The importance of fathers

“In those days, they shall say no more, the fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

– Jeremiah 31:29

THIS QUOTE from the Bible represented the power of the father as the primary authority of the family for many centuries. His word was unquestioned, his decision final, his influence dominant in all matters relating to family. What he was not seen as was a caretaker of the children – that responsibility rested with (or was vested in) the mother, or mother substitute.

The world began to radically change with the social, economic and technical advances of the 20th century, and with those changes came a basic change in the structure and function of the family – with a consequent shift in the authority of the father. His influence was increasingly seen as minor, even negligible, and his importance was defined by how well he provided for the family.

Another factor in the diminished role of the father was the then new field of psychology. In fact, psychology became part of the problem. Research studies did not place much importance on the role of the father, and his influence on the development and growth of his child was reported as “insignificant”. The term ‘parent’ was often meant as mother – and father, if mentioned, was equivalent to other influences. Only a small number of parent-child studies investigated the father’s role, and the few studies that were done at that time focused on the father’s involvement as reported by the mother. For example, in a number of studies that used more than 2,000 parents who responded to questions about parenting, not one father was interviewed. An indirect result of the lack of research data on fathers was the implied assumption that they weren’t interested in fathering. The pendulum of the father’s influence swung so far that the Bible verse would have read: “The fathers have eaten a sour grape that had an influence on the mothers, who chose not to offer them to the children.”

The pendulum slowly began to swing back in the 1970s, with newly designed studies beginning to support the impact of fathers. That change influenced a graduate student to risk doing a PhD thesis on father-son interactions and how those interactions may actually be an important influencing factor in an adolescent son’s development. Fortunately, the study did find positive results of a father’s influence on the moral reasoning of an adolescent son.

These days, neither the general public nor psychological researchers see the father as an equivalent to ‘other influences.’

We’ll know we’ve reach equal parity when Father’s Day becomes as well celebrated as Mother’s Day.