Counseling Fathers

Chen Z. Oren, Dora Chase Oren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135859404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Conseil en psychothérapie

Men do not often come for counseling because they are having difficulties with being a father, but many of the presenting problems and reasons for seeking help can be related to the roles and responsibilities of fathering. The dramatic shift in societal expectations of being a father can often leave men confused as they navigate conflicting views, demands, and responsibilities.

Counseling Fathers is designed to bridge the gap between fathers and professional helpers. This book provides the mental health practitioners with a guide for working with fathers in therapy, whether the issues of fathering are at the center of the discussions or in the background. The organization of the book speaks to the variety of today's fathers and the issues that they face.Part I provides an historical overview of the fathering movement, a strength-based approach to working with fathers, and an assessment paradigm using gender role conflict theory. PartII takes a cross-cultural approach, with a series of chapters that look at counseling with Latino, Asian, Black, and Caucasian fathers.Part III looks at specific populations of fathers, including first time fathers, teen fathers, stay-at-home fathers, gay fathers, and older fathers. Counseling Fathers provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive resource for family and individual practitioners who work with men who father.

SECTION

1

Historical Perspectives and Current Directions

C H A P T E R

1

The New Fathering Movement

RONALD F. LEVANT AND DAVID J. WIMER

This chapter takes a recent historical perspective and examines the emergence of the new father role, also known as the involved or nurturing father, which began around 1975 in the United States and became prominent on the national scene in the 1980s. The first author was a participant in the movement that created this new area of research and clinical practice. Thus, we will discuss this movement, in part from the first author’s own experiences that include serving as the Director of the Boston University Fatherhood Project from 1983 to 1988. We will discuss the social changes in the 1960s and 1970s that led to the new father role. We will also consider data on paid work, family work, and free time that suggest that men have not fully adopted the new father role, and data on changes in divorce patterns that suggest there may continue to be a “crisis of connection” between men and women. Finally, we will consider how counselors have in the past and might in the future address these matters.

THE NEW FATHERING MOVEMENT: A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE

In the mid-1970s, the first author was a young assistant professor in counseling psychology at Boston University who was considered an expert on family therapy. During this time, he also struggled on a personal level with the role of the divorced father. He visited his daughter in New York on weekends, and she lived with him during several summers. It was hard for him to imagine being an involved father because he did not have much to draw on from his memories of his own father, whose idea of spending time with his sons always involved work, like having his sons mow the lawn while he supervised.

These extended visits with his daughter did not always go smoothly. He lived with a sense of fraudulence, often thinking to himself: “How can you pretend to be an expert on parenting when you are so inept in your own life as father?” Like most men, he kept his sense of inadequacy to himself for fear of violating the traditional male norms of self-reliance and invulnerability. He thus deprived himself of the experience of learning that other fathers struggled with this role.

In the late 1970s, the film Kramer vs. Kramer resulted in a major epiphany in his life. He saw himself in the character portrayed by Dustin Hoffman and realized, for the first time, that he was not alone. His focus started to shift from a sense of personal inadequacy to a realization that his struggles might be inherent in the larger-scale change going on in the lives of men. Fathers were starting to take on roles vastly different from that of their own fathers and for which they had received little, if any, preparation. He researched the question of what resources existed for fathers who wanted to be fully involved, effective parents of their children. The answer was, Nothing. Echoing Michael Lamb (1979), he concluded that the father was the forgotten parent and that parent education was synonymous with mother education.

This series of events became the proverbial “fork in the road” in his life. He found his academic interest in parenting waning and became much more invested in fathering. This shift led to the founding of the Boston University Fatherhood Project in 1983, which was a research, service, and training program designed to enhance fathers’ involvement in family life. With the help of bright young doctoral students, he turned to the task of designing psychoeducational parenting programs for men (Levant & Doyle, 1983; Levant & Kelly, 1989).

Along with colleagues, such as Joseph Pleck and James Levine, Levant participated in developing a revolutionary new concept of fathering that emphasized the father’s ability to play an “expressive” role in the family, rather than being limited to an “instrumental” role (Parsons & Bales, 1955). Levant and others viewed the father as capable of providing even the most intimate type of nurturance for his children from infancy onward. These pioneers envisioned a new father role that went far beyond the elements of the traditional father role as good provider, supporter of the children’s mother, and chief disciplinarian, and accumulated data that showed that men could be involved, nurturing parents (Lamb, 1981; Levant, Slattery, Loiselle, Sawyer-Smith, & Schneider, 1990; Parke, 1979; Pruett, 1987). They also actively advocated for the new father role. For example, Levant and Pleck served on the steering committee for the Greater Boston Fatherhood Forum in 1984. This event drew a lot of media attention because it featured the former U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas, who had recently resigned his Senate seat when diagnosed with cancer, making a statement (seen at the time as a radical departure from traditional norms) that he was not resigning because of his health, but rather because he wanted to spend more time with his family.

Levant (1992; Levant & Kopecky, 1995) went even further, arguing that the traditional view of fathers’ roles as helping their sons become more “masculine” deserved serious scrutiny. Premised on an essentialistic philosophy, such a notion encourages fathers to engage in behaviors that empirical research has shown play an important role in socializing young boys to conform to the norms of traditional masculinity. We are referring to data such as those showing that traditional fathers begin to take an active interest in their children after the thirteenth month of life (Lamb, 1979) and from that point on socialize their toddler sons and daughters along gender-stereotyped lines (Lamb, Owen, & Chase-Lansdale, 1979; Siegal, 1987), which includes expressing disapproval to sons who engage in gender atypical play (Langlois & Downs, 1980). Recent longitudinal research confirms these findings, demonstrating that paternal responses to sons (emotion socialization) were associated with a 50% decrease in sons’ expressions of sadness and anxiety from preschool to early school-age (Chaplin, Cole, & Zahn-Waxler, 2005). Levant has long been critical of the idea that fathers should reproduce masculinity in their sons. Instead, he argues that the endorsement of and conformity to traditional masculine norms is not essential to being a healthy male, but rather is a social construction and not entirely benign at that. Levant and Richmond (2007, p. 142) reviewed the literature and concluded that the endorsement of traditional masculinity ideology was found to be associated with a range of problematic individual and relational variables, “including reluctance to discuss condom use with partners, fear of intimacy, lower relationship satisfaction, more negative beliefs about the fathers’ role and lower paternal participation in child care, negative attitudes toward racial diversity and women’s equality, attitudes conducive to sexual harassment, self reports of sexual aggression, lower forgiveness of racial discrimination, alexithymia and related constructs, and reluctance to seek psychological help.”

SOCIAL CHANGES THAT LED TO THE NEW FATHER ROLE

The women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s produced enormous changes in women’s roles, particularly with regard to women’s dramatically increased participation in the workplace. To grasp the magnitude of these changes, consider that there has been a 500% rise in the employment of mothers of small children since the 1950s. Twelve percent of mothers with children under the age of 6 were employed in 1950, whereas 60% were employed in 2000 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2000). Currently, less than 10% of American families fit the traditional model of breadwinner husband/homemaker wife with children (Fraad, 2001), and the percentage for families of lower socioeconomic status and families of different ethnicities has always been lower than the overall percentage because these families have never conformed to the traditional family structure (Baca Zinn & Eitzen, 1996).

Coincident with this change in workforce participation was women’s dramatically increased participation in higher education. In 2006, women earned approximately 51% of all doctoral degrees in the United States, representing an increase from 39% in 1995, 34% in 1985, and only 22% in 1975 (Hoffer et al., 2007). In addition, 2006 was the first time in U.S. history in which women were awarded more doctorates than men across every racial/ethnic minority group.The enrollment of women in undergraduate education has increased dramatically since 1960. As of 2003, women as a whole made up 58% of all students enrolled in undergraduate institutions, compared with only 38% in 1960 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2006). As with doctoral degrees, more women receive bachelor’s degrees than men across all racial/ethnic minority groups. In 2003, 67% of all undergraduate degrees awarded to African Americans were awarded to women. This trend was consistent for American Indians (63%), Latin Americans (61%), and Asian Americans (55%).

Thus, women have been living with major changes in the construction of their gender roles for almost 50 years. They have moved from a sole emphasis on the family, and many now juggle career and family concerns (including spouse, child, and elder care, in many cases), although juggling work and family has likely always been the case for women of different ethnicities (Baca Zinn & Eitzen, 1996). In making this shift, they have combined traditional feminine norms such as love, family, and caring for others with newer norms such as independence, career, and defining themselves through their own accomplishments.

It was in this context that the new father role developed. Some men saw the compelling need to co-parent with their working wives and willingly chose to do so by taking either the “morning shift” (getting the children dressed, fed, and off to day care or school) or the “evening shift” (picking up the kids, starting dinner, and settling the children into their evening routines), but as we document below, the new father role has not yet been universally adopted. Although there has been an increase in men’s openness to relationships and much greater participation in the emotional and domestic arenas (c.f. Silverstein, Auerbach, & Levant, 2002), many men cling to the older definitions that emphasize work and individual accomplishment over emotional intimacy and family involvement. Masculinity plays an important role in this. Using path analysis, Bonney, Kelley, and Levant (1999) found that the endorsement of traditional masculinity ideology directly influenced (as an unmediated relationship) both maternal and paternal beliefs about the father’s role, and indirectly influenced men’s participation in child care (through its effect on maternal and paternal beliefs about the father’s role).

RESISTANCE TO THE NEW FATHER ROLE

It is puzzling that many men have resisted change in their role definitions in light of the loss of the “good provider” role. Many men are in fact no longer the good providers for their families that fathers have traditionally been and that many men expect themselves to be. With the majority of adult women in the work force, very few men are sole providers and most are coproviders. This has been documented repeatedly, for example, in the study conducted by the Families and Work Institute (1995) that found 55% of employed women provide half or more of the household income. In addition, 73% of American companies have women in senior or top-level positions (Bond, Galinsky, Kim, & Brownfield, 2005). Finally, there has been an erosion of wages for men over the last 30 years that has challenged the ability of men to be the sole family provider (Levy, 1995).

The good-provider role has been such an important part of the definition of what it means to be a man that one would think its loss would impel an immediate search for alternatives. Although some men are actively involved in constructing new definitions of being a man that do not require devotion to work, others seem to be caught up in denial. For example, we know men whose wives work full-time, but who still consider themselves their family’s provider, and they justify this attitude by rationalizing that they make more money, could make more money, or are more committed than their wives to providing for the family.

The obvious candidate to replace the good provider is the “good family man,” the husband who shares child care and housework, as well as provision, with his wife, which would include the new father role. However, men have not flocked to this new role. Although some think that contemporary culture has embraced the idea of the nurturing father (LaRossa, 1989), there have not been major changes in corporate and government family policies supportive of men’s full involvement in family life. Until President Clinton’s Fatherhood Initiative in 1995, researchers and policymakers focused on the father’s role of provider (Cabrera & Peters, 2000). The Fatherhood Initiative sparked interest in a more comprehensive study of the father’s role, and researchers are now starting to understand better the impact that fathers can have on the cognitive, moral, and social development of their children (Lamb, 1981, 2004; Pleck & Pleck, 1997). However, the research sparked by the Fatherhood Initiative also revealed many barriers to overcome. One major barrier is that men themselves have not fully embraced this new good family man role, judging from studies on the division of household labor.

The Division of Household Labor

In the middle and late l960s, large-scale time-budget studies indicated that husbands’ participation in family work (both child care and housework) was quite low (1.1 to 1.6 hours/day) compared with that of their wives (7.6 to 8.1 hours/day for housewives and 4.0 to 4.8 hours/ day for employed wives), and that husbands tended to increase their participation only slightly (0.1 hour/day) in response to their wives’ employment (Robinson, 1977; Walker & Woods, 1976). Juster and Stafford (1985) found a 20% increase in the amount of time husbands put into family work over the period 1965–1981. Douthitt (1989) found additional increases in the amount of time that husbands put into family work during the 1980s. Although Berardo, Shehan, and Leslie (1987) found the type of family work men engaged in shifted from yard and car work to child care and meal preparation, in the area of child care, fathers still tended to rely on their wives to assign tasks rather than taking responsibility for the care (Van Egeren, 2004). Data from 1988 indicate that the amount of time husbands spend in family work is only about 38% of the total, and access to free time is a major area of inequality, in which fathers have approximately 20% more free time than mothers (Sayer, 2005). The failure of men to share family work equally with their wives continues the “second shift” identified by Hochschild (1989). Hence, it is clear that inequities remain, owing to some men’s unwillingness to accept responsibility for family work. This may be contributing to the continuing “crisis of connection” between men and women (Levant, 1996), which can be seen in the contemporary patterns of divorce.

The Increasing Fragility of Marriage

As is well known, the divorce rate more than doubled between 1965 and 1979. Divorce rates are measured in terms of numbers of occurrences per 1,000 members of the population. The rate had been roughl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Foreword
• Preface: Counseling Diverse Populations of Fathers
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• SECTION 1 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES AND CURRENT DIRECTIONS
• SECTION 2 COUNSELING FATHERS ACROSS ETHNIC GROUPS
• SECTION 3 COUNSELING SPECIFIC POPULATIONS OF FATHERS
• Footnote
• Index