by AJ Thompson
Tom Brokaw called it “The Greatest Generation”. They were the people who survived the Great Depression, then fought and won World War II. They were also the generation that begat the Baby Boom – that’s the generation I belong to. Often we’re accused of being the “greediest” or “neediest” generation.
True, the oldest of our generation did qualify to begin receiving Social Security checks this year, but the rest of us are still watching our paychecks siphoned for medicare and social security funding for the generation ahead of us – oh yeah, it’s that generation. Of course, that means we should feel honored to be paying for their retirement after all they did for us.
I do want to be careful here to pay appropriate respect. All of us have mothers and fathers, and by and large, they had a commitment to hard work and a willingness for sacrifice that younger Americans cannot even conceive of. In many ways, the Boomers and those who’ve followed have had so much given to us, we completely take for granted many things our immediate ancestors never thought they could even attain.
So we come to our worldviews from wholly different perspectives. In many ways, it is easy to understand why so many in the older generation think we lack a consistent work ethic, that we are too materialistic, and that fail to take responsibility for things they see as a simple matter of duty.
What is difficult to understand, however, is that older Americans fail to see where we got our value system. Let’s be clear – our values came from them. We learned what they taught us. We learned by their precepts, and we learned by their example.
What is often misunderstood, however, is that if we learned from their example, why didn’t we turn out to be more like them?
In truth, we didn’t turn out like them because in many ways they didn’t want us to. They did not want us to struggle living just above poverty. They didn’t want us to feel like we lacked the education that could have made it so much easier to provide for a family. They didn’t want the females of our generation to feel as if they needed to depend on men for their survival.
But they also taught us to be different from them in many ways. They told us that it wasn’t good to be intolerant of people of other races, religions, and cultures. By and large, we listened – and we are generally much more tolerant than our parents were. They told us it was good to have some fun and not be tied to the grind of work and family seven days, 24 hours every week. So we aren’t! We play more, vacation and travel more, and amuse ourselves with entertainment more than any generation at any time every on planet earth.
We are the people our parents brought us up to be. They molded us, shaped us and gave us the platform on which we experience life and the lens through which we view the world. We’re apples that fell right beneath the trees that bore us. And so, they should ruminate on how they have left the world to us and what we have done with it with great satisfaction.
Our views and behaviors in the realm of sexuality, marriage and divorce, and every aspect of our lives are informed by who are parents brought us up to be! While we are not carbon copies – by any stretch – nor are we functioning prototypes they have programmed, but we are indeed what our parents raised us to be.
And while we learned from their teachings to be somewhat different from themselves, we learned from their examples to be like them in many ways as well. If your parents graduated from college, it’s likely you did too. If your parents went to church, you probably did too. If not, it’s doubtful you did either.
And if your Dad was an absentee father…? Whoa! This conversation just took a sharp turn. Dad? Absentee father? What’s this about?
Well, if you ask me, what this is about is the most important issue facing our country and it needs to be understood far better than it is today. I believe that the absence of a father’s frequent, consistent and meaningful physical presence in his children’s lives is the biggest reason America is heading in the wrong direction today.
Moreover, I believe the example that was expected of “the greatest generation”, and the manner in which it has been handed down to the generations now dominating American population has played an enormous role in creating our cultural problems, and the ways the political and psychological communities have addressed the problem have largely only made it worse.
Here is what I mean. Fathers who left their families during the Great Depression or World War II were usually doing a noble thing. It was seen as necessary in order to provide for and protect their families. For the most part, they probably did not want to leave their families behind, but did it out of great love and sense of need for them.
By the time World War II came to an end, American men were largely accustomed to being fathers and caring for their families by being apart from them. It was all that many fathers knew of fatherhood. They could not be two places at once, and they could not perform their essential functions of provision and protection at home – so they had to be away.
When their sons and daughters grew up, they passed their experiences on to them in various ways. They taught their sons to be providers for their families, but without the need for fighting a war or looking for work in far away places. Many men who started in the workforce between 1950-1980 found a reliable job in a stable workplace, but in following their father’s example, behaved as if their office was their battlefront in a war, or a remote place of employment far away from home. There was no regular place for them in the home. Their “place” was on the “workfront”, and they were not at all comfortable spending a signifcant protion of their waking hours at home.
Their families were well provided for – better than any generation before them. They owned homes, two cars, and maybe even belonged to a country club in the suburbs. But they were rarely home. They spent time with their kids over dinner, on the way to church and watching school plays and sporting events. Any more of themselves would have required them to give up much of the time they devoted to providing income for those kids – and that was unthinkable.
So the Baby Boomers and Gen X’ers are rightly thought of as generations of kids growing up with absentee fathers. This truth needs to sink in. Absentee fatherhood was a culturally accepted, then virtually mandated behavior in America, with unintended, natural consequences. Today, politicians and psychologists are striking out at boogeymen called “deadbeat dads”. But the real problem we are and have been facing for at least the last generation is that our culture keeps saying to fathers, “Go out and find a job! Make money to give your wife or your kids’ mother. Don’t worry about being there for them, your responsibility is to pay for what they do.”
No, I’m not writing to diminish the importance of provision for children. They need shelter, and to eat and be clothed just as much as they always have. It is even good to provide well beyond their basic essentials. But the assumption that providing for a child demands that his father will be absent from his life for nearly all of his waking hours isn’t just wrong, it is highly destructive.
A child gains more from the memories he has with his father than all of the things he can buy. A child is closer to the values he holds dear, family life and even his own mother when his father is present in the home. The culture around the family benefits so much because fathers are there to lead and be a part of families, and it suffers when fathers are not.
I don’t want to resort to cliches to reinforce my point. What I do want to do is point out how our attempts at remedying the problems, are only serving to make them worse because they are reinforcing the tired, failed notions that fathers exist to provide money to mothers, and that he serves the family best when he is absent from the home.
In the 1990’s, Congress passed two significant pieces of legislation affecting this theme, both of which express major statements on public policy, and both of which have been abject failures: the Violence Against Women Act, and the Welfare Reform Act. In other places, I have statistically analyzed these laws and pointed out how desperately they have failed in achieving the results they claimed to seek. Here I only want to comment on the policies themselves, and suggest ways the political and family therapy realms would help to remedy the deeper and more serious problems that have been created.
First of all, the desire to protect women from domestic violence is clearly good, as is the desire to reduce the number of people on welfare. But the way we have about trying to achieve these objectives only serves to create a class of villians – men, typically fathers – and to exascerbate absentee fatherhood. No one is going to defend men who assault their wives or lovers, nor men who skip out on their families without taking responsibility for them. In fact, it is regularly argued that men who perpetrate violence or do not meet certain financial obligations are better removed from the family environment than being a part of it.
Conceptually, I agree with that argument. When violence is rightly defined as intentional or uncontrolled behavior that is life threatening or physically disabling, the perpetrator should be incapacitated. Certainly, it is appropriate to remove that person from the presence of the potential victim, and if he is a threat to his own children, from their presence as well. Likewise, if a parent refuses to share in the financial responsibilities appurtenant to raising a child, that parent is sending the child a message that he is not wanted, and it is well for the parent to be separated from the child.
But the argument assumes the above facts. How often are these fact reality? How often are they distorted to suggest they are reality? How often is a mere suggestion that facts like these exist, taken as gospel? How often are horror stories created taht turn out to be largely or even absolutely false? Doesn’t this argument take that which is an exception to ordinary family structure, and create a playground of pretending that it is the rule? Aren’t we better served but looking at real, live, actual facts and addressing what really does exist – where and when it exists?
More to come…
– AJ
contact the author at ajt@web20mates.com
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American Presidential Politics 