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Talk

Trust New York to come up with an introduction like that. I mean, really. It is true I’m a New Yorker. I’ve lived in the City now for almost forty years, and whether I’m up to all those adjectives, that’s another thing for you to judge later. I’m not so sure, but I hope to hold up Manhattan in this list of speakers.

It’s not just a pleasure to be here, but it’s also a challenge. I don’t think I’ve ever addressed an audience of the kind you were described as, and it looks like you really are. I met some of you beforehand. You come from different countries. Some of you have very odd names; some of you have very familiar names. But I expect that there is a little bit of the world here tonight, not just New York in a parochial sense.

What I’m going to talk about is the general theme of fatherhood. I think that I can show, with a few comments and analysis, that the crisis of our culture today is in important respects a crisis in the family. But at the center of the crisis in the family is a crisis in what it is to be a father. We’ve lost this understanding of the capstone, in my judgment, of what it is to be a man, because I think all men are called to be fathers. Now, I don’t necessarily mean they are called to be biological fathers. I mean that they’re called to be fathers to at least some of the younger people in their life.

But I want to introduce this with a remark from the ancient Hebrew Scriptures where they say that “the sins of the fathers” go on for generations, sometimes for three or perhaps for seven. It is interesting that they only speak, so far as I know, about the sins of the fathers being perpetuated onto their children.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that mothers aren’t capable of sinning or of not being good mothers. But there is something very profoundly true about the scriptural observation. First of all, I think mothers are much more reliable at being mothers than fathers are at being fathers. There are many, many more “good enough” mothers, relatively speaking. So they’re less likely, I think, to be causing damage to their children. I know there are exceptions. After all, I’ve been an active therapist for years, and I certainly know people who have had serious trouble with their mothers. But in general, mothers are much more reliable at being mothers than fathers are at being fathers. Second, if a mother is not reliable, usually it shows up very soon when the child is young, and other women who observe it— the grandmother, the sister— step in and help out. You find substitute mothers and foster mothers coming in quickly, if the mother is one of those who are truly unsatisfactory.

And finally, there’s another reason why these comments from the Jewish Scriptures are correct, and that is, if the mother really fails and there’s nobody else to pick it up— if mothering fails— the children are so damaged that they can’t pass their sins on to anybody, that is, they’re not out there functioning. They may be withdrawn, they may be in a mental institution, and they may be so frightened or anxious that as members of society, they simply fail. Or let’s say that the children got into some socially destructive mode, when they got a little bit older. So, in a certain sense, the sins of the mother are much less likely— even if they do occur— to be passed on to subsequent generations.

And so, they speak of the sins of the fathers, and what happens is something like this: The child has a good enough mother, and then the father comes along and fails in some substantial way; perhaps he’s an alcoholic, or he abandons them and runs off with another woman. In fact, one of the tragic ways in which a father can fail when the child is young is simply to die, and the child feels abandoned. Young children don’t understand death as an accident; they just feel purposely abandoned. There are ways to overcome this to some degree, but for some of the people we will look at, their failed father was a dead father— a dead father who was not later replaced in any way by a new substitute father.

What is the father’s major function? I’ll talk about some of the data later, but the father is a kind of Mr. Outside, while the mother is Mrs. Inside. She forms the basic character, the emotional life, the interpersonal responsiveness of the child, much more than the father. But the father introduces the child much more often to the outside world. The father symbolizes the structure of that world, of law and order, of the activities, of the things that you get involved in when you leave the home.

What happens when the child is functioning okay because of having a good enough mother but has a bad father? Very often, the child will get out into that world and cause a lot of trouble, because the father hasn’t been there. In fact, in social science, probably the most reliably documented piece of evidence is the effect of bad fathering on children; we can see it in various pathological indices. It’s unbelievable that this information has been around for over fifty years in extremely substantial ways, but it continues to get little attention.

Let me mention in summary what some of these indices are: Researchers have found that the father makes major contributions to the child’s development, especially to individual identity and social identity. The father helps the child to separate psychologically from the mother, teaches the child much more to control its impulses, especially in the case of small boys and older boys as well. The father serves as a buffer from the mother’s attention and keeps the child from being overly emotionally bound to the mother. “This often happens when the mother really has no one else to get involved with, because the father has abandoned her. The father is very instrumental in the development of the intellectual life and the outside activities of the children and in their respect for the outside world in terms of law and order.”

The most common finding is the tendency to criminality in boys and young men who didn’t have fathers. It’s so common that it’s a cliché. We see it over and over again. Our prisons are filled with young men who didn’t have functioning fathers. This is a common response to a lack of discipline and fathering. These young men also lack an understanding of the outside world and often have a kind of incompetence in dealing with it that leads to anger and a rage, and it shows. They often run into a bunch of other young men like themselves, and pretty soon you’ve got a gang with all of its well-known problems.

By the way, when the father is present, the children end up with higher cognitive capacities, higher IQs. In addition, when the father is in the family, the children are more likely to be employed, make more money and more often succeed in life. This is true for both the boys and the girls.

We’ve all heard about something called “the Mozart effect.” I’m not talking about the effect of his music on your brain but about the effect of Mozart’s father. Mozart was the product of his father’s devoted attention, though perhaps a little bit too intense. In fact, history is filled with children like that. There’s Pascal, whose father spent his time at home, schooling the young genius, and there was John Stuart Mill with his father, James Mill. At age three, young Mill was learning Greek. His father focused intensely on him. In the athletic world today, we have many outstanding athletes whose fathers were important to their success. Michael Jordan talks about his father as having helped him, as having modeled for him, as having led him. For Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, it was his deeply involved grandfather. And when it isn’t a father, it’s a coach, or a teacher or another substitute father.

Many times, young women who are very successful show the same phenomenon. They have a strong sense that their father is with them and has broken the barriers down for them. I don’t know all of the examples. Recently I saw in the paper an article involving a very successful, wealthy New Yorker who is the head of Citigroup— Sandy Weill. I’ve never met him, but there was a picture of him with his daughter. They were smiling next to each other. The daughter had just had her first IPO. He was right there with her, giving her support. This is one of the things that fathers do for their children.

But returning to criminality: This is perhaps the major way in which failed fathers pass on their sins to the next generation. There are plenty of poor environments where the fathers are present and there is no criminality. We think of criminal behavior as somehow related to ghettos or the inner city or something like that. When the social scientists take out whether the father is present and the whole issue of the stability of the family, there are no ethnic, racial, linguistic, or cultural factors related to criminal behavior. It is family structure that counts, and the crucial family person that isn’t there is the father. The mother may be there, but she commonly struggles through welfare; if she has a job, the children get farmed out to daycare. Either way, there’s a big price to pay for the children.