Vital Education For Our Men

Written by Andrew King | 15 June 2010
Posted in Feature

This review is about a longitudinal study of a group of US adolescents and what impact closeness to their father has on their life. It does comment on the impact family separation can have on children, especially the father/child relationship. Please note, there are other studies that highlight that children are less impacted by the experience of family separation but more by the degree of conflict that occurs.

There are many reasons that men are not often seen in health/community welfare centres. Most significantly, appointment times are often during the day when it is difficult for men or women to have time off from work. Also many men question and are wary of involvement with external community welfare agencies. King (2005) recognises that many men have a strong suspicion about people who influence their family life. Besides trusting family members, many men have little trust and question the relevance of new ideas about relationships until a crisis occurs and some change is required.

From boyhood, competitiveness is nurtured as young men are taught not to ‘be walked over by other people’. This process continues as the child grows into manhood with entrenched values of independence and autonomy. For many men, a suggestion that they need to change what they are thinking or doing is met by a high degree of resistance. Accompanied with this, most do not fully recognise the significant impact they play in their family relationships. They are more conscious of what others think they should be doing differently, like ‘men should show more of their feelings’. This assumption is that something needs to be fixed; the father has to learn to act differently. Due to this, professionals need to work harder at the pre-engagement stage when working with men, to find an alternative way to deal with any suspicion and defensiveness.

This study is well designed and provides a great overview into how different variables and issues are controlled for in research. It finds that:

1. Adolescents who are close to their non-resident fathers report higher self-esteem, less delinquency, and fewer depressive symptoms than adolescents who live with a father with whom they are not close.

2. Adolescents living with a father with whom they are not close have better grades and engage in and less substance use than those having a non-resident father who is not close. At the same time, however, not being close to a resident father is associated with lower self-esteem compared to having a non-resident father who is not close.

3. Adolescents do best of all when they have close ties to resident fathers. A central conclusion of this study is that it is important to consider the quality of father–child relations among those who have a resident father when assessing the impact of non-resident fathers on their children.

4. Closeness to fathers reduces violence similarly in resident-father families and non-resident-father families.

The study does control for the difference in age and how adolescents may respond differently to either the mother or father.