Murphy Brown And The Absent Father Syndrome
Self Help
What's A Mother/Father To Do?
Parenting For The New Millennium
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ... He who loves his wife loves himself ... Children, honor your father and mother. -- Ephesians 5:25, 28; 6:2
Some years ago, about a week after the Los Angeles riots, then Vice President Dan Quayle was in San Francisco giving a speech to the Commonwealth Club. He came down hard on social anarchy and the "breakdown of family structure, personal responsibility, and social order in too many areas of our society...." He spoke of a "welfare ethos that impedes individual efforts to move ahead in society." While he decried the "terrible problem with race and racism," the core of the speech bristled with words like "indulgence and self-gratification glamorized by casual ... sex and drug use" (Time magazine, 6/1/92, p. 29).
The Vice President went on to add that "the failure of our families is hurting America deeply ... Children need love and discipline. They need mothers and fathers. A welfare check is not a husband. The state is not a father ... Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong."
So far, so good. But then Mr. Quayle dropped in a paragraph that made the media go bonkers. He said: "It doesn't help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown -- a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly-paid professional woman -- mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another 'lifestyle choice' " (Ibid., 29). And so the media firestorm began to rage with reactions from every quarter.
Perhaps some Americans were asking: "Who is Murphy Brown?" Murphy Brown is the television character played by Candice Bergen. She is a "blond, media anchor-goddess and wiseguy and now defiantly unmarried Madonna," says Time magazine (Op cit., p. 29).
In the debated episode, watched by 36 million, she delivered a baby boy, without the father. She had triumphantly decided to raise the baby herself while the father was apparently off doing his thing saving rain forests.
If, as the Vice President's aides claimed, he intended to stir a debate on "family values," he surely succeeded. "Debate" may be too demure a term. "Firestorm" might be more appropriate, or "national harangue." But at least the Vice President might have commended the divorced Murphy Brown for not getting an abortion.
Nevertheless, the furor aroused did indeed touch sensitive national nerves. Just what is happening to our family system? Just where do the family and the fathers stand in our value system and lifestyle choices? And what might our Christian teachings say to us as Christians in these times?
I.
For one thing, our Christian faith affirms over and over again the importance of families and fathers.
Various historians have noted that often a nation rises or falls on the stability or instability of the family. Edward Gibbon, in his classic study of Rome's decline and fall, said the dissolution of family values was one of the factors leading to the demise of the empire.
Will and Ariel Durant, in concluding their ten-volume Story of Civilization, note the effect of the decline of morals and family values on the demise of a nation. "After the wars of Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, Antony and Octavius, Rome," wrote the Durants, "was full of men who had lost their economic footing and their moral stability...." There were "women dizzy with freedom, multiplying divorces, abortions, and adulteries ... A shallow, sophistication prided itself upon its pessimism and cynicism" (Caesar and Christ, p. 211, quoted in their The Lessons of History, pp. 39-40). That, said the Durants, could have been a description of Europe and America after the wars. If family solidarity and stability go, the nation often has been in jeopardy.
More than that, many societies and nations have been seen as extensions of the family. Tribal chiefs were seen as tribal fathers, the father among fathers. Kings were often thought of as the national father in a hierarchy of noble fathers on down to peasant fathers. Ancient Israel was organized into twelve tribes under the names of tribal fathers. And it is noteworthy that much of Western and Eastern Christianity addresses its spiritual leaders as fathers and refers to the head of the church as Pope, papa, or Patriarch, father-ruler.
Thus in many social units, the family model, with the father at the head, served as the basic unit of which the nation or tribe was but an extension. Occasionally in history a matriarchy would surface, but rarely.
However, in American society, we think of persons as individuals or as members of special interest groups rather than as members of families or larger sociological groupings. Consequently, we speak more of selective individual rights than of inclusive group rights, such as family rights.
Increasingly then, the state tends to usurp absolute rights over individuals, sometimes aside from, or in opposition to, their familial group. For example, in some instances, a state may hold parents responsible for the conduct of their underage children at the same time it upholds a fifteen-year-old girl's right to a legal abortion without parental knowledge.
The state, say sociologists Peter and Brigitte Berger, in their book, War Over The Family, tends to move in to undermine and control the family. And the state does so through the bureaucracies of helping agencies and experts who may or may not help. Consequently, parental rights and familial identity and solidarity may be undermined by the famous, fearful line, "We're here from the government and we're here to help you."
However, Christian scriptures and traditions would affirm the primacy of the family and the responsibilities of parenthood. Our traditions would warn fathers not to abandon responsible fatherhood by abdicating to the state and its agencies. And we fathers are warned against sacrificing children and family to success and career. We fathers are called to be there, not absent.
II.
Christian scriptures and traditions also call upon fathers (and mothers, too) to be financially responsible for their families. Indeed, the scriptures say that any man who does not provide adequately for his family is worse than an infidel.
One of the biggest problems with single parent families today is the financial one. In most cases, the mother (owing partly to outdated custody laws automatically awarding custody to the mother) is given the responsibility of raising the children with financial support provided by the divorced and frequently absent father. Yet, one of the sad facts of American life is that not only are divorced fathers frequently physically absent, they are financially absent as well. A large percentage of divorced fathers default partially or entirely on their child-support payments, allowing resentment to build not only in the ex-spouse, but also in the children.
While many men may resent archaic custody laws which automatically favor the mother and too-high child-support payments, the women and children invariably come out on the short end of the financial deal. That is especially true in some states where divorce proceedings are drawn out to the advantage of the men and especially of the divorce attorneys, and generally to the disadvantage of the women and children. Christian fathers who find it necessary to divorce should do their best to fulfill their emotional and financial obligations to their children.
But if divorce laws and customs and child-support payments are a problem, so are welfare systems. Critics on both sides of the ideological spectrum criticize the effect of our welfare system on the American family, especially the father.
AFDC -- Aid to Families with Dependent Children -- began under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s for widows with children. It soon expanded to include all unmarried parents with children. Mickey Kaus, liberal author of The End of Equality, says that in 1960, AFDC was so meager, few could live on it. However, by the 1970s, AFDC was enough, says Kaus, "both in the resources it provided and in the easier terms under which it could be obtained, to enable a broad substratum of low-income women to keep a baby without a husband." Kaus then adds, "Without AFDC the culture of single motherhood could not sustain itself" (Investor's Business Daily, 6/19/92, p. 2).
Welfare payments exploded in the 1960s -- a factor that critics say contributed to dissolution of families and the proliferation of absent fathers. One study showed that an increase of $200 a month in AFDC correlated with a 150 percent increase in the illegitimate birth rate in teens. Blacks have been especially hard-hit. The percentage of black households headed by women grew from 28 percent to 40 percent between 1970 and 1980. In 1990, 40 percent of AFDC parents were black, 38 percent were white and 17 percent were Hispanic. Blacks comprise 12 percent of the population and Hispanics 9 percent.
David Elwood of Harvard University, in his recent study of AFDC families, says that over a half-million remain dependent on government handouts for ten to fifteen years and longer. University of Chicago sociologist Robert Sampson notes the high correlation of broken homes and crime. "A high threshold of single-parent families in a community means a low capacity for social control of kids," says Sampson. And Washington, D.C., researcher Jim Maddox says young men in mother-only families don't "have any role models for what a responsible, good family man is. Masculinity then is defined by gangs rather than good family men in the community" (Ibid.).
Is it not time for Christian fathers to support welfare reform which puts fathers back in the family, rather than paying to keep them out? And is it not time to support efforts to employ gainfully those caught in the web of welfare? Christian fathers are called upon to be present, not absent, in good social and economic policies where they provide financially for their own.
III.
We Christian fathers (and mothers) need to re-dedicate ourselves to a hands-on, heart-to-heart relationship with our children.
It is well known that in young families the adjustment of wife-husband love to include love for the children is a major adjustment. Young mothers frequently turn their attention to the children, often to the neglect of their husbands. Husbands sometimes then withdraw to work or pleasure and we have the beginnings of the classic Oedipus complex syndrome. The child comes to love the mother, wanting to eliminate the father from the love triangle.
Christian fathers are warned against abdicating responsibility for their children and their wives. A common mistake of young fathers is to take their wives and family for granted. Time for just husband and wife alone together should be planned so they can celebrate and nurture the love they have for each other without the demands and distractions of children.
But if fathers should not abandon their wives and children to each other, neither should they abandon them to the powers of the peer culture. We fathers struggle against the powerful forces at work in the hearts and minds of our young, and too often we are tempted to throw in the towel. That is why I think parental support groups can so helpful, so that when our children tell us "everybody is doing it," we can quote at least a dozen parents who can affirm that their children aren't "doing it."
Fathers are rightly concerned over the athletic and academic achievements of their children. Sam Levinson tells of an eighth grade teacher who gave her students an aptitude test to see what they were best suited for. What they were best suited for, it turned out, was seventh grade!
However, Christian fatherhood surely means being present in concern for the spiritual development of their children as well as academic, athletic, and artistic development. Just how high a priority do we give to church and Sunday school, youth groups and church choirs, not to mention the encouragement of daily Bible reading and prayer? If we train up our children in the way they should go, chances are when they are older, they will come back to it.
Vice President Quayle may have been slightly off-target in seeming to put down single mothers. But he was surely on target when he emphasized the importance of healthy families and the high significance of the loving, supportive father.
So one thing mothers and children can do is to give thanks for those fathers who are present and responsible and loving. If the ancient scriptures enjoin us to love our wives and children, they also enjoin wives to love their husbands and children. May it be so.
Prayer
Eternal God, who in power created the world, and who in love from the very loins of your Being brought us forth in your image so that for centuries we have called you Father, we give thanks and praise for our divine parentage.
We acknowledge before you and one another that we sometimes feel abandoned and alone in the world. It is as if there were no one in the universe to whom we ultimately belong. Feeling overlooked and neglected, we sometimes wonder if we will be forgotten forever, lost in the wandering atoms and molecules and spaces of an indifferent universe.
Remind us then, in the depths of our spirits, O Lord, that we belong to you that you not only created us in your image, but re-created us in the image of our elder brother, Jesus, the Christ. Let your Holy Spirit bear witness with our spirits that we are indeed your children, and if children, then heirs of eternal life now and in the life everlasting. So then in the assurance of your grace and love, may we, with Jesus call you Abba, Father; Daddy, Father. Help us to feel and to know your fatherly presence among us.
We are mindful of the fathers among us -- fathers in varieties of circumstances and needs. There are fathers out of work needing employment, fathers estranged from wife and children needing reconciliation, fathers working under oppressive conditions needing liberation, fathers confused and frustrated with anti-father, anti-male moods needing understanding and strength to cope, fathers absorbed in self and career needing the corrective hand of your discipline to help them love someone besides themselves, fathers in trouble, fathers in prison, fathers stressed out, fathers lonely and afraid, fathers diseased and dying. Be merciful, our Heavenly Father, and bless these fathers with the gifts they need most.
We ask your blessing for the fathers and families of our society. Help us to find ways to bring families together again, to give our children a stable and loving environment, and to give our sons and daughters the love and commitment and companionship they truly need. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.
Some years ago, about a week after the Los Angeles riots, then Vice President Dan Quayle was in San Francisco giving a speech to the Commonwealth Club. He came down hard on social anarchy and the "breakdown of family structure, personal responsibility, and social order in too many areas of our society...." He spoke of a "welfare ethos that impedes individual efforts to move ahead in society." While he decried the "terrible problem with race and racism," the core of the speech bristled with words like "indulgence and self-gratification glamorized by casual ... sex and drug use" (Time magazine, 6/1/92, p. 29).
The Vice President went on to add that "the failure of our families is hurting America deeply ... Children need love and discipline. They need mothers and fathers. A welfare check is not a husband. The state is not a father ... Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong."
So far, so good. But then Mr. Quayle dropped in a paragraph that made the media go bonkers. He said: "It doesn't help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown -- a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly-paid professional woman -- mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another 'lifestyle choice' " (Ibid., 29). And so the media firestorm began to rage with reactions from every quarter.
Perhaps some Americans were asking: "Who is Murphy Brown?" Murphy Brown is the television character played by Candice Bergen. She is a "blond, media anchor-goddess and wiseguy and now defiantly unmarried Madonna," says Time magazine (Op cit., p. 29).
In the debated episode, watched by 36 million, she delivered a baby boy, without the father. She had triumphantly decided to raise the baby herself while the father was apparently off doing his thing saving rain forests.
If, as the Vice President's aides claimed, he intended to stir a debate on "family values," he surely succeeded. "Debate" may be too demure a term. "Firestorm" might be more appropriate, or "national harangue." But at least the Vice President might have commended the divorced Murphy Brown for not getting an abortion.
Nevertheless, the furor aroused did indeed touch sensitive national nerves. Just what is happening to our family system? Just where do the family and the fathers stand in our value system and lifestyle choices? And what might our Christian teachings say to us as Christians in these times?
I.
For one thing, our Christian faith affirms over and over again the importance of families and fathers.
Various historians have noted that often a nation rises or falls on the stability or instability of the family. Edward Gibbon, in his classic study of Rome's decline and fall, said the dissolution of family values was one of the factors leading to the demise of the empire.
Will and Ariel Durant, in concluding their ten-volume Story of Civilization, note the effect of the decline of morals and family values on the demise of a nation. "After the wars of Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, Antony and Octavius, Rome," wrote the Durants, "was full of men who had lost their economic footing and their moral stability...." There were "women dizzy with freedom, multiplying divorces, abortions, and adulteries ... A shallow, sophistication prided itself upon its pessimism and cynicism" (Caesar and Christ, p. 211, quoted in their The Lessons of History, pp. 39-40). That, said the Durants, could have been a description of Europe and America after the wars. If family solidarity and stability go, the nation often has been in jeopardy.
More than that, many societies and nations have been seen as extensions of the family. Tribal chiefs were seen as tribal fathers, the father among fathers. Kings were often thought of as the national father in a hierarchy of noble fathers on down to peasant fathers. Ancient Israel was organized into twelve tribes under the names of tribal fathers. And it is noteworthy that much of Western and Eastern Christianity addresses its spiritual leaders as fathers and refers to the head of the church as Pope, papa, or Patriarch, father-ruler.
Thus in many social units, the family model, with the father at the head, served as the basic unit of which the nation or tribe was but an extension. Occasionally in history a matriarchy would surface, but rarely.
However, in American society, we think of persons as individuals or as members of special interest groups rather than as members of families or larger sociological groupings. Consequently, we speak more of selective individual rights than of inclusive group rights, such as family rights.
Increasingly then, the state tends to usurp absolute rights over individuals, sometimes aside from, or in opposition to, their familial group. For example, in some instances, a state may hold parents responsible for the conduct of their underage children at the same time it upholds a fifteen-year-old girl's right to a legal abortion without parental knowledge.
The state, say sociologists Peter and Brigitte Berger, in their book, War Over The Family, tends to move in to undermine and control the family. And the state does so through the bureaucracies of helping agencies and experts who may or may not help. Consequently, parental rights and familial identity and solidarity may be undermined by the famous, fearful line, "We're here from the government and we're here to help you."
However, Christian scriptures and traditions would affirm the primacy of the family and the responsibilities of parenthood. Our traditions would warn fathers not to abandon responsible fatherhood by abdicating to the state and its agencies. And we fathers are warned against sacrificing children and family to success and career. We fathers are called to be there, not absent.
II.
Christian scriptures and traditions also call upon fathers (and mothers, too) to be financially responsible for their families. Indeed, the scriptures say that any man who does not provide adequately for his family is worse than an infidel.
One of the biggest problems with single parent families today is the financial one. In most cases, the mother (owing partly to outdated custody laws automatically awarding custody to the mother) is given the responsibility of raising the children with financial support provided by the divorced and frequently absent father. Yet, one of the sad facts of American life is that not only are divorced fathers frequently physically absent, they are financially absent as well. A large percentage of divorced fathers default partially or entirely on their child-support payments, allowing resentment to build not only in the ex-spouse, but also in the children.
While many men may resent archaic custody laws which automatically favor the mother and too-high child-support payments, the women and children invariably come out on the short end of the financial deal. That is especially true in some states where divorce proceedings are drawn out to the advantage of the men and especially of the divorce attorneys, and generally to the disadvantage of the women and children. Christian fathers who find it necessary to divorce should do their best to fulfill their emotional and financial obligations to their children.
But if divorce laws and customs and child-support payments are a problem, so are welfare systems. Critics on both sides of the ideological spectrum criticize the effect of our welfare system on the American family, especially the father.
AFDC -- Aid to Families with Dependent Children -- began under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s for widows with children. It soon expanded to include all unmarried parents with children. Mickey Kaus, liberal author of The End of Equality, says that in 1960, AFDC was so meager, few could live on it. However, by the 1970s, AFDC was enough, says Kaus, "both in the resources it provided and in the easier terms under which it could be obtained, to enable a broad substratum of low-income women to keep a baby without a husband." Kaus then adds, "Without AFDC the culture of single motherhood could not sustain itself" (Investor's Business Daily, 6/19/92, p. 2).
Welfare payments exploded in the 1960s -- a factor that critics say contributed to dissolution of families and the proliferation of absent fathers. One study showed that an increase of $200 a month in AFDC correlated with a 150 percent increase in the illegitimate birth rate in teens. Blacks have been especially hard-hit. The percentage of black households headed by women grew from 28 percent to 40 percent between 1970 and 1980. In 1990, 40 percent of AFDC parents were black, 38 percent were white and 17 percent were Hispanic. Blacks comprise 12 percent of the population and Hispanics 9 percent.
David Elwood of Harvard University, in his recent study of AFDC families, says that over a half-million remain dependent on government handouts for ten to fifteen years and longer. University of Chicago sociologist Robert Sampson notes the high correlation of broken homes and crime. "A high threshold of single-parent families in a community means a low capacity for social control of kids," says Sampson. And Washington, D.C., researcher Jim Maddox says young men in mother-only families don't "have any role models for what a responsible, good family man is. Masculinity then is defined by gangs rather than good family men in the community" (Ibid.).
Is it not time for Christian fathers to support welfare reform which puts fathers back in the family, rather than paying to keep them out? And is it not time to support efforts to employ gainfully those caught in the web of welfare? Christian fathers are called upon to be present, not absent, in good social and economic policies where they provide financially for their own.
III.
We Christian fathers (and mothers) need to re-dedicate ourselves to a hands-on, heart-to-heart relationship with our children.
It is well known that in young families the adjustment of wife-husband love to include love for the children is a major adjustment. Young mothers frequently turn their attention to the children, often to the neglect of their husbands. Husbands sometimes then withdraw to work or pleasure and we have the beginnings of the classic Oedipus complex syndrome. The child comes to love the mother, wanting to eliminate the father from the love triangle.
Christian fathers are warned against abdicating responsibility for their children and their wives. A common mistake of young fathers is to take their wives and family for granted. Time for just husband and wife alone together should be planned so they can celebrate and nurture the love they have for each other without the demands and distractions of children.
But if fathers should not abandon their wives and children to each other, neither should they abandon them to the powers of the peer culture. We fathers struggle against the powerful forces at work in the hearts and minds of our young, and too often we are tempted to throw in the towel. That is why I think parental support groups can so helpful, so that when our children tell us "everybody is doing it," we can quote at least a dozen parents who can affirm that their children aren't "doing it."
Fathers are rightly concerned over the athletic and academic achievements of their children. Sam Levinson tells of an eighth grade teacher who gave her students an aptitude test to see what they were best suited for. What they were best suited for, it turned out, was seventh grade!
However, Christian fatherhood surely means being present in concern for the spiritual development of their children as well as academic, athletic, and artistic development. Just how high a priority do we give to church and Sunday school, youth groups and church choirs, not to mention the encouragement of daily Bible reading and prayer? If we train up our children in the way they should go, chances are when they are older, they will come back to it.
Vice President Quayle may have been slightly off-target in seeming to put down single mothers. But he was surely on target when he emphasized the importance of healthy families and the high significance of the loving, supportive father.
So one thing mothers and children can do is to give thanks for those fathers who are present and responsible and loving. If the ancient scriptures enjoin us to love our wives and children, they also enjoin wives to love their husbands and children. May it be so.
Prayer
Eternal God, who in power created the world, and who in love from the very loins of your Being brought us forth in your image so that for centuries we have called you Father, we give thanks and praise for our divine parentage.
We acknowledge before you and one another that we sometimes feel abandoned and alone in the world. It is as if there were no one in the universe to whom we ultimately belong. Feeling overlooked and neglected, we sometimes wonder if we will be forgotten forever, lost in the wandering atoms and molecules and spaces of an indifferent universe.
Remind us then, in the depths of our spirits, O Lord, that we belong to you that you not only created us in your image, but re-created us in the image of our elder brother, Jesus, the Christ. Let your Holy Spirit bear witness with our spirits that we are indeed your children, and if children, then heirs of eternal life now and in the life everlasting. So then in the assurance of your grace and love, may we, with Jesus call you Abba, Father; Daddy, Father. Help us to feel and to know your fatherly presence among us.
We are mindful of the fathers among us -- fathers in varieties of circumstances and needs. There are fathers out of work needing employment, fathers estranged from wife and children needing reconciliation, fathers working under oppressive conditions needing liberation, fathers confused and frustrated with anti-father, anti-male moods needing understanding and strength to cope, fathers absorbed in self and career needing the corrective hand of your discipline to help them love someone besides themselves, fathers in trouble, fathers in prison, fathers stressed out, fathers lonely and afraid, fathers diseased and dying. Be merciful, our Heavenly Father, and bless these fathers with the gifts they need most.
We ask your blessing for the fathers and families of our society. Help us to find ways to bring families together again, to give our children a stable and loving environment, and to give our sons and daughters the love and commitment and companionship they truly need. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.
