Happy Father’s Day, Dad.
Sounds simple enough, right? Not if you’ve been following the past week’s flap over a promotional video by a toilet-paper manufacturer celebrating — sort of — Father’s Day.
The “Happy Father’s Day, Mom” YouTube video features a half-dozen adults acknowledging efforts, teachings and substitutions made by each participant’s single mother because of an absent father. Each ends his or her comments with “Happy Father’s Day, Mom.” It’s a compilation of tender expressions with an unexpected role-reversal twist.
And it has drawn a prompt, likely unexpected response. “Angel Soft ad which disparages fathers gets huge negative backlash” was the headline of infowars.com coverage, which also reported threats of boycotts. Posted Monday, the video had been viewed nearly 150,000 times by midday Thursday, with a ratio of negative “thumbs-down” votes to “thumbs-up” likes at more than 5-to-1 — 2,555 to 422.
Writing for Philly Voice in a piece titled “Dear Angel Soft, I am a single mother and I do not endorse your message,” Syreeta Martin — whose two daughters are from different fathers — said she works hard to ensure her children honor mothers, fathers and elders.
“If my daughters’ fathers were to pass tomorrow, I still wouldn’t allow them to strip their fathers of that title, because without them, my daughters wouldn’t be here. And even with all the hurt and pain my youngest daughter’s father brought me, he is still her father, and I never speak negatively of him to her. Why? Because that’s her father, and although he was immature, I know, deep down, he loved her. …”
Added Martin: “And I certainly don’t want my daughters thinking that a woman can provide the same kind of love to her child that a man can. Ask any ‘daddy’s girls’ if there’s a love on this earth like their fathers’, and I’ll guarantee they’ll tell you there isn’t.”
Yale psychiatrist Kyle Pruett expressed the difference quite simply: “fathers don’t mother.” Writing for Salon, he explained: “We’ve come to understand that fathers don’t mother and mothers don’t father. Fathers can’t really be replaced, in full, especially by somebody who doesn’t feel like a father. We’re beginning to understand that to the extent that dads are positively involved, the children’s and the mother’s lives are better.”
W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, has detailed in book and magazine form the positive impact of a good father and four ways today’s dads make valuable and distinctive contributions to their children’s lives. Highlighted in his writing for The Atlantic, Wilcox singles out the following:
- The power of play: Whether roughhousing with the tykes or coaching in youth sports, dads participate in physical play that exposes children to arousal, excitement and unpredictability. Children learn how to handle their bodies and emotions during and after play and learn what’s appropriate, acceptable behavior and what isn’t.
- Encouraging risk: Fathers tend to encourage children to bravely embrace risks, challenges and independence, while mothers lean to ensuring safety and well-being. Wilcox cites a study that says “fathers tend to stand behind their children so the children can face their social environment, whereas mothers tend to position themselves in front of their children, seeking to establish visual contact with the children.”
- Protecting his own: In monitoring their children’s comings and goings, fathers — because of size, strength and more aggressive public presence — seem more apt at keeping predators and bad peer influences away. Wilcox says multiple scholars agree that paternal absence is “the single greatest risk factor in teen pregnancy for girls.”
- Dad’s discipline: While moms discipline more frequently and with more flexibility and more emotional negotiations, dads are firmer, more willing to confront and enforce, with children believing the father has more authority. Discipline is best with the diversity and balance provided by mothers and fathers working in parental partnership.
And so, Happy Father’s Day, dads — please understand you have distinctive and important roles to fill and future generations to help teach and reach for the ideals of fatherhood.