The Absent Sitcom Dad
In the wake of the Columbine school shooting, the question reverberates like a televised death knell. What's troubling America's youth? Like issues of media violence and gun control, we've studied this problem in the past. As in the past, we decry parental inadequacies as the overwhelming cause of childhood angst - with one slight change. As Stephanie Coontz observes in The Way We Never Were, historically mothers have shouldered the responsibility for emotionally disturbed children. Increasingly commentators, quoting divorce statistics and out-of-wedlock birth rates, indict fathers. Don Elium, best-selling co-author of Raising a Son, extends the critique to distant, uninvolved fathers. But in her New York Times column, Anna Quindlen contended that "fathers today do seem to be more emotional, more nurturing, more open" than the five o'clock dads of sixties sitcom reruns. In contrast to Ward Cleaver, who ate dinner with his family after an eight-hour workday, today's corporate culture has created eight and nine o'clock dads who lament time lost with their families.
This Father's Day, perhaps we owe our fathers greater respect for the position we've assigned them. Married or single, fathers who wish to spend more time with their children face daunting economic and social barriers. The Families and Work Institute challenges corporations to honor men's desire for family time, yet socioeconomic factors discourage such consideration. Stephanie Coontz argues that Americans are reacting to major socioeconomic change when they "discover a crisis in family structure and standards." And the latter half of the twentieth century has witnessed major change. In the Media Education Foundation video Advertising and the End of the World, communications scholar Sut Jhally notes particularly the increasing commercialization and fragmentation of American society. While mass media might bemoan the absent father and suggest a return to "traditional values" (the popular version of which refers to a 1950s novelty), the networks cannot depict this return without shooting themselves in their collective foot. Thus, the absent sitcom father indicates the economic nature of the problems affecting our real families.
It is true that the incidence of divorce and the number of children living with single mothers are on an upward trend. And researchers have correlated these figures with increased depression among children and teens, adolescent suicide, academic deficiencies, and youth violence. Correlation, however, does not imply causality. Forum on Child and Family statistics show that children raised in single parent homes are substantially more likely to live below the poverty line than are children raised by two parents. We might assume that splitting the nuclear family causes a deterioration of society, when perhaps the economic forces at work in our society are shattering our families. We might assume as well that "traditional" families are the foundation of a virtuous society, when society consists by definition of aggregate persons united by community ties. Community ties, in other words, are the prerequisite for harmonious families.
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