With Australia preparing to celebrate Father’s Day this Sunday, WARWICK MARSH, founder of the Fatherhood Foundation, argues that the notion of fatherhood is being reclaimed in Australia…
‘All in all it seems to go, but you don’t know what you got till it’s gone’, first sung by Joni Mitchell in 1970 could well be the theme song of Sonora Dodd, the founder of Father’s Day.
The US-born Sonora Louise Smart Dodd was 16 years of age when her mother died in childbirth with her sixth child. Sonora was her mother’s only daughter and shared the burden with her father William in the raising of her five younger brothers. Sonora was so inspired by her father’s sacrificial love for his children that she held him in great esteem.
CELEBRATING FATHERS: Warwick Marsh argues that more Australian men are following in the footsteps of Father’s Day founder Sonora Dodd and putting their families first. PICTURE: Cris Watk (www.sxc.hu)
“Almost one in four Australian children live in a home tonight without their biological father present in the home. In a survey a few years ago, the greatest fear young children had about growing up was not the atomic bomb, but that their mother and father were going to break up.”
When she heard a church sermon about the newly recognised Mother’s Day, Sonora felt inspired to give fatherhood recognition as well. She approached the Spokane Ministerial Alliance and suggested that her own father’s birthday, Sunday 5th June, be the day to honour fathers. The Alliance chose the third Sunday in June instead and the first Father’s Day in the world was celebrated on 19th June 1910 in Spokane.
Although President Coolidge supported the idea of a national Father’s Day, it was not until 1966 that President Lyndon Johnson signed a presidential proclamation declaring the third Sunday of June as Father’s Day in the US. Australia and New Zealand celebrate Father’s Day on the first Sunday of September. Seventy-six other countries around the world now celebrate Father’s Day. Big things grow from small beginnings!
Germaine Greer, the famous Australian feminist, does not share Sonora Dodd’s desire to honour fathers. She says, “Women’s liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and one that withers away, then Marx will have come…The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together.” Gloria Steinem said, “We must overthrow the whole…patriarch.” However Andrea Dworkin was a little bit more colourful with her thoughts on men and patriarchy in general. “I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.”
Such thinking has pervaded our culture – our academia, media and politics – for the last three decades. With what result?
David Blankenhorn, in the groundbreaking book, Fatherless America, said that, “Fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation”. Ronnie Williams, aboriginal elder, poet, preacher, singer and storyteller from Western Australia who passed away in 2004 said, “Why is it that white Australians greet each other as ‘you old bastard’? Is it because they still suffer the rejection from their forbears in England as transported convicts and still carry the fatherhood wound deep in their sunburnt soul?”
Almost one in four Australian children live in a home tonight without their biological father present in the home. In a survey a few years ago, the greatest fear young children had about growing up was not the atomic bomb, but that their mother and father were going to break up.
Because of the enormous bias still contained within the family courts system against the male of the species, when fathers and mothers do break up, it is usually the father that is pushed out of the picture. For many other children, their fathers are working such long hours, combined with long transit times to and from employment, they often grow up without knowing their father’s love and communication. Daddy is always tired and the lights are on, but no one’s home. It could well be argued that the majority of Australian children are experiencing the pain of fatherlessness in one way or other even up to this present time.
Fatherlessness, according to Dr Bruce Robinson, costs Australia $13 billion per year. Fatherlessness increases the likelihood that children will grow up in poverty, increases crime, drug abuse, youth suicide, child sexual abuse, mental health problems, levels of child obesity, poor health, poor nutrition and lower levels of educational performance for children. In spite of what radical feminists may say about the ills of patriarchy, fathers are foundational for the development of healthy children and strong families. There is no doubt that many of these radical feminists have suffered terribly due to patriarchal betrayal in the form of sexual abuse as Adrienne Burgess, pro-father feminist, points out in her ground breaking book called Fatherhood Reclaimed published in 1997.
Susan Falundi, another respected feminist, took the debate on the ‘masculine crisis’ to another level when she published Stiffed – the Betrayal of Modern Man in 1999.
Perhaps Dr Warren Farrell summed it all up in his brilliant book, Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say, published in 2001.
WARWICK MARSH’S COMMUNICATION TIPS FOR FATHERS:
1. Be an active listener.
When you listen to your family member, don’t listen passively with the television on, or while typing an email, give them your complete attention. To hear is not the same as to listen and understand. Actively listening to someone requires effort. In order to become an active listener, it is important to show your family that you want to listen. Avoid interruptions, be accepting of what they are saying even if you don’t agree, watch for nonverbal cues such as facial expressions and tone of voice, and lastly summarize what they are saying in your head to ensure that you understand.
2. Talk so others can understand.
It is difficult for people to know what you are thinking and feeling without you telling them. When you express yourself, be willing to share what you truly think and feel, not just what you believe they want to hear. Be honest and avoid generalizations. Rather than saying ‘you’ and putting the blame on another person, try using the word ‘I’ and express what you are feeling.
3. Use words that show love.
Your tongue holds the power of life and death. It is important for your family that you are encourage rather than discouraging them. The words you speak into your child’s life help shape their self image. If you tell your child that they are great at something, it will build their confidence, and they are more likely to believe it.
4. Attack the problem, not the child.
When your child makes a mistake, be careful to address the mistake, not the child. Better for your child to hear that they have behaved poorly than that they are ‘bad’. When disciplining your children, think about the words that you are saying. Are you condemning your child or their actions?
5. Think before you speak.
In the heat of the moment people often say things that they later regret. Try to take time to think through an issue before you react. If you are in a situation where you may say or do something hurtful, take a time out by going for a walk or counting to ten and calm yourself before you respond. Put yourself in your family member’s shoes and consider the way your words or actions may affect them, and your relationship.
6. Make your home a haven.
For the entire family, your home should be a safe place from external conflicts and trials, as well as a place of acceptance and strength. Foster peace in your home. Look for ways to show appreciation for your loved ones. Find ways to show your family you love them, and tell them so on a regular basis. If your child does not feel secure in their home, where will they feel secure?
7. Improve communication within your marriage.
Effective communication within your marriage is crucial to having good communication within your family. As parents, you are setting an example for your children. You can resolve conflicts easily and contribute to a healthy family environment for your children as you learn to communicate effectively. When you discuss a serious issue regarding your spouse, do it privately. In an argument go into a private room or resolve the conflict when the children are not around. Learn to negotiate and listen when your partner’s point of view differs from your own. If you do have a disagreement in front of your children, it is important that they see you resolve the issue in a healthy manner. Remember, you are teaching your child how to communicate.
All of the above are just ideas. It is up to you to decide what to apply to your family. These ideas are just a few that will help you go from a good dad to a great dad. Remember – good communication is a key to healthy family relationships.
~ www.fatherhood.org.au
“Father’s issues will be to the early twenty-first century what women’s issues were to the late twentieth century…” he writes.
“For the first time in history, the sexes have an opportunity to redefine love, to create not a women’s movement blaming men, or a men’s movement blaming women, but a gender transition movement.
“In the past, we have been challenged by a paradox: political movements have been led mostly by unhealthy people, but few healthy changes have occurred without political movements.
“In the future, we are challenged with the possibility of a movement producing healthy changes being led by mostly healthy people. This will happen only if men do their homework, study their internal worlds, have the courage to take their perspectives to the external world, and invite women to join them. Men can’t say what men don’t know, and women can’t hear what men don’t say.”
It has been interesting to watch the changes in attitude to men and fathers in Australia over the last seven years. Fathers were seen as optional extras by academics, politicians and most media commentators when Warren Farrell made his bold prediction.
Father’s Day 2007 is showing Mr Farrell to be a modern day prophet with an uncanny sense of timing. Hollywood is releasing movies with strong positive fatherhood themes at an incredible rate of knots – I Am Sam starring Sean Penn, Evelyn with Pierce Brosnan, Life is a House, Finding Nemo, Dear Frankie, The Pursuit of Happyness and the brilliant Aussie movie starring Eric Bana, Romulus My Father. The music world is doing much the same. Our poets and celluloid storytellers, the high priests of our modern culture, are tending to the father wound of our broken society.
The good news is that the fatherhood and men’s movement in Australia is going from strength to strength. On 20th June, 34 leaders from within the men’s movement gathered in Federal Parliament House for an historic ‘Men and Father’s Family Friendly Policy Forum’. Interestingly enough, many of the leaders within the men’s movement are women such as Maggie Hamilton, who spoke passionately about the needs of men and fathers from her recent book, What Men Don’t Talk About. Other brilliant speakers were Judi Geggie, University of Newcastle-Family Action Centre, and Dr Pamela Henry and Natalie Gately – both lecturers in law at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia, who spoke about the endemic anti-male bias found in the Family Law Court and Child Support Agency. The Labor Party fielded five Shadow Ministers and the Coalition also rose to the occasion with the presence of senior coalition ministerial leaders. Topics such as the desperate ongoing problems within the Child Support Agency and Family Law Court, the poor state of men’s health, the shocking situation with male suicide, increasing sexual exploitation of women and children, indigenous men’s health, the great need to affirm marriage and support families and the struggle that boys have in a femocentric education system.
All these issues were articulated as never before to political parties that now realise they have to win the hearts of men, who at 49.2 per cent are the largest voting minority group in the nation.
Men are excited because the founder of Father’s Day, Sonora Dodd, is no longer the lone voice of the last few decades of feminist history. The theology that ‘all men are bastards’ and need to be beaten to a bloody pulp on an indiscriminate basis, is finally losing its hold on the academic, media and political worlds. The words of Bettina Arndt, that ‘no gender has a monopoly on vice’ is finally being accepted without demur. The winners in this battle are our sisters, our wives, our mothers and grandmothers. The ultimate winners are our children. We can no longer accept the failed notion of ‘I’ over ‘we’. The heartbroken pursuit of hedonistic individualism will always result in more fatherlessness and even more broken hearts and broken families. No government on earth can continue to fund an ever increasing fatherless society. No civilisation has ever lasted more than a few generations of fatherlessness, nor can ours. As Arnold Toynbee, a British historian, said: “Civilisations die more from suicide than murder.”
The sacrifice of Sonora Dodd’s father in giving himself up for the purpose of raising his six children in the aftermath of the Civil War was indeed a noble act. It is an act that every good father performs in one way or another when he puts his family first on a daily basis. This Father’s Day, and for many to come, the words of Andre Dworkin will have a hollow ring to them because more Australian men are following in the footsteps of Sonora Dodd’s father than ever before and putting their family first. The ‘we’ is becoming more important than the ‘I’. Men are studying their internal worlds. Men are inviting women to join them in their struggle for true gender reconciliation. For the first time in history the sexes have an opportunity to redefine love. After all, the greatest thing a man can do for his children is to love his children’s mother. Indeed, for our culture to prosper and succeed, we need fathers who are responsible, committed, loving and involved in the lives of their children.
Our children know this, our women know this, and their voices are finally being heard by the media, academia and government of our land. The restoration of fatherhood in Australia is good news for all of us.
Warwick Marsh is the founder of the Fatherhood Foundation with his wife Alison. They have 5 children and have been married for 32 years.
