GUEST POST – “What Our Culture Has to Say about Fatherhood”

THIS IS A GUEST POST FROM PREVIOUS TRUEMANHOOD.COM GUEST POSTER, AND US ARMY HERO, RYAN KRAEGER.  THANKS RYAN!

Earlier this week, when I had no time to write, this post about whether men want to be daddies anymore caught my eye. Fitting as it did into my current musings on fatherhood in general, I read the post. It wasn’t bad, it made some good points, although it went a little too far the other way in some spots, but I’ll accept the hyperbole as that. Then, I scrolled down to read the comments. The poor kid got flamed. Some college kid somewhere stands up and calls out the men of our generation for failing at life and he gets three basic responses:

1) Who would want to be a father if that’s what it means? All that responsibility! You have to think about yourself. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

2) I don’t fail at fatherhood/I won’t fail when I get out of college, stop partying and hooking up and settle down to it. You have to have your fun first, then you settle down and do the whole dad thing.

3) Awwwww, that’s so cute! (Take it from me, that ubiquitous female accolade is ten times more annoying than the worst insults of the most hateful men out there.) If more men were like you, me and my girlfriends wouldn’t keep ending up with losers.

I counted only two rational response that acknowledged the good points and politely corrected the exaggerations.

I’m not even going to address #3. Yes, I lament the number of losers in the world, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that any woman ever has to “end up” with one. That makes it sound like it just sort of happens to you somehow and you just don’t know how. Responsibility goes both ways.

But the other two are male problems, and those I will address. #1 and #2 are two sides to the same coin. #1 is just a little more honest than #2. The first one simply acknowledges, “Hey, I just want to have fun and do my own thing. I don’t want to have kids, because kids would cramp my style. And if I did have kids by accident, well, I can keep them off to the side while I do the really important stuff.” The only self-deception comes when they call it something other than plain, ordinary selfishness. “Looking out for myself, taking care of number 1, etc.” These are all euphemisms for selfishness. And while the original poster did exaggerate a little, saying that fatherhood should be a father’s only vocation, it certainly should be his primary vocation and the reason and source for all his other vocations.

#2 is a little more subtle. It’s quite true that there are freedoms a single man enjoys which are not available to a married man. In fact, that is the major reason why I have not married. However, it does not follow that these freedoms are simply carte-blanche to enjoy yourself any way you want to. Take this as a principle: If you are single, that is your responsibility. Just as marriage is the responsibility of married, so singleness is the responsibility of single people. It is not just a free pass to goof off, it is a vocation. It is just as much a style cramper as being married with kids. If not, then either your style is so perfected it needs no cramping, or you’re not doing it right.

Particularly telling is one commentor who said, “I don’t think this post is addressed to college age guys. It said ‘men’ not ‘boys’.” What?! What is wrong with our society? There is no way you can tell me that a guy is a “boy” until he graduates from college. If he isn’t a man by the time he graduates highschool, then his father is setting him up for failure because out here only the men survive. No one expects him to be an old man, or a middle-aged man, or even a fully mature man. He’s a young man, but a young man is still a man. For certain, he’d better not be some irresponsible boy. No one is knocking college kids for not assuming the responsibilities of married life. I’m knocking these guys for not assuming the responsibilities of their current state. The point is not which responsibilities you are shirking, the point is that if you are shirking responsibilities now, that is part of your character, and it will still be part of your character when you get married, or irresponsibly father a child out of wedlock.

So what does a father with three kids and a minivan have in common with a late teen, early twenties kid who still has pimples on his face, and rocks a falling apart beater full of textbooks and McDonalds bags? What they have in common is that they are both men. The vocation of manhood is always, in all cases, a vocation of self-gift, and so to the extent that either man gives of himself, he is living that vocation. To the extent that he is not giving, he is quite literally failing at life. The only difference is how and to whom he gives. A father gives himself to his wife and children. A college kid gives himself in a ton of other ways. The freedom from the responsibilities of married life are intended to give him the freedom to give himself in these other ways, whether as a student, campus minister, volunteer, missionary, soldier, worker, seminarian, or even simply by praying. The “simple” act of prayer is an act of self-gift, even of total self-gift since it is a total surrender to God’s will for the sake of another.

Our culture tells us that it’s normal and healthy to spend a few irresponsible years between highschool and thecommencement of the American dream, in order to “find yourself” “sow the wilds oats” or “get it out of your system.” The idea is that having had your fun you’ll be ready to take on the responsibilities of your chosen vocation when college is over. Well, that is a damning lie. It’s damning us as a culture. Even if that wild time doesn’t leave you with STD’s, a number of illegitimate children who may never have a stable family, if they even make it into this world, and alcohol or drug addictions, isn’t it quite likely that, instead of getting all the wildness out of your system, it might just leave you with an itch for that sort of thing that might just tug at you in the midst of your newly wedded bliss. You don’t magically become a mature, self-sacrificing, responsible man simply by virtue of fathering a child, or getting married. You can only build on the foundation you have, and if the foundation you have laid by the time you reach that milestone is rotten, you’re going to have some tearing down to do before you can build anything worth building.

The failure of fatherhood in the West, is not the problem it is the symptom. The problem is the failure of manhood. Our culture asks who would sign themselves up for the “prison sentence” of fatherhood. It’s a just question because the vocation is not for wimps. Only a man could look it in the eye, count the cost, and step forward. As long as we are not expecting our young men to be real men, we will continue to have broken homes, broken hearts, and fatherless children. We reap what we sow.