Perhaps there are still children who have not eaten people? Save the children.
Last entry in “Diary of a Madman” by LU XUN
IN THE MID-1970S, POET ADRIENNE RICH FAMOUSLY DISTINGUISHED the difference between fathering and mothering. “To ‘father’ a child suggests above all to beget, to provide the sperm which fertilizes the ovum,” she wrote. But “to ‘mother’ a child implies a continuing presence, lasting at least nine months, more often for years.” In the time and place Rich was writing, her understanding of fathering and mothering might have been appropriate, and not coincidentally it dovetailed neatly with popular understandings about the parenting habits of other animals—for example, how traits like “maternal instinct” were common across species. The question for us is whether what she says is always and automatically true. Are mothering and fathering fixed or flexible?1
Alternate definitions of parenthood have always existed. But we often tend to view the world through a lens of our own cultural making, so it’s easy to forget that men in different cultures father in different ways.
The phrase “traditional dad” can slip off the tongue as a way to describe our own fathers or friends. Terms like “traditional” or “modern” or “usual” or “unusual” are all used to modify fathers, to tell us something important about what one person does in comparison with others. Yet what people mean by “traditional dad” is likely to vary quite a bit. A father who is especially protective of his children could be said to be traditional. But then so could a father who abandons his children. Or, if not “traditional,” exactly, maybe such a father might be seen as “typical” in the eyes of some: the point is, it rarely seems as surprising or shameful when a father neglects his children as when a mother does. A father who is especially tender is acting like a traditional father, as is one who is particularly strict. A father who roughhouses with his children is traditional, as is one who is more distant from them. A father who is never around, and a father who is always around, might both be called “traditional.”
Writing about a small agricultural village in Mexico in the 1940s, anthropologist Oscar Lewis described fathering as a distinct set of experiences that men had with their children, especially boys, while they planted and harvested maize, chiles, and tomatoes. “The father assumes an important role in the life of his son when the boy is old enough to go to the fields,” wrote Lewis. “Most boys enjoy working in the fields with their father and look forward with great anticipation to being permitted to join him. Fathers, too, are proud to take their young sons to the fields for the first time, and frequently show great patience in teaching them.” Historically in China, as in Mexico, during the harvest seasons a boy of six or seven was expected to learn “by trying to work within sight of his father.” And in China, as elsewhere, the pattern for centuries was that after a next child was born, “the older child begins to sleep with his father instead of his mother.… When this change occurs, the father begins to dress the child, too.”2
The idea that modernity finally challenged a “traditional” way of behaving in which fathers had nothing to do with children until the current era is absurd and ahistorical. It serves no purpose other than to make people feel good about men who do more with children than their (similarly urban-origin) fathers did. When men moved to the cities from the countryside, and began working in factories or driving buses or selling items in the street, they left behind not only their oxen and plow but also their ability to father in an intimately engaged fashion every day of the week. Much about what seems “traditional,” and in this sense “natural,” in terms of parenting divisions of labor reflects more about modern myths of the past than about ancient truths as to the kinds of interactions fathers and mothers had with children of various ages.
When we talk about “traditional dads,” whatever that might mean, it becomes shorthand for whatever has been replaced by some other pattern of fathering. If we scratch the surface of fathering and mothering, we find not only tremendous variation across cultures and historical contexts, but, perhaps most significantly, generational shifts. The differences in parenting across generations belie our belief in common features of fatherhood that we supposedly share with other animals. Unique to humans, patterns of fathering can and do change dramatically in a short period of time.
I went to a cocktail party in an upscale neighborhood of Mexico City many years ago, ferrying my two-month-old baby in a Snugli canguro (literally, kangaroo). A man introduced himself to me as a banker and remarked, “You know, we Mexican men don’t carry babies!” He told me that’s why he made money, so someone else would carry his babies, change their diapers, and care for them until they got to “the age of reason.” But in the squatter settlement where I was living at the time, a lot of Mexican men did carry babies and young children, and they were not disparaged for it.
Back in my neighborhood of Colonia Santo Domingo, when I repeated his remark, it was met with disdain. “That’s silly. Haven’t you seen the guy who sells vegetables at the open market on Saturdays? The one who keeps his baby in a cardboard box under the table?” The banker’s statement sharpened my awareness of some striking differences based on class, resources, and values within the Mexican capital, especially related to who thought fathering involved more than making a baby.
As it happened, three years before this, in 1989, I had been walking through downtown Mexico City when something caught my eye through a doorway. I turned back, focused my camera, and took a picture of a man holding a baby while talking to a customer in a shop for musical instruments. When I later showed the photo to friends in Mexico and the United States, I got rather consistent responses: “That can’t be,” was the gist. “We know Mexican men are machos, and machos don’t carry babies.” All I could say in response was that I had taken the picture in Mexico, and I assumed the man was Mexican.3
I decided to carry a copy of the photo with me during fieldwork in Mexico City and to informally survey people’s thoughts about it. It ended up being a photographic Rorschach test. “Is his woman sick? His face looks like he’s suffering.” “He must be indígena (Indian), because mestizo men wouldn’t be caught dead like that.” “That photo is irreal. My husband never carried our kids.” “Please don’t show that photo in your classes; that’s not the way Mexican men are.” “That baby must belong to his boss who made him watch the child.” These comments were all from middle- and upper-middle-class people, most with liberal, feminist politics.
In Santo Domingo, the responses were the opposite. The most common response I got from neighbors was, “Seems normal to me.” Not every man there carried babies and toddlers, but many did, and no one found it odd. This was clearly a question of class. To some degree, the poorer you are, the fewer options you have, including with respect to family divisions of labor. So who has which duties in Mexico may be more fixed in families with more resources. You could even say that rigid gender roles are a sign of privilege. But we all know this is not really true, as women from the working class do more at home than their husbands do, whether the women are also working outside the home for money or not. Still, class sometimes matters in unexpected ways. Among more working-class couples in the United States, for example, a prevailing ethos is often that men should work outside the home and women within, but in practice they share duties more than they say or think they do. In the middle class it is often the opposite, as husbands and wives assert they both share household chores a lot more than is the case.4
After collecting responses to the photo of the man in the music shop over a period of four years, I decided to solve the mystery behind the man with the baby. I couldn’t remember exactly where I had shot the picture, but after walking around for a couple of hours downtown, I eventually walked by a doorway through which I saw a wall of mandolins displayed. I realized I had stumbled onto the place again. I went inside, took out the photo, and, feeling a bit like a detective in a murder whodunit, asked a young woman behind the counter, “Do you know this man?” Much to my surprise, she shouted out, “José, come quickly, it’s you! Some guy’s got a picture of you!”
José Enríquez came out from the back, without the mustache he’d had in 1989, but possibly wearing the same shirt. Finally I would learn the truth. I told him I had taken his photo many years before, and, feeling increasingly awkward about what I was saying, tried to explain why my obsession with his picture had led me to spend years studying fathering in Mexico. Fortunately, José was a patient man, and he kindly explained that the baby belonged to a neighbor who lived upstairs from the shop, and that the mother sometimes left the baby with him when she went out shopping—“It’s so much easier to shop if you’re not carrying around a baby. Besides, I was not going anywhere, and I like babies.” He shared a photo of his own three children, and then he asked me gently, “Don’t men like babies in the United States?”
Over the years my friends and neighbors in Mexico City have taught me about what they see as the importance of genetics to understanding why fathers and mothers do what they do. My young friend Daniel is an unusually sensitive guy. I’ve known Dani since he was born. When he was a teenager he painted large, lush portraits based on religious iconography that still hang proudly on the walls of his parents’ home. Because of his early devotion to the world of ideas, his graceful demeanor, and his deep wellspring of caring for others, his mother, Norma, thought Dani might become a priest. I am always struck by his delicate take on the world.
Yet the world around him has not always been so gentle. He has lived all his life in the neighborhood of Santo Domingo. Dani knows women who are well represented in community-wide associations. Women who are key to block organizations. And women who hold their own in household discussions and decisions. But he also knows how uneven and unsteady change sometime seems, with one mother and wife leading marches on municipal authorities downtown, while her neighbor has to ask permission from her husband to leave the house.
I was back visiting the neighborhood and explained that I was thinking about the relationships between gender, culture, and biology. Dani said he thought families and communities were obviously important influences, but there were some things only biology could explain.
“Do you know Gloria, the single mom who lives down the street?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
“And you remember that her mom is also a single mom, right?”
“Sure.”
“Well, did you know that Gloria’s grandmother was also a single mother? And her great-grandmother? And her great-great-grandmother, too?”
“I didn’t,” I told him.
“So, okay. It’s one thing to say that one or two generations of single moms is a question of culture. But when it’s five generations? At that point it has to be hereditary.”
Dani was raised in a settlement of land occupiers of Mexico City, with poor families and poverty all around him. He had made it to high school, where most students have to take general biology. Genetics is a component of that course, in Mexico City as elsewhere. This means all students who finish high school in the capital are at least exposed to basic ideas about genes and their powerful ways. Just because Dani studied genetics doesn’t mean he thinks that biology explains everything. But at a certain point, he believes, you just have to admit that it matters. Dani was visibly pained by the suffering of these women and their daughters. He was not dismissing their predicament: biology provided a way of showing mercy for the women. Ultimately Dani was saying they could not help themselves from becoming single mothers. It was in their blood. This was not a superficial and unconcerned analysis, but heartfelt empathy sharpened by high school genetics textbooks.
Yet what a panoply you can find when you get beyond contemporary assumptions in those textbooks about men’s supposed compulsion to sire more children. There are the “milk fathers” in poor areas of Brazil, who provide store-bought powdered baby formula for the mothers of their children even when they are not otherwise active as fathers; the “left-behind father-carers” in Indonesia, who pick up the slack to care for their own children when their wives, the breadwinners, emigrate to follow work opportunities outside of the country; the paternal “gestures of affection” among Palestinian fathers tending to their hospitalized children; the “check fathers” whose only fathering is financial. In parts of the Caribbean, men with many children have long been known as having “strong blood.” In China, parents to this day quote the ancient philosopher-sage Mencius, who said, “There are three ways to be unfilial; having no sons is the worst.”
The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead developed a test she called “the negative instance”: all you need is one exception to a particular theory about the way all humans are, and you have in effect eliminated biological determinism as an explanation for that behavior. If we apply this test here, all we have to do is find “negative instances” for uniform patterns of fathering to conclude that culture is key, that biological programming is less consequential than we often assume, and that change is possible.5
Context is everything. Other patterns of fathering may seem foreign; it’s a good thing when we are astonished by them. It’s good to hear, “Well, maybe that’s the way fathers are there, but that’s not the way we do it in Moose Jaw, Canada.” Or Ganja, Azerbaijan. Or Stepaside, Ireland. Furthermore, if we have our sights set in any way on shared parenting by men and women, and equality of responsibilities, and investment in children, it will all seem less daunting if what we aim for represents a break with mere centuries of habit—or maybe only decades—rather than millions of years of evolution.
Talcott Parsons, one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century, tracked modernity’s progress in the 1950s by an increasing, not decreasing, social division of labor, especially within the family. For Parsons, the ultimate familial achievement lay in the realization of distinct duties, with mothers finally able to specialize in their collective and biologically mandated task of child-rearing and men devoting themselves to more outside, public pursuits. Adrienne Rich’s analysis about the distinct meanings of “fathering” and “mothering” did not come from Parsonian modernization theory, but it revealed widespread attitudes that often reflected less the realities of actual fathers and mothers than the societal standards in vogue in influential academic and government circles.6
One of the consequences of migration and urbanization in Mexico, and the new, modern division of parenting labor, was the development of a new form of child neglect that goes under the name of mamitis, or mommy-itis. This folk diagnosis reflects the influence of biomedical ideas about children’s expected demands on and attachment to their mothers as well as the increase in women’s obligations regarding child care following the rise of urbanization in Mexico. This psychological childhood trauma, often mentioned in a humorous way, has always been dependent on socioeconomic as much as subjective factors. As grandmothers left behind in the village became a less viable option for parents in cities, and child care woefully lacking for many working parents, mamitis was used as an excuse (by both women and men) for women not to work outside the home for money. It was also a form of protest against the transformations demanded of modern families. The concept is comparable in many ways to what psychologists in the United States might call separation anxiety, or being a mama’s boy (or girl), except that it was taken out of the realm of the interpersonal and made a reflection of social dislocations especially impacting women as mothers.
Mexico is not alone: child care has changed around the world in recent decades. But these changing patterns reflect socioeconomic factors more than they prove an evolutionary link to parenting practices. In many of the changes we see a direct impact not just on women and how they mother, but also on men and ways of fathering. There are, to date, no recorded case histories of papitis, however, and this means that in societies around the world men are often less expected to be good parents than was the case only fifty years ago. Their presence as active participants in child-rearing is not seen as being as important as it was in recent memory.
My older daughter, Liliana, spent her first year of life in the squatter settlement of Santo Domingo. When she started eating solids I would go to a butcher shop down the street because the shopkeepers, Guillermo and his brother, would grind up meat twice when they knew it was meant for an infant. As I was leaving one day I shouted back to thank Guillermo, and I said, “Okay, gotta go home to cook this up with some pasta and…” Before I could add, “some vegetables,” he interrupted me and scolded, “No, not pasta. That’s just going to make her fat. You know, Mateo, that the father doesn’t just procreate; he’s also got to make sure they eat right.”
The need for men to take a crash course in how to feed children has become a major issue in recent decades across Southeast Asia, where the “feminization of migration,” both internal and international, has led to the widespread phenomenon of “left-behind fathers,” mentioned earlier. These fathers shop, cook, feed the children, bathe them, launder their clothes, and tell them stories at rates never before witnessed in recorded history. Categories that have long naturalized the stature of fathers and husbands as the masculine pillars of the home alongside the assumed association between women and nurturing have been undermined by the need for greater earnings and the work opportunities available for women as guest workers abroad. The feminization of migration has challenged age-old God-sanctioned and Confucian-based models of family hierarchies—precursors to modern naturalized frameworks of fathering and mothering—in Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian countries.7
In roughly two-thirds of families in Indonesia and the Philippines with a mother absent for most of the year to earn money for the household, the stay-at-home father is the primary caregiver for their children. In other homes, grandmothers and other relatives pitch in, though some complain that grandparents are such “soft disciplinarians” that it’s better to leave children in the hands of their fathers. Unsurprisingly, some people, fathers and others alike, have an easier time adjusting to new duties and identities than others. For some men in Southeast Asia, assuming household and child-rearing responsibilities is a way to prove their ability to solve problems, provide materially for their offspring, and otherwise prove their masculine strength and ability to overcome obstacles to achieve whatever they set out to do. Others are bothered by issues of emasculation and inadequacy, given their wives’ greater earnings, and it can be hard to ignore these concerns. “No money, no power,” intone some men, who nonetheless may reasonably claim that they, too, continue to contribute materially, often through agricultural income.
Researchers report growing numbers of men expressing greater sympathy for the household tasks their wives have shouldered since time immemorial. In fact, these tasks take on an increasingly degendered hue as men cook meals, bathe the younger children, and look after every other aspect of daily family life. Their lower economic status compared to their migrant wives means they also often have reduced decision-making power, at least with respect to major investments and purchases. Revealing the contradictions of the age when it comes to defying hallowed gender norms, one Vietnamese woman who left her home in a village in the Red River Delta, to work in Hanoi, remarked, “My husband is the master of the family, but I am the decision maker. He is the pillar of the home so that our children will see our model. If I want to make a decision, I make it, then inform my husband before we implement it.”8
For most of the twentieth century, a protracted struggle for gender equality has unfolded in many areas of the world. These have involved suffrage, reproductive rights, education, work opportunities, and campaigns against gender-based violence. Modern, reliable, accessible forms of birth control have transformed our intimate lives. Migration is no longer a demand placed on men alone; indeed, the feminization of migration has forced dramatic changes in the lives of fathers and children. Feminist political movements have both responded to and propelled these social disruptions. And simultaneously with these tectonic shifts, even as biology is assigned an ever more controlling presence in human actions, men and women throughout the world have been renegotiating maleness and masculinity—what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a father. Some are even considering whether fathering and mothering might one day mean the same thing.
In a study of psychiatric training in the United States, Tanya Luhrmann, a psychological anthropologist, writes of “a moral vision that treats the body as choiceless and nonresponsible and the mind as choice-making and responsible.” This moral vision entails signaling whether the humans who happen to inhabit male bodies have fewer options in controlling their actions, such that it would be less useful to hold them accountable, and whether the best we can hope for is to find effective mechanisms to contain men in their uncooked form. There can be few issues more sensitive to mind-body distinctions than fathering: beliefs in fathering as synonymous with procreation alone are really just dressed-up versions of saying men are nonresponsible bodies, that we would do best to expect little from them in the way of child-rearing, and that we should be pleasantly surprised when they manage to break free of their corporal compulsions.9
“Over 95 percent of the world’s more than ten thousand bird species are raised by two attentive, hardworking parents,” writes ornithologist Richard Prum to help ward off unrelenting human-animal comparisons that exculpate fathers who are largely absent in rearing offspring. Why else do we regularly encounter flabbergasted articles in our daily newspapers about the same animal species—seahorses, pipefish, emperor penguins, smooth guardian frogs, and marmosets, to name a few—where the males defy standard reproductive practices? For example, in the case of seahorses, fathers give birth instead of mothers; with emperor penguins, the male alone incubates the egg, while with other kinds of penguins males and females take turns incubating.10
My cousin Richard defied gender and familial expectations when he and his wife, Audrey, decided before their first son, Andy, was born that Richard would be a stay-at-home dad. “The idea that Audrey would have stayed home with the kids was never on the table,” he told me. “She really liked the working thing. I also think there was probably a feminist aspect to it. She wanted to go out and prove something. She’s really good at what she does. I probably wasn’t as good. She had all the fancy credentials [like clerking for a Supreme Court justice]. I was always more interested in staying home and taking care of the kids.”
When did his sons realize they had a strange caregiver situation? “I was super-involved in their lives,” Richard said. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I would always sign up to be the Room Mother. I coached the Little League soccer team. I was the swim coach. I’m sure I embarrassed the hell out of them sometimes. But it was all they knew. Besides, Andy’s best friend also had a stay-at-home dad. He’s an aspiring screenwriter and adjunct professor of film. He basically stayed home and his wife’s a doctor. So maybe the boys didn’t see this arrangement as all that strange.”
Richard reports that when some people heard this was what he did “for a living,” the response was sometimes, “Really?!” But mainly he heard, “Wow! That’s really cool.” He thinks that if he’d been a woman and said that he stayed home with the kids, they would have been far less impressed. One friend told him she thought his two boys were probably more independent because of the arrangement. He demurred, telling me, “I don’t know if I’d agree with that because I probably have too many female traits in me.” Besides, Audrey was a lot more involved in raising their sons than the average male partner in a law firm would have been. “I don’t know whether that’s some kind of maternal instinct or because culturally moms feel they need to be in on it more, or what,” Richard said.
The hardest challenge was how to tell his father (my uncle)—who, like Richard and his two brothers, was a lawyer—about his decision to leave the bar and devote his life to raising his children. “I think he was a little bit in shock,” Richard said. “He never expressed disapproval, but I was afraid to tell him, thinking I would be disappointing him. Our grandfather was very successful in the business world. My father was successful as a lawyer in ways easy to measure. I never felt like I was letting the kids down because I wasn’t putting food on the table.” I interrupted and told him that, indeed, he literally had put food on the table. Richard continued, “The idea of breadwinner was never an issue. But the idea of a career, of being preeminent in your field, was something I never got to do.”
Early on, Richard was tempted when the law firm where he had worked before called and asked him to return. His mother—my aunt, and a stay-at-home mom with yet another law degree—agreed to help out with the kids, telling him, “The first six months are critical in a child’s development. So even if you walk away from it now, you’ve done something significant.” But he decided against returning to work. “Having one person, the mother or the father, stay home makes life and marriage easier,” he said. At one point, he and Audrey sat down to take stock of how this unusual arrangement was working out for each of them and their two sons. “And I told her I thought I was taking advantage of her,” Richard said. “She was having to work so hard to put bread on the table. And she said, ‘I feel like I’m the lucky one. I can always just do my job and when I come home there’s always food.’”
I asked Richard if he thought his sons, one now out of college a few years, the other just finishing, might follow in his footsteps. “Would either of my boys be a stay-at-home dad? I really doubt it.” Change comes hard. Maybe Richard would say that only a man who has—as he put it—“too many female traits” would stay home to cook, clean, and care for the kids. But I’m pretty sure he would be comfortable with the idea that becoming a stay-at-home dad is a matter of being able to afford it, individual temperaments, and a couple’s overall aspirations for their family. Richard is a compassionate person, something you can see in his interactions with others; in other words, he has a quality thought stereotypically to be a maternal one. He is also someone who, by staying home, has long been bucking the system. There is something wrong with our thinking if compassion is seen as a consummate female trait and bucking cultural traditions is not.
If biology were more determinant of fathering patterns, we would expect to find great uniformity across cultures and historical epochs, and we would not expect to find rapid change in fathering patterns from one generation to the next, much less one year to the next. The very particular case of Palestinian fathers who leave occupied Gaza to take their children to Israel for cancer treatment, however, highlights just how tenuous gender divisions of labor can be in the contemporary era. Caught up in political currents beyond their control—living in territory occupied by Israel since 1967, with borders closed in 2001, and a blockade emplaced in 2007—families desperate for decent medical treatment for their children stricken with cancer have few options.
The most common decision in these Palestinian families is for the mother to stay home with the other children while the father accompanies the ill child to a hospital in Israel. Once there, according to one recent study, the father faces the difficult and disorienting challenge of having to place his trust in the medical personnel, who not only do not speak Arabic but are assumed to be hostile to Palestinians in general. Whether at home in Gaza or in a Tel Aviv hospital, “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the prime factor shaping the lives of Gaza fathers.” Fathers were already expendable at home. They were available for the task of taking the child to the hospital because their labor was already chronically underutilized. But the transition to providing “maternal” child care is not nearly as problematic as some might imagine. By taking on this role, the Palestinian fathers inadvertently unveil the “fragility of gender roles, and possibly also some of their arbitrariness,” according to the study’s authors.11
The political exigencies of life in the Palestinian territories force families to adapt and often to make creative decisions concerning gender divisions of labor, including, in this case, with desperately ill children. That fathers and mothers have consistently and quickly bent the culturally proscribed, gendered rules is testament to a quality of human adaptability shared with no other animal. Their example attests to the limited importance of biology in determining actual fathering practices. Widespread patterns can develop in human societies based on biological differences—notably pregnancy and lactation—but they are mere evolutionary pressures and not decisive or permanent restraints.
In 2018–2019, I worked with a team of practitioners and scholars on the issue of young men’s sexual and reproductive health in a borough of Mexico City called Venustiano Carranza. As part of the project, we interviewed young men and women about their lives, their families, their sexual histories, their dreams for the future, and the ups and downs they had already experienced inside a sprawling, marginal section of the Mexican capital. One recurring theme in the interviews was fatherhood: specifically, a number of youths talked about fathers who had abandoned them and their families.12
“I was barely in second grade when my mother discovered that my father had been deceiving her and she ran him off,” said one young man. “For two years I saw him every Sunday, then it was one Sunday yes, one Sunday no, and now the fact is that I don’t see him. Not even a message. He doesn’t get in touch for Christmas or my birthday. I try to talk to him again, telling him, ‘No, no, whenever you want.’”
Another interviewee told us, “Unfortunately I have a father who’s responsible, but he lives with someone else, he has another partner, and another son with her. He’s like 100 percent with them and like 30 percent with us, 30, 40 percent with us.” Some of them didn’t really know their fathers. “Well, I don’t have what you could call a relation with him,” one said. “I don’t remember him. It’s been so long since I’ve seen him, I don’t really know what to tell you about him.”
Sometimes the mothers seemed to be the main obstacles in the way of ongoing relationships with fathers who no longer lived with them. “At first it was tough,” one young man recounted, “because at first I couldn’t see my father. The truth is that I love him and I loved him. I couldn’t see him because my mother prohibited this and that. I was always with him, from an early age. He was the one who taught me how to do things. But most of the time I spent with my mother. I was almost always with her.” He laughed when he told us, “You could say I had mamitis. Not like now. Now I hardly speak to her.”
Learning these life histories of young men in an area of Mexico City was dispiriting, but not nearly as depressing as conversations I had with my team members, most of whom were also from Mexico City. When I asked them if they thought the young men’s acute awareness of their experiences with irresponsible and absent fathers meant that they themselves would be different kinds of fathers in the future, I was met with an immediate and emphatic, “No, Mateo, they will repeat the same patterns; they, too, will abandon their wives and children. That’s just what men do.”
I was aghast. And then I thought about it more. For young men in Venustiano Carranza to not become their fathers will depend on political and social pressures, some of which can only be guessed at. The jury is surely still out. Generational changes in fathering depend on changing men and masculinities. And changing fathering might depend on changes in women and mothering as well, and the direct, indirect, and residual influences that women have on men and masculinity.
In 1951, the English pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott invented the term “good enough mothering.” The concept championed the idea that when a child realizes that their good enough mother won’t and can’t satisfy every need, this helps the child to better adapt to the realities of life. Since then, others have extended the concept to “good enough parenting.” But it might be worth further considering what “good enough fathering” might look like in the future. Just as my cousin Richard was the beneficiary of praise and support for his fathering, in part simply by virtue of the fact that he was a stay-at-home man, so, too, in the modern age men receive accolades or opprobrium based in good measure on what the speaker thinks is normal fatherly behavior, which invariably is less than what one would expect from mothers. Even to compare “good enough fathering” to “good enough mothering” can bring into relief the lesser social expectations of men with children. An exception to this rule was manifest in a simple question from a dear friend and neighbor of mine in the squatter settlement of Santo Domingo in Mexico City.13
As I dropped off my then four-month-old daughter, Liliana, with her abuelita, Ángela, one afternoon in 1992, Ángela asked me, “Is this the greatest love you’ve ever felt?” I told her that it was certainly different from any kind of love I’d ever experienced, mumbling something I’d learned years before about how the classical Greeks differentiated kinds of love, agape and all that. Ángela responded, “Yes, but isn’t it the deepest love?” I told her I loved Liliana more every day, but that I was still not used to being a father. I kept expecting someone to intervene and tell me I had to give her back. All I can say is that the look on Ángela’s face that day was the most awful mix of pity and disappointment (or horror) at my inability to discover and release what should have been my instinctive feelings of parental love.
Before Ángela died, I returned with Liliana for a visit and was finally able to report that the love I felt for my daughter, the fatherly love that Ángela insisted I should have possessed from the beginning, had at last and without doubt deepened into the greatest and deepest love I had ever experienced.
Change is possible.