Father’s Day is celebrated a month after Mother’s Day. The formal establishment of a day to celebrate and honor our dads, however, lagged behind Mother’s Day for far more than a month. President Richard Nixon made Father’s Day a federal holiday in 1972, a whopping 58 years after Mother’s Day was made into a holiday under President Woodrow Wilson’s pen in 1914.
Father’s Day failed to drum up the same immediate cultural support that Mother’s Day garnered. As one historian notes, many men “scoffed at the holiday’s sentimental attempts to domesticate manliness with flowers and gift-giving, or they derided the proliferation of such holidays as a commercial gimmick to sell more products—often paid for by the father himself.”
The importance of fatherhood has become much more apparent in recent years in light of a phenomenon that has come to be known as the “boy crisis.” This phenomenon, marked by challenges faced by young men in areas such as education, mental health, and social development, has captured the attention of both sides of the political spectrum. To begin to define a healthy form of masculinity, a fundamental connection must be reestablished: the vital role of fatherhood in shaping the next generation of boys.
The loss of healthy masculinity is not merely a philosophical or cultural concern—it’s a harbinger of lost potential, fractured communities, and ultimately lost lives. The second leading cause of death in the United States for men under 45 is suicide. Young men between 25 and 31 today are 66% more likely to be living in their childhood homes than young women. Current male engagement with the workforce is about the same as it was during the Great Depression.
The identity of a father has traditionally motivated men to get out of themselves and to make sacrifices for others. In other words, to man up. The biggest hole in Beatle John Lennon’s heart was that he was not there for his first son Julian. To make up for this, Lennon put aside his career for five years to become the primary caregiver when his second son Sean came around. He said that he never knew what love was until he raised his son. It was the act of becoming a father that allowed Lennon to willingly make a radical lifestyle change for someone else, to make such a significant act of love and sacrifice.
Such examples are beneficial for boys, helping to give them a vision for their lives they can strive toward. “The fifth of six boys (with one sister on each end), in a neighborhood filled with other rowdy and largely unsupervised boys, I learned how to fight, take risks, make friends, trust or challenge others, and negotiate and enforce rules for our games,” reflects Nathan Schlueter, professor of religion and philosophy at Hillsdale College. “And somehow, most of us looked forward to’growing up,’ when we would assume the responsibilities of work, marriage, and family.”
Even as he was allowed to be an unsupervised boy out in the neighborhood, Schlueter never lost sight of the larger goal: to become a father and a role model within a family of his own. This implicit understanding of, and simultaneous excitement at the prospect of growing up, taking on responsibilities, and most importantly, starting a family is increasingly absent from our cultural fabric, and many feel it is no longer within reach. Instead, Gen Zer’s are increasingly adopting a slow-life strategy, where individuals postpone life milestones, such as getting a driver’s license, getting married, and having children.
Of course, every man can’t become a biological father, and every boy is not raised with one. Still, fatherhood is the best thing in nature that connects two generations, for handing down customs and values. Even when biological fathers have become scarce, there are concrete steps that society and adult men can take to cultivate the next generation of boys.
Being a provider, protector, making sacrifices, and being an upstanding community leader are all traditionally associated with fatherhood. Good adult role models, including religious leaders, coaches, teachers, camp counselors, volunteer firefighters, can encourage these traits in boys by exemplifying them. Taking a more active and caring role in the lives of others is the first vital step in reestablishing the much-needed culture of fatherhood.
In the poem, “Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden writes of a man who models fatherhood for his son. His son does not have the capacity to appreciate it for what it is until much later—perhaps, when he himself becomes a father.
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Silently, and sometimes underappreciated, a father dutifully and lovingly carries out his role. Growing up watching their fathers, the next generation of men take up the same mantle of love. And when they do, they understand a little bit more of what it means to be a man.
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