Absent Fathers: deadbeat or irresponsible?

A father who is absent from a child’s life would generally be called an absentee father. The kids likely won’t call him dad but will more likely say the more formal and distant-sounding term “father.” When in their youth, kids may call him their “bio dad” or simply say that they don’t have a father in their lives

Absent fathers are prevalent in modern culture, significantly impacting the adult son’s self-esteem and intimacy. The reasons for and type of father absence are crucial in determining the effects on the son. Many adult sons struggle with self-esteem, emotional attachments, and expression, requiring them to focus on their absent fathers to succeed in their relationships. This social problem has profound emotional, developmental, educational, and legal consequences for the abandoned sons.

Father Absent – Social Context

In the mid-19th century, fathers moved out of the home for economic reasons, leading to a shift in their role from being an active and present dominant influence to being physically absent and intermittently dominant. This resulted in alienation in both directions, with the majority of single-parent families headed by mothers and the minority by fathers. Social and economic institutions do not support fathers who actively parent after divorce or separation, as they work fewer hours, earn less money, and feel powerless. Fathers who have joint custody of their children often work fewer hours, earn less money, and feel powerless, which blocks their involvement with their children. For instance, American family structure is patriarchal and father-absent, reflecting the economic and gender inequities present in American society. Fathers can be absent in various ways, both physical and emotional, due to historical and contemporary economic conditions that force men to work outside the home for long hours.

Absent fathers

Absent fathers are those who leave the family without explanation or staying in contact with their children, creating a sense of mystery. This is different from military service fathers who maintain contact and inform their children of their return date. The mother often tries to portray the father as still loving her son, but this can be problematic for both the son and his mother. The dominant culture reinforces the message of the silent man, and the absent father’s lack of communication can create a cycle of ambiguity, inhibiting or damaging the son-mother relationship.

Father absence occurs when parents separate and the father no longer lives with his children and provides no parental investment. Parental separation has been proven to affect a child’s development and behavior. Early parental divorce (during primary school) has been associated with greater internalizing and externalizing behaviors in the child, while divorce later in childhood or adolescence may dampen academic performance.

Whilst father’s absence mainly results from parental divorce and separation, including parental alienation, other factors such as family poverty and developmental difficulties have been associated with father absence, the effects of which have been explained by various theoretical approaches.

Signs of an absent father include

• Workaholic: They are there but they are not really there.
• Lack of empathy: An emotionally or physically lacking father is one that doesn’t feel empathy.
• Emotional immaturity: This characteristic is related to lack of empathy.
• Irresponsibility: This is a father who is not attentive to their child’s development.
• Self-centered: The self-centered father forgets about his children.

Effect of Father Absence

Fathers abandon their sons for various reasons, including divorce, death, absences due to employment or military service, addictions, incarceration, and chronic physical or mental illness. Some fathers are considered honorable, while others are perceived as disgracing or stigmatizing. An absent father may have a need for adventure or feel unable to meet the requirements of his role. The mystery of their fathers’ absence is the complicating factor that defines the sons presented in this article.

The fathers’ absence impairs the sons’ ability to develop and sustain positive self-worth and form lasting relationships with adult romantic partners. Men from this background often experience difficulties initiating and sustaining intimate relationships. Abandoned sons often have intense feelings related to their absent fathers, which can be categorized into two forms: emotional reactivity and over-identification. Emotional reactivity involves the son rejecting the importance of his father, leading to denial and unresolved grief. Over-identification, on the other hand, idealizes and worships the absent father, based on the actual or fantasy father they wish for, despite the father’s apparent lack of contact, interest, commitment, or feelings for his son.

Self-Esteem and Shame

Abandoned sons may experience lasting damage to their sense of worthiness, leading to a distrust of relationships and feelings of shame. This shame-based identity restricts men from accessing their emotions and communicating clearly. Men often become “shame bound” due to family intimacy dysfunction, such as secrecy about their absent father. Male gender socialization is based on shaming around emotional expressiveness, limiting men’s emotional expression and causing them to perceive themselves as inferior. Resocializing men to be more expressive can improve their emotional connectedness.

Intimate Struggles

Abandoned men often struggle with intimacy, often entering treatment due to relationship difficulties with their parents, siblings, chosen partners, and children. These men often face anxiety at family developmental transition points, such as engagement, wedding planning, and childbirth. The formation of an intimate premarital relationship can be fraught with false starts, detours, and fighting. Once committed or married, abandoned sons can unwittingly replicate the roles enacted by their fathers by being emotionally or physically absent. Childbirth is an especially intense transition for abandoned men, as the new father may become overwhelmed by parenting tasks and have unrealistic expectations of the child’s capacities. For some, this becomes a time of reunification with their father, causing them to mourn the loss and bond with the infant.

Treatment

Treatment for abandoned sons aims to enhance self-esteem and intimacy. Two types of treatment are available: with fathers who are available and willing to re-engage, and with sons whose fathers remain absent or wounding. Treatment often comes from requests from female partners for couples therapy during a crisis. A three-tiered approach is proposed, starting with immediate crisis resolution, focusing on the abandoned son/absent father dyad, and reunification with the absent father using intergenerational family therapy. Treatment concludes with couples therapy.

Grief Work

Grief work is a crucial aspect of treatment for abandoned sons, involving investigating their relationship history and understanding the process of grieving. This process involves helping the son grieve their actual and fantasy losses, including their father, childhood, and adolescence. The therapy involves introducing the son to their father and exploring the nature of their relationship. Open grieving goes against individual, family, and cultural imprinting for men, as it allows others to see their tears, rage, and shame. Family-of-origin rules imposed on the son can also hinder intimacy. Addressing these rules can help create a positive therapeutic alliance and help the son clarify and direct his anger towards the source. The therapist can model appropriate ways to express anger and teach assertive methods. Repeated debriefings of anger-generating incidents can reduce the intensity of the son’s rage, indicating readiness for reunification.

Preparation For (Re)Unification
After a sufficient period of mourning, the next treatment goal is (re)unification between the abandoned son and his absent father. Depending upon the physical availability of the father, variations in treatment can take place. For adult sons who have had contact with their absent father, a focus on reunification is appropriate. For those sons without contact with their father, the goal of mourning will have to suffice.
Preparing the abandoned son to engage the absent father begins with clarifying the son’s unspoken wishes. What did he always want to say to his father, to ask his father, to share with his father? What were the impediments to asking or sharing?
Role playing these conversations, utilizing family sculpture, psychodramatic techniques, gestalt, or other active techniques assists the son in rehearsing what he wants to convey to his father.
Father-Son Therapy Sessions
Following the preparation, the son invites his father to participate in treatment. In my clinical experience, to date, each invited father has attended a family of origin meeting with his son, or participated in some type of son-father treatment. This speaks to the needs of the absent father as well as the needs of the son. These therapy sessions typically number between one and ten, often with as much as a month or more between sessions, during which specific relationship assignments are completed.
Headley (1977) offers excellent suggestions in how the therapist and client can work together to accomplish a successful invitation. This process focuses on understanding the needs of both generations, conveying in a letter the wish to reunite, and blocks aspects of blame that usually negate progress.
One principle in working with absent fathers is focus on what is within the son’s power to relate in the ways that he prefers, regardless of the father’s response. The therapeutic effort is not to change the father. The purpose of the treatment is to help the son relate to his absent father in different and preferred ways. The father is not the focus of change, although the father may change as well.
An abandoned man often says he could never ask his father to participate. Yet, the act of asking is often the climax of the treatment since the son now feels empowered.
Many fathers approach entering family therapy with apprehension or fear, particularly if they belong to a generation in which therapy implied severe mental illness. To their credit, they have embarked on a journey with their sons that often has wide-ranging impact on their own lives.
Based on an intergenerational premise, the needs of the absent father are viewed as identical to those of the abandoned son, that is, a need to increase his capacity for self-esteem and intimacy in his family, to initiate and respond to the needs of his partner and children, and to become more emotionally expressive. The father would need to grieve the loss of his father, (re)connect with his partner, and bond with his son.
Since the fathers share with their sons some degree of longing (usually unexpressed and
often unacknowledged), the opportunity to “help” their son is an attractive offer. It reinforces their self-concept as a good father, even if the evidence is obviously contrary.
For those fathers who know they have failed their sons in some way, it affords another chance.
Once the father has committed to the treatment, the task becomes to free the son from the earlier relationship constraints. To free himself, the son must talk to his father about the stored-up feelings, thoughts, and wishes from the past. Through this he takes on a realistic view of his father (past and present) that integrates the father’s deficits and assets.
The son gains a new image of his father by the process of (re)unification. He has the benefit of watching his father struggle with a difficult relationship task. He hears his father discuss his side of their earlier relationship and whatever pains or dilemmas he experienced.
Unfortunately, some fathers rewound their sons. The father may not have changed his earlier abandoning or abusive behaviors. The possibility of greater wounding or disappointment is discussed during the preparation stage, before inviting the father to join the therapy. Rarely is an absent father all that a son wishes or hopes for. Some fathers lack interest, many are relationally incapable, and others abdicated their moral and family responsibilities decades earlier.
Adult Son/Adult Father Relationship
Some fathers and sons reconcile. The next task is employing the newfound intimacy generated in that relationship to help the son. This occurs through the active development of the adult-to-adult relationship and by the father’s sharing of his own experiences. The enhanced adult son-adult father relationship often requires the son to make the initial and subsequent moves towards (re)connection with his father(2) Assessing the benefits to the son occurs in the context of the possible damage from rewounding. Therapies of all types assume a positive outcome. This is not always true for sons trying to form intimate relationships with their fathers.
The usefulness of the father’s stated advice to his adult son is of secondary importance. The son need not accept or agree with the content. The effort by the father is his gift to his son. The danger in this stage is that the father will attempt to dominate or impose his beliefs onto his son. When the son can continue to assert himself with his father this stage is completed. If the father is unable to accept his son’s adult decisions, or is invalidating to his son in other ways, this phase adjourns.
In the unhappy outcomes the fathers reveal their deficits or lack of interest, and the sons
of necessity disconnect and say goodbye to them. A second round of grieving for the abandoned son ensues. The goal is once again to reduce the mystery of his absent father
so the son can appropriately attach in his current intimate relationship. At this point in the treatment, the abandoned son is in a better position to enhance his relationship with his intimate partner. Couples therapy resumes with the original complaints and goals being addressed.

CASE EXAMPLE
His marital therapist referred Mr. P., a 34-year-old businessman, for individual psychotherapy. Married for five years, he and his wife separated soon after the birth of Daniel. Mr. P. felt “uneasy” about being a father. While continuing in marital therapy, he has not reunited with his family. He reported that he was worried about increased demands on his time, that he was catching up on things he had missed out on as a child, uncertain about how to be a father, and missing his wife, whose attention was more focused on their son. Mr. P. identified “unfinished business” with his father revolving around feelings of abandonment and anger.
Mr. P. is an only child. When he was six, his father divorced his mother, left without explanation, and has remained absent without any contact since then. His mother was the sole supporter of the family, often working two jobs. Mr. P. was “on his own” and economically self-supporting by age 14.
His initial goal in individual therapy was to understand why he left after his son was born. He also had a strong desire to reunite with his family. In a six-month course of treatment, Mr. P. explored his anger toward his father by talking with his mother, asking questions about his parents’ marriage, his father’s personality, and what triggered the divorce. He reviewed photos of his father, noticing the physical similarities. He also began a Journal of letters addressed to his father in which he was able to express his longing, his questions, his anger and frustration, most poignantly expressed in one letter as, “I’m not going to let your abandoning me ruin my future!”

As Mr. P. focused on family-of-origin work, he developed a wider range of emotional expression and was able to cry for the first time in his life for what he had missed and still missed. Sharing his grief with his wife helped him to distinguish between his life and his father’s life. This separation of past and present allowed him to reconnect with his wife and to build a connection with his infant son. Mr. P. searched for his father, based on the information that he received from his mother.
He contacted his paternal aunt, who had remained in contact with his father. She agreed to help Mr. P. in contacting his father. Mr. P. and his father exchanged letters. Initially, these letters were short, chatty, and just reported the current news to each other. Letters progressed to telephone calls. After several calls, Mr. P. asked his father if he would like to meet in person. Encouraged by their contacts, he agreed to meet for lunch mid-way between their homes. At follow-up contact three months after his last individual session, Mr. P. was reunited with his family and continuing to see his father. He persisted in couples therapy to help overcome the pains of marital separation and the loss of his father and to enrich his ability to be a father and husband.

Conclusion

The consequence of father absence reveals its damage, when the son attempts to form and sustain an adult intimate relationship. At each developmental stage, the abandoned son typically experiences relationship difficulties that propel him into treatment, usually at the behest of his spouse. Treatment focuses on the reduction of mystery regarding his
absent father. This process entails grieving and (re)unification with his father. Following the grieving and reduction of mystery, the son is in a more wholesome position to succeed in his intimate relationship.

Adapted from https://www.fatherhood.gov/