A family unit has been historically modeled as a man, woman and child, with the extended family to include grandparents, aunts, uncles and on occasion, nieces and nephews. In whatever model you choose, the man or father was usually the protector and breadwinner, while the responsibility of physical care, initial training, and emotional well-being fell to the woman or mother. These “models” reflect how man as a social creature used sub-groups to reduce conflict and allow larger groups to co-exist. While this is an anthropological description, it allows us to compare and highlight the differences seen in likely social models of tomorrow. These models of the family unit have gone through little significant change until the last fifty years, when there was a dramatic shift in the roles played and by whom. It is no longer true that the father is the sole breadwinner. Economic realities dictate that the woman (mother), too, must contribute earnings to the household budget. This creates a void of absentee parenting being filled by the public education of our children.
Nurturing, too, has become a shared responsibility. Both parents are expected to provide care conducive to a nurturing environment. Both male and female are instrumental in educating and preparing a child to master enough social skills to enter mainstream society with the least amount of friction. All models of family units have undergone significant change except in regard to the psychodynamics involved in the interplay of the family unit. Our civil sophistication has evolved at the speed of light commensurate with our continually advancing technology. Today’s state-of-the-art is tomorrow’s dinosaur. Today, the world has undergone dynamic evolutionary change. We are driven by the need to accommodate advanced technology in our personal lives. We no longer practice norms; in fact, aberrant behaviors qualify people as members of “special interest groups” in which tolerance is the norm. Our techno-culture makes it necessary to adopt new strategies and parallels in preparing our children to be adaptable to an ever-changing, always rearranging world.
Fathers now bear equally in the responsibilities of providing physical care and emotional nurturing for the young. It is not enough to simply provide safety, sustenance and guidance to a young mind fraught with questions. As the custodial parent (temporary or not), he must also simultaneously discipline and teach – all on a visitation schedule of every other weekend. The world we live in is complex to understand and complicated to negotiate. Pitfalls are everywhere. We are bombarded with silly things that if we fail to understand will have the power to devastate us. We may easily find ourselves in a bind or other “circumstances beyond our control.” We must read the fine print because ignorance of the law is no excuse.
On a good day, our children receive hundreds of conflicting messages to digest – predatory messages specifically designed to target the young as “new consumers.” We must communicate with our children as if we cared that they understood the world as it unfolds around them. And we must impart what understanding we have in the hopes that through sharing and mutual discovery, we will create a bond that can weather any drastic changes life may bring.
We will, however, find it is unnecessary to have all the answers. And we’ll find that an untold beauty and love can be found in discovering together what we both need to learn. Even for adults, the world and its issues can be complicated. We need to form a “comfort zone” where we and our children can communicate our ideas with confidence and faith that we’ll be understood. We must not wait until we have the answers to give our children; we must encourage their faith and trust in us and invite them on a journey of discovery with us. We must admit to ourselves and to them that we may not have all the answers and we may not even know the questions, but what we do have is a great love for them and an even greater desire for them to have the best and brightest future. We must do all we can to assure them every night before they go to sleep of this love and encourage them to feel safe. Children need a “comfort zone,” too. If we wish to traverse the paths that life may have in store for us, we must take time away from the pain of living and see the absolute beauty which awaits us. This isn’t to suggest that problems can be avoided, nor that lessons need not be learned – only that problems are how life teaches us and finding the solutions to problems makes us part of the answer.
We must do this because our lives do not exist inside a vacuum. We are the offspring of our parents as they were the offspring of theirs. We took what they gave us and it became our job to increase it, and pass it on. Ours is not to question why. No. Our lives are not over; they have barely just begun. There remains much interplay with others. But we do have an obligation to pass on the baton that our parents passed to us. We are still young and learning. We need all the help our parents can give us. We need all the answers and lessons that experiencing problems can give us. And we need our children to become our reason to ask. We need to share our experiences with our children to help guide them through the emotional “minefield” they must traverse.
Today, many unhealthy lifestyle choices are being presented to our children as acceptable or expedient. Most of these choices appeal to some deficit or lack of bonding experience in the child’s personal life. These unhealthy choices appeal to wayward emotions that can be neutralized simply by sharing something of ourselves appropriate to the situation. When children require our care, it is our duty and responsibility to reach out to them. Even if all we can do is reach back to give them our empathy, it will be enough.
We must never forget what a child’s world is like. We can know because at one point we were children ourselves and can understand the desire to fit in or the insecurity of not fitting in. At a very young age through the associative process our children learn that crying gains them adult attention. When they are older but have not yet reached the age of reason the preferred method to gain adult attention is to “act out.” We need all our patience, tolerance and love to understand this and only use discipline when it is gainful for us and for them. This must be the measuring stick. Guidance is an adult responsibility. This approach promotes emotional well-being and helps establish a comfort zone where a sense of security and self-esteem can be nurtured. Our children need confidence in themselves and in their world in order to choose well between the myriad of options facing them. The natural insecurities of childhood and adolescence translate into bad judgment and unhealthy associations.
Emotional health is the key. Without fundamental emotional health a child has little if any self-direction. Without self-direction, a child’s vulnerability leads him/her to make all kinds of decisions and bad choices. Add to this the constant changes being affected in their personal lives like new technology, travel, “serial parents” and changing cultural norms, and perhaps it becomes clear that the atypical is now the norm and there is little need of tradition anymore. We live in groups where we feel as though we need to be in constant contact with each other. Yet, we rely on that same group technology to keep us safe from each other. We remain insecure about our future as if tomorrow was just another number on a lottery ticket. We have begun to rely on science and its technology to guide us through the complex maze of personal relationships. And yet we intrinsically understand that science holds no answer. We intrinsically understand that providing all the encouragement and guidance possible to our children is the only way. We must seek to provide a secure environment that promotes the “emotional” well-being of our children.
As parents we need to positively know that providing stability is conducive to gaining emotional health which allows for the responsible choices we need to make as people. As fathers we have a responsibility to our children that transcends our rights as custodial parents. We have an obligation and responsibility to ourselves and to our children to continue the continuum time-line of the Universal Culture of Fatherhood with deliberation and forethought.
As rational/emotional beings, we have the ability to act upon any information provided to us by our intellect and/or our emotions. The two are not synchronous, and generally speaking, are out of context with each other. Rarely are declarations uttered in emotional excitement endowed with rational deliberation. Nor are rational, logical thought processes embellished with feelings. But because we are intellectually complex beings who can be motivated as much by emotion as by intellect, we must be careful when assigning motive to action.
We are not usually clear when we express motive. Motivations that we feel with urgency may lose some of their potency in the translation to language. Many times we misinterpret our feelings when expressing them because they are so entangled and hurtful and frustrating to express. In the case of anger we would much rather yell at someone. Rarely do we have the presence of mind to reassert objectivity and express a precision of mind devoid of emotion. Such a demeanor appears strange yet familiar to us. Normally, we express a cocktail of hurts, wounded pride, along with a good deal of defensive parrying to fend off further assaults. All of this is completely natural to do when under attack, but we rarely are.
As a rule, the other party are victims of the same lack of communication skills that we are. Therefore, we need to realize and take into account that a number of inept attempts at effective communication is our investment in the healing process.
As the Universal Culture of Fatherhood says we are complex and complicated beings; so, too, does it say we are simple and uncomplicated in our choices of actions, which are nothing more than elaborate strategies to meet our needs. This is the fundamental reason for language and all other forms of communications.
Communicative skills are there to facilitate a developing sense of community through the catalyst of feedback which expresses the need for further social interaction and cooperation. This is the reason the (group) family maintains its integrity as the medium all models must incorporate in order to favor life.
Personal Man – “Individual Man” – is his destiny, so it becomes his right of passage to define the road he will travel. Personal Man must reconcile his intellect with his emotions. These two facets represent the opposite states of awareness a man may have and they often compete rather than cooperate with each other. Under normal conditions the best that can be expected is confusion. Usually patient parental guidance gives us the tools we need to learn objectivity, delayed gratification and self-control – a process which demands self-denial. As children, the adults in our lives teach us to temper our emotions with our intellect, a balancing act to be sure, but one with great rewards. So we learn to react in a way so as to permit others to have their choice of actions so long as our own freedom of choice is acknowledged. We usually peacefully co-exist with others, because co-existing within a community of equally valued beings represents an opportunity for diversity to become influential in our lives. The cause-and-effect medium becomes pivotal and indispensable as a tool of deliberate action. A medium where the natural law of consequences repeatedly keeps us aware of our actions. And so we acquire the ability from caring and concerned adults to incorporate patience and purposeful deliberation in our quest to respect the rights of others. We help to guide our own choices with concerns for the whole and not just our part. The guidance of parents who themselves learned as they went lends us sophistication and history in our efforts to achieve the best possible outcome. It remains true that we have the ability to learn from the lessons of those who traveled the same road before us. But it is also true that we are autonomous individuals capable of original action and need each other to bond with and complete the circle. This is where we have the capability and authority to deliberately affect the outcome of the Universal Culture of Fatherhood.
Yes, our intellect is filled with historical data which may be reviewed when searching for similar patterns in order to anticipate and/or predict future behaviors. However, we as a species are co-existing in real time and sharing our diversity of experiences with each other so that the whole of humanity may benefit. We are rational/emotive beings, this is true. Yet it is also true that we are beings who developed the capacity to communicate our emotions long before we could communicate the reason of our intellect. Our emotions can be so potent as to override common sense and convince us that it is within the interest of all that it be done our way. When we are young, we are helpless to care for ourselves or in any way contribute to our environment or its well-being. And so we rely on others who have had similar experiences to anticipate and meet our needs. This is simply nature’s way of encouraging healthy co-dependent relationships between those who will rely on each other in order to have a future.
Babies are precious and cry because they need us. We seek to meet their needs because we need them. It is a part of the naturally developing human landscape for mankind to be inextricably bound together. His past, present, and future exist before him in the eyes of his child. Man cannot divorce himself from his past. The past is his present and future. The “time continuum” is as old as the universe, and as long as re-creation remains the dominant goal of life, it will remain so. It has been on the hearts and minds of Mankind since the beginning of time and will not be ignored. Throughout history there have been rises and falls of many civilizations. It would appear as though man has yet to fully temper his emotions with reasons for living.
