Respecting the Family
In 1981 Pope John Paul II wrote a letter known as Familiaris Consortio, about the Christian family in the modern world. Section 25 deals with fathers, and focuses on three qualities:
1. fidelity to a wife;
2. care of children;
3. the sort of presence in the family that is neither oppressively dominant (the Pope used the word machismo) nor leaving everything to the wife.
None of the three can be taken for granted in Ireland today. Though they may sound like pious exhortations, they are in fact meaty.
Wife, partner, lover
The Pope mentions fidelity to a wife. Do we need marriage? Some commentators find the use of the terms wife, husband, spouse embarrassing and politically incorrect. Advertisements for lotteries and competitions offer prizes to ‘you and your partner’. Now partner is a good word with a strong meaning: a person who has agreed to work with you in some area of life, such as golf or cards, business or politics. Many firms in law or industry carry the names of two or three partners.
Then what do you call the woman who shares your bed without the contract of marriage? The Chinese spoke of concubines, the Victorian middle classes of mistresses. We have a good word which denotes both the bond of affection and its transient nature: lover. There is more at stake here than just language usage. When words like spouse, marriage, wife or husband become politically incorrect (i.e. when the faint-hearted fear to use them in public), the family is devalued. There is a cheapening of the life-commitment that marriage implies, and that gives stability to the personality and growth of children.
Cohabitation or marriage
A lover may object: We all know that it is better for children to grow up in a secure relationship, but that doesn’t mean the couple has to be married. Wrong. That’s exactly what it does mean. Generally speaking, children suffer permanent disadvantage if their parents aren’t together when they grow up. Of course, some such children emerge relatively unscathed; but to tell the public that other types of family are just as successful for children as married parents, is simply untrue. The immense research on this issue points one way. Halsey, an ethical socialist, summed up the evidence: ‘The children of parents who do not follow the traditional norm… tend to die earlier, to have more illness, to do less well in school, to exist at a lower level, to be more prone to deviance and crime, and finally to repeat the cycle of unstable parenting from which they themselves suffered.’
So when the Pope emphasises fidelity to a wife, he is not just taking a moral position, but leaning on a mass of experience and research evidence. In fact recent research in a secular university shows that where a couple pray for one another, bringing God into the marriage, it is significantly more stable and contented.
Jacques Lacan, that profound observer of family relationships, saw the retreat of the father as the greatest danger to Western civilisation. The retreat may show itself in focussing on work outside the home, and confining his role to providing for the family, leaving all the effective decisions to his wife. He may never have recovered from the shattering post-natal discovery of what a change children make in the lives of their parents, and shied away from taking part or making his voice heard in the home. It may be a more total retreat, refusing any commitment to his children or their mother. Or it may be the sort of retreat involved in separation or divorce, which can leave the displaced father feeling discouraged, deskilled and emasculated. The Irish Constitution, sometimes thought of as patriarchal, is curiously silent about fathers; those who have lost their children can find themselves at a huge disadvantage in law. Both men and women are diminished by a Constitution that over-identifies women with motherhood and under-identifies men with fatherhood.
It is fifty years since Bowlby noted that the securest babies are those who have seen a lot of their fathers; forty years since Schaffer and Emerson found that for nearly one third of infants, the main attachment was with their father. Since then, more and more research has documented the special contribution of fathers to their children. Given the opportunity, they can be as nurturant of young children, as capable and emotionally responsive, as mothers are.
Though many fathers feel themselves as failures, out of touch with their children and over-busy, their impact on the family is still profound. The effects of contact with father are in securer babies, and children who are intellectually curious and independent, ready to explore and take risks. Involvement of fathers influences their children’s sex-role development and academic performance. Poor father-child relationships are strongly associated with delinquency in sons.
The family is not just one of our social institutions, but the one on which all others depend. Family affects how we grow our children. A change in basic groups will change human nature. So the Israeli kibbutz (in which children’s rearing was managed by other helpers than the mother, who saw her child for perhaps only an hour a day) produced a different sort of children, less emotional, more driven and individualistic. Family affects our politics, and constitutes the great protection of the individual against the state. Remember de Tocqueville: As long as family feeling is kept alive, the opponent of oppression is never alone.
Above all, the nuclear family offers a space for the extraordinary tensions that arise out of intimate living: between man and wife, father and son, mother and daughter, brothers and sisters. Within a family these explosive forces can be worked through in a framework of exceptional strength. Even the revolts of adolescence are negotiated successfully in 90% of families, because of the bond of unsentimental affection that binds parents to their children. The result is a dynamic equilibrium, which produces a particular sort of people. To quote Lacan again: If you want an institution that will produce a creative and revolutionary people, there is none to compare with the Western nuclear family.