THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994 TAG: 9406150436
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
DATELINE: 940619 LENGTH: Medium
Not.
{REST} There are some new books that seek to straighten me out a bit. They encourage me, they chide me, they scold me. Just like the kids.
The Gift of Fatherhood by psychologist Aaron Hass (Simon & Schuster, 203 pp., paper, $11) acknowledges that most dads start out with good intentions and end up with regrets. Because men derive a sense of satisfaction from the status they attain, Hass notes, and because we tend to be competitive in our occupations, we often neglect our children for our jobs.
``Will you play with me, Daddy?''
``I've got some important work to do.''
Hass' crucial message is that the most important thing we can give our offspring in our stressful, overbooked era is time.
Not toys, not discipline, not educational advantages - ourselves.
We reap, Hass says, what we sow. Our kids will probably parent the way we do. And if we don't like the way our parents did it, we have to break the cycle.
The Future of White Men and Other Diversity Dilemmas by multiculturalist Joan Steinau Lester (Conari Press, 164 pp., $17.95) points out that white men like me formerly ran the country. Women raised the children; people of color served. Gay men and women and people with disabilities didn't exist.
Times have changed.
Consequently, white men are called upon to share. Men have been so conditioned not to show emotion or even happiness, Lester says, that they can't display the warmth they really feel. She wants us to lighten up.
Prejudice must be taught. So must tolerance. Lester, a lesbian mother of two biracial children, advocates the latter.
Family therapist Olga Silverstein and freelance editor Beth Rashbaum insist it's wrong to view success and power as touchstones for male identity. In The Courage to Raise Good Men (Viking, 275 pp., $21.95), they maintain we should question the very idea of a male sex role that ``draws lines between appropriately male and appropriately female behaviors.'' John Wayne's out, Alan Alda's in.
No, Alda's out, too.
The one who's really in is Murphy Brown, single mom.
``The good man, like the good woman,'' Silverstein and Rashbaum write, ``will be empathic and strong, autonomous and connected, responsible to self, to family and friends, and to society.''
They say we need to teach our sons to be tender, not tough. To cooperate instead of to compete. To give instead of to take.
And dads with the traditional sociological sensitivity of Fred Flintstone just get in the way. No wild men need apply. Boo to you, Robert Bly.
``Those feminine qualities that Bly and his cohorts are seeking to drum away on their weekend retreats may turn out to be precisely the ones men will need to survive in this drastically changed world of ours,'' the authors contend.
The old male role model, they argue, is obsolete.
Actually, I think fiction writer Ann Beattie, who has never billed herself as a psychologist or therapist or feminist or any other kind of ``ist,'' provides the definitive statement on bringing up a boy in our self-obsessed, politically correct, exhaust-imbued era:
``Do everything right, all the time, and the child will prosper. It's as simple as that, except for fate, luck, heredity, chance, and the astrological sign under which the child was born, his order of birth, his first encounter with evil, the girl who jilts him in spite of her excellent qualities, the war that is being fought when he is a young man, the drugs he may try once or too many times, the friends he makes, how he scores on tests, how well he endures kidding about his shortcomings, how ambitious he becomes, how far he falls behind, circumstantial evidence, ironic perspective, danger when it's least expected, difficulty in triumphing over circumstances, people with hidden agendas, and animals with rabies.''
So what's a father to do?
I personally subscribe to Hass' advice: Love your kids.
Then, love them a little more. by CNB