Excerpts from the introduction
…We are still passing laws to replace the natural father by
whoever the mother chooses. For example, in 2000, after a child's
biological mother died, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that
the child could stay with the stepfather, although the court deemed
the natural father to be a good man and a good father who loved his
child and wanted to raise his child. When that son becomes a dad,
he'll know his natural rights stop at his wife's whim.
The consequences? We will explore how neither animals nor humans become
emotionally involved if they know they can lose what they love at
someone else's whim. We would not expect mothers to emotionally invest
in children if the dad could choose a different mother for the child
should he someday fall in love more with another woman. We will see,
then, how we are alienating the father from his parenting instinct
in a way similar to the alienation of the domesticated dog from its
parenting instinct when it discovered it wasn't needed to feed the
puppies, and besides the puppies could be taken away. More on that
later.
If you think Part II is not for you because, "I'm not into politics,"
I'll ask you to challenge yourself: if we are alive, we are into politics.
Politics comes from the Greek, meaning people. Even when we are alone,
we are considering people and considering people's considerations
of us. The moment we see our dads more positively, we have a more
positive view of our own worthiness of his love and attention, and
we begin to alter our view as to how we want dads to fit into the
family, and therefore the workplace, and therefore the laws that govern
both.
Our attitude of dad-as-wallet is not fixed. It is a view that has
been magnified since industrialization. However, it is now ubiquitous.
For example, a womanfriend called me after reading the first draft
of this book, saying, "You won't believe this. When I finished
your manuscript, I had to unwind, so I turned on Jeopardy. Their 'Answer'
card read, 'The day of the year on which the most phone calls are
made.' The correct response was, 'What is Mother's Day?' The next
'Answer' read, 'The day of the year on which the most collect phone
calls are made.' The correct response was, 'What is Father's Day?'
So here I am trying to escape from your book on the jeopardy of dad-as-wallet
only to encounter dad as wallet on Jeopardy!"
Read excerpts
from this book:
From
Introduction | From
Ch. 1 | From Ch.
2 | From Ch. 6
See
Table of Contents | Order
this book online
Reprinted with
permission of Warren Farrell, Ph.D., from his Father and Child
Reunion (NY: Tarcher/Penguin, 2001. Do not reproduce without proper
authorization from the author or the publisher.
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