Fathers and sons face a lifetime of unfinished business. What does a son learn from his father? Simply: Whether to love women, or hate them. Whether to take pride in his work, or shrink shamefully from creative endeavor. … And what does a father learn from his son? Whether he is capable of warmth and nurturing, or fearful of intimacy. Whether he is a generous teacher and mentor, or a narcissist and authoritarian. A father transmits to his son his vision of what it means to be a man. A son teaches his father humility.
The tie between father and son is still, as an anthropologist once noted, “the most critical and potentially dangerous of human relationships.” A number of long-term studies of fathers and sons are just now yielding fascinating and unexpected data about this “most critical” of relationships. Social scientists are now suggesting that strengthening the father’s role in the family may be a key to solving some of society’s most troubling problems.
1. GOOD LOVING. For years, it was believed that a father’s masculinity had to be critical to the development of masculine characteristics in his son. If a father loved boxing, hunting, etc, his son would, too. But whenever researchers tested this assumption, they found no connection between the two, a result that mystified them. Then, a few years back, they approached the issue differently: When does a boy WANT to be like his father? Answer: when his father demonstrates warmth, closeness, and involvement with his boy – qualities that, ironically, have long been thought of as feminine. The father could wear lederhosen to his job as a hairstylist, but if he was involved with his son, Junior’s happiness, by all kinds of psychological measures, soared.
a. Highly involved fathers break down gender stereotypes and get involved
on the drudge level of raising their children.
b. Fathers who provide nontraditional support directly affect their sons’
success as adults.
It is impossible for them to be over-involved. In fact, sons simply
do better and better the more time their fathers spend with them.
This contrasts with new findings about girls, who actually do more
poorly in school when their fathers are too active in their lives.
Other studies have demonstrated that fatherly expressions of
affection and nurturing correlate with higher IQs in four year old
boys.
c. Fathers themselves reap measurable benefits from raising sons.
A Glueck study found that fathers who participate in their sons’
social, emotional, and intellectual development as young men are
likely to be rewarded with marital stability and happiness in middle
age.
2. TAKING THE TODDLER IN HAND.
Psychoanalytical theorists from Erik Erikson to Freud agree that a boy
emerges from adolescence, ideally, with a sense of purpose and initiative
that’s modified in part by guilt and fear; that is, a boy learns to seek
gratification from working and feeling generally productive, and he has a
conscience.
[Article contains more on the social development of boys in relation to their father, and how it works out in different situations.]
As many as 59 percent of the baby boomers’ children will live with only one parent, usually their mothers, for at least a year before they’re eighteen. For boys there are consequences. They are hard put, for instance, to accomplish an essential early task: controlling their inherent pugnacity. Young boys seem instinctively to invite their fathers to roughhouse, exploring the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior. Without a paternal presence who sets limits, a boy’s natural aggression can intensify into a well of pure destructiveness. One measure: Two thirds of convicted rapists, three quarters of adolescent murderers, and three quarters of long-term prison inmates grew up without a father in the house.
A father’s shortcomings can also help a boy. Boys with poor fathers often realize in midlife that their dads had hard times to deal with, that many had done their best, and that, at any rate, no father is perfect. Many transform the anger they felt into sadness and become committed to being the kinds of fathers to their sons that they wished their own fathers had been to them. Bad models of fatherhood can be reworked – but never too successfully.