Father’s Day for most, a fa(r)ther day for some
Every third Sunday of June is celebrated as Father’s Day with the purpose of recognising and appreciating the contribution, a father makes to his family and the society as a whole. Although it is a lovely gesture, however, this symbolism does not, in any way alleviate the silent agony of a vast number of fathers who, for no fault of theirs are forcefully separated by legal means from their children who crave for their unconditional love.
Archaic and obsolete laws, some of which have not changed for decades, are heavily biased in favour of mothers. They fail to understand or blindly ignore that the child needs both its parents, one is not a replacement for the other. A father is equally important to a child as is its mother. Such antiquated laws are taken advantage of by so called feminists and anti-men agenda groups, political parties and NGOs with misplaced ideologies trying to squeeze maximum mileage by jumping on this bandwagon.
There is even a scientific bias to it. As Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg of Vrije University, Amsterdam notes, even though half the parents are fathers, 99% of research on parenting focuses on mother-child relationship with hardly any studies or research conducted on father-child relationship. Her research is now showing that not only behavioural but even hormonal and neural changes all take place in a father’s brain on hearing the sound of an infant crying (as evidenced with functional brain scanning).Therefore, the general impression in the society as portrayed by the media of the father being a strict authoritarian, unbending taskmaster who deals with children in a firm manner is quite incorrect. This is more so when it is compared to being a mother, who almost universally ‘’understands her children’’ and pitches fatherhood and motherhood as adversarial rather than a partnership.
The Aka tribe is in Central Africa still follow the hunter-gatherer nomadic lifestyle. Here the roles of parents are interchangeable, often mothers go hunting up to the eighth month of pregnancy, while fathers spend nearly of the time with infants and young children. A study of this nomadic society conducted by Professor Barry Hewitt, an American anthropologist noted that it did not matter whether it was the mother or father, the crucial thing of importance was the physical closeness to either of the parents. As currently and incorrectly believed in the so called modern society that it is not the duration but the quality of time spent, Hewett’s study shows that ‘’what fathers need is a lot more time with their children, and they need to hold them close a lot more than they do at the moment. There are lots of positive contributions fathers can make to bringing up their children, but we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of touch and cuddles.” There is an increasing body of evidence showing that given the chance, fathers can be every bit as respondent to their infants as mothers in terms of reading their signals and communicating with them. According to Ruth Feldman, professor at Yale University and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, fathers’ brains are very adaptive and responsive to their children’s needs and contribute for their emotional and cognitive well-being.
However, the reality is that couples separating is becoming more common and socially acceptable. The unintended and innocent victims of this are children and they consequently become a pawn in the custody battle that generally ensues. These legal battles can last for years, and whilst the outcome is awaited, the custody of the children is nearly always handed to the mother with absolute disregard to father.
Michael Lamb from the University of Cambridge has been doing research in the role of fathers in the development of children for over thirty years. In his article, The Role of the Father in Child Development, he states that although fathers may not engage in direct emotional conversation with their children, they significantly enhance children’s emotional competence through various indirect social processes. This has a positive impact on the child’s social behaviour and academic performance and this is seen to extend beyond the preschool years. Children of fathers who get an opportunity to read more with them are noted to have better language and cognitive skills, not just better emotional competence.
Similarly, Dr Paul Ramchandani,Professor of Child and Adolescent Mental Health at Imperial College London and University of Cambridge and his colleagues, in their systematic review of 24 studies examining father’s parenting and children’s psychopathology involving over 22000 children, noted that greater father involvement was associated with fewer behavioural problems in children and less involvement was associated with more behavioural and emotional problems. It was also noted that children who reported low attachment to their fathers were more likely to be aggressive. Importantly, these outcomes were independent of the child’s relationship with the mother. The study concluded that “Fathers can fill a unique and distinctive role in their children’s lives and factors that impact upon the quality and amount of involvement fathers have with their children can affect children’s long-term development”.(Barker B, Iles JE, Ramchandani PG. (2017) Fathers, fathering and child psychopathology. Current Opinion in Psychology, Volume 15, June 2017, Pages 87-92, ISSN 2352-250X http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.02.015)
In fact, to turn the argument on its head, latest high quality (meta-analysis) research as commented in the American Psychological Association comparing psychological adjustment in children of gay fathers with heterosexual parents seems to suggest that the children of gay fathers had much better psychological adjustment compared to those who had a mother and a father. (No differences? Meta-analytic comparisons of psychological adjustment in children of gay fathers and heterosexual parents.Miller BG ,Kors S, Macfie J. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, Vol 4(1), Mar 2017, 14-22) Although, I am in no way suggesting that mothers have a negative impact on the psychological development of a child (pun intended), we must seriously reconsider the absence of a father’s role in the day-today upbringing and overall development of a child and exhort the legal community to reconsider its near-default stand of handing custody of minor children to the mother.
