How Did You Learn To Be A Father?

Do We Lower the Bar for Black Fathers?

Do We Lower the Bar for Black Fathers?

by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan

I am a better father, than I am a husband; or at least that is what has been affirmed to me, if I am to gauge such things by the number of compliments that I receive from friends and passer-bys. Indeed it’s been so easy to believe the hype, as strangers react in amazement when I show any hint of nurturing, affection or playfulness with my two daughters. I used to strut around thinking I was doing something exceptional; twelve years of parenting and decades of critical attention to the discourses that frame contemporary Black masculinity have taught me that such affirmation is borne out of a belief that Black men play little role in the lives of their children. In a society that expects so little from them, Black fathers often get celebrated for doing exactly what they are supposed to do as parents.

I thought about all of this, when the Today Show recently did a story about the positive impact of horseplay between fathers and children. It’s not new research; I cited the decade-old research of Ross Parke and Armin Brott (Throwaway Dads: The Myths and Barriers That Keep Men from Being the Fathers They Want to Be) in my book New Black Man (2005), paying particular attention to the effects play with fathers has on the self-esteem of daughters. I can’t think of a father that doesn’t find such activity one of the most pleasurable experiences of parenting, especially with young children; such play is still a vital part of my relationships with both of my daughters. I can imagine play with fathers becoming one of the pillars of a normative American fatherhood, along with providing security and discipline.

Yet, regardless of race, the expectations associated with fatherhood are far less dynamic than those that we expect of mothers, so much so that there are even institutional impediments that discouraged men from fully engaging in parenting responsibilities beyond those that are viewed as normal. 

It is only within the last decade, for example, that public restrooms include unisex changing stations or changing stations in men’s bathroom to accommodate fathers. In interactions with child-care providers, teachers, and pediatricians, fathers continue to be treated as disinterested on-lookers. Child-care providers almost never provided me information about the kinds of days my daughters had when I picked them up, without me making an effort to get such information. They would freely share such information with my wife—and always with much more detail than they shared with me. It has been no different with their schooling, as teachers and administrators seem genuinely confused—or even concerned for their safety—when Black fathers, in particular, decide to be classroom parents or occasionally decide to visit, as if we are all party to some on-going child custody case with our baby-mama.

And if institutional forces didn’t do enough to discourage more engaged parenting by fathers, popular culture has been a trusted source to further dissuade engaged fatherhood. Indeed there is an entire comedic tradition—a cottage industry really —built around fathers and parenting. Films like Daddy Day Care (2003), Parenthood (1989) and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and numerous television sitcoms have flourished by making the clueless, ineffective father the regular punch-line. In early television culture—and well into the 1980s—the comic image of the father trying to survive the challenges of domestic life, where countered by equally troubling comic images regarding women in the workforce; I’m thinking specifically about a the highly influential I Love Lucy, which along with early sitcoms like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie (where the main female characters had magic powers) served as a backlash to the influx of women in the workforce during World War II.

Indeed, in our contemporary culture, the lowered expectations for Black fathers are powerfully contrasted by expectations for Black mothers that adhere to parenting standards that are almost impossible sustain, without an engaged co-parent; mothers in general are given little sympathy when they fail to live up the societal expectations of what a “true” mother—woman—is supposed to do.

While there are many criticisms directed at absentee Black fathers—and legitimately so—very rarely is that level of critique extended to Black fathers when they are present, even if they are engaged in abusive behavior towards their partners and their children. Not so ironically, there is a equally troubling discourse that blames Black women, their ambitions, and their so-called attitudes for the failure of Black fathers to remain in the home or as engaged parents. Such critiques place a premium for fathers being present, often overlooking that what many children need, is simply to have as many adults as possible involved in their lives, regardless of gender or if they live in the residence.

With so many communities being challenged by chronic unemployment, particularly among adult males, parenting and gender scripts are seemingly being re-written as we speak. The Today Show feature that I cite above, as well as sitcoms like Modern Family, is evidence of a culture trying to wrap its head around what fathers bring to the table as parents—beyond traditional expectations—at a time when many fathers have little choice but to take a hands-on approach to parenting in order for their families to survive. It should not have taken a national economic crisis for us to realize that in devaluing the role that men can play in raising children, regardless if they are parents or not, we are devaluing the lives of our children also.

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Mark Anthony Neal is the father of two adopted daughters, aged 12 and 8.  The author of several books, including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press), Neal also teaches African-American Studies at Duke University and is the host of the weekly Webcast, Left of Black, produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan

Prepping Parents for Education Reform

Lofty plans for overhauling the education system are all very well and good. But parents have to be ready to take advantage of change.

Prepping Parents for Education Reform
by Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele

As a member of the burgeoning movement to improve public education, I believe that for education reform to happen, advocates need to focus their efforts on equipping parents with the appropriate mind-set to succeed in the rapidly changing school landscape.

Many parents will need help transitioning to and operating under the new paradigms proposed by school-choice advocates, primarily because -- well, public education has never been viewed as a commodity. Not all parents are aware of their options, and if they are, not all parents have the time to commit themselves to take full advantage of a sudden abundance of choice.

A few months ago, I attended a media-training seminar for school-choice advocates. There, one of the attendees described his laissez-faire ideal for America's schools: The public education system would function as a shopping mall, with parents picking and choosing from an array of public schools. As he saw it, parents wouldn't be forced to send their children to a school based on geographic zoning restrictions. Instead, mothers and fathers would be the consumers; school leaders would be the vendors. The vendors would be motivated to increase their products' efficiency to attract customers, thereby increasing the quality of all goods (think schools) sold -- and so on and so forth as the Business 101 supply-and-demand principles go.

While that proposed model is not bad or ill-intentioned, it is drastically different from the way that parents, particularly mothers, have traditionally gone about securing -- if that is even the appropriate term -- public education for their children.

Read the More @ The Root.com

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Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele is a multimedia journalist specializing in political thought and introspective narratives. She works in education reform. Follow her on Twitter.

Still a Nation of Cowards: Parenting in An Age of Violence

This isn't the better world we hoped our children would be born into.

Still a Nation of Cowards
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

I was with my two daughters a few nights ago—my wife within an earshot—as my oldest, now 12, worked on a school project. She was supposed to develop a family timeline from 1910-2010, in which family events coincided with historical events. Of course, unlike some of my daughter’s classmates, there is no shared immigrant narrative that begins with a view of the Statue of Liberty and a visit to Ellis Island.

My daughter seemed genuinely perturbed at having to recount the role that racial discrimination, segregation and violence played in her family’s development and those of so many African Americans. When I explained that her grandmother and grandfather were not allowed on the beach that we now vacation at every year, my youngest daughter, eight, simply chimed in “lame.” Lame indeed, but this seemingly jovial recognition of how far we have come was dampened a bit, when I shared that their other grandparents, my parents, were married the same year that President John Kennedy was assassinated and that that their daddy was born the same year that El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) was murdered.

I’ve often had these kind of conversations with my oldest daughter—the 20 minutes we spend in the car in the morning is my version of a daily freedom school—and it perhaps informs some of her rants at the fact that we’ve never had a woman president or that it matters to some people what somebody’s sexual orientation is while they are defending the country. Though she’s never said as much, I suspect she thinks that the world was brutish, boorish, and barbaric in the years before she was born. She would, of course, be right.

Yet, part of the faith that we all have as parents, is the belief that our children are born into a world that is far better than the one we were born in. The stress that we experience as parents, in part, is often the product of the reality that we are never quite sure that’s the case.

The recent shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, along with the shooting deaths of six others including Federal Judge John Roll and a nine-year-old girl, as well as the wounding of 13 others in front of a Tucson, Ariz., supermarket, is yet another reminder that we’ve not come as far as we’ve thought.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21.com

Obama Speaks to the Kids...the Horror!

Seems Like a Parenting Problem To Me
by Mark Anthony Neal

President Obama’s planned address to the nation’s school children on Tuesday has generated criticism as some of his political opponents argue that he is using the opportunity to, at best, infect America’s classrooms with partisan politics and, at worst, indoctrinate them with a radical and “socialist” agenda. Never before has such an address been subject to the kind of scrutiny that the president’s rather innocuous call for good grades and a stay in school mentality has. There is little doubt that the uproar over the president’s address is just further evidence of efforts by some to try to delegitimize the presidency of Barack Obama—like those in the birthers movement—and a desire by political opponents to deny Obama any political goodwill in the midst of a heated debate over health care.

I’d like to suggest that some of the apprehensions surrounding the president’s speech are also the product of a general feeling among America’s parents that they have lost control of the message when it comes to instilling their children with homegrown values.

The idea of a sitting president addressing school children should be openly embraced by all citizens as an opportunity for the ultimate civics lesson. Yet some parents are planning to boycott schools the day of the president’s speech and some school districts are offering parents the chance to opt-out of the nationwide event. As one parent recently told “The Michael Berry Show,” a conservative talk radio show in Houston, TX, “my rights as a parent are being circumvented so this president can speak to my children. My children will not be going to school.” Rights as a parent being circumvented? Is the president discussing religion or some other issue that is clearly out of bounds in the nation’s public schools? What gives? Why is the president given a power that, Oklahoma State Senator Steve Russell describes as a “cult of personality… something you'd expect to see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein's Iraq?” What explains such irrational responses?

I disagreed strongly with many of President Bush’s domestic and foreign policy initiatives, especially his version of educational reform, “No Child Left Behind.” Even as I waged battles with various school officials over “NCLB” and its impact on my children, I can’t imagine that, at any point, I would have been fearful of my children hearing a speech by the president behind such a policy. Like most parents, I send my children to school every day with the expectation that I have instilled them with an understanding of our family’s values and respect for others. Of course it’s an everyday battle, but whether it’s at the dinner table, while doing homework or while riding in the minivan afterschool, I, like many parents, use such opportunities to debrief, hopefully developing children who have the regular ability to accept information that is valuable to them while rejecting and respectfully disagreeing with that which is not. It’s an act of faith that is a regular part of good parenting; we simply can’t control all of the information that targets our children.

President Obama is an easy target for the fears many of us have about our children being bombarded daily my media images and subliminal advertising that we feel powerless to protect them from. Politics and irrational behavior aside, for those parents who are concerned and disturbed about the president’s address, the Disney Channel and X-Box are far more likely to indoctrinate their children.

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Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University and the parent of two daughters, ages 11 and 6.

Adopting (White) While Black

from NewsWeek

Raising Katie
What adopting a white girl taught a black family about race in the Obama era
Tony Dokoupil
Newsweek Web Exclusive

Several pairs of eyes follow the girl as she pedals around the playground in an affluent suburb of Baltimore. But it isn't the redheaded fourth grader who seems to have moms and dads of the jungle gym nervous on this recent Saturday morning. It's the African-American man—six feet tall, bearded and wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt—watching the girl's every move. Approaching from behind, he grabs the back of her bicycle seat as she wobbles to a stop. "Nice riding," he says, as the fair-skinned girl turns to him, beaming. "Thanks, Daddy," she replies. The onlookers are clearly flummoxed.

As a black father and adopted white daughter, Mark Riding and Katie O'Dea-Smith are a sight at best surprising, and at worst so perplexing that people feel compelled to respond. Like the time at a Pocono Mountains flea market when Riding scolded Katie, attracting so many sharp glares that he and his wife, Terri, 37, and also African-American, thought "we might be lynched." And the time when well-intentioned shoppers followed Mark and Katie out of the mall to make sure she wasn't being kidnapped. Or when would-be heroes come up to Katie in the cereal aisle and ask, "Are you OK?"—even though Terri is standing right there.

Is it racism? The Ridings tend to think so, and it's hard to blame them. To shadow them for a day, as I recently did, is to feel the unease, notice the negative attention and realize that the same note of fear isn't in the air when they attend to their two biological children, who are 2 and 5 years old. It's fashionable to say that the election of Barack Obama has brought the dawn of a post-racial America. In the past few months alone, The Atlantic Monthly has declared "the end of white America," The Washington Post has profiled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's struggle for relevance in a changing world, and National Public Radio has led discussions questioning the necessity of the annual Black History Month. Perhaps not surprising, most white and black Americans no longer cite racism as a major social problem, according to recent polls.

But the Ridings' experience runs counter to these popular notions of harmony. And adoption between races is particularly fraught. So-called transracial adoptions have surged since 1994, when the Multiethnic Placement Act reversed decades of outright racial matching by banning discrimination against adoptive families on the basis of race. But the growth has been all one-sided. The number of white families adopting outside their race is growing and is now in the thousands, while cases like Katie's—of a black family adopting a nonblack child—remain frozen at near zero.

Read the Full Essay @

Obama, the Father

from The News & Observer

Point of View: A Father's Day Message
by Mark Anthony Neal

DURHAM - The dap-love that Barack Obama and wife Michelle shared at a recent rally highlights one of the most refreshing, yet seldom talked about aspects of his candidacy. This was Barack Obama not simply as the first African-American nominee of a major political party, but Barack Obama as African-American husband and father.

The Obama campaign has tried throughout this year's presidential campaign to downplay the significance of the senator's race, yet he stands as such a stark counterpoint to long-held stereotypes about African-American men as fathers and husbands. In this regard, his ascendency challenges myths not only about the capacity of African-Americans to serve as commander-in-chief, but also about black men as fathers.

With Father's Day almost upon us, Barack Obama, the African-American father, offers needed affirmation of the black men who toil and struggle to be effective parents.

There's a veritable cottage industry associated with so-called black fatherlessness, as many books and studies make the link between under-achieving black boys and the lack of father figures in their lives. The very idea of the shiftless, lazy, irresponsible black male has reached such mythical proportions that when black men show evidence of even the most basic of parenting skills, it's cause for celebration. Indeed, much of Obama's appeal lies in the fact that he has overcome the absence of his own father.

In his best-selling memoir "Dreams from My Father," Obama provides a heart-wrenching account of the effect that not having his father in his life had on him. Obama's parents divorced when he was a child and he had little contact with his father, who died in 1982. Obama literally had to conjure a father, whom he saw only once after his parents' divorce, recalling, "I would meet him one night, in a cold cell, in a chamber of my dreams."

Yet there's no secret to Obama's success. Even without his father present, he was a product of strong parenting and adult presences, such as his grandparents, in his life.

Read the Full Essay @