Parenting – Hank Racette

A Thought About Single Parenting

Posted on August 25, 2019 | by hr | 2 Comments

I brought Darling Daughter back to college this week; the nest is, once again, empty. I don’t expect her to spend next summer at home as she did this year: she’s a sophomore now, and it’s reasonable to assume that my days of having a child in the house, other than for a brief visit, are over. And I’m okay with that.

I’ve been a single parent these past eight years, and I have some thoughts about the challenges of being a single parent. In particular, I’ve been thinking about the special challenge of being an only parent, someone raising children without the benefit of a partner, even a separated partner, who remains a continuing presence in their children’s lives. I know this is far less common than divorced or separated parents, but I know of several cases, and I’ve been thinking about them.

I believe that people come in precisely two sexes, male and female, that men and women are different, and that children benefit from the presence of both a mother and a father in their lives. Boys learn how to be men by watching their fathers, and how to relate to women by watching their mothers and fathers interact; the protectiveness and concern they develop for their mothers will, some day, be expressed toward the other women in their lives. Girls learn how to be women by watching their mothers, and how they should be treated by men by watching how their fathers treat their mothers. Their fathers are the first men in their lives and, we hope, show them the love and protectiveness they should expect in their future relationships.

As a father raising children alone — but I didn’t raise them alone. One of the wonderful things about being a man raising children is that children have friends, and the mothers of your children’s friends feel an irresistible urge to take care of your kids for you. Single men are perceived as generally incompetent on the domestic front (and for good reason), and that incompetence is assumed to extend to child-raising — and, most pointedly, to the raising of daughters. (I raised five sons; my youngest is my only girl.) It takes a stubborn man to resist the efforts and contributions of concerned mothers, and I never was that stubborn.

My children benefited, and continue to benefit, from the influences of other people’s mothers. That works for motherless boys and girls: while mothers are unique and irreplaceable, other mothers can nonetheless shower children with their maternal attention, giving the boys the tenderness and care fathers often fail to provide, while offering the girls the feminine understanding and support fathers rarely even recognize is lacking.

Similarly, young men in fatherless homes can experience the influence of a male role model outside of the immediate family. Extended family, friends, coaches — there are established surrogate male role models for boys without fathers.

The greatest challenge, I think, is for mothers raising daughters without the benefit of a male partner — even an often absent male partner. Because of the different natures of men and women, it’s difficult for young women to safely experience the attention of men: girls don’t have the options of surrogate fathers comparable to the surrogate mothers both boys and girls can enjoy.

None of this is intended to imply that mothers are less important than fathers; far from it. But I think there are more ways for motherless children to experience the maternal influence than there are for fatherless girls to experience the paternal influence.

I don’t have any thoughts about how to address that.

Restoring the Patriarchy

Posted on August 9, 2019 | by hr | Leave a Comment

I think it would be a good idea. Oh, not the legal aspects of it: with two narrow exceptions, I think men and women should be treated the same under the law. Rather, I think we should restore the cultural aspect of patriarchy, the idea that the father has a special authority and a special responsibility within the home, and that men in general have special obligations within society.

Men are, in general, more powerful (by which I mean more powerful than women; all the comparatives here refer to men relative to women, because there are only two kinds, male and female). Men do most of the creating and most of the destroying, impose most of the structure, cause most of the mayhem. Men are the principal actors in society by virtue of their greater drive and aggression and strength, their lesser interest in people, their greater interest in things and in the manipulation and control of things.

Biology made us that way. We don’t have to like it, but not liking it doesn’t make it untrue.

The problem with pretending that men aren’t more powerful than women, or that this isn’t an intrinsic quality of masculinity, is that by ignoring this reality we necessarily ignore the responsibility of managing it. Pretending that little boys aren’t, by their very natures, more aggressive than little girls discourages us from teaching little boys to channel that aggression into positive and productive pursuits. The aggression doesn’t go away, as the mean streets of Baltimore and Chicago sadly attest every single day.

We know how to discipline young men, how to shape the expression of their growing power. We do it by imposing a beneficent authority upon them, an authority that they can look up to and respect, that itself exhibits the kind of self-control and nobility we wish to see them express.

What does that authority look like? It looks like a father — a father, or the martial surrogate for a father represented by the military. Most pointedly, it looks like a father who embraces his role as the primary leader and disciplinarian.

Our culture is moving in the wrong direction as regards the sexes. It encourages men to be ashamed of their strength, women to be ashamed of their vulnerability, and both to deny that these traits are natural and intrinsic to the respective sexes. Under the illusion of freeing men and women from artificial constraints, it urges women to behave with less caution even as it erodes the cultural constraints on male behavior that served to keep men in check.

We are in denial, and would be better served by greater honesty about the fundamental differences between the sexes, and the unique role fathers play in raising rough boys to be gentle men.

Pride Month and Father’s Day

Posted on June 16, 2019 | by hr | 2 Comments

Today is Father’s Day. June is Pride month. Until a few years ago, I’d have found nothing particularly incongruous about that conjunction: there is nothing about the celebration of one’s sexual preference, however odd it may be to call that “pride,” that precludes, obfuscates, or undermines an appreciation of the role fathers play in the lives of their children and their value to society.

But times change, and not always for the better.

Today, the LGB community — those people who are, to varying degrees, attracted sexually to members of their own sex — has chosen to associate itself with a distinctly different group, those who embrace one or another form of gender-identity fantasy or delusion. That’s what the T in LGBT refers to.

I’m sympathetic to homosexuals, as we used to call people who experience strong same-sex attraction. (I think it’s no longer considered appropriate to use the term, but I’m nothing if not no slave to fashion. Parse that at your leisure.) Attraction, whether to members of one’s own sex or the more quotidian kind, is what it is, and I’m perfectly willing to believe that it isn’t something one can change even if one wishes one could. I’m glad that being gay or lesbian is legal, tolerated, and accepted.

I’m sympathetic as well to those who suffer one or another form of gender dysphoria, who imagine or wish themselves to be of a different sex, or who are so confused about the nature of sexuality as to imagine that there’s a meaningful category of human sexual identity that is neither male nor female. People suffer all kinds of emotional and psychological troubles, and their suffering is real.

But the so-called trans movement is nonsense — the self-righteous pouring of gasoline on to the sputtering psychoses of true gender confusion. That it has been elevated to the level of a fad, and given a patina of the same victimhood status to which the homosexual community could once lay legitimate claim, is a sign of the narcissistic unseriousness of our time.

The gender identity movement — the trans movement — is a self-contradictory celebration of inchoate and childish urges, of the desire to make it so by wishing it so. Pursuit of its confused fantasy of sexual mutability, of parallel universes of ever more contrived sexual identity, necessitates the abnegation of the simple truth of sexual reality: that there is male and female, man and woman, and — barring a handful of ambiguously and unfortunately malformed individuals — nothing else.

The world can not gracefully accommodate both physiological reality and gender-identity fantasy — and neither can the culture. Unfortunately, the levers of popular culture are in the hands of deeply unserious people, and so the tide of opinion favors the fantastic over the actual.

Which brings us to Father’s Day. The point of this holiday is the recognition that being a father matters — that men have something unique to offer, that masculinity is distinct from femininity, distinct and valuable. That claim is incompatible with the spiraling nonsense of the trans movement.

My favorite band will play at my favorite bar this week in celebration of Pride month. I’d go, if it were merely an LGB event. But the trans thing is stupid, is on the march, and has to be opposed by people who think Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are acknowledgements of something non-trivial.

Parenting Thoughts: The Virtue of “No”

Posted on May 19, 2019 | by hr | 1 Comment

I think I did alright in the child-raising department. There are a lot of things I don’t do well, and a few I do very badly, but I think I’ve been a good parent, particularly in the last decade or so. There’s quite a bit of on-the-job training involved in parenting — hardly any other kind, in fact — and I think I was better at it when I finished than when I started. I’m sure my older children would second that, perhaps with more vigor than I’d like.

If I could pass on a bit of advice, it would be on the important topic of saying “no” to your children.

There are other things, of course, essential things: love them and don’t let them doubt that you love them, control your temper, never be cruel, show them that you love their mother and respect their father, give them security. I’d like to simply assume those things, because they’re pretty obvious and, as I said, essential.

What isn’t obvious to everyone — and I think this is particularly true for single mothers — is that it’s good for children to hear “no.”

I think a lot of parents feel that they have to justify a “no,” that they have to be apologetic about it, or have a defense ready in case the child responds with “why not?” That’s nonsense: parents have enormous discretionary authority, and there’s nothing wrong with using it. If “no” feels right, don’t think you have to defend your answer — and certainly not when you deliver it. If “no means no” is ever true, it’s true when talking to children.

Kid have nothing but time, and will argue, whine, wheedle, negotiate, and act as if nothing in the world is more important than the thing they want right now. They’re wrong. Not only don’t they need to watch that show/play that game/eat that dessert/buy that thing, but they’ll ultimately be happier if they have to develop the ability to accept defeat, shift their focus, and go find something else to do. They won’t be scarred by disappointment.

Children who can’t accept “no” as an answer are going to be unpleasant to deal with, and are going to face difficulties in life. They’ll grow up acting like typical progressives: nothing will ever be acceptable except exactly what they demand. By all means, discuss your decision-making process with your kids. But do it at your convenience, not theirs. Getting what they want is the highest priority for children, and nothing is ever more pressing for them: if they really want to discuss it, let them come back when it’s convenient for you.

Above all — and, this is particularly important for single mothers — don’t think for a moment that you are going to lose your child’s love if you say “no.” Mothers have an enormous, primal claim to their children’s love, and nothing short of sustained, monstrous misconduct will endanger it. Don’t be afraid to say “no” when you think it’s the best answer.

Two final points.

First, learning to say “no” is particularly important at meal time. Kids should learn to eat what’s served. We made it a point not to make meals that were especially difficult for any of our children; those simply weren’t on the family menu. But, beyond that, the kids were expected to eat what was put in front of them — and, after some learning, they did.

Secondly, if your children are fortunate enough to be in a stable, two-parent household, they should learn that the first “no” means “no”: if mom says “no,” don’t ask dad, and vice versa. Having both parents on the same page communicates to the children that their resistance is futile — and heightens their respect for parental authority.

One of Those Parenting Moments

Posted on March 7, 2019 | by hr | 1 Comment

I don’t get many late-night calls from my children. I don’t get many calls from them at all, really: they’re pretty independent, and they’ve put up with years of me talking to them and at them. I can forgive them for not wanting to volunteer for yet another lecture on whatever political or cultural issue is my current obsession. (Having put up with me for years, many of you can probably relate to that.)

Parents understandably dread the late-night call. So when my 19 year old daughter, my youngest child, called me from college an hour ago, my first words upon answering were “is everything okay?”

Everything was fine. More than fine: this was one of those rare and delightful moments of parental affirmation, when your kid decides that maybe you were right all along.

She was walking home from a guest lecture by Jonathan Haidt. His topics were largely those covered in his latest book, The Coddling of the American Mind: the social justice movement and the related and debilitating hypersensitivities of gen-Z (or whatever we’re calling the current crop of college students), the negative impact of safe spaces and social media, and the way our obsession with safety has created fragile, vulnerable young people unable to deal with conflict or consider alternative views.

She enjoyed the lecture, which she says was well received, and she stayed on the phone for almost an hour telling me about it — and this a girl from whom I’m lucky to get three texts a week.

But what I loved best was when she told me, in her characteristically frank, even blunt way, that the speaker said the things she’d heard from me for years, and that it felt good to her to hear them affirmed by someone of his stature and reputation — in short, that maybe Dad wasn’t as crazy as she and her brothers had always agreed he was.

Ah, sweet vindication.