This fathers day, offer dad forgiveness as much as celebration
What makes a father? Most every living thing has parents, but only a small minority of animals exhibit any degree of paternal care.Almost none approach the amount of male investment in children that characterizes human societies, and some of our closest primate relatives appear to be especially unlike us in this regard. We will probably never know where this aspect of human uniqueness comes from, or who the first men to think of themselves as fathers were.
For the great majority of our history as a species, there was no understanding of reproduction to support anything like what we now call “biological fatherhood.” In fact, only in the 1980s, with the development of gene-based testing, did it become possible to establish paternity with absolute certainty.But there are common themes in the annals of dads.Across millennia, in the absence of a precise understanding of paternity, men have told stories about what it means to be a father that have supported their claims to power and authority.
Our unique human capacity for storytelling underpins the importance of fathers in human families and societies.And these stories share a key resemblance.As far back as we can go in the historical record, to the earliest law codes and religious texts, fatherhood is presented as a godlike paternal mandate: I know what’s best for you, and if you do as I say and you will be protected and provided for.But this creates another problem.
Men have historically made promises that only gods could keep, defining fatherhood in terms that can never be entirely satisfied — probably in order to elevate themselves above women, whose role in the creation and sustenance of life was vividly clear. As a result, time and time again, and especially in moments of historical change and upheaval, men have found themselves mired in crises of masculinity and fatherhood, unable to entirely satisfy the role’s expectations and responsibilities.At such moments, men have often tried to reassert the ...