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"I'd
like to be more involved with my kids."
"I'm afraid of holding the baby and that bothers me.
You know, I wouldn’t even mind changing his diaper once
in a while!"
"I want my kids to feel closer to me than I felt towards
my father."
Well, as psychologists involved
in child development, all we can say is - Great! Both mothers
and fathers can provide rich experiences for their children
and each can use his or her unique personality and style to
enhance each child's development.
Psychologists are still debating
whether women and men have different biological instincts.
One study found that in our society and culture most girls,
from an early age, have many more experiences of "parenting"
than boys.
For whatever reason, girls spend
more time with dolls, and with playing "house" and
with "Mommy and baby" than boys do.
Similarly, boys are seldom chosen
as babysitters, so that form of early "parenting"
is also experienced more by girls.
Of course there are exceptions,
but most boys suppress these emotions already at an early
age.
Psychologist Buck Park, Ph.D.
at the University of Connecticut conducted research that concluded
that while all children start out being emotionally responsive,
boys have learned by the age of six to actively suppress their
emotions.
Thus, it appears that both boys
and girls, and women and men, have a potentially large repertoire
of emotions that lie within them. Accessing those emotions
may be difficult for some men, but they can do it if they
want to. And nowadays more men seem to want just that.
You can have the qualities that
create a good parent - such as responsiveness, sensitivity,
empathy and good judgment - no matter what gender you are,
and it's only common sense that our kids should receive these
elements from both of you.
So
close, yet so far...
For too many years now, in too
many families, fathers have been distant from their kids and
minimally involved. I've had tens of kids tell me in my practice
that they have no emotional connection with their father after
I heard from the father how great things were between them.
One mother showed me a thank-you
card her six-year-old had made for his parents as part of
a school assignment. It thanked them for his clothes, food,
toys, and love. After the word "love," he wrote
in parentheses: "Mommy." The father was shocked.
He appears to have a loving, intense involvement with the
family, spends more time with his children than most fathers
and is as active a homemaker as the mother.
Fathers recognizing this discrepancy
of perception are taking another look at the level of connectedness
they have with their children. They are making a conscious
effort to listen more intently to their kids and to spend
time with them alone, not only "doing things," but
also trying to hook up with the child's world in an attempt
to understand and to connect.
Another indication of this trend
on the part of the fathers is the growth of courses on fatherhood
throughout the U.S. and Canada. From the Fatherhood Project
in New York to the Fatherhood Course at Boston and Harvard
Universities and Massachusetts Institute of Technology to
the Making Room for Daddies Course, men are working at being
better able to relate to their children and wives and to handle
family conflicts as they arise.
Based on our work and clinical
experiences, it would seem to us that women and men are equal
but different. For example, it is often cited that men
and women parent differently in that women are supposed to
help the family connect (called "encouraging affiliation")
while fathers encourage their children’s autonomy.
William Pollack Ph.D. conducted
research that challenges this traditional view. He found that
both genders have qualities of autonomy and affiliation but
they differ in how they perceive the two qualities: Men
said they affiliated with their children by playing with them
or by teaching them while women do so through hugging and
holding.
In Pollack's book, In a Time
of Father Heroes: The Re-Creation of Masculinity (Guildford
Press, 1993), co-authored with R. William Belcher, Ph.D., M.D.,
they write: "We need to recognize that there is a his autonomy
and a her autonomy, a his intimacy and a her intimacy."
As we said, equal but different. And our kids need each of them
- both mom and dad parenting positively - in his or her own style.
The more of that we have, the better off our kids will
be.
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