When my son was born, I got plenty of advice about his eating and sleeping, too much about which gear to buy and hardly any at all about my biggest question: what it actually meant to be a dad.
It was the summer of 2017, a time of reckoning for fathers. Bill Cosby, known as America’s dad, had been charged with sexual assault, and his trial played on every TV in the maternity ward. The nation had just elected as president Donald Trump, who boasted of never having changed a diaper. As #MeToo swept the country, masculinity entered a time of crisis on the left. Meanwhile, the right was embracing traditional visions of gender roles.
I wanted to find a different model of paternal care, but this is not the sort of issue most parenting books address, and my own father, who had recently had a stroke, wasn’t available to help guide me in the way he always had. All my life he had been a safe and solid presence, but now he was newly vulnerable and remote. I didn’t want to fashion myself as infallible, as so many fathers do, so I did virtually the only thing I felt qualified to do as a historian: Whenever I could find a few free hours, I started researching the history of fatherhood, particularly in the West, in search of some lost ideal that I could emulate.
Over more than six years of study, a few themes kept coming up. From the very beginning of the written historical record roughly 5,000 years ago, fatherhood has been marked by what looks to a modern reader to be masculine insecurity. Many of the oldest surviving legal and religious texts work anxiously to establish a godlike mandate: I know what’s best, and if you do as I say, you will be completely protected and provided for.
Ancient Sumerian inscriptions tell the story of a father, Shuruppak, eager to counsel his son Ziusudra. Shuruppak gives his son all sorts of advice, but his real concern is his own tenuous authority. “My son,” Shuruppak pleads again and again, “let me give you instructions: You should pay attention! The instructions of an old man are precious: You should comply with them!”
In the centuries that followed, fathers would continue trying to reinforce their paternalistic authority, especially in times of crisis and social change. At a precarious moment in ancient Athens, when it seemed as if the great city might not survive, Aristotle formulated policies to increase a man’s power within and beyond his household. The first Roman emperor sought to stabilize his empire after years of civil war by bolstering the patriarchal family and “traditional” morality. Five hundred years ago, Henry VIII’s anxieties about succession drove him to claw back the power to pass property and status to favored heirs. Again and again, the message has been the same: Fathers know best. Except in hindsight — whenever patriarchy ushered in war and destruction — it seemed clear that they did not.
My research did help me understand my own role as a father, but not in the way I expected. As I was finishing a book on fatherhood’s invention and transformation, I felt disappointed that my search had not turned up a new, more humane and generous model for paternal care. The trouble with a father’s godlike paternal mandate is protection and provision cannot be fully guaranteed — they run out. Nobody is actually a god. Perhaps to elevate themselves above women, whose power to create and sustain life is vividly clear, men have defined the role of the father in terms that can never be entirely fulfilled.
And then one day, years into this project, I was walking with my six-year-old son when it struck me that I had unwittingly fallen into the same trap: assuming that I as a father would know best what was right for him and for us. In that moment, I thought for the first time to ask my son what he thought a father should be. Without missing a beat, he told me that a father should be funny and good at hugging.
This idea was not yet in my book — or in any of the old books I had been reading. I realized that instead of trying to retrofit a model from the past, maybe I should be listening to my son. So now after dinner we go outside for bird watching, his favorite activity, rather than baseball, my preference, which I had assumed was best for him, too. In the car we play Bad Bunny, his favorite artist, instead of mine, Bob Dylan. As often as I can, I go where my son wants to take me. And when I do, I learn and grow, too, and become more like him.
It turns out that this idea of a father does have a precedent — but one that’s found in linguistics rather than in history.
The word “father” and its close relations derive from a sound — “fa,” “pa,” “da” and so on — that’s common across the world’s languages. Linguists have observed that infants often attach this sound, one of the easiest and earliest to form, to the first thing that they learn to recognize outside of themselves. This nursery sound isn’t just an identifier, but often a way to ask for help.
This is the basis of my newfound understanding of fatherhood. A fatherhood not of directing and controlling, but of accompanying. Not only of teaching, but also of learning. Not of insisting that we know best, but of paying attention to what the people we care for are asking us to do and be: a fatherhood of listening.
Augustine Sedgewick is the author of “Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power” and “Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug.”
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