It was my dad who taught me how to swear. He swore like a sergeant. He had actually been a sergeant, so he came by it honestly. At moments of high stress, he would string together six or seven curse words in an eloquent stream of invective that could be heard up and down the street. I was mortified, but he took no notice. Today, 60 years later, I use those same curse words in that same order to swear at my computer. Daddy would be proud.
My father was an enlightened man, for his time. He was unusually domesticated. He shopped and cooked and vacuumed without complaint. He liked smart women (he married two of them) and supported their careers. All of that was rare.
When I was 13, my folks split up. I don’t blame them now. They were young, and had a lot of problems and couldn’t get along. Divorce was still relatively rare in those days. My mother and I and my younger brother and sister moved far away to Canada. After that, my father largely went missing from my life, except for walk-on appearances at Christmases and family weddings. There was a hole in my heart where his big booming voice used to be. I felt abandoned. That’s what usually happens when fathers leave the family. It’s not that they don’t care about their kids any more (although some don’t). It’s just that there’s no substitute for daily family interaction. Your lives unfold on different tracks.
The world of fatherhood has changed dramatically since the 1960s – for better and for worse. The good news is that fathers are more engaged with their children than ever before. The bad news is that more kids are growing up fatherless than ever before. The result of these two changes is what you might call the fathering gap – a gap that in my view is more consequential than the inequality gap or the income gap or just about any other gap that you could name.
The evidence is conclusive. Kids from two-parent homes do better on every measure than kids from fatherless households. (And kids whose parents are married do better than those whose parents cohabit). Kids with fathers present are less likely to drop out or abuse drugs, far more likely to stay out of trouble with the law and less likely to have children out of wedlock.
The failure of the family widens the social and economic divide. And in many ways, the best social program is a father. Two-parent families have more resources to invest in their kids. But good fathers also do things that mothers can’t. They model how to be a man. They show, by example, how a man and a woman should treat each other. At best, they teach their sons about male strength, tenderness and compassion. They teach their daughters how they should expect to be treated by other men.
Yet, having a father in the home is increasingly a class privilege. The less affluent the household, the less likely it is that a father is in residence. In the United States, 39 per cent of students have absent fathers, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The rate is 20 per cent for white children, 31 per cent for Hispanics and 57 per cent for African Americans. In Canada, about 20 per cent of children live in lone-parent (primarily single-mother) homes.
Whenever I write about the value of two-parent families, I hear from reproachful single mothers who say it feels as if I’m demeaning them. So let’s be clear. Plenty of single moms do heroic jobs and raise fine kids. But there are certain things that only dads can do, and those things matter.
After my parents’ marriage ended, both of them remarried. Dad had two more children and invested his parental energies in them. The younger one and I eventually became very close. “We got all the love you didn’t,” she told me once. Sometimes he expressed this love in unusual ways. Just before she went off to college, he gave her a credit card she could use for gas, and a bail-bond card she could use to get out jail – just in case. “Don’t tell your mother,” he warned her. In the last few years of his life, he read my work faithfully – something that I never knew until she told me.
Last weekend my brother, my half-sister and I convened for an informal family memorial at the place where he and his second wife are buried. I thought of his flawed life, and of mine. We told family stories. Then we went to his favourite restaurant and had a drink. He would have liked that.