ninme

This is just so silly:

The Times - Of course children don’t need fathers
What women miss most is the man-sized salary, not the hunter-gatherer himself, by Carol Sarler

It might be very nice indeed for a child to have a dad around the house — provided, naturally, that he’s the proper kind: the devoted, sober, gentle giant much given to manly rites of passage like the proud purchase of a brace of season tickets to Arsenal. But nice is not the same as need and certainly not as “rights”; further, if the hands-on presence of a father were actually so imperative, our species would have died out in the primordial swamp.

Hunter-gatherers didn’t sit around fashioning nappies out of hemp; they were off and away, garnering the means of survival — a function that, by the way, remains the most useful role for a father. Ask any single mother what she most misses about having a man and her answer will be a man-sized salary; it is the absence of that, rather than of the man himself, that makes children go off the rails.

Medieval men thundered off to war for years on end; feudal men (rich) ignored their children until they were adults, feudal men (poor) ignored them until they were fit to work a field. As recently as the beginning of the last century aloofness remained the norm until, just as it started to thaw as an inevitable by-product of the economically driven evolution of the nuclear family — constant presence, shared living space, shared meals and how was school today? — two consecutive generations spent years without fathers, losing them first to the rigours of Ypres and then to the confines of Colditz, often never to return. Children’s “needs”, you say? Don’t be silly. Such as they were, they were met by women or not at all.

Even if the father was off in the fields, off on Crusades, killed by Germans, or at White’s, at least the kid had someone to emulate.

Remember this ad? It’s another thing I’ve long noticed about Japanese cultures. Watching Japanese shows, a recurring theme is that children understand and don’t resent their parents for having to work. American and Western shows, the endlessly recurring theme is that children are affronted, insulted, resentful, and go on to blame their absent parents for everything that goes wrong with their lives because their parent (father, usually, or mother who needs to work) had to work. Dad’s off saving the world from drug dealers, murderers, terrorists, international assassination agencies bent on ruling the world, but Junior throws a fit because he’s missed a softball game, and the (western) audience is expected to go “Awww,” and really confront the reality that even as we were cheering for him for saving the world, his selfishness and ours were preventing him from being a better father. Awwww. Puke.