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Expanding What We "Know" About Men and Children Through Personal Experience

Tue, 2009-12-08 15:45 — figleaf


Photo “Figleaf and Son – 1997”
by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that’s me!)
Chrisj of At My Soiree, taking to task yet another rendition of the you can run but you can’t hide from the genetics of gendered behavior points anecdotal evidence produced by Kay Hymowitz to support her contention that women are just “naturally” driven to choose children over career. After addressing an anecdote about journalist Hanna Rosin Chrisj turns to a second anecdote.

The other story is by Katie Roiphe who describes an “‘addiction to her newborn baby that left her indifferent to work.”

Read the quote in context here.

Not to put too fine a point on it but by the end of my first (sleepless) night with my infant son (and, later, daughter) I was indifferent to work as well. I wanted to inhale him, to hold him when he slept, to carry him against my heart or on my back or shoulders. Work can be worlds of fun, and you can’t really do without the paychecks or invoices, and because I worked from home I found ways to fit it in. But for all the challenges and rewards of work there’s nothing like having a new human being in your hands, one who trusts you and needs you and squeaks and drools and blows out his or her diaper and wakes you up and wears you out and… eventually… lights up like sudden dawn when they catch your eye with theirs.

Maybe it runs in the family because when I mentioned it to my father he said he’d felt the same way with each of his children.

The difference, he said, is that whatever he felt he did what he was told and believed he was supposed to do: go back to work, be a breadwinner, and leave the child rearing to my mom.

He also told me, one day, when he was visiting and we were at a playground, that looking around at some of the other dads with their children he felt terribly sad that he hadn’t had more time… and that we couldn’t know how lucky we were in our generation to get to be a part of the family and not just the supply boat.

So here’s the deal on gender and evolutionary psychology: I don’t know, maybe they can prove that the incredible bonding I felt, and the bonding my father says he deeply missed, is a different bonding pathway than women have. Maybe so, though I’m more inclined to think any actual, innate difference might just be one of degree.

And who am I to imagine how Hannah Rosin or Katie Roiphie or Kay Hymowitz… or anyone else, woman or man, feels about their infants? All I can say, though, is that the connection and desire to be there that I felt for my children went right through me, to the point where early on I’d hear the sound of her breath in the wind in the trees and the rhythm of his sighs when I was sharpening a knife and then all I’d want to do was make a cradle for them in the crook of my arm and hold them.

If evolutionary psychology says no, that can’t be innate because of my Y chromosome then, well, fine, so much the harder for them. Because the other explanation for such a powerful, overwhelming bond would be… social or experiential conditioning. Which they’d then have to factor out in their further estimations of selected gender differences. When they can persuasively say their methods have grown subtle enough to account for that I’ll be ready to listen.

Till then? My children will be home from school soon, and I don’t have much patience to wait.

While I only talked about one sentence the rest of ChrisJ’s post is pretty cool too. Go check it out.

Tue, 2009-12-08 20:42 — Sungold (not verified) #permalink

Lovely post, figleaf. This is what I’ve been missing in your blog lately – those posts that go beyond analysis (interesting and important as that is) and also deal with emotions and experience. There’s absolutely no rule that confines you to writing about sexual emotions and experiences, just because once upon a time you decided to call yourself a sex blogger.

I don’t want to make a sacred cow of experience as a basis for knowledge, because it’s nowhere near as transparent and self-evident as some feminists have taken it to be. It can be a great reality check on other people’s gross generalizations, though, and you do this really effectively here. But maybe more importantly, it injects a warm dose of humanity into your writing and thinking. I loved that about this post.

I could speculate on the role oxytocin might have played in your early parenting experiences (men produce it too), or digress on how often mothers display the opposite of “bonding” (which would be a post of its own), but for now I think I’m just going re-read your post, and enjoy it.

[Thanks for your kind words, Sungold! I really appreciate it. Also, ChrisJ makes some good points about mothers and not bonding. I just picked out that little fragment. Also, if you like posts about personal experience around the time you were posting this comment I was posting about my plans for a new tattoo… on my forehead. :-) —fl]

Wed, 2009-12-09 03:59 — Franz Faber (not verified) #permalink

I spent a lot of time caring for my daughter during infancy and childhood, and even though I was not the one who had to get up and breast-feed in the middle of the night, can tell you that lack of sleep can also cause one to lose interest in work. But yes, for a parent, work has a strong competitor for one’s interest, especially now with my grandson. To see a baby gradually become a PERSON is astonishing.

[Yup. Men can’t nurse their children but they can get up and bring them in when they cry, and then change them, reswaddle them, and then get them back to sleep again after. Thanks, Franz. —fl]

Wed, 2009-12-09 11:35 — Mike (not verified) #permalink

Great post – I have been fortunate to be able to experience nearly every moment of my kids as they have grown…I work at home and my wife is a stay at home mom. It has been somewhat difficult though to explain to our kids sometimes when I need actually work and can’t play at the moment that most kids don’t see their dad most of the day everyday, etc…

I LOVE being a dad and also loved being there for them when they were completely helpless. Some of my most memorable memories of each of my three kids were just sitting there holding them staring as they slept in my arms.

I never want to be one of those dads who someday says, “I wish I would have _____________________ with my kids.” “Where did the time go?”

Mike

Thu, 2009-12-10 11:50 — Red (not verified) #permalink
I know plenty of Moms who love their kids like nothing in the world, BUT for whom this doesn’t translate into the desire to be a housewife even if money were not an object. The desire not to be an absentee parent? I would hope so. But that’s very different from living “The Feminine Mystique”. It does seem to me that these sort of responses are quite varied among both men and women. If their are some men who care more about spending every second on their non-working time consuming alcoholic beverages, some women-even housewives-are just as bad. When I was growing up my mother worked but spent much of her waking non-work time doing things with me and my brother. (As a teacher she did something we called in retrospect “summer homeschooling”, where she would teach us stuff but most of the curriculum was more free form and creative than what happened during the school year.) Our Dad however, was more interested in beer than time with kids. In the house next door the mother was a housewife and never had a job. But she was actually pretty indifferent to her kids. She basically watched TV all the time, and ignored the five children. The father of that house, although also an alcoholic, spent much of his non work time playing with the kids. Of course, he also beat the the mother and sexually abused at least one of the girls. The interesting thing to me looking back on it-even though I was a feminist very early in the game-is just how much emphasis there was on whether or not mothers worked. That was treated as the be-all-end-all-do-all-and-have-all. But nobody on our block noticed that the sole working mother actually spent more time (quantity not just quality!!) doing things with kids, than at least half those housewives who did not have an infant or toddler in the home, on our street. Even more interesting is how by comparison almost nothing was said about what Dads were doing.

And for some people it can vary even with different kids. I know both men and women who were pretty indifferent to at least one child from birth to leaving home, but were totally agog with at least one other. Sometimes this great love will be for their firstborn, but by baby 5, they are just worn out. Other times the firstborn will be unwanted and resented even as a cute baby/child all it’s life, while the laterborn(s) will be dearly loved.

[Brilliant points, Red! It nicely coincides with the often repeated but usually ignored by “traditionalists” that the “mothering” instinct isn’t universal. (I don’t agree with hard-core anti-motherists who say it’s a middle-class conceit, but the particulars — if not the magnitude — of their evidence is difficult to ignore.) And here’s the deal with my frustration with EP’s narrow focus on “sexual selection:” even if parenting behavior isn’t innate (and I suspect much of it is) there’s still children’s behavior, much of which certainly is. And to the extent they’re innate there are some fascinating stories about the pressures that shaped it. Which we’ll promptly hear none of if it all gets shoehorned into an EP dismissal of “oh, well, it’s all just signaling so the male will know he’s only selecting ‘healthy’ mothers.” Or whatever excuse they cook up for ignoring it this decade. Thanks! —fl]

Fri, 2009-12-11 00:16 — Red (not verified) #permalink
As I think more about it Katie Roiphe has a way of debunking feminist ideas for the sake of being provocative. Perhaps because her mother was a feminist who had a relatively negative tone to it. In fact, she admitted to having “man in the gray suit fantasies” years before becoming a mother. So to some extent you need to consider the source here. But perhaps a deeper point is that any form of falling in love can distract anyone from being deeply fascinated from work or school or hobbies for a certain period of time. Which is not to say that all forms of falling in love (parental, romantic or even certain deep friendships) are exactly the same. However, in all cases they may put other passions, drives, and even flaws into abeyance for a time….....but don’t often change one’s character permanently!!

[Yup. ChrisJ mentioned also that to at least some extent Roiphe and Rosin’s personal stories aren’t the best sources of anecdotal evidence for the EP’s post because they were also professional stories written to heighten drama of the narrative. Good points about love too, Red. And excellent point about how it changes short-term behavior but not core character. Thanks, Red. —fl]

Fri, 2009-12-11 11:16 — Red (not verified) #permalink
Part of what is going on I think, is a lack of sophistication in our society about these things. Partly people are quick to jump on the example of a mother’s love for her baby lowering her interest level in work as “Well, then I guess this settles it. Women were meant to be housewives.”, because that’s the conclusion they want to draw. But partly, I think people really oversimplify the relationship between stronger emotions and work. In reality, there’s nothing that says every emotion one experiences must conform to a certain framework. In fact, variable levels on interest in one’s work due to “various distractions” whether for these matters of the heart, or because one is involved in the anti-war movement or a play or whatever can actually protect against career burnout in the long run. As for this love of one’s baby not changing somebody’s character permanently, I think I should know that as well as anyone.

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