This year, Father’s Day fell on my father’s birthday. My thoughts turn to him and how recent trends have reshaped attitudes toward fathers and fathering.
The original Latin word for father is pater, and paterfamilias describes the male head of a household. Traditionally, the patriarch, or paterfamilias, was the sole wage earner, the family provider and protector, and the moral and religious educator of offspring. In our collective imaginations, he is the Great Father archetype, a wisdom figure, a protector who restores justice and brings order to chaos by embodying righteous authority and power. In the Vedic Hindu tradition, he is the sky father; he is the Greek god Zeus and the Roman god Jupiter. He is the stern God of the Old Testament and the Heavenly Father of the New Testament.
In our dreams, the good father archetype (see my previous blog, “Fathers: Heroes, Villains, and Our Need for Archetypes”) may appear as a kindly old beggar, a roaring male lion, or a familiar male figure we admire. Cultural heroes like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, the Lakota leader Sitting Bull, or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. offer a projected version of the good father archetype, as can presidents, tribal chiefs, cult leaders, movie stars, and heroes in literature. Fictional fathers, like Atticus Finch from the novel and movie To Kill a Mockingbird, depict idealized versions of wise, morally upright fathers. These figures may bear little resemblance to our flawed flesh-and-blood dads, but they fill a psychic need, as do some leaders, to believe someone stronger and wiser is looking out for us. Fathers of minorities or other marginalized groups are only now regularly being represented in popular culture.
My personal story illustrates an outdated patriarchal model of fathering. I grew up in a white, middle-class family in a quiet, mid-20th-century suburban New Jersey neighborhood. My father worked at a 9-to-5 government job. My mother worked as a private secretary before she married. A second salary would have improved our family’s resources, but my father forbade my mother from forsaking child-rearing........