Making Over Mom and Dad

Changes in traditional family structure have altered today's concept of parenting.

By Frederic Golden, Annie Murphy Paul, published on May 01, 1999 - last reviewed on September 28, 2009

Single fathers were once an amusing oddity: usually widowers, they were portrayed in popular culture as hopelessly inept with diapers and blushingly awkward with talks about the birds and the bees. But times have changed. According to a report released by the Census Bureau, the number of single fathers jumped 25% in three years, from 1.7 million in 1995 to 2.1 million in 1998.

Moreover, many of these men are taking on the role for new reasons: not because their wives have died but because judges have awarded them custody. That change reflects a larger one: Men are increasingly considered capable and effective single parents. "It appears that fathers raising children on their own are doing a better job than they were several decades ago," observes Doug Downey, Ph.D., a sociologist at Ohio State University. In fact, the care they provide is almost indistinguishable in its effect from that given by single mothers, as a recent study by Downey demonstrates: on measures of self-esteem, behavior and performance in school, relationships with others, and well-being later in life, children raised by single mothers and single fathers fared virtually the same.

There's a lesson here for fathers in intact familes: they only act like "Dad" because there's a "Mom" to play off of. "Faced with similar structural demands and without another adult with whom to 'do gender,'" notes Downey, "women and men in single-parent households act in less sex-stereotyped ways than their counterparts in mother-father households."

The Stepdad

Stepparents of both sexes are an increasingly familiar part of family life: more than 33% of U.S. children are expected to live in a stepfamily by age 18. While cultural fables abound about stepmothers, there are few featuring their male counterparts--but the social science research on them is straight out of the Brothers Grimm.

Stepfathers, it turns out, invest fewer resources in their charges, are less involved in their lives, and know less about their thoughts and opinions than biological fathers. Men find it more difficult to raise stepchildren than biological children, and become less satisfied with stepfathering once they have had children of their own. Grimmest of all, the work of Martin Daly, Ph.D, and Margo Wilson, Ph.D., both psychology professors at McMaster University in Ontario, indicates that men are much more likely--on the order of 100 times--to abuse and even kill their stepchildren than their genetic offspring.

Blame nature for this bleak reality, the researchers say: such behavior is in an evolutionary sense "adaptive." A father looks after the well-being of his child, the theory goes, to ensure that his own genes will be reproduced in turn. A man has no such genetic investment in his stepchildren, who may even take resources from his own children or time from his partner, their mother.

Despite the harsh implications of such theories, Daly insists that looked at from another angle, they offer an impressive demonstration of the strength of the father-child bond. "Parental love is the most selfless love we know. You give and give to your kid and get nothing back and you're glad to do it," he says. "It would be very strange if people acted that way toward just any old baby" The fact that the great majority of stepfathers are kind and loving toward their stepchildren is a testament to a bond of another sort: affection, freely chosen and generously given.

If there's any insight to be gleaned from this gathering of modern father figures, perhaps it's just that: what makes a father may be genetic material, or a monthly check, or a legal document, but what makes a dad is love.

BY ANY OTHER NAME...

Confronted with rapidly changing family forms, psychologists and others who work with families have had to reach for terms beyond the familiar mother, father, child, inventing a new vocabulary to describe family members' new roles. Here, a sampling:

o BINUCLEAR FAMILY As postdivorce fathers become more involved with child rearing, they are beginning to be seen as the other hub of family life, just as important as mothers.

o SOCIAL PARENT When two parents actively care for a child, but only one of them is genetically connected to the child--as is often the case in gay and lesbian couples-the parent who does not share the child's genes is known as the social parent.

o SERIAL PARENTING As divorce and remarriage have become common, men, and to a lesser extent women, are producing multiple sets of children with different partners.

o DISTANCE PARENTING The increasing mobility of Americans has taken many divorced parents far away from their children. Though no one argues it's ideal, parents who have no choice are learning how to parent from a distance.

o NONRESIDENTIAL FATHER Recent estimates suggest that almost 60% of children growing up in America will live apart from their biological fathers at some point. That makes the nonresidential father--one who doesn't live with his children--the norm rather than the exception.

o POST-DIVORCE FAMILY Once, we spoke of broken homes and split families in the wake of divorce. Now counselors, therapists and others are telling their clients that while divorce may end a marriage, it doesn't end a family. Mother, father, and children are all still there--just in a different configuration.