Language is a good indicator of what a culture values. For example, our dictionary definition of mothering is “the nurturing of an infant or small child by its mother.” Parenting means “the rearing of children.” Fathering means “a male parent.”
Mothering is highly valued and appreciated in our culture; when people are sick or sad, they want to be mothered. The value of parenting is likewise recognized, as any number of books, blogs, and classes on the topic will attest. Fathering, however, is generally used only to signify the man who supplies the genetic material.
If mothers stopped mothering in mass, we would recognize it as an extraordinary problem that must immediately be rectified. One in three children live in homes without fathers, but rather than trying to aggressively change that statistic, the bulk of our energy is devoted to ameliorating the damage, not reversing it. However, like the specific and irreplaceable roles mothers play in their children’s lives, fathering cannot be so easily replaced.
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