By Laurie A. Couture
A father’s love is a quiet, smiling, head-nodding sense of pride; it is ever-present and strong. Children long for the strength, protection, and sense of pride from a dad. While mom’s love is said to be unconditional, dad’s love kindles constantly and forever, even if he pulls away… or is pushed away. Dads love their children just as passionately as moms do, but they demonstrate this differently, in their own “dad” way. Their love is like the gentle yet driving, unstoppable force that carries a timeline through space-time. They joke and horseplay, they carry us up high on their shoulders, they provide the best that they can, and they ebb and flow—watching and allowing the child to take risks and fly, while holding on with overwhelming warmth during secure snuggles and warm hugs of pride.
Unfortunately, and heartbreakingly for the children, our society is convinced that a father’s love is optional; an accoutrement to mothering; a nice “extra” if it’s there. On the flipside, fathers are pulverized for being inconsistent, absent, flawed, or “deadbeat”, in many cases after years of being treated as ATM machines, optional “extras” in the films of their children’s lives, or believing themselves to be worthless to the wellbeing of their children. In fathers who are judged as having abandoned their children, oftentimes they believed they weren’t good enough for their children or even that their children would be better off without them. Trauma in the life of the father is often at the root of true cases of withdrawal, child abandonment, or neglect: Either his own childhood trauma or trauma suffered in the relationship with the child’s mother or family side.
However, when fathers are estranged, access-limited, alienated, legally cut off, abandoning, or deceased, the children are the ones who lose the most. They endure the lifelong pain of missing half of their identities, half of their legacies, often half of their families, half of their heritage, and half of their birthright of paternal love and validation of the paternal side of themselves. This is akin to being partially dehydrated at all times. How important is a father’s love? A father’s love is so crucial to the development of a child that research by Mitchell et al. (2017) found that children who have lost a father due to death, separation, divorce, or incarceration have abnormally shorter telomeres—the endcaps on the ends of their chromosomes that keep chromosomes young and healthy—and the effect of this was most prominent in boys.
Reference:
Mitchell, C., McLanahan, S., Schneper, L., Garfinkel, I., Brooks-Gunn, J., & Notterman, D. (2017). Father loss and child telomere length. Pediatrics, 140(2).
