The missing man

The word ‘parent’ in our country still effectively means ‘mother’. Parent is used as a politically correct term to sound inclusive, but in reality it rarely is. This may be because the word is too vague and permits enough space for the absent parent to remain, well… absent. In any ‘group’ or ‘talk’ on parenting, most of the attendees are mothers.

This is not by accident. It is a constructed reality. Society has conjured this by allowing the busy parent — the one who provides for the family ‘monetarily’ — to be absent or relinquish the responsibility of the children to the other. The mother.

This places a burden on the mother, whether it is experienced as such or not. However, what is ignored is the impact on the child of having a powerful, but largely inactive male member in the family. In fact, to have a father who is alive but absent seems to have a worse effect on children than having a dead and, therefore, unavailable father.

Today, across classes there is a crisis in fatherhood in urban India — men are not becoming fathers. This problem spans the richest families with disposable wealth to the poor in unauthorised housing and the wide middle-class in between. They are fertilising eggs with their sperm but seem to be clueless about their next role. These are not just my words. President Barack Obama in a 2010 speech on Father’s Day said, “We need fathers to realise that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realise that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child — it’s the courage to raise one.”

The Economist has, more than once, run a cover story on the uselessness of the male. Feminists have often argued whether it is even necessary to have men in families.

I am arguing that it is. It is important because the growing child needs his father.

A son in need

Ideally, I would assert that it is as important for both boys and girls to have their fathers present, but for now I am going to stick to the need of boys. I make this choice because there is often little separation between mothers and their sons in our culture. The mother is often blamed and caricatured for this: whether as the overprotective mother chasing her son with a glass of milk; or the anxious mother of the young man, keeping an eye on his friendships with girls; or the overbearing and possessive mother-in-law making life difficult for the son’s new wife. Yet this separation between mother and son can only come about if the father enters the picture early enough and is valued by his son. For there to be a greater distance between mother and son, the distance between father and son needs to reduce.

The gap left by the father is filled by the mother, and the father can’t fit back in. It is an unfortunate chicken-and-egg situation, but casting blame will never prove helpful.

The longest distance

The young people I work with often tell me about the distance between themselves and their fathers, and the damage this causes. It is a common theme that runs through many of their stories. It is not enough to say that a father’s involvement benefits a young person. Each form of absence — whether it is just disinterest or divorce, alcohol, disease and death — has a profound impact on a child. Urban India must recognise the link between a father’s absence in a son’s life and the child’s capacity to regulate aggression. This aggression could be outward towards other people (usually female, starting with his mother and moving to others) or inwards in the form of self-neglect and depression. Both these scenarios are on the increase.

More than one mother has come into my office complaining that her teenage son hits her. The father is absent in one way or another. Her son, she says, will not come to see me. So it’s between me and her. These mothers are strong, capable women who are not pushovers, yet here they are being physically bullied by their teenage sons and feel powerless to stop it. On further exploration it emerges that the sons feel powerless too — especially in the outside world — with their peers and in school. They are often frustrated and demoralised, and take their anger out on the one person who is always present — the mother.

These are not stories from poor, uneducated families. These are from middle- and upper-middle-class families that use a ‘this won’t happen to us’ version of denial as a force field.

Research after research shows that a father’s involvement in his children’s lives has a positive impact on their development, school achievement, social skills and relationships. Harsh Mander recently wrote in The Hindu on “involved fatherhood”, and the State of the World’s Fathers report, which concludes that “fathers matter”.

Children would have told you that, if anyone had cared to ask or listen to them. If children don’t ask for their fathers, it is not because of disinterest, but because they have seldom known them. When their mothers handle all dimensions of care — food, upkeep, school, friendships — then what will the father bring in? Sadly, neither father nor child have an answer for that.

The actions of most fathers suggest that they want to remain providers or bystanders. They leave all the caretaking to a combination of mother, grandmother and hired help (usually female).

As a child psychologist, when I am asked to help a child, it is the mothers who make the first call. In 12 years of practice, one father has made the first call. I have learnt that I must call the father to the first appointment. If not, it is too easy to conclude that he is the villain of the piece. When I persist, the fathers do arrive. They seem torn between the desire to be in the wings and the urge to be called onto centre stage. They want to be involved but they don’t seem to know how. Their reluctance often hides a lack of confidence in their own capacities as a father. They simply are not sure they are valued. And they really do want to be.

(Nupur Dhingra Paiva is a clinical child psychologist who teaches at Ambedkar University, Delhi)

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