By Admire Chitambo

There is normative identification and description of manhood as synonymous to the core values of a society. In her book, The Gender Knot, Allan G. Johnson writes, community virtues of control, strength, competitiveness, resilience, stability, logic, forcefulness, decisiveness, rationality, autonomy, self-sufficiency, and control over any emotion that interferes with other core values (such as invulnerability) are presented as masculine. These qualities are so valuable in public spheres related to business, politics, war, athletics, law, and medicine. On the contrary, community soft qualities such as cooperation, mutuality, equality, sharing, empathy, compassion, caring, vulnerability, a readiness to negotiate and compromise, emotional expressiveness and intuitive are viewed as largely feminine. The effect is that this dichotomy of masculine and feminine qualities connects mothers more to children while at the same time estranging fathers from their children. In family management, dominant masculinity has placed women are in the foreground and men in the background, marginalised as outsiders without a visible role concerning the daily welfare issues of the family.

Men in their old ages often grumble about the yawning gap that exists between them and their children. At times, men often indict women of marshalling children to gang up against the fathers. Such situation gets complexified when the father is having or suspected of extra marital affairs. I have analytically indulged myself to trace the root cause of this thorny issue. The issue is why it’s so easy for children to get more inclined to the mother than the father. As children grow older, the mother is the face of children welfare since the father plays a background role. Father, during their productive age, work tirelessly hard for families and give larger chunk of their earnings to the mother. In such set up, the father uses the mother as a conduit to reach the children with the fruits of his daily labour. This, however, has the effect of giving all supplies the face of the mother. A system where everything that children need is given to the children through the mother has the effects of making children especially those in their young ages conclude that the mother is the key player. I’m not touting for a situation where parents engage in competition to impress their children, but I’m progressively trying to facilitate a realisation on the importance of achieving a balance visibility of both parents in family matters.  Parents should take turns visiting children at school to pay for fees and the supply of other goodies than to have one parent usually the mother doing so. One way of building equal connection and bonding to the kids is function as a couple in ways that make it easier for children to detect cooperation towards their welfare.

Fathers should carefully realise that a practice where the mother is known for reporting kids’ mischief and misdemeanour to the father and the father takes over by administering a sjambok works against the father. Getting connected to children is not solely liked to biological reasoning, rather, it is a social investment that demands a lot of emotional etiquettes that helps to access that part of the child which receives lasting engravement of who we are to them. The ideation of fatherhood as synonymous to control and authority creates a barricade between the father and the children. Under authoritative fatherhood, children grow up with an image of a whipping father, whose primary function is regulatory and punitive. Fathers also need to challenge their wives to also assert authority over their children and not use fathers as a buffer. I remember when I was growing up, my mother would frequently say, you shall see it when your father comes. My father would periodically come home from a distant rural school where he worked as a teacher and I with my elder brother used get serious beating for the mischief done in his absence. I personally think that it affected me because I grew up with not a so good picture of who my father was to me, although he was the supplier of all our needs as kids and of course my mother worked as housewife. She would cook food for us, come for school visitation and do all the routine that a mother would do. I remember one day, how my father got too angry as he was discipling me such that my mother had to cry for the beating to stop. I remain very positive that this created a gap between me and my father. We never talked stories as father and son but on the contrary, we would walk 10km to and from our rural church, side by side with my mother talking and laughing. I viewed my mother as caring, loving and understanding. At the same time, my father as a frightening someone who was always addressed by his totem. His presence was so imposing and whenever he summons me into his presence, I had to first make sure that I remove all the dust and clear my voice so that I could respond calmly.

I am touting that positioning of fathers is this hegemonic frame of fatherhood disconnects children. As a father I have learnt the technique of building and managing connections and bonding with children. I have developed the habit of taking my kids and walk with them to the mountains together. Along the way, I buy all the small goodies that they want. I have mastered to art of buying sweets for my small boys as I come from work so that they can come close to me as their father. I have mastered the technique of shoving the mother to assert her authority over the naughty boys in the same manner that she would desire me to do. I have ceased to perceive having children being disciplined by the father as a gesture of being accorded my status as a father. I have met men who are so bitter about how they have been isolated in families. It is so easily to lose someone whom you have never ben meaningfully bonded to. It is so easy to corrupt someone whose mind has never been conquered with positive presence.  As fathers, we should revisit our ideation of the person we should be to children. I have realised that the so much hyping on how men ought to take greater portion of feminised responsibilities is not meant to burden men with domestic chores but rather building broken connections. Social transformation perspectives coalesced around building an effective social ecosystem must become one of the driving forces of change. Men should be empowered to engage in liberative engagements to realise how self-defeating are norms of control, strength, toughness, coolness under pressure and forcefulness.

Admire Chitambo is a Christian resident of Mbizo, a gender and protection worker, gender and policy studies student who writes in his individual capacity. He has interest in fostering social transformation, organisational gender and social inclusion audit, social skills building, team building. He can be contacted at 077 395 0692 or sachitambo@gmail.com