This year Father’s Day fell on my father’s birthday. My thoughts turn to him and how recent trends have reshaped attitudes towards fathers and fathering.

The original Latin word for father is pater, and paterfamilias describes the male head of a household. Traditionally the patriarch, or paterfamilias, was the sole wage earner, the family provider and protector, and the moral and religious educator of offspring. In our collective imaginations, he is the Great Father archetype, a wisdom figure, a protector who restores justice and brings order to chaos by embodying righteous authority and power. In the Vedic Hindu tradition, he is the sky father; he is the Greek god Zeus and the Roman god Jupiter. He is the stern god of the Old Testament and the Heavenly Father of the New Testament.

In our dreams, the good father archetype (see my previous blog, “Fathers: Heroes, Villains, and Our Need for Archetypes”) may appear as a kindly old beggar, a roaring male lion, or a familiar male figure we admire. Cultural heroes like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, the Lakota leader Sitting Bull, or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. offer a projected version of the good father archetype as can presidents, tribal chiefs, cult leaders, movie stars and heroes in literature. Atticus Finch, the father in the novel and movie To Kill a Mockingbird, and Dr. Cliff Huxtable, Bill Cosby’s character on the 1980s TV sitcom The Cosby Show are two fictional fathers who depict idealized versions of a wise, morally upright father. These figures may bear little resemblance to our flawed flesh and blood dads, but they fill a psychic need, as do some leaders, to believe someone stronger and wiser is looking out for us. Fathers of minority or other marginalized groups are only now regularly being represented in popular culture.

My personal story illustrates an outdated patriarchal model of fathering. I grew up in a white middle-class family in a quiet New Jersey mid-twentieth-century suburban neighborhood. My father worked at a 9-to-5 government job. My mother worked as a private secretary before she married. A second salary would have improved our family’s resources, but my father forbade my mother from forsaking child-rearing for a job. Father was king. He issued the commandments; mother enforced them. She ruled the household: hygiene, schoolwork, and manners. He controlled the finances and made the rules. One of his favorite injunctions was: “You don’t have to love me, but you do have to respect me.” (I write more extensively about my complex relationship with my father in “My Jewish Question, My Father.”)

Everyone I knew was raised to respect their elders. Part of the traditional value system included filial piety and civic manners. While this model of family dynamics still exists, it is no longer the norm. In recent decades, there has been significant research into the roles fathers play in child development. The changes in societal attitudes toward marriage, women’s financial independence, single parenting, and masculinity indicate we are in a new era of envisioning fatherhood.[1]

Fathers go by many names—dad, daddy, papa, papi, pops. Whatever we call him, across diverse backgrounds, children with involved fathers experience better mental health. Children raised with active fathers have fewer behavior problems, longer attention spans, enjoy greater sociability, and are less likely to commit juvenile crimes.[2]

Today’s fathers can be gay, straight or trans; married to our mothers or not; stay-at-home or non-residential; a donor dad, a stepdad, an incarcerated dad. Since the late twentieth century, the role of women in the workforce has transformed the role of fathers. Between 1948 and 2001, the percentage of working-age women employed or looking for work nearly doubled—from less than 33 percent to more than 60 percent.[3]

According to research funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, one in three children live in a single-parent household. Within single-parent families, most children—14.3 million—live in mother-only homes. About 3.5 million children live in father-only homes.[4] Between 2 million and 3.7 million children under age 18 have an LGBTQ+ parent. Many of these children are being raised by a single LGBTQ+ parent, or by a different-sex couple where one parent is bisexual. Approximately 191,000 children are being raised by two same-sex parents. Overall, it is estimated that 29% of LGBTQ+ adults are raising a child who is under 18.[5]

Psychological studies suggest that father love has as great an influence on a child’s mental health as mother love. A father’s presence in a child’s life, his positive attention and guidance, can help a child develop a sense of their place in the world, which influences their social, emotional, and cognitive functioning.[6]

Some fascinating data from the Pew Research Center on the modern American family and on gender and parenting tells us men are more likely than women to give children more freedom. More men than women want to raise children the way they were raised. Women are more likely to: say they are overprotective of children; consider raising their children as the most important aspect of who they are as a person, and are more likely to worry about their children being bullied or struggling with depression or anxiety. Only a quarter or less of parents feel it is very important for their children to marry (25% for men, 18% for women). Similar numbers feel it is important for their children to become parents.[7]

A study conducted by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) found that fathers tended to be more involved in caregiving when they had positive psychological characteristics like high self-esteem and lower levels of depression and hostility. Fathers were also more involved when their children were boys.[8]

Data supplies facts, statistics track trends, but our experience concerning fatherhood and our relationship to our fathers is not a statistic. It is a unique bonding phenomenon and a crucial theme in the story of our lives. Literature reveals what statistics can’t—the complex feelings, desires, and struggles inherent in this intimate relationship.

One writer who has expanded our empathic understanding of a father’s relationship to his child is Ta-Nehisi Coates. His book, Between the World and Me, is devastatingly beautiful  and written in the form of a letter addressed to his son that tries to consolidate the many fears he holds for his Black child:

“You would be a man one day, and I could not save you from the unbridgeable distance between you and your future peers and colleagues, who might try to convince you that everything I know, all the things I’m sharing with you here, are an illusion, or a fact of a distant past that need not be discussed. And I could not save you from the police, from their flashlights, their hands, their nightsticks, their guns. Prince Jones, murdered by the men who should have been his security guards, is always with me, and I knew that soon he would be with you.” [9]

What are five words to describe your father? What makes your father unique?

[1] Cook, Eliza Lathrop, “Better Understanding Fathers: An Overview of U.S. Fatherhood Trends and Common Issues Fathers Face,” Parenting in Context, Cornell University College of Human Ecology, 2014.

[2] Fast Focus Research/Policy Brief, “Involved Fathers Play an Important Role in Children’s Lives,” Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison, February 2020.

[3] “The Changing Role of the Modern Father,” American Psychological Association, 2009

[4] “Child Well-Being in Single Parent Families,” Annie E. Casey Foundation, updated April 24, 2024.

[5] LGBT Data & Demographics, Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, 2019.

[6] “Dads can be positive role models for living a physically and psychologically healthy life,” American Psychological Association, updated December 21, 2022.

[7] Minkin, Rachel, and Horowitz, Juliana Menasce, “Gender and Parenting,” Parenting in American Today, Pew Research Center, January 24, 2023

[8] “Factors  Associated with Fathers’ Caregiving Activities and Sensitivity with Young Children” Journal of Family Psychology, 2000., Vol. 14, No. 2. pp 200-219

[9] Coates, Ta-Nehisi, Between the World and Me. One World. Penguin Random House. New York. 2015.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at Transcending the Past.

If you found this post interesting, you may also want to read “Fathers: Heroes, Villains, and Our Need for Archetypes,” “Fatherless Daughters: The Impact of Absence,” and “Given Away: The Plight of the Wounded Feminine.”

Keep up with everything Dale is doing by subscribing to her newsletter, Exploring the Unknown in Mind and Heart.

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When the first plane hit the World Trade Center in Manhattan, I was standing on a pier in northern Wisconsin. The day couldn’t have been lovelier. Or more serene. A clear blue sky, the light gloriously golden on a perfect fall day.

The summer folks had left the lake by then. The quiet, for this working author, was a balm. Then the phone rang. It was my husband telling me that a plane had crashed into one of the towers. They did not know what had happened yet, he said, but probably something was wrong with the plane. He told me not to worry and to go back to my writing.

We had no television at our cabin. As soon as I hung up, I turned on the radio. Ten minutes later, the second plane hit. It was the beginning of a national trauma. I immediately packed and began the four-hour drive back to Madison.

Here is where fatherhood comes in. During that entire ride home, I kept the radio on, waiting for my President’s voice to assure me that this was not the end of the world. I later learned that George W. Bush did broadcast a brief statement from the school in Florida where he had been reading to children. But for some reason, I never heard it on my radio.

The silence I experienced from our president during those long anxious hours driving home has stayed with me. I was reminded of how FDR’s inspiring words after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor not only shaped America’s destiny but reassured an entire nation of its strength and purpose. Churchill in Britain during the blitz, Gandhi in India fighting for independence from colonial rule, Mandela in South Africa, these are the associations that come to mind when we think of national heroes as strong father figures. To be sure, the same human flaws afflicted them that afflict the rest of us, but over time idealized versions of these men persist. They have come to represent the virtues of courage, fortitude, wisdom, and benevolent authority, values that most cultures deem positive and necessary for the continuation of the state.

On the day of the 9/11 attack and during the months that followed, I found myself longing for just such a father figure, one who could assure me that not only did our government have the skills and wisdom to deal with the frightening prospect of terrorism, but also that I could continue to believe in our common humanity and our democratic institutions.

The projection of values onto a national figure parallels how we project values and qualities onto the most important and guiding presences in our personal lives, our own mothers and fathers. What is projected or placed onto another individual by our unconscious reflects the values of our specific time and place as well as our psychology. A child growing up in eighteenth-century England, for instance, could expect a model of fathering quite different from a child growing up in eighteenth-century Polynesia. Likewise, today, the diversity of fathering styles emerges from the diversity within a culture.

Yet, certain eternal structures within the human psyche – archetypes – exist across cultures and transcend time and place. In The Father: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives, psychoanalyst Andrew Samuels notes that the archetypal father is not restricted to personal experience: “The idea is that, behind the personal father whom we know and to whom we relate, lies an innate psychological structure which influences the way we experience him.”

In classical Jungian terms, the mother archetype is characterized by nurturing, containing, and generative qualities, while the father archetype is assumed to be a more active and aggressive principle dominated by intellect and will. This duality, which current gender issues may question, is nonetheless reflected in our myths and language, and our view of the cosmos. We say Mother Earth (Gaia), Father Sky (Kronos, Zeus, Yahweh); we speak of Eros (Soul) and Logos (Spirit). During the Third Reich, Nazi propaganda favored calling Germany the Fatherland (Vaterland). By contrast, Russians often refer to their country, affectionately, as the Motherland. Why a country should be referred to as one parent or the other may represent our differing expectations of mother and father. The former implies care, belonging, family, benevolence; the latter, order, discipline, masculine strength.

Not every male leader who becomes a father figure is a hero. An alarming number of kings, dictators, presidents, and the like, embody the shadow qualities of the archetype. Historians have accounted for Hitler’s rise to power by his uncanny understanding and manipulation of the desperation and dissatisfaction of many German citizens. If his determination to restore Germany to its former glory won him adoration as a worthy and strong father figure, his inhumanity toward Jews and others expressed a collective need to blame others/outsiders for the country’s troubles. Cult leaders such as Jim Jones, Charles Manson, or David Koresh also took on the status of father figures, playing out on a grand scale the violent, destructive, and anti-social aspects of the father archetype. These men are our abusive fathers writ large.

Whether we think of our fathers as heroes, villains, or just ordinary guys, they (or father substitutes) play a crucial role in our psychological development by presenting a crucial and necessary complement to the bonding relationship with mother. Mothers provide the breast for nourishment, but in our ancestral history fathers were necessary to ensure the survival of offspring. They provided protection from predators and alternative sources of food. In the postmodern world, most mothers work, whether tending crops or in an office. Father as sole breadwinner is no longer an accurate description of his family role. On their website, Parents As Teachers, William Scott and Amy De La Hurt cite the following research on the important role of fathers in raising young children.

• Early involvement by fathers in the primary care of their child is a source of emotional security for the child (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2011).
• Fathers’ affectionate treatment of their infants contributes to high levels of secure attachment (Rosenberg & Wilcox, 2006).
• Children who have close relationships with their fathers have high self-esteem and are less likely to be depressed (Dubowitz et al., 2001).
• When fathers acknowledge their child’s emotional response and help them address it with a problem-solving approach, the children score higher on tests of emotional intelligence (Civitas, 2001).

Fatherhood and fathering are receiving more attention from psychologists these days.  Economic and sociological changes, more working mothers, more single mothers among them, have put many fathers in the role of primary or shared-time caregiver. Decades ago, a father in the delivery room was unheard of. Now it is a common practice. Fathers can participate in the pregnancy through classes and instructions on everything from birthing techniques to the specifics of breastfeeding. Cultural changes concerning gender identity and same-sex marriage will continue to precipitate changes in how we parent.

In many places around the world, people believe their parents live on as spirits after they’ve died. Through ritual and ceremony, these wisdom figures return to the living to offer advice, supply ancestral memory, or intervene with the gods. For some of us, our fathers have become inner figures who aid and support our journey into maturity. On the level of inner development, we can work with forgiveness and compassion, and form a new relationship to a father who may have been a source of pain. Absent or present, dead or alive, our fathers have shaped who we are.

Here is a beautiful poem by Robert Hayden written by a son, now a grown man, remembering his father with love and remorse.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with crack hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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