That's What Dads Do

I was 15 years old, the seventh of nine children and the fifth of seven boys, when at 2 a.m. on a winter night, my niece Gina woke up crying in her crib in my bedroom. She was barely two months old and was staying with us at my parents’ house while my brother Donald and his wife MaryAnn enjoyed a weekend getaway. As my parents and I had planned, I warmed up Gina’s baby formula, fed, burped, and diapered her while the rest of the house slept.

Placing Gina back down in the crib, she looked at me and smiled the most precious thank you I had ever seen in my young life. That smile was hotly contested at family gatherings for years – “just gas,” they tried to tell me. I knew better. I was smitten. I had to be a father someday.

Two years later I was visiting my guidance counselor and planning my senior year at Syosset High School. My college requirements were complete, and my counselor was recommending I take a Home Economics Child Development class. It felt like an odd suggestion to a 17-year-old male, and I initially resisted. “Wait,” he pointed out. “You’ll be the only boy in the class.” I thought about that for a second and signed up.

My classmates and I watched over those toddlers for eight months, playing with them, talking to them, documenting their cognitive development as we studied and applied the theories of Piaget, Skinner, Jung and others.

Apparently, I was good at this. In June, I was awarded for my work in that class with one of the two Home Economics awards. “You’re going to make a great dad,” Mrs. Flynn, our teacher, told me.

What she and I could never have predicted was the tortuous five years of infertility my then wife and I would endure to get there. On another cold winter night, I held my three-hour old daughter Nicole for the first time. Two more miracles (Chris and Tyler) arrived by 2003. I was living the life I had dreamed of the night Gina smiled at me.

My Father Wasn’t So Lucky

Like most men, my fathering style was my own version of what my dad modeled for me. His dad died when he was an infant during the depression, so he was raised by some pretty rough uncles, themselves alien to anything remotely like what we today would call nurturing.

Perhaps that is where my father’s rage as a young dad came from, sometimes manifesting itself in an angry open hand to the face or his belt to your butt. It was hard as a young boy for me to reconcile that angry person with the man who also was devoted to his wife and family.

My understanding of my dad and fatherhood greatly expanded as a teenager working summers at our family’s Long Island lumberyard. I often had to join my dad weekday mornings on long drives to Queens and Brooklyn to pick up plumbing and electrical supplies. Sitting side by side with him in the front seat of his car, stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway, my father opened to me about himself, his life, the mistakes he thought he had made as a father and husband.

Over those summers, I gained a more realistic view of the man whom I had tried to worship. Sometimes he would weep about things he regretted, like how one night in the early 70s he angrily threw out of our home a long-haired Alabama farm boy, the man my eldest sibling Janet brought home to introduce to the family. They would later marry.

“This may upset you,” my dad said, his voice cracking as he stared out the windshield, “but I love Mike today no different than I love all of my sons.” I wonder if he saw the tears of joyous empathy dripping from the corner of my eyes.

Dad didn’t need to tell me how much he loved Mike. He showed it by helping Mike and my sister start their own business in Patchogue. A carpenter by trade, dad helped them purchase and renovate an old farmhouse in Manorville that hosted countless family gatherings. He showed it in the way he kissed and embraced Mike whenever they were together.

My dad softened with time and wisdom, growing a self-awareness that helped him evaluate himself more objectively, and work on those parts of himself that he felt he needed to change.

Defining a Father’s Legacy

Dad bounced in and out of hospitals for the last two years of his life, a debilitating battle with his heart reaching its end. I spent countless nights alone with him in hospital bedrooms, watching him sleep, helping him eat, and like those days in the car on the Long Island Expressway, discussing the hard things of life.

He also revealed how tired he was fighting for his life. I did my best to give him permission to rest.

“If you need to go dad, it’s okay,” I told him. “Don’t worry about mom. We’ll take care of her. And you live on through your children, through the lessons you taught us about how to be a father, a parent. And your grandchildren will grow up to be the parent you were because you taught your children so well. You are as immortal as any person will ever be.”

One night in the intensive care unit at NYU Langone, I told him how much I admired the sacrifices he had made to provide for us. He seemed uncomfortable hearing my sentiments. “That’s what dads do,” he said, brushing off my characterization of his life’s work.

Science is Defying Our Assumptions

While that discussion was about traditional male parenting roles, over the second half of his life, my father taught me it’s wrong to assume that men are biologically less capable of being the nurturing, kind caregivers we expect mothers to be. Since his passing in the spring of 2001, science is increasingly proving him right.

When men are intimately involved in raising their children, they can literally become more “mother-like.” A study by Notre Dame's Lee Gettler draws a correlation between active father parenting and the reduction in testosterone for the male children raised by these active fathers. Gettler proposes that the fathering men do today can have “lasting effects across generations, not just through behavior but also through biology.”

And this change can happen even before a man becomes a dad. A 2001 study of Canadian first-time expecting fathers showed both a decrease in testosterone and an increase in estrogen.

What then prevents America from tapping into this biological potential? I believe the gender biases our society clings to have a great deal to do with it.

According to the Pew Research Center’s 2017 Study “On Gender Differences, No Consensus on Nature vs. Nurture,” 30% of the adult respondents said they valued empathy, nurturing and kindness in women. Only 11% of the study’s adult respondents valued those same attributes in men. (Respondents could mention up to three traits per question.)

What was valued in men most? Honesty and morality (33%); professional and financial success (23%); ambition, leadership, strength and toughness (19%); and hard work/a good work ethic (18%). Only 5% of adults listed family oriented.

When you Google the adjective nurturing, what do we find? “Caring, giving, female, feminine, womanly, maternal, motherly, mother, womanlike…” Even our language defines the space men are excluded from.

If these are the messages men constantly receive about how they are valued, why do we expect them to pursue and prioritize being a nurturing man, dad and husband?

What We Can Do About It

Policy wonks talk about legislation and other tools to push and pull more men into fatherhood. Others infer that a more religious nation will miraculously cure America’s man/father problems. Not me. I place my trust in good men raising kind men to be loving fathers.

I am not pretending to be an expert, though I have read a great deal about men, fatherhood, the biology and sociology behind masculinity, who we are, and perhaps why we do what we do. My humble offering here are three simple steps we can take to create more incredible men and dads.

1) We need to expose boys at an early age to the incredible dopamine rush of nurturing.

I was lucky to have been born when I was, so that my oldest brother had a daughter I could care for when I was still forming my emotional wants and needs. We can’t rely on a proliferation of large families, so America needs a national movement of programs connecting nurturing dads and sensitive father figures with boys and expecting fathers. We need these adult men teaching the next generation about the incredible personal satisfaction found in being empathic, nurturing men and fathers.

By being open and vulnerable with me during my teen years, my father taught me an alternative way to be a man that still permitted me to feel manly (whatever that is). His example has had a greater impact on me than anything I have been taught in 60 years of living.

2) We need more positive role models in the media who don’t fit the traditional expectations of what society calls a masculine man.

There have been dozens of authors attempting to define the problems of American men and the restrictions traditional masculinity presents for them and for society. I recently watched an interview of Scott Galloway, one of today's popular male podcasters and authors filling the New York Times bestseller’s list and YouTube with his views of the world.

After acknowledging that modern American men are struggling in a world changing faster than men can adapt to, Galloway said:

“I think there's no excuse for any man under the age of 30 not to get really [ expletive ] strong. You should be able to walk into any room if you're a man under the age of 30 and know that if [ expletive ] got real, you could kill and eat everybody or out run them. And here's the thing you're going to be less prone to depression. You're going to be kinder. You're going to have a broader selection set of mates, which is really awesome right. And also you're going to be a better man who breaks up fights at bars.”

Galloway’s interviewer, Liz Plank, who in her book For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity, advocates against such definitions of masculinity, never challenged Galloway on his view.

How are we going to get men to act more nurturing if we continue to accept this aggressive definition of what it means to be a man? We need to permanently redefine what it means to be masculine and stop abdicating definitions to pop culture idols.

3) We need to stop suppressing male emotions for the sake of some stoic model of manliness.

There are many reasons why men are more likely to successfully commit suicide, have fewer close friends as they age, and act out in violent ways (how about we stop the bar fights from even beginning?). At the heart of these issues, I believe, are the shackles of masculinity.

I recently watched the movie The Holdovers. In the final scene, Paul Giamatti’s character has a poignant farewell with a male student for whom he made an unexpected but significant sacrifice. In the scene, as these two men attempt to recognize what has transpired between them, they inch remarkably close to tears and a hug. Instead, the screenwriter and director have the characters perform a stoic handshake. Apparently, that’s safer and more predictable for men.

As much as we would like to believe otherwise, most of contemporary American society is still not comfortable with men hugging and crying in each other’s arms. It’s allowed at funerals of loved ones. It’s noble in a war movie. It’s okay on a sports field when a professional athlete plays their last game of a long career. But place men in a more traditional situation of simply being sad, or overjoyed with love for the sacrifice of one man for another, and these emotions are transformed into something less than masculine.

We need to normalize the acceptance of men displaying the emotions that are openly welcomed when women perform them publicly.

America will have healthier boys and men, more equal distribution of household labor and childcare, deeper and more caring bonds between fathers and their children, when the definition of being a man and father reflects a truly nurturing man. Then people can simply say: “That’s what dads do.”