My grandfather never changed my father's diapers, never put him to bed, never even played with him.
One of the most important father-son memories my father has (and which he has told me about) is of when he was five years old and his mother would let him stay up late to watch a show on TV; his father had then vetoed it and he had gone to bed crying. He also recalls that his father, from time to time, ran after him with a belt (in those days it was still considered acceptable).
A dad plays with the baby
It is evident how my father did not have a valid model to inspire him to become an involved father : «I had to invent it myself – he confided to me recently – but I think it was also an instinctive fact, born simply from my desire to be close to you . I felt love for you, I wanted to teach you many things, I felt the need to play with you».
Adding that, subconsciously, he was probably making up for the deficiencies he suffered in his childhood.
The idea that man possesses a parental instinct, and that he is not just a supplier of goods and the family's top financer,
is relatively new. To my grandfather's generation the concept was practically foreign.
When I was born in 1986, the idea that men should do more by participating more in family life was gaining traction, but they were still
seen as mere substitutes for mothers .
As proof of this, it is striking how, until just a decade earlier, the scientists who studied the early development of children looked exclusively at mothers.
Indeed
, the mid-1970s was the heyday of
attachment theory , which radically focused
on the critical importance of attachment between infant and mother in the early years of life . This went hand in hand with the assumption that this was the only primary relationship in which children could be involved.
At the time, however, researcher
Michael Lamb (who later became a forerunner of paternity research in the 1970s) and a handful of other scholars were all coming to the same conclusion:
Babies can develop attachments to their dads as strong as as much as that towards their mothers.
Fathers became more than a comfortable prop for mothers. After modest initial studies — experiments that showed that a temporarily abandoned baby stopped crying as soon as his father returned — researchers eventually came to the conclusion that
active dads could have a net positive impact on every aspect of a child's development. From that seed grew a series of intriguing pieces of evidence proclaiming that
not only are men made to care for children, but that
being an involved dad impacts children's physiology, psychology, and outcomes for the rest of their lives.
This positive impact has been associated, to report concrete situations, with fewer cognitive delays, better school readiness, decreased tantrums and aggressive behavior, and lower rates of depression.
In short, dads make the difference. So why, when we see a man with a baby on a weekday, do we still reflexively wonder where the mother is (even though we think he looks so damn cute in that stroller)?
The truth is, just as women have always had what it takes to be CEOs, men have always had the power to nurture. Now that we're acknowledging that, the day may soon come when the default assumption that mom is the primary parent will seem ridiculously bizarre, and we'll all be better off for it.
Taken from Born Mom | by Carlotta Cordieri
