Published: June 25, 2009 06:58 pm      

STAWAR: Evolving fatherhood in tough times

Last week, we celebrated Father’s Day, and I am looking forward to cashing in my Barnes and Noble gift card, but this has been a rough year for men in America.

Many have lost their retirement nest eggs, their jobs and even their homes. Perhaps more importantly, their status, self-esteem and confidence also have been shaken.

The American Psychological Association recently interviewed psychologist Daniel Kruger, from the University of Michigan, to get his take on how the economy affects men from an evolutionary perspective.

According to Kruger, men may be more damaged by economic stress than women, because they are more sensitive to their relative position in the social hierarchy. Garrison Keillor once said, tongue in cheek, that men are more sensitive than women. He claimed that men are more interested in relationships than the physical environment.

That’s why they have so little interest in fixing the screen door, taking out the trash or mowing the grass. However, if Kruger truly believes that girls have little interest in their “relative position in the social hierarchy,” he obviously has never been to junior high school.

According to evolutionary psychology, economic status is one of the main features that men are evaluated on by the highly desirable, but finicky, female of the species. In other terms, poverty may be more devastating to men, mainly because they think they can’t impress women when they’re broke.

Psychologists believe that from a bioevolutionary perspective, women’s attractiveness to potential mates is rooted in physical attributes related to childbearing. All of this, of course, is related to the genetic imperative to have offspring that survive and flourish.

Twenty-six-year-old Anna Nicole Smith’s marriage to octogenarian billionaire J. Howard Marshall was a classic case in point. However, as men’s life spans have increased, the genetic risks for physical and mental disorders in children with older fathers have skyrocketed. This definitely limits the benefit of having a much older father, regardless of the resources he might command — bad news for older celebrity fathers.

Besides cramping men’s social life, Kruger maintains that financial difficulties also strain fathers’ relationships with their children. Suddenly “good ole dad” may not be able to provide the toys, vacations, cash or the new car at age 16 any more. Children long accustomed to affluence can become very impatient with frugality.

Kruger says that “men under financial strain may be more easily frustrated and this can lead to ‘adverse interactions.’”

I can personally vouch for this. I remember whenever my father would feel the financial pinch, he would get all kind of cranky and start drinking heavily, then before you know it — adverse interactions.

Kruger also mentions the remote possibility that some men out of work might use their free time as an opportunity to bond closer with their children.

It is not entirely clear how parental anxieties get passed on to children. Many of us baby boomers had parents who were raised during the Great Depression, so we were exposed to fathers who had experienced tremendous economic stress.

Both my father and Diane’s were constantly worried about the cost of electricity, to the extent that Diane’s father would not let her use her miniature electric oven because he said it ran up the electric bill. Our fathers also had an obsession with turning off lights and wasting water by leaving a faucet running, or taking too long in the shower was considered a major crime.

I still have problems hiring people, like plumbers or electricians, since my dad felt this was surely a one-way ticket to the poor house. I was taught that you should never hire people to do any work you could do yourself.

This, of course, accounts for horrors in my childhood such as the uneven and crooked bathroom tile, the toilet in the basement with an open trough to the sewer instead of a drain pipe and the purple concrete patio.

As women become the sole earners in many households — because men can’t find jobs in the current economy — many men feel like failures in their traditional role as the provider.

In theory, some men might spend their time away from outside work vacuuming the house, doing the laundry and baking casseroles. But Kruger thinks it is unlikely they will slide into the role of Mr. Mom.

Even though there may be more sharing of responsibility for generating income, housekeeping, parenting and caring for aged parents, Kruger doubts that we will ever see a reversal or even an equalization of established gender roles. They have been far too important from an evolutionary perspective.

In an article titled “What’s a Mother to Do? The Division of Labor among Neanderthals and Modern Humans,” anthropologists Steven Kuhn and Mary Stiner theorized that gender roles gave Homo sapiens an important competitive advantage over their Neanderthal rivals.

Examining the fossil record, they concluded that Neanderthals never developed a gender-based division of labor like Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens were able to beat out Neanderthals in the contest for survival, largely because they were more adaptable, producing weather-resistant clothing, sophisticated shelters and pulverized nuts and seeds to consume when game was scarce.

This was only possible because female Homo sapiens specialized in domestic activities, such as sewing, making artifacts and food preparation.

And let’s face it, except for rare outliers, such as professional tailors and chefs, we men are pretty terrible at those things that Kuhn and Stiner call “skill-intensive crafts.”

For example, the buttons I sew on never look right and I can remember trying to fix the seam on the seat of a pair of ripped pants with a stapler and scotch tape.

I also will never forget the time my uncle, Marion, fixed spaghetti for supper when his wife was visiting her sister. Even though he was in a hurry, it seems inexplicable that he would use a pressure cooker — if you do not take into account the beer consumption factor.

As you might have guessed, the cooker exploded, resulting in the contents of an entire pot of spaghetti stuck to the kitchen ceiling and lots more of those pesky adverse interactions.

Terry L. Stawar, Ed.D. lives in Georgetown and is the CEO of LifeSpring, the local community mental health center in Jeffersonville. He can be reached at tstawar@lifespr.com or 812-206-1234. Check out his “Welcome to Planet-Terry” podcast at www.lifespr.com/podcast.