Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child (25 page)

T
O FURTHER UNDERSTAND
the significance of having an involved, emotionally present father, it helps to look at how families have changed over time. In the past several generations, fathers have gone from being the primary source of their children’s welfare to being, in many cases, superfluous. With high rates of divorce and births to unmarried women, too many children today live without their dads. Many kids know their fathers only as the guy who was here but left, or the man who is supposed to pay child support, but doesn’t.

Historians trace the beginning of this shift back two hundred years to the Industrial Revolution when men started spending their days apart from women and children. Still, it wasn’t until the 1960s that economic forces and the modern wave of feminism converged to deal the father-dominated family system a crippling blow. Since then, women have entered the workforce in record numbers.
In 1960, only 19 percent
of married women with children under age six worked at jobs outside the home. By 1990, that number had climbed to 59 percent. Over the same period, the average worker’s
purchasing power declined so that many families felt they could no longer get by on a single income. In 1960, 42 percent of all American families had a sole male breadwinner; by 1988, this figure had dropped to 15 percent.

“
Such change has rendered
traditional assumptions about fatherhood and breadwinning obsolete,” writes historian Robert L. Griswold, author of
Fatherhood in America
. “Women’s work, in short, has destroyed old assumptions about fatherhood and required new negotiations of gender relations.”

At the same time, the institution of marriage has seriously eroded.
Between 1960 and 1987
, divorce rates more than doubled. Today, more than half of all first marriages end in divorce. One study from the University of Michigan predicts that
among first-time marriages
, the rate of divorce may be as high as 67 percent.
Birth to single mothers
has also become increasingly common, now accounting for nearly a third of all children born in the United States.

Without the bonds of marriage, many of today’s fathers relinquish their responsibility for their children altogether. Unless the relationship between mother and father is stable, the father often withdraws all forms of support from his children—emotional and financial.

Ironically, this shift away from paternal responsibility is happening at the same time men have many new opportunities for intimate involvement in the lives of their children. Some men are taking advantage of such opportunities. Studies show that fathers—especially those in dual-career households—are providing more child care than men did in past generations. Today’s fathers are also more likely than their predecessors to participate in their children’s births, to request paternity leave and flexible work schedules, to cut back on hours and pass up promotions in order to spend time with their kids.

As hopeful as these trends appear, however, evidence suggests that progress toward involving fathers more in their children’s lives is extremely slow. Some blame employers, claiming that today’s male workers still don’t get the flexibility that successful parenthood requires.
A recent survey of medium to large U.S. businesses
, for example, showed that just 18 percent of full-time male employees
were offered unpaid paternity leave. Only 1 percent got paid leave. Good part-time jobs with substantial benefits are hard to find, and workers’ careers are often stalled when they refuse to work overtime or uproot their families for cross-country job transfers.

Others blame the courts, claiming that the number of children with absent dads will continue to grow until divorced fathers are treated more fairly; in about 90 percent of divorces,
custody is awarded to moms
.

And finally, many say the problem lies with dads themselves for not taking more initiative to get involved in the mundane details of their children’s lives.
One researcher estimates
that in two-career families, fathers are engaged with their kids about a third as much as their mothers are, and actually provide child care only about 10 percent of the time. In addition, when men pitch in with child-care responsibilities, they typically take on the role of “baby-sitter”; that is, they tend to rely on their wives to assign tasks and give them direction, rather than taking initiative themselves.

As a result of such problems, many men remain detached from their kids’ lives. I am reminded of how this detachment played out in the custody battle between film director Woody Allen and his former partner Mia Farrow. To get a sense of Allen’s relationship with his children, the judge asked him to name his kids’ friends and doctors, but Allen could not do so. Like the first two fathers described at the beginning of this chapter, Allen lived in a world apart from his children. Such fathers are outsiders looking in, missing countless opportunities to connect with their kids in meaningful and helpful ways.

T
HE
D
IFFERENCE A
D
AD
M
AKES

W
HAT DO CHILDREN
miss when their fathers are absent, distant, or preoccupied? Research in child development tells us they are losing far more than an “assistant mom.” Fathers typically relate to children differently than mothers do, which means their involvement leads to the development of different competencies, particularly in the area of social relationships.

A father’s influence begins at a very early age. One investigation,
for example, found that
five-month-old baby boys
who have lots of contact with their fathers are more comfortable around adult strangers. The babies vocalized more for the strangers and showed more readiness to be picked up by them than babies who had less involved fathers. Another study showed that
one-year-old babies cried less
when left alone with a stranger if they had more contact with their dads.

Many researchers believe that fathers influence their children primarily through play. Not only do dads typically spend a greater percentage of their time with children in playful activities, but they also engage in styles of play that are more physical and exciting than the way mothers interact.
Observing parents with their newborns
, Michael Yogman and T. Berry Brazelton found that fathers talked less, but touched their babies more. The dads were more likely to make rhythmic, tapping noises to get the babies’ attention. Their play was also more likely to take their children on an emotional roller coaster, going from activities that commanded minimal interest to those that got the babies quite excited. Mothers, in contrast, kept their play and their babies’ emotions on a more even keel.

Such differences continue well into childhood, with fathers engaging their kids in more rough-and-tumble activities including lifting, bouncing, and tickling. Dads often make up idiosyncratic or unusual games, while moms are more likely to stick with the tried-and-true pursuits like peek-a-boo, pat-a-cake, reading a book, or manipulating toys and puzzles.

Many psychologists believe that dad’s raucous style of “horseplay” provides an important avenue for helping children learn about emotions. Imagine dad as a “scary bear,” chasing a delighted toddler across the yard, or lifting and twirling the child over his head for an “airplane ride.” Such games allow the child to experience the thrill of being just a little bit scared, but amused and aroused at the same time. The child learns to watch and react to Dad’s cues for a positive experience. He finds out, for instance, that squealing and giggling makes Dad laugh and so it prolongs the game. He also watches Dad for indications that play is winding down (“Okay, that’s enough for now”) and he learns how to recover from excitement and to be calm again.

Such skills serve a child well as he ventures out into the wide world of playmates. Having roughhoused with Dad, he knows how to read other people’s signals when feelings run high. He knows how to generate his own exciting play and react to others in ways that are neither too sedate nor spinning out of control. He knows how to keep his emotions at a level that’s optimal for fun-filled play.

Studies of three- and four-year-old children
conducted by Ross Parke and Kevin MacDonald provide evidence of this link between fathers’ physical play and how children get along with peers. Observing children in twenty-minute play sessions with their dads, the researchers found that kids whose fathers showed high levels of physical play were most popular among their peers. An interesting and significant qualifier emerged in this study, however: Kids with highly physical dads were only rated as popular if their dads played with them in ways that were
nondirective, noncoercive
. The children whose dads were highly physical but also highly bossy received the lowest popularity scores.

Other studies have provided similar evidence. Across the board, researchers have found that children seem to develop the best social skills when their dads keep the tone of their interactions positive and allow kids to take part in directing the course of play.

Such discoveries fit hand in glove with my own findings, which highlighted the importance of dads avoiding criticism, humiliation, derogation, and intrusiveness with their kids. The children in our studies who did best in terms of peer relationships and academic achievement were those whose dads validated their feelings and praised their accomplishments. These fathers were the Emotion Coaches, who neither dismissed nor disapproved of their kids’ negative emotions, but showed empathy and provided guidance to help their kids deal with negative feelings.

During the exercise where parents taught their child to play a video game, for example, Emotion-Coaching dads cheered their children on, providing just the right amount of guidance without being intrusive. They often practiced the teaching technique of scaffolding that we discussed earlier. That is, they used each of the child’s successes as incremental evidence of his or her competence. With simple words like, “atta boy,” or, “I knew you could do it,”
these dads turned each small victory into a foundation for a better self-concept. Their praise gave their children the confidence to keep going, keep learning.

Conversely, the children in our studies who had the hardest time with grades and social relationships were those whose dads were cold and authoritarian, derogatory and intrusive. During the video game exercise, such dads might make humiliating remarks to their kids, mocking and criticizing them for their mistakes. They might also take over when the game was not going well, providing the child with evidence of his or her incompetence.

Three years later, when we checked in with these families and with the children’s teachers, we found that kids with the humiliating, nonsupportive dads were the ones most likely to be headed for trouble. They were kids displaying aggressive behavior toward their friends. They were the ones who were having the most trouble in school. They were the ones with problems often linked to delinquency and youth violence.

While our studies showed that mother-child interactions were also important, we found that, compared with the fathers’ responses, the quality of contact with the mother was not as strong a predictor of the child’s later success or failure with school and friends. This discovery is undoubtedly surprising, especially since mothers typically spend more time with children than fathers do. We believe the reason fathers have this extreme influence on their children is because the father-child relationship evokes such powerful emotions in kids.

B
EING
T
HERE FOR
Y
OUR
K
IDS
, P
HYSICALLY AND
E
MOTIONALLY

B
EING CLOSE TO
your children doesn’t have to be
that
hard for men. And yet, as psychologist Ronald Levant explains in his book
Masculinity Reconstructed
, many of today’s fathers are struggling for a definition of dad that feels right. “
Just as men of the Baby Boom generation
are becoming fathers themselves, they’re being told that everything they learned about fathering from their own dads—that a father is someone who works hard, who isn’t around much, who
criticizes more than he compliments, who doesn’t show affection or any other emotion except anger—no longer applies,” Levant writes. “Instead men are supposed to be sensitive, caring, enlightened dads who are really there for and involved with their kids…. The only problem is many men don’t know how to be that kind of father, for the simple reason that their own dads weren’t that kind of father to them.”

In ancient times a father guarded his offspring by being a warrior and a hunter. Over the centuries, his role shifted to that of breadwinner. Through hard work and self-sacrifice, he earned money to pay for his children’s safety and security in the form of house payments, grocery bills, and college tuition. Today, we feel the father’s role shifting again as dads are called upon to provide yet another level of protection for their kids—one that might buffer children from destructive forces like gangs, drug abuse, and sexual promiscuity. Science tells us that a man’s conventional psychological defenses cannot produce a shield against such dangers. Today, children’s safety comes from their fathers’ hearts. It is based on men being present with their children emotionally as well as physically.

As we discussed in
Chapter 3
, men have the capacity to recognize and respond constructively to their kids’ emotions. This has been demonstrated in
projects like Levant’s Fatherhood Project
, aimed at improving the ways dads communicate with their kids around emotions. After eight weeks of training in sensitivity and listening skills, fathers in this course improved their communication with their kids and showed more acceptance of their children’s emotional expression.