Let’s face it, if there was something to celebrate on Father’s Day, it was not the awesomeness of South African adult manhood, says Kopano Ratele.
Johannesburg - Sunday was Father’s Day, an occasion we celebrate on the third Sunday in June.
I am uncertain when the day was first celebrated in South Africa. But it is really a terrible choice given its proximity to June 16, a day set aside to commemorate the bloody struggle of black children against apartheid patriarchy.
Even without that bad choice, though, let’s see what we can celebrate this year.
We can celebrate the absence of biological fathers in the lives of the majority of children.
We can celebrate that even when they are physically present in the house, some fathers are usually emotionally absent, which is incredibly depressing.
We can celebrate that many men who want to be there for their children are too ashamed of their poverty or precarious jobs to face them.
Let’s face it, if there is something to celebrate on this year’s Father’s Day, it is not the awesomeness of South African adult manhood or wonderful work the majority of fathers do in the lives of their children. In short, the state of fatherhood is disheartening.
Most men are failing to meet the job description of fatherhood. At the same time, most men are being failed by the current neoliberal economic policies to enable them to be there for their children. Of course, some men won’t do the hard work of fathering, but others simply can’t.
The problem around fathers and fatherhood has many parts. They are nested within each other and constantly moving.
One part of the problem is that fatherhood should start at planning a child. But it is not. Men are still contributing to pregnancy, obviously, although the apparent number of unintended and unwanted pregnancies is an ongoing worry.
Men are not impressively involved when it comes to sexual and reproductive matters. As a result, many of us father children, but when the time comes to do the humdrum yet absolutely essential tasks of parenting, we are usually not there to carry the load.
Particularly from conception to the end of school-going years, fatherhood is really about the day-to-day routine. When men don’t do their share of the routine parenting, women are left to do the heavy lifting. Not only do women carry the baby, they also do the vitally important job of socially and psychologically nurturing children into adulthood.
The answer to this part of the problem is that rather than each of us celebrate in the usual individualistic way we have come to, the state and organised civil society should use a day like Father’s Day to induce men to get involved when it comes to sexual and reproductive matters as well as contributing their share to parenting.
Another part is that many men themselves grew up without adequate parenting from their own fathers. Some studies indicate that the majority of men recognise they are not there for their children. Some men know that by abandoning their children, they are failing just as they were failed by their fathers.
The notion of not “being there” is utterly significant. In fact it is the key to how men can be helped to step up to the demands of fatherhood in today’s world because it is such a common leitmotif we encounter when we ask children and young people about their fathers.
A certain kind of dense absence defines the lives of many South Africans, given that father hunger is also a shared theme in the narratives presented by adult men about their own fathers. My father was away at the mines, some of the adult men reported in a study we conducted a few years ago.
The hunger of an adequate father object is an intergenerational inheritance that warrants psychotherapeutic repair at psychological and cultural levels. If we do not mend the bonds of fathers and children, involved fatherhood will remain a luxury only available to those who have access to some kind of therapeutic intervention. This repair work will involve helping adult men to overcome their own unresolved anger and pain of growing up without fathers.
Yet another part of the problem, perhaps the most intransigent, lies in the obvious societal disrepair around fatherhood and masculinity that goes beyond individual men. The fact that the majority of children grow up without fathers must impress on us that the fatherhood issue is not confined to a few irresponsible men.
Individual men can be more involved in the lives of their children, definitely. However, from others' and my own work with men, it is plain that the heart of the matter lies in the outdated model of fatherhood and manhood our society still holds. It is a model of fatherhood and masculinity the majority of men cannot live up to. The repercussions reverberate well beyond the affected families.
Women are also implicated in perpetuating the disconcerting state of fatherhood in the discourse they relay to their boys and girls. However, the crux of this woeful matter is that both women and men continue to be sold on a model of fatherhood - and family - that clearly does not work.
Now why do some men and women want children when they actually don’t seem to want them and the prevalent model of fatherhood is unworkable, we might ask? That’s what academics call the big research question.
We want children for a variety of reasons, including genetic, evolutionary, cultural and psychological reasons. However, in this form of economy, while men and women might want children, many cannot afford to give them a decent life. They cannot afford to raise children because they don’t have the economic means to even support themselves.
Does that mean only the well-employed are allowed to bear children?
On the contrary, most men and women need support to enable them to support their children - every kind of support. More crucially, the gloomy state of fatherhood arises precisely from the fact that our society, like similar kinds of societies around the world which are dominated by neoliberal financial capitalism that benefits a small group at the top, sends seriously mixed messages to men and women about fatherhood. Poor families are the casualties of these confusing messages.
On the one hand, the message is that ideas about fatherhood are changing. The good father is said to be the man who wants to be in the delivery room at his baby's birth. He changes nappies. He reads to the children every school night.
If only this picture was generalised to the majority of men, we would be a different country. In such a country, men would be allowed to take time off work to care for their children. There would be genderless changing rooms at every mall and workplace. Men would have money to buy books for their children - which brings me to the other message.
This other message tells families that to show your love means nothing if you are not able to buy what the shopping malls have laid out for Father’s Day. It conveys the idea that the best thing families can do on the day is to buy stuff for dad. With the high levels of unemployment and poverty in the country, it means that many families will not be having a loving Father’s Day.
Since the ability to provide for one’s children remains central in how men - and women - define fatherhood, despite the call to make care-giving an equally cherished role for fathers, some men will continue to feel they come up short of being adequate fathers.
The sense of inadequacy carried by men who can’t deal with these confusing messages suggests that, unless we stuff Father’s Day with messages of a new consciousness, some men will continue to stay away from their children.
The absence of men in their children’s lives, which is nested in the failure to live up to the demands of fatherhood in a neoliberal society, is clearly entangled with the struggle for many men to find a viable sense of adult manhood in an economy whose only use for them is as cheap or surplus labour.
* Kopano Ratele is a professor at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa and a researcher in the Violence, Injury and Peace Research Unit at the Medical Research Council.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Star