Nothing Is Overlooked: Dads Matter To Children In A Simple Way – Without Them The Kids Wouldn’t Exist

In the opening lines of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway relates something his father once said: “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in the world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.” In the opening of One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Colonel Aureliano Buendia “was to remember that distant afternoon when the father took him to discover ice.” These literary fathers offer advice and adventure, but there is another quality of fatherhood, which should never be forgotten: spending time with our children, loving them, changing their diapers, helping them with their homework, and so on, causes our children to blossom.

Asking whether a father matters to a child is like asking whether the radius matters to the circle or whether the root matters to the branch. Our society’s failure to acknowledge fathers’ importance is now reflected in the shape of the American family. Fathers are disappearing, and anti-father sentiments are commonplace. Meanwhile, as many as half of American children with divorced parents never or almost never see their fathers. Even in a stable, two-parent households, fathers are unsure of what they bring to the table, now that the nineteen fifties idea of teaching sons what it means to "be a man" has come off it.

Fathers also have a unique role to play in their children’s psychological development. While mothers work to create security and stability, fathers do the opposite, engaging in the rough and tumble play, encouraging risk taking, introducing new words, and bringing home strange toys. Fathers seem to play a special role in helping children enter the wider world. Sons and daughters with more engaged fathers tend to be better with language, and more popular at school. Fathers are also using smartphones as truly mobile workstations to be home early or to be at important events with their kids. There are even areas where fathers are more influential than mothers. Time spent with fathers predicts how empathetic children will be as adults.

Fathers can help their children grow into confident adults, often simply by being available
and open-minded. The truth is we inherit from our parents a mixture of the personal and the impersonal. It matters that our fathers were kind to us when we were children or teenagers – that they loved us, and on Father’s Day, we’re grateful for those kindnesses. But other, more uncontrollable things also matter: whether our dads were stressed out about money thirty, forty or fifty years ago. Whether they ate well, smoked or drank. You can’t really be grateful for or angry about those impersonal elements of chance. And yet they are written into us too. They make up the arbitrary, contradictory continuation of what families are composed.  In a way, that randomness marks the depth of the bond we share with our parents. How do you know you matter to someone? When you affect on another with selflessness and love.