Fatherhood is one of the great enigmas of our time, a treasure hunt of scattered clues rather than blinding revelations. The clues come from your own dad, his dad if you are lucky, from society at large, but they come piecemeal, unbidden, arriving when you least expect them.
Often the best ones are meaningful only retrospectively. "Ah," you say later. "I understand what that means now."
Let’s assume our young father is brave and noble, wanting to do right by his partner and his kids, but he’s also negotiating through quicksand, with a blindfold. It is a tough ask.
He’ll need all the help he can get because the very idea of fatherhood in SA is in crisis. Men don’t know who they are or what they want out of relationships.
They don’t know if they want the secure comforts of monogamy or the freedom to play the field. They realise they can’t be boys forever but endlessly mourn the innocence of lost boyhood.
Rams Mabote, radio personality and father, started Future Kings four years ago. He realised he needed to act after reading yet another newspaper article about an abusive boyfriend beating up his girlfriend.
"We are a society that breeds bad and violent men," he tweeted last year, referring, in this case, to a sickening example of local football violence. "We can chose to ignore this reality or even justify it, but it is a fact. It does not matter what else is done to build SA, if we don’t breed a new man, such scenes and more will be with us forever."
Future Kings encourages boys aged between 13 and 18, brought up by single mothers, to join the group. The focus is on communication, building trust and doing things together.
"We are trying to give boys new stories that will make them think differently about their role in society," says Mabote. "I think boys function in a vacuum in which they don’t know what they can do better for society, or themselves."
Mabote’s instinct that there aren’t enough enabling stories in the lives of dispossessed and confused boys is spot-on. The "State of SA’s Fathers Report", for example, tells us that 61.8% of all SA fathers are absent from households, if absenteeism is defined as those "who don’t spend more than four nights a week over four consecutive weeks" at home.
It might go without saying, but you can’t be a proper dad if you aren’t there. Being there starts early. A friend of mine knows when his son was conceived (in the Kalahari), and I was present at all of our three sons’ home births.
Being a dad means not only being present but mucking in. It means changing nappies, nondisposables if you are environmentally conscious — and anyway disposable nappies are so damn expensive.
It means bottle-feeding the little mite so your wife can catch up on some sleep if she’s a breast-feeder. It means feeding children and dressing them on winter mornings and — worst of all — getting up on winter nights when they wake.
It’s not simply, as the recent TV ads for Gillette and Black Label tell us, about taking a stand against bullying and violence against women, important as this is. It’s about being attentive to the details: to address, to context-appropriate emotion, to tenderness and love.
Cry if you are sad. Jump if you are happy. But be consistent.
Inconsistency is frightening to young people — and to people generally. And please try, please, to name your emotions accurately. What is rage? How is it different to anger? What is happiness? What is love, as distinct from lust? Why is tenderness a good thing?
Try a little tenderness
As the great Australian novelist Tim Winton reminds us: "There’s great native tenderness in children. In boys, as much as girls. But so often I see boys having the tenderness shamed out of them. Boys and young men are so routinely expected to betray their better natures, to smother their consciences, to renounce the best of themselves. To submit to something low and mean."
A time-honoured antidote to children being "low and mean" is for dads not only to be present but for them to be doing things with their children. This applies particularly but not exclusively to boys. Build sets. Mend things. Make kites and fly them. Kick the ball around. Show the young Kagiso Rabada wannabe how to hold the cricket ball.
If you make a promise, follow through. In a far-reaching bout of misconceived generosity I once told one of our sons I would build him a treehouse. We have an old and rather sad-looking oak tree at the bottom of the garden and, after having just read Conn and Hal Iggulden’s Dangerous Book for Boys, I was convinced that, yes, I could do that.
I soon realised that I couldn’t. I’m no stranger to hammer, nail and saw, but a treehouse was beyond my rather limited DIY range. Shamefaced, I admitted as much to our youngest son. That was seven, perhaps eight, years ago. Occasionally he still brings it up. Forgiveness hangs in the balance.
We have listened to the talk shows and been pounded with the statistics, so the crisis narrative with respect to masculinity (and fatherhood) in SA has a familiar feel. The rape figures, the domestic violence figures, the absent-father figures all tell us that men are the fallen gender. We know the schtick.
Less is said about what to do about the crisis. People talk idly about appropriate "role models". They talk about emotional literacy; they talk about raising boys’ self-esteem by getting them to do things.
This is all well and good, but one thing seldom gets discussed. That’s contempt, the poison emotion. Contempt is an emotional time-bomb. Researchers and psychologists say it is one of the key predictive indicators in whether relationships will succeed or fail.
But what is contempt? We sort of know but many of us couldn’t define it with any accuracy.
Contempt is generally understood as a combination between disgust and anger, two powerful negative emotions. It can be shown both verbally and nonverbally.
In verbal terms it is about not talking on a plane of equivalence but "talking down" to someone.
From a nonverbal point of view, eye-rolling is mildly contemptuous; sneering is self-evidently contemptuous. Researchers say contempt, which attempts to exclude from a relationship or community, is more disruptive than straight-on criticism.
"Gottman [John Gottman, an American researcher who studies the health of marriages] has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt towards you is so stressful that it begins to affect your immune system," writes Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink.
Contempt might well be the end point of a scale that begins with what was identified by Mabote as an absence of stories. Stories, of course, need tellers, and there might not only be an absence of stories in SA society but a shortfall of those who can tell them. This month signals 25 years of democracy in our country, a great story in itself, but, sadly, we are not telling this story (or any others) particularly well.
And as every child will tell you, there’s nothing better than a good story.
Try a little tenderness
As the great Australian novelist Tim Winton reminds us: "There’s great native tenderness in children. In boys, as much as girls. But so often I see boys having the tenderness shamed out of them. Boys and young men are so routinely expected to betray their better natures, to smother their consciences, to renounce the best of themselves. To submit to something low and mean."
A time-honoured antidote to children being "low and mean" is for dads not only to be present but for them to be doing things with their children. This applies particularly but not exclusively to boys. Build sets. Mend things. Make kites and fly them. Kick the ball around. Show the young Kagiso Rabada wannabe how to hold the cricket ball.
If you make a promise, follow through. In a far-reaching bout of misconceived generosity I once told one of our sons I would build him a treehouse. We have an old and rather sad-looking oak tree at the bottom of the garden and, after having just read Conn and Hal Iggulden’s Dangerous Book for Boys, I was convinced that, yes, I could do that.
I soon realised that I couldn’t. I’m no stranger to hammer, nail and saw, but a treehouse was beyond my rather limited DIY range. Shamefaced, I admitted as much to our youngest son. That was seven, perhaps eight, years ago. Occasionally he still brings it up. Forgiveness hangs in the balance.
We have listened to the talk shows and been pounded with the statistics, so the crisis narrative with respect to masculinity (and fatherhood) in SA has a familiar feel. The rape figures, the domestic violence figures, the absent-father figures all tell us that men are the fallen gender. We know the schtick.
Less is said about what to do about the crisis. People talk idly about appropriate "role models". They talk about emotional literacy; they talk about raising boys’ self-esteem by getting them to do things.
This is all well and good, but one thing seldom gets discussed. That’s contempt, the poison emotion. Contempt is an emotional time-bomb. Researchers and psychologists say it is one of the key predictive indicators in whether relationships will succeed or fail.
But what is contempt? We sort of know but many of us couldn’t define it with any accuracy.
Contempt is generally understood as a combination between disgust and anger, two powerful negative emotions. It can be shown both verbally and nonverbally.
In verbal terms it is about not talking on a plane of equivalence but "talking down" to someone.
From a nonverbal point of view, eye-rolling is mildly contemptuous; sneering is self-evidently contemptuous. Researchers say contempt, which attempts to exclude from a relationship or community, is more disruptive than straight-on criticism.
"Gottman [John Gottman, an American researcher who studies the health of marriages] has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt towards you is so stressful that it begins to affect your immune system," writes Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink.
Contempt might well be the end point of a scale that begins with what was identified by Mabote as an absence of stories. Stories, of course, need tellers, and there might not only be an absence of stories in SA society but a shortfall of those who can tell them. This month signals 25 years of democracy in our country, a great story in itself, but, sadly, we are not telling this story (or any others) particularly well.
And as every child will tell you, there’s nothing better than a good story.
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