The Girlification of America

Not wanting to be left out, the Wall Street Journal celebrated Father’s Day by printing a serious study explaining that fathers should become more nurturing. That is, they must get in touch with their maternal instincts.

The girlification of America proceeds apace.

You might ask whether fathers really have maternal instincts or whether they are as good at being mothers as mothers are, but researchers have produced a myriad of studies proving that they should do so anyway. As happens with most social science studies, these are dubious, on a good day.

The studies suggest that more nurturing fathers produce less anxious and less depressed children. Of course, the studies do not consider the impact of broken homes, a salient point when so many homes in today’s America are broken. They say nothing about social media and its nefarious influence. 

And they do not seem to care about what these men are doing in the world outside of the home. That is, what kind of example are they setting for their children?

Given the ubiquity of therapy culture, these studies drone on endlessly about things like emotional regulation. They assume that well-regulated emotions produce great social and academic outcomes. If you believe that, you will believe that high self-esteem produces better grades. Such was the conventional wisdom in the psycho world, until everyone discovered that it did not.

And, while we are here, when considering the influence of emotionally labile nurturing fathers, we should consider the case of the Tiger Mom, Amy Chua. We recall that Chua took full charge of her daughters’ upbringing. Her law professor husband had very little hands-on influence on their emotional regulation. 

Chua did not teach her daughters the joys of being emotional. She taught them self-discipline and hard work. She taught them skills that would make them more effective in the world outside of the home.

And we know that the Tiger Mom’s daughters have been very successful and very well-adjusted.

For example, her elder daughter attended Harvard and Yale Law School. She also founded an online tutoring company. From there she went on to clerk at the Supreme Court. Since she had, on her own initiative, signed up for ROTC at Harvard, she followed her service on the Supreme Court with a stint in the Army. And she also got married.

As for emotional lability and regulation, when the Tiger Cub went off to college her Tiger Mom told her that she was on her own, that she should deal with her own problems and not call her mother for advice share.

As you might recall, the psycho world rose up to denounce the Tiger Mom, because her way of bringing up her children defied conventional psycho wisdom. It was certainly not very nurturing.

And yet, when it came to learning how to function in social situations, in the real world marketplace, in school and in the court system, the Tiger Mom approach was obviously far superior to the whine and complain approach favored by psycho professionals.

Consider this. The psycho world has decided that the best way to bring up children involves acting like therapists. If this were Wall Street, we would say that they are talking their book. But clearly these psycho professionals are pretending that the best way to raise a child is to treat parent-child interactions as therapy sessions. One ought to say, as bad therapy sessions.

Worse yet, these approaches infantilize children, treating them like overgrown babies. Note well that the Tiger Mom taught her daughters to function in school and in the world. She understood that people whose currency is whining and complaining do not get very far, in school, in the world, or even in life.

Jennifer Breheny Wallace offers this summary:

A soon-to-be published survey of more than 1,600 teenagers by the Harvard Education School’s Making Caring Common project found that almost twice as many 14-to-18-year-old boys and girls feel comfortable opening up to their mothers (72%) as to their fathers (39%) about anxiety, depression or other mental-health challenges. The gap suggests that fathers can become much more involved at home, offering the kind of emotional support that many children today so urgently need.

Fathers who were involved in caregiving and play, and who reacted with warmth and greater sensitivity to a child who expressed emotions, were significantly more likely to have children with better emotional balance from infancy to adolescence. Those skills in children are linked, in turn, with higher levels of social competence, peer relationships, academic achievement and resilience, while poor emotional regulation skills are linked with anxiety, depression and behavioral problems.

Of course, girls are more likely to open up, in general. Boys do better to learn to keep their counsel. Unless they want to grow up to be girly men:

Our culture often tells men that softer emotions are weak, so fathers may have to give sons explicit “permission to feel,” says Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. 

As for the benefits, real or imagined, we should note that children do best when they live in two parent homes. It might be the case that it is better to have fathers present, period. And we should have accepted by now that family dinner, as enacting family coherence, produces many of the psychological benefits that the researchers attribute to motherly fathering.

As for nurturance, didn’t the Tiger Mom demonstrate that it is seriously overrated, even in mothers. Parents should prepare their children to go out in the world, to function in the outside world, and to deal with their own problems without running home to mom or to a nurturing father.

As for the silliness about feelings, consider what is going to happen to a young trainee when he stands up at his first meeting and declares that he must share his feelings. Truth be told, they are going to eat him alive, and not in the good sense of the term.

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