If anyone has any doubts about how to raise a baby, they are living in the right day and age. It seems like there are more resources, studies and products available for expecting couples than ever before. This is a far cry from my parent’s time when Dr. Benjamin Spock’s book on baby care covered all the bases and mom would treat the rash caused by my reusable cloth diapers with a grayish cream (later found to cause skin cancer), while my dad smoked Marlboro Reds a few feet away.

In the years that followed, awareness for a baby’s well being increased, and being the progressive people they were, my parents kept up with the trends. In preparation for my sister’s arrival, they were quick to repaint my old crib with a thick coat of oil-based paint to cover the chipped up lead-based layer I had gnawed on while teething. And there would be no toddlers standing in the front seat of dad’s truck waving at passing cars as I had. Instead, my sisters would be safely strapped into something referred to as an “infant car seat,” a contraption that resembled a torture devise used by Dr. Mengele in the Nazi death camps. Continue reading »

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With several state primary elections over and the field of Republican Party, presidential hopefuls narrowed down, I thought this a good time to highlight where the candidates stand on a few issues that impact families. As I mention last week in The History of Fatherhood in the United States, the family became a fully politicized issue by the 1970′s and nothing has changed since. In this current election this holds true, more so than ever.

In this post, I spotlight former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. Ironically, when it comes to family, the majority of the attention Mr. Gingrich has received is focused more on his marital debacles than his political ideology on the topic. And his ideology isn’t without controversy either if you recall his remarks on poor children and their work ethic.

Before moving on, it’s worth reviewing Mr. Gingrich’s childhood and background. Born near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Mr. Gingrich was adopted as an infant by his stepfather who was a career infantry soldier. This regimented, conservative upbringing no doubt had an impact on his views of the family. Later he went on to earn a Ph.D and then taught history at West Georgia College. In 1979 he was elected to Congress and retired in 1999, earning a reputation for being controversial. Since then, Mr. Gingrich has acted as a political consultant, while also authoring 27 books. Continue reading »

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I’m going to make a confession here that few people know about: I’ve used illegal drugs. For a little over a year after my divorce I took X-stasy and smoked marijuana. That’s right, not in high school or in college, but as an adult.

Go ahead and judge me. This is the internet, which, among its many benefits, is the freedom to condemn others anonymously in the comments section. If you feel so compelled, have at it; just know I won’t care. It was dumb, I know. I’m not going to waste time justifying it, and that’s not exactly the point of this post anyway. Continue reading »

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A study published in last month’s issue of Pediatrics found that children with depressed fathers were more likely to display emotional and behavioral problems. The study, which involved 22,000 children from two-parent homes, discovered that if the mother was  depressed then the child was 19% more likely to have issues; for fathers, the increase was 11%, and if both parents suffered, then the number shot to 25%.

Even though the risk with depressed mothers was higher, according to the researchers, the significance regarding fathers was that there has been little focus on their depression’s impact. Because mothers are the parent who a child is the most exposed to, studies have tended to be centered on them. Continue reading »

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There are consequences

I swore to myself that I would not give in, and watch season five of the Showtime series, Californication. Lot of good that did me. I’m already two episodes into the self-destructive adventures of the over-sexed anti-hero, Hank Moody (played by David Duchovny). Granted the show may not be your particular brand of …booze—heavy doses of amoral, gratuitous sex and coarse vulgarity are understandably hard to swallow for many—but I have my reasons. Blame it on the “A*#hole in Me.”

Whatever the case, as Hank rode off into the California sunset in last year’s season finale, I thought that was it. By the open-ended way they left things, I figured the series was over. I couldn’t conceive of a plot line that would be much different from any of the previous three. It starts getting old after four years watching Hank be the cynical writer/cool dad, still in love with the same women who he always manages to win back only to hurt her yet again after a string of bad choices and dumb luck lands him in some twisted, sexually dysfunctional love triangle (or square, or pentagon, or—you get the picture). Continue reading »

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As I mentioned in Part 1 of this post, after reading an essay on the progression of fatherhood written by author and stay-at-home dad, Roman Krznaric, I became curious about this same progression in the United States. Again, what I found over the course of the research fascinated me.

I had been under the impression that, aside from some variation, the role of fathers as the “provider” remained basically the same in this country. Not so. Although they were recognized as the authoritarian figure in the household, fathers were much more involved in their family’s lives. This, of course, could be a good or bad thing, but in any case, as the United States expanded westward and advanced into the Industrialized Period, a father’s influence continued to decrease as did his attachment to the family, both physical and emotionally.

This increasing detachment then resulted in mothers becoming the hub of family life essentially by default, which carried with it the childcare and household duties. Moving into the later part of the 19^th Century the division of roles became more pronounced as did the distinction between the working and middle classes.

Because all family members in working class families needed to work, and yet still lived in poverty, the government stepped in and created a family wage economy allowing the man to support his household on his income alone. This is where we pick up again, and government intervention becomes a central theme as it tries to correct the outlying consequences of decreased paternal influence—consequences created by its own industrialized economy. Continue reading »

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After yesterday’s post about Roman Krznaric’s essay on the history of the men as fathers, I decided to do a little research on my own; being a self-professed history nerd, I didn’t require much arm-twisting to do so either. Unlike Krznaric’s broader worldwide focus, I decided to hone in on just the progression of fatherhood in the United States, and what I discovered was surprising.

Most of us are familiar with the major events in history—the colonization of early America, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, World War 2, and so on.  What many of us may have not considered, however, was the part these events played in shaping the image and expectation we have of fathers today, which, when looked at through a lens of the past 300-plus years in its entirety, is slightly off in my opinion.

What’s more, when looking through that lens, keep in mind that many of the perceptions we’ve had of family dynamics throughout history are incorrect or only half-truths. For example, the idea of colonial fathers being an austere, unfeeling, authoritarian ordained by God isn’t entirely accurate. Did religious dogma dictate that the man was to be the head of the household? Yes, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t warm and unloving. We only see it as being so because such an arrangement seem archaic and stifling within the context of our contemporary society—a society that has morphed over three centuries at the hands of ever shifting socio-economic conditions and world-changing events beyond our control.

To get a true picture of this progression of fatherhood through time, there was no way I could fit everything into ten slides; thus the presentation is split into two parts (and even then it’s still probably not enough). Continue reading »

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