Mitch's Tips for Parents

Why Fathers are Important

We have lived by a fantasy that the more valuable parent or influence is the mother which has been supported through our entire social organization for years. It is my belief that the rage we are seeing in young men, the violence, the apathy, the depression, the unwillingness to grow up, can all be traced to the absence of men in the lives of our young men.

Men have been relegated to the sidelines in parenting. Men have allowed it to happen. And mothers have helped and upon occasion insisted upon it. Mothers often are reluctant to relinquish or share control. The love the mother builds with her children when the children are small can usurp her relationship with her husband or the children’s father. Fathers become extraneous in the family.
This happens in two parent homes as well as by default in single parent homes where the mother is the primary caregiver.
The reign of the mother comes to an abrupt and often violent halt once the boy becomes an adolescent. Mothers are faced with a testosterone-infused “monster” who she has neither the experience nor the biology to deal with.
That is the father’s job. And he may have to call in a community of men to help him because one man will not be enough.
Out of need and oftentimes desperation, women are inviting men back into the parenting equation. Yet others stand between their son and his father, trying to negotiate a relationship that would be healthier without her. To disempower the father, necessarily disempowers the son who by his biology ultimately must stand in the company of men. It also heightens the son’s rage toward women.
The basic ingredient lacking for many mothers today is trust in men. They must learn to trust that what the father brings and how he brings it, serves the son. And men need to show up, regardless of the mother’s objections.