biological anthropology without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If you look at Hrdy’s work (like “Mother Nature”), she really isn’t reductionist at all.
A lot of Hrdy’s work is on mothers committing infanticide, so it would be interesting to see her do a popular Mother’s Day article. Not that anyone would ever publish it.
alen
14. Jun, 2007
“These posts ignore stats that show (time and time again) that full-time working moms spend more time on average on care than working fathers.” (See “The Second Shift” by Hochschild.)
From the link I provided….
Criticism #3) “Even fathers in intact families spend a lot less time focused on their kids than they think: in the U.S. fathers average less than an hour a day (up from 20 minutes a few decades ago), usually squeezed in after the workday.”
We’re not given a source for the assertion that “fathers in intact families spend a lot less time focused on their kids than they think,” but it may have been taken, to one degree or another, from Susan Faludi’s 1991 anti-male bestseller Backlash. In that book she contrasts what men and fathers do around the house with what Faludi says men “think” they do.
And who’s to tell them they’re wrong, that they don’t do much, they only “think” they do?
Their wives, of course.
It never seems to occur to Faludi or Hrdy/Batten that perhaps the fathers’ assertions of their roles are accurate, and that it’s mothers-who often pride themselves on being #1 with the kids-are disparaging or downplaying fathers’ role. It is likely that, to some degree, both fathers and mothers exaggerate their own roles, though we get no sense of that from the TIME magazine article.
The “lazy husband/uncaring father” stereotype is a myth. Census data shows that only 40% of married women with children under 18 work full-time, and over a quarter do not hold a job outside the home. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2004 Time Use Survey, men spend one and a half times as many hours working as women do, and full-time employed men still work significantly more hours than full-time employed women.
When both work outside the home and inside the home are properly considered, it is clear that men do at least as much as women. A 2002 University of Michigan Institute for Social Research survey found that women do 11 more hours of housework a week than men but men work 14 hours a week more than women. According to the BLS, men’s total time at leisure, sleeping, doingpersonal care activities, or socializing is a statistically meaningless 1% higher than women’s.
See also: http://www.reason.com/news/show/27612.html for discussion on the topic of these kinds of stats.
jen
14. Jun, 2007
Alen, I think you should look more closely at the idea that because men spend more hours at their workplace, they “work more”. Something that is much discussed by women in the workplace is the fact that many women are able to hold down a full-time job — including doing a good enough job of it to remain employed, evidently — in significantly fewer hours.
I at least just don’t believe it. Before I had kids I didn’t work as productively or as hard as I do now, and I have yet to see a dad who does it either. But I routinely see working moms doing it all. Of course this is just my experience, but I can say that this is a commonly-held view in the business world, at least the part I have seen.
alen
14. Jun, 2007
1) that’s not what I quoted.
2) That’s the problem with commonly-held views.
alen
14. Jun, 2007
In case it was missed on anyone… when I said:
“It’s not so clear whether women, as a group, have the faculties to compete with their male counterparts in the workplace, although there are the exceptions which have come close to reaching the bar set by men.”
I was being facetious. It was a gender-reversed example to prove a point for RM, and it has nothing to do with anything other than that.
Jeremy Adam Smith
14. Jun, 2007
Couple of other random thoughts, relating to, but not directly on, the article:
What I keep seeing as I look at fatherhood stats is bifurcation. Many dads really are embracing much more egalitarian, involved relationships with kids, with others are losing touch. I think the divisions are sliced lots of different ways. There are generational differences. There are cultural differences (and North America is nothing if not culturally diverse). There are also different economic forces and growing inequality. If you look at the history of fatherhood, you can see how economic distress is really, really bad for father involvement. In times and places when women have little economic power and fathers are defined as breadwinners, many men who feel like they can’t support families abandon them. Are these bad fathers? Some are. Others (I’m going on a lot of documentary evidence presented in Griswold’s Fatherhood in America) feel their children, their boys especially, are better off without their bad example and overpowering sense of shame. In these times and places, a family without a man in the house is perceived as more deserving of charity and help from relatives.
This is one of the reasons why I think women’s economic empowerment is actually very good for fatherhood (contrary to what conservatives say): it makes breadwinning just one of many roles a dad can adopt. As a result, men can lose their jobs without necessarily losing their identity and dignity, and can step into other roles temporarily or permanently. Their attachment to children is given an opportunity to deepen, even during a period of severe distress. (It also goes without saying that two potential earners are better than just one.)
Denguy
14. Jun, 2007
Awesome. Fight-fight-fight!
I don’t usually align myself with fathers because I’m the only stay-at-home dad in my area. During the days, I hang with stay-at-home moms since they’re the only at-home parents in my neighbourhood. There’s no squabbling about sex-we’re all just parents. I know some fathers who have never changed a diaper. I know some fathers who work 60-hour weeks and go out with “the boys” three nights a week.
The negative portrayal of fathers in the media bothers me only if I let it do so. My own father was a rather absent parent. Most of the working dads I know spend about an hour or two-at the most-in a day with their kids, but that’s also true of all the working mothers I know. Are working mothers doing more parenting than working fathers?
My wife gets a great deal less time with the kids than I, but she spends most of the weekends (the ones she’s not working) with them and pretty much every single evening when she gets home. And then of course there’s our time after the kids go to bed. As far as having some “me” time, my usual night out is Mondays at 9pm: I go play hockey and have a pint after, but just one-kids can get up early!
Anonymous
15. Jun, 2007
“What I keep seeing as I look at fatherhood stats is bifurcation.
Many dads really are embracing much more egalitarian, involved relationships with kids, with others are losing touch.”
From a recent study funded by Spike TV. If this is the type of bifurcation you’re seeing in today’s fathers, then I doubt it’s much different than today’s mothers. If it’s not what you’re seeing, then there’s got to be a problem somewhere…:
http://sev.prnewswire.com/television/20070612/NYTU08812062007-1.html
* 71% of today’s dads feel that society does not appreciate the importance
of fathers;
* 88% of today’s dads feel emotionally connected to their children; the
same was true of only 35% of their fathers;
* 89% of today’s dads are comfortable showing their children affection;
the same was true of only 34% of their fathers;
* 74% of today’s dads often act as a shoulder for their kids to cry on;
the same was true of only 26% of their fathers;
Jeremy Adam Smith
15. Jun, 2007
Ah, Spike TV. An authoritative source of social science stats, if ever there was one. I’m being sarcastic. Spike TV’s polls are a joke, though they might reveal certain paranumerical truths. However, you’ll be cheered to know that some of the results described in the press release are confirmed by the findings of actual social scientists like Joseph Pleck, Trent Maurer, and Kerry Daly-I’m thinking especially of the bit about dads looking to moms for guidance on parenting.
Look, no one who pays attention to evidence is going to be able to say that fatherhood today is all good news and no one is going to get away with saying that it’s all bad news. It’s complex. We’re in a period of transition, with many cross-cutting trends and factors in play. Hrdy and Time got it wrong in terms of their emphasis, but it’s equally wrong to proclaim the current generation of fathers to be the greatest ever. And, as I said yesterday to my kid, two wrongs don’t make a right. (Groan…)
As it happens, I spend a lot of time emphasizing the positive trends in fathering — I’m writing a whole book about positive images of stay-at-home dads and I co-edit a magazine about research into positive and prosocial behaviors. Sometimes that leads me to an overly rosy view of things, but I try to keep my eyes and ears open for facts that might contradict, correct, or modify my ideas. It is indeed possible to try to amplify the positive in hopes of setting new standards and aspirations, while still not ignoring the negative. It’s pointless to try to defend all dads everywhere, because some dads are not defensible-and their behavior is linked to wider problems of entitlement and irresponsibility in masculinity. They need and deserve criticism, not coddling. Likewise, it’s ridiculous and wrong to paint all dads with the same black brush — the evidence overwhelmingly shows that substantial numbers of men have made a break with a culture of male privilege and that guys in general are spending more time with kids. That’s good. Let’s celebrate it. But we can’t imagine that we live in utopia.
alen
15. Jun, 2007
No one’s claiming that the state of fatherhood a Utopia.
They’re just crying foul at the claims that motherhood is a utopia, and that fatherhood is a mess; and that such a politically charged message, based on a lot of bad research and statistics, was put out specifically for fathers day.
alen
15. Jun, 2007
A couple of notes on your comments on the study posted above…
- interviews are not polls
- providing funding isn’t the same as being the source for stats.
I agree that not enough is mentioned on how they collected the information, though… but then unless you’re aware of more than is in the article, you can’t really say the study is a “Joke” and maintain your integrity on the subject.
Jeremy Adam Smith
15. Jun, 2007
“crying foul at the claims that motherhood is a utopia, and that fatherhood is a mess; and that such a politically charged message, based on a lot of bad research and statistics, was put out specifically for fathers day.”
Well, we agree on that much!