dad, you suck.
why i am this
Daddy: We Need You More Than You Know
by Alexandra Chowansky
I have a dream. It shows an idealized picture of my father that I have painted in the hues of fantasy. He would call me every day just to say “hi” and ask me, “Do you need anything?” or “Do you have any preference for dinner on Friday?” He would have a house close to school and I would have my own room in it. It's a dream of sanctuary. It would be a place I could go to on the weekends or on school holidays or just when I wanted to go home. It is a home. It would be a place where he and I are together, where there is a family that has never been apart. An optimist may say that dreams can come true, but for so many daughters who are the victims of divorce and subsequent father absence, such dreams are far out of reach. Experiencing the loss of the father engenders chronic and far-reaching issues for young women. Father absence affects several aspects of a girl's life, including cognitive development, tendency to attend college, quality of sexual and intimate relationships, and drug and alcohol use.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2002 that 50% of marriages currently taking place that would eventually end in divorce (70). My family, too, is a statistic. My parents got divorced when I was about six years old. I was immediately thrown into custody embroilments and bribed by my child psychologist who was supposed to be helping me work through my decision. I was utterly and completely confused, acting as a middle man, and hearing my parents unabashedly belittle and insult one another. How is a six year old child to choose which parent she would like to live with? I naturally wanted both of my parents. But in the end, the divorce went through, and after all of the tears and insults and drama, my mother was granted custody and my father left.
Mothers are often granted custody of their children, perhaps because of the common view that mothers are the primary and nurturing caregivers, and due to this fact, mothers are granted custody in 9 out of 10 custody cases. According to Teyber and Hoffman, the father's absence in parenting is due in part to these “inadequate sex roles” (1). Society has delegated specific roles for both mother and father causing the perception that children belong more to their mother, who is usually thought to be more adept in raising children, than to their father. The father's role, on the other hand, was limited to financial support or enforcing discipline. These stereotypes of the father being powerful in the workplace, and the mother being powerful in the home, were established in the early 1900s during the Industrial Revolution, and are still relatively prominent today along with their subsequent sexual inadequacies. It is due to these “competing power bases” that fathers tend to lack involvement with their children after divorce (1). Therefore, as Dunn states, my father and so many others tend to completely give up on the “fatherly role” altogether, and their contact with their children gradually decreases more and more (660). My father was granted partial custody of my sister, brother, and me. For the first few months after the divorce, we were with him on the weekends. However, not much later, he took a job in Egypt and moved there for five years. After Egypt, he has lived and worked in Australia, Nepal, Colombia, England, Scotland, Germany, Austria, Costa Rica and just about every other imaginable country on the face of the planet. Phone calls every day turned into once a week, then once a month, then hardly ever. I would get postcards sometimes. Birthday presents became a thing of the past. We lost contact. According to Amato, this loss of contact is detrimental to the development of growing children, because fathers provide “... not only economic resources... [they are also] sources of emotional support, practical assistance, information, guidance, and supervision” (1). In my situation, I missed out on having a father altogether, along with this support system. I fell victim to the adverse affects of father absence. I am a statistic.
Having an estranged father results in several emotional issues. According to Lamb, Sternberg, and Thompson, long term problems may include “... behavior problems, depression, poor school performance, acting out, low self-esteem, and (in adolescence and young adulthood) difficulties with intimate heterosexual relationship” (84). I can identify with several of these problems. For instance, father absence is evident in young women's academic achievements and tendency to attend college. Krohn and Bogan state that cognitive development in girls without fathers is weakened, which in turn affects their academics. Academics are most notably affected in math subjects. Math is a subject often correlated with masculinity, so without the proper masculine figures, girls lack interest in the subject as well as the stimulation to pursue it (598-599). Ever since times tables in third grade, I have hated math. To this day when I am sitting in chemistry class trying to figure out the simplest conversion, I struggle. Girls also tend to develop less in social areas and critical thinking skills as a result of father deprivation. Right around the time of my parents' divorce, I became extremely introverted. If anyone talked to me, even if it was a member of my extended family, I would give one word answers, get nervous, and blush. My self-confidence plummeted. It wasn't until high school when I finally started coming out of my shell. However, I am still shy, and find it difficult to keep eye contact.
College attendance is also affected in two major ways as a result of a girl's experience without a father. Young women who live solely with their mother often can not attend college because of financial costs. Their mothers, whom they have most likely seen struggling to be a single parent, simply can not afford to pay for higher education, or their fathers may refuse to help regardless of the fact that they continue to pay child support. Krohn states that several girls choose to enter the workforce rather than continue their education because they long to be financially independent. To them, being able to support themselves is absolutely crucial because they never wish to end up in the financial turmoil they have seen their mothers in (603). Thus, according to Krohn, daughters who do attend college tend to fall into one of two extreme behaviors: either overachieving in an effort to gain their father's approval or underachieving and eventually failing or dropping out (603-604). I was lucky enough to be able to attend college, but it was not without hard work. I fall into the overachiever category. For as long as I can remember, nothing I have ever done has been “good enough.” If I got a B on a paper, I would come home either crying or absolutely livid. If I messed up taking notes in class, I would rip out all of my notes and start over. Although I have learned to bridle some of these behaviors, I am still overly zealous in my study habits and grades. I feel completely inadequate if I get anything lower than an A. Granted, this did get me a lot of scholarship and grant opportunities, but sometimes I need a bit of a reality check. For my Chemistry midterm a few weeks ago, I read each of the six chapters covered on the exam twice, wrote notes on each chapter, made index cards, and re-did every single homework assignment three times. A little obsessive, right? Ironically, I study so much I go blank when I get the test. I obsess more over what kind of reaction I can get from my father than on the importance of the grades themselves. I am sure a lot of people wonder, “Why do you care so much? He's not even around.” The truth is, I don't know. In a way, it's sort of my subconscious way of showing him that he's missing out on a great kid. But at the same time, it is so much more than that. Even I can not put my finger on exactly why I care so much about him and what he thinks if he abandoned me. It's quite a paradox. It is almost as though I am trying to fill up the gap he has made in my life with whatever I can, so much so that he will recognize it. I suppose that I think by doing whatever I can to make him recognize and love me, he will see the error of his ways and majestically come back into my life and everything will be okay again. I want to make myself so wonderful that he can't help but fulfill my idealized dream of his really being my father again.
Another interesting area of study has been in how absent fathers affect the sexuality of their daughters in both the development of their sexual activity and even in the outcome of their future relationships. Comings, Muhleman, Johnson, and MacMurray state that, “... girls exposed to a stressful environment, especially when due to father absence in the first 7 years of life, showed an early onset of puberty and precocious sexuality, and had unstable relationships as adults” (1046). Research conducted by Krohn shows that when behavioral problems and others similar to the aforementioned problems are issues beginning at a young age and during critical times of development, there is a greater risk for early sexual activity. Krohn's studies also recognize the fact that development is affected by a young woman's sense of security, and when that security is lost due to an absent father, there is a tendency to become pregnant at a young age (604-605). Girls in these situations tend to engage in sexual activity not only because of these factors, but also due to their separation from their fathers, they desire attention and contact with males in a sometime unconscious attempt to obtain a father figure in their lives. These effects are lessened if the father left in later stages in life as opposed to earlier ones and negligible in girls whose fathers are present. I personally never engaged in extraordinarily precocious behaviors, but I witnessed my sister. She began engaging in sexual activities at an early age, and was with a different loser boyfriend every other week. She was often used and emotionally abused in some way as a result of these relationships, and now will even admittedly say that she was trying to find a male in her life who would not abandon her. As Perkins states, girls tend to enter into relationships with men similar to their fathers later in life, in the sense that the men they are attracted to either abandon or abuse them in some way (617). I am in a relationship that I have been involved with for over a year, and although I am not precocious, I find myself expecting much more attention than my significant other can readily give me. I crave for him to be with me at all times. If I ever feel my security is in any way threatened, I blow up, and have often put our relationship in jeopardy because of this. I see these tendencies in myself, and fear that I will be one of the many who ends up divorced or parenting on my own. Krohn states that daughters without a present father figure are 164% more likely to be single parents and 92% more likely than girls whose fathers are present to divorce (605).
Father absence also has a marked influence of increased delinquency among girls. When adolescents are going through the various stresses associated with divorce and parent separation, they often act out with deviant behavior. These behaviors are generally those normally associated with adolescence, such as experimentation with drugs and alcohol. However, when the father is absent, these activities are intensified, and girls' participation in drug and alcohol use is significantly more than those with fathers at home. As Stern, Northman, and Slyck state, “... those from fatherless homes are more likely to have serious problems in these areas [of drug and alcohol usage]... the father's role... serves[s] and important role in and of itself... [in the] nature of the deterrent effect of father presence on problem behaviors (311). I started drinking right around my thirteenth birthday. I liked the fact that I felt empowered when I drank. I felt as if I belonged to a family. Granted, the family was nothing more than other troubled teenagers, but for me it was better than nothing. I felt like I didn't have to think about anything when I was drunk. It washed all of my problems away. I blacked out on several occasions, and had spent time at the police station by fifteen. I wouldn't come home at night. My sister fell into the trend also. She had her stomach pumped twice by the time she was fifteen. She eventually became involved with drugs, stayed away from home for days at a time and would come home strung out. My mother called the cops on her on several occasions, either to file her as a missing person or to try to get her under control. We have both seriously cleaned up our acts since then. Now it would be difficult to tell that either one of us had behaved like that unless we divulged otherwise. When I got to college, I had already been through all of the thrills of staying out late and drinking all night. I'm over it, while everyone is just now going through it, and in a way, I feel blessed by this. The negative ways I have been affected by my parents' divorce and my father's absence have made me mature beyond my years. Due to my situations in the past, I have been handed a great deal of responsibility and experienced more than I should have. However, I am fortunate to have experienced all that I have, and despite the difficulties I have been faced with, I have been bettered by them.
Intact families are obviously the ideal for any child. The family is the heart of development; it shapes the way children view themselves, their world, and the way they live their life. It is the basis of the growth of all values, beliefs, characteristics, personalities, and behaviors. It is the center of love that is so necessary to the life of every human. However, in America, the continuously increasing rates of divorce serve only shatter the traditional family in increasing numbers and in turn adversely affect the lives of not only the participants in the legal proceedings, but their children who experience the tumultuous and confusing ordeal of losing a parent. Frequently, the father is the one who departs from the family unit, leaving the children to face several problems that they and even their remaining parent may be unconscious of. I was unconscious of a lot of them for a long time. I never would have thought to attribute some of my behaviors to my father. But as I have grown older, I have come to realize more and more that my father has affected me in far-reaching ways, and these issues will continue to affect me for the remainder of my life. It is irreversible damage. I have no regrets, and would not change my life or what has happened to me for anything. Fortunately, my father and I have begun to rekindle our relationship recently; however it is very difficult, and my feelings about him and our relationship have always been and will probably always be intensely complicated. As I wrote in my journal on October 16, 2004,
“Even when I would go for months and months without talking to him, or receiving a single phone call or post card, I never took it too much to heart. Why I do not know. I'm not saying I never cried or got angry. But for some reason, I have a really strange connection with my father. I can not even claim to know him that well being as I never see him. I know him in a different way that other people know each other. I admire him. I adore him. I think he's the coolest father ever. I love the way he looks and hearing people say that I look like him and act like him. I love his attitude; I love everything about him. He's brilliant. But I hate him. I hate him so much sometimes. I hate crying myself to sleep and knowing that he chooses to make me admire him from afar, as though he's some celebrity I'll never meet in the flesh. I hate that he's not here.”
Daughters obviously face unique challenges and issues as a result of father loss. The father plays an important role in the life of his daughter. Although divorce is sometimes a necessary option for a couple, the relationship between the father and his children should be as avidly maintained as humanly possible. It takes special efforts to overcome the difficulties of a broken relationship. However, becoming a father is a responsibility that can not be shirked. Men need to take responsibility and initiative and remain involved in the lives of their daughters, and mothers must allow them to visit with them and support the relationship. The parents' conflicts should not affect the quality of relationship between the daughters and father. The father-daughter relationship can be a beautiful thing, but it needs to be given a chance and attended to as much as any other relationship. Nothing should come between flesh and blood. No argument between ex-spouses, no distance, and no relationships should ever come between a father and his daughter. Daughters need a father in their lives, plain and simple, and deserve their full and undivided support, guidance, and love.
Daddy: We Need You More Than You Know
by Alexandra Chowansky
I have a dream. It shows an idealized picture of my father that I have painted in the hues of fantasy. He would call me every day just to say “hi” and ask me, “Do you need anything?” or “Do you have any preference for dinner on Friday?” He would have a house close to school and I would have my own room in it. It's a dream of sanctuary. It would be a place I could go to on the weekends or on school holidays or just when I wanted to go home. It is a home. It would be a place where he and I are together, where there is a family that has never been apart. An optimist may say that dreams can come true, but for so many daughters who are the victims of divorce and subsequent father absence, such dreams are far out of reach. Experiencing the loss of the father engenders chronic and far-reaching issues for young women. Father absence affects several aspects of a girl's life, including cognitive development, tendency to attend college, quality of sexual and intimate relationships, and drug and alcohol use.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2002 that 50% of marriages currently taking place that would eventually end in divorce (70). My family, too, is a statistic. My parents got divorced when I was about six years old. I was immediately thrown into custody embroilments and bribed by my child psychologist who was supposed to be helping me work through my decision. I was utterly and completely confused, acting as a middle man, and hearing my parents unabashedly belittle and insult one another. How is a six year old child to choose which parent she would like to live with? I naturally wanted both of my parents. But in the end, the divorce went through, and after all of the tears and insults and drama, my mother was granted custody and my father left.
Mothers are often granted custody of their children, perhaps because of the common view that mothers are the primary and nurturing caregivers, and due to this fact, mothers are granted custody in 9 out of 10 custody cases. According to Teyber and Hoffman, the father's absence in parenting is due in part to these “inadequate sex roles” (1). Society has delegated specific roles for both mother and father causing the perception that children belong more to their mother, who is usually thought to be more adept in raising children, than to their father. The father's role, on the other hand, was limited to financial support or enforcing discipline. These stereotypes of the father being powerful in the workplace, and the mother being powerful in the home, were established in the early 1900s during the Industrial Revolution, and are still relatively prominent today along with their subsequent sexual inadequacies. It is due to these “competing power bases” that fathers tend to lack involvement with their children after divorce (1). Therefore, as Dunn states, my father and so many others tend to completely give up on the “fatherly role” altogether, and their contact with their children gradually decreases more and more (660). My father was granted partial custody of my sister, brother, and me. For the first few months after the divorce, we were with him on the weekends. However, not much later, he took a job in Egypt and moved there for five years. After Egypt, he has lived and worked in Australia, Nepal, Colombia, England, Scotland, Germany, Austria, Costa Rica and just about every other imaginable country on the face of the planet. Phone calls every day turned into once a week, then once a month, then hardly ever. I would get postcards sometimes. Birthday presents became a thing of the past. We lost contact. According to Amato, this loss of contact is detrimental to the development of growing children, because fathers provide “... not only economic resources... [they are also] sources of emotional support, practical assistance, information, guidance, and supervision” (1). In my situation, I missed out on having a father altogether, along with this support system. I fell victim to the adverse affects of father absence. I am a statistic.
Having an estranged father results in several emotional issues. According to Lamb, Sternberg, and Thompson, long term problems may include “... behavior problems, depression, poor school performance, acting out, low self-esteem, and (in adolescence and young adulthood) difficulties with intimate heterosexual relationship” (84). I can identify with several of these problems. For instance, father absence is evident in young women's academic achievements and tendency to attend college. Krohn and Bogan state that cognitive development in girls without fathers is weakened, which in turn affects their academics. Academics are most notably affected in math subjects. Math is a subject often correlated with masculinity, so without the proper masculine figures, girls lack interest in the subject as well as the stimulation to pursue it (598-599). Ever since times tables in third grade, I have hated math. To this day when I am sitting in chemistry class trying to figure out the simplest conversion, I struggle. Girls also tend to develop less in social areas and critical thinking skills as a result of father deprivation. Right around the time of my parents' divorce, I became extremely introverted. If anyone talked to me, even if it was a member of my extended family, I would give one word answers, get nervous, and blush. My self-confidence plummeted. It wasn't until high school when I finally started coming out of my shell. However, I am still shy, and find it difficult to keep eye contact.
College attendance is also affected in two major ways as a result of a girl's experience without a father. Young women who live solely with their mother often can not attend college because of financial costs. Their mothers, whom they have most likely seen struggling to be a single parent, simply can not afford to pay for higher education, or their fathers may refuse to help regardless of the fact that they continue to pay child support. Krohn states that several girls choose to enter the workforce rather than continue their education because they long to be financially independent. To them, being able to support themselves is absolutely crucial because they never wish to end up in the financial turmoil they have seen their mothers in (603). Thus, according to Krohn, daughters who do attend college tend to fall into one of two extreme behaviors: either overachieving in an effort to gain their father's approval or underachieving and eventually failing or dropping out (603-604). I was lucky enough to be able to attend college, but it was not without hard work. I fall into the overachiever category. For as long as I can remember, nothing I have ever done has been “good enough.” If I got a B on a paper, I would come home either crying or absolutely livid. If I messed up taking notes in class, I would rip out all of my notes and start over. Although I have learned to bridle some of these behaviors, I am still overly zealous in my study habits and grades. I feel completely inadequate if I get anything lower than an A. Granted, this did get me a lot of scholarship and grant opportunities, but sometimes I need a bit of a reality check. For my Chemistry midterm a few weeks ago, I read each of the six chapters covered on the exam twice, wrote notes on each chapter, made index cards, and re-did every single homework assignment three times. A little obsessive, right? Ironically, I study so much I go blank when I get the test. I obsess more over what kind of reaction I can get from my father than on the importance of the grades themselves. I am sure a lot of people wonder, “Why do you care so much? He's not even around.” The truth is, I don't know. In a way, it's sort of my subconscious way of showing him that he's missing out on a great kid. But at the same time, it is so much more than that. Even I can not put my finger on exactly why I care so much about him and what he thinks if he abandoned me. It's quite a paradox. It is almost as though I am trying to fill up the gap he has made in my life with whatever I can, so much so that he will recognize it. I suppose that I think by doing whatever I can to make him recognize and love me, he will see the error of his ways and majestically come back into my life and everything will be okay again. I want to make myself so wonderful that he can't help but fulfill my idealized dream of his really being my father again.
Another interesting area of study has been in how absent fathers affect the sexuality of their daughters in both the development of their sexual activity and even in the outcome of their future relationships. Comings, Muhleman, Johnson, and MacMurray state that, “... girls exposed to a stressful environment, especially when due to father absence in the first 7 years of life, showed an early onset of puberty and precocious sexuality, and had unstable relationships as adults” (1046). Research conducted by Krohn shows that when behavioral problems and others similar to the aforementioned problems are issues beginning at a young age and during critical times of development, there is a greater risk for early sexual activity. Krohn's studies also recognize the fact that development is affected by a young woman's sense of security, and when that security is lost due to an absent father, there is a tendency to become pregnant at a young age (604-605). Girls in these situations tend to engage in sexual activity not only because of these factors, but also due to their separation from their fathers, they desire attention and contact with males in a sometime unconscious attempt to obtain a father figure in their lives. These effects are lessened if the father left in later stages in life as opposed to earlier ones and negligible in girls whose fathers are present. I personally never engaged in extraordinarily precocious behaviors, but I witnessed my sister. She began engaging in sexual activities at an early age, and was with a different loser boyfriend every other week. She was often used and emotionally abused in some way as a result of these relationships, and now will even admittedly say that she was trying to find a male in her life who would not abandon her. As Perkins states, girls tend to enter into relationships with men similar to their fathers later in life, in the sense that the men they are attracted to either abandon or abuse them in some way (617). I am in a relationship that I have been involved with for over a year, and although I am not precocious, I find myself expecting much more attention than my significant other can readily give me. I crave for him to be with me at all times. If I ever feel my security is in any way threatened, I blow up, and have often put our relationship in jeopardy because of this. I see these tendencies in myself, and fear that I will be one of the many who ends up divorced or parenting on my own. Krohn states that daughters without a present father figure are 164% more likely to be single parents and 92% more likely than girls whose fathers are present to divorce (605).
Father absence also has a marked influence of increased delinquency among girls. When adolescents are going through the various stresses associated with divorce and parent separation, they often act out with deviant behavior. These behaviors are generally those normally associated with adolescence, such as experimentation with drugs and alcohol. However, when the father is absent, these activities are intensified, and girls' participation in drug and alcohol use is significantly more than those with fathers at home. As Stern, Northman, and Slyck state, “... those from fatherless homes are more likely to have serious problems in these areas [of drug and alcohol usage]... the father's role... serves[s] and important role in and of itself... [in the] nature of the deterrent effect of father presence on problem behaviors (311). I started drinking right around my thirteenth birthday. I liked the fact that I felt empowered when I drank. I felt as if I belonged to a family. Granted, the family was nothing more than other troubled teenagers, but for me it was better than nothing. I felt like I didn't have to think about anything when I was drunk. It washed all of my problems away. I blacked out on several occasions, and had spent time at the police station by fifteen. I wouldn't come home at night. My sister fell into the trend also. She had her stomach pumped twice by the time she was fifteen. She eventually became involved with drugs, stayed away from home for days at a time and would come home strung out. My mother called the cops on her on several occasions, either to file her as a missing person or to try to get her under control. We have both seriously cleaned up our acts since then. Now it would be difficult to tell that either one of us had behaved like that unless we divulged otherwise. When I got to college, I had already been through all of the thrills of staying out late and drinking all night. I'm over it, while everyone is just now going through it, and in a way, I feel blessed by this. The negative ways I have been affected by my parents' divorce and my father's absence have made me mature beyond my years. Due to my situations in the past, I have been handed a great deal of responsibility and experienced more than I should have. However, I am fortunate to have experienced all that I have, and despite the difficulties I have been faced with, I have been bettered by them.
Intact families are obviously the ideal for any child. The family is the heart of development; it shapes the way children view themselves, their world, and the way they live their life. It is the basis of the growth of all values, beliefs, characteristics, personalities, and behaviors. It is the center of love that is so necessary to the life of every human. However, in America, the continuously increasing rates of divorce serve only shatter the traditional family in increasing numbers and in turn adversely affect the lives of not only the participants in the legal proceedings, but their children who experience the tumultuous and confusing ordeal of losing a parent. Frequently, the father is the one who departs from the family unit, leaving the children to face several problems that they and even their remaining parent may be unconscious of. I was unconscious of a lot of them for a long time. I never would have thought to attribute some of my behaviors to my father. But as I have grown older, I have come to realize more and more that my father has affected me in far-reaching ways, and these issues will continue to affect me for the remainder of my life. It is irreversible damage. I have no regrets, and would not change my life or what has happened to me for anything. Fortunately, my father and I have begun to rekindle our relationship recently; however it is very difficult, and my feelings about him and our relationship have always been and will probably always be intensely complicated. As I wrote in my journal on October 16, 2004,
“Even when I would go for months and months without talking to him, or receiving a single phone call or post card, I never took it too much to heart. Why I do not know. I'm not saying I never cried or got angry. But for some reason, I have a really strange connection with my father. I can not even claim to know him that well being as I never see him. I know him in a different way that other people know each other. I admire him. I adore him. I think he's the coolest father ever. I love the way he looks and hearing people say that I look like him and act like him. I love his attitude; I love everything about him. He's brilliant. But I hate him. I hate him so much sometimes. I hate crying myself to sleep and knowing that he chooses to make me admire him from afar, as though he's some celebrity I'll never meet in the flesh. I hate that he's not here.”
Daughters obviously face unique challenges and issues as a result of father loss. The father plays an important role in the life of his daughter. Although divorce is sometimes a necessary option for a couple, the relationship between the father and his children should be as avidly maintained as humanly possible. It takes special efforts to overcome the difficulties of a broken relationship. However, becoming a father is a responsibility that can not be shirked. Men need to take responsibility and initiative and remain involved in the lives of their daughters, and mothers must allow them to visit with them and support the relationship. The parents' conflicts should not affect the quality of relationship between the daughters and father. The father-daughter relationship can be a beautiful thing, but it needs to be given a chance and attended to as much as any other relationship. Nothing should come between flesh and blood. No argument between ex-spouses, no distance, and no relationships should ever come between a father and his daughter. Daughters need a father in their lives, plain and simple, and deserve their full and undivided support, guidance, and love.