No Longer Missing in Action

Nobody would ever accuse Alan Clark of being a lousy father. For more than 20 years, he has pressed his nose to the grindstone at work. He keeps the mortgage paid and the lawn mowed. He has shuttled his three kids to more weekend soccer games than he can recall.

Isn’t that what good dads do?

The 49-year-old mortgage broker is not so sure. In 1993, Clark had what can only be described as a fatherhood epiphany. It washed over him, crashing like an ocean wave, when the Leave-It-to-Beaver life he thought he had built for his family suddenly seemed on the brink of collapse.

A couple of kids got shot a few blocks from his house. A punk with “purple hair and pierced everything” hassled his son. His older daughter saw kids with knives at the local middle school. His younger girl glimpsed marijuana in her sixth-grade class.

Everywhere Clark looked, he spotted evidence that “the moral fabric of the country was failing.” And not failing on some distant inner-city block, but right here in his suburban San Diego backyard, and threatening to take his kids down with it. After years of “running on autopilot,” this veteran father was seized with self-doubt.

Clark recalls wondering: Do I really know my kids? How can I steer them clear of trouble when I have no clue what is going on in their lives? How can I get a clue when I’m so busy working I barely have time to talk to them?

“I got fearful,” Clark said. “I knew I couldn’t be on autopilot anymore.”

Thus began one man’s response to the nation’s values crisis, an intensely personal--and, to most outsiders, invisible--journey into fatherhood that took a very ordinary dad to parenting courses and PTA meetings and lunch dates with the unlikeliest of companions: his own children.

Across the United States, thousands of men are on similar pilgrimages, reevaluating their relationships with their kids as part of a burgeoning fatherhood movement that stretches beyond race, class and religious or political affiliation. Behind it is the sentiment, shared by Clark and countless other Americans, that the nation is sliding into a valueless abyss and that men, by failing to spend enough time with their kids, are partly to blame.

“If fathers don’t stand up,” Clark predicted, “then our country’s going to have a real problem, our families are going to have a real problem. You’ll have a new generation of kids who don’t understand respect, don’t understand moral issues.”

Divergent Trends

This public awakening to fatherhood comes at a time of two very divergent trends, a period when men are more--and less--involved in child-rearing than ever.

Today, either by choice or because of job loss or unusual work hours, one in six preschoolers is cared for by his or her father; from 1965 to 1988, that figure remained stable at one in seven, according to the Families and Work Institute in New York. Single fatherhood also is on the rise; the percentage of single men caring for their children has quadrupled in the last quarter of a century, from one in 100 in 1970, to one in 25.

At the same time, the absence of fathers is reaching epidemic proportions in America, which bears the unwelcome distinction of leading the world in fatherless families. Tonight, about 40% of the nation’s children will go to sleep in homes apart from their biological fathers. Nearly 27% of babies--including 68% of black infants--are born into single-parent homes. And just half of U.S. children will spend their entire childhood in an intact family.

“For the first time in the history of any human society, millions of children are growing up separated from their fathers,” said David Blankenhorn, author of the 1995 book “Fatherless America.” “This is a historic event, unprecedented in human affairs.”

These twin phenomena--single dads and missing dads--illustrate the paradox of fatherhood in the 1990s, or at least fatherhood as it is discussed among public policymakers and in the press. But these trends, although significant, do not really illuminate the reality facing the silent majority of fathers, men like Clark who are married and living with their families. Like him, these mainstream dads often are unsure of how good a job they’re doing.

Their concerns are well-founded, according to experts, who say that while men clearly are changing more diapers and cooking more meals for their kids than the fathers of generations gone by, they still have a long way to go.

“The rhetoric says fathers should be more involved,” said Ross D. Parke, a UC Riverside psychology professor who has studied fathers in intact families. “But the reality is they are not as involved as we would like them to be.”

The rhetoric, however, is thick.

Last year, the “Million Man March” drew more than 800,000 black men to Washington, where Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan exhorted them to become “good husbands and fathers.” The Promise Keepers, an evangelical Christian group with much the same message, is packing football stadiums with upward of 50,000 men in cities across America.

The Clinton administration has caught fatherhood fever, as Vice President Al Gore spearheads an effort to make more “father-friendly” government workplaces and programs, which all too often have ignored fathers or, at best, viewed them simply as a means of child support.

In the process, Gore has become the nation’s pater familias; his own fatherhood epiphany, when his son was hit by a car and nearly died a few years ago, is well known. Recently, Gore has taken to telling a more upbeat tale, of the time he showed up late for a meeting with the president of Uzbekistan because his daughter’s soccer game went into double overtime and it was his turn to hand out the postgame snacks.

“Every institution in America must begin formally to see fathers as not just a paycheck or a child-support payment,” the vice president said last month in a speech urging employers to offer fathers flexible work schedules, the option to telecommute and time off to attend school functions. “We’ve got to go beyond this idea of fathers as invisible men.”

Misty Memories

Alan Clark knows just how easy it is for a man to become invisible. He is the son of just such a father, and for years he was one himself.

As a child of the 1950s, Clark is filled with misty memories of his youth on Dewey Street in Mar Vista. He revels in stories from that seemingly easy time, tales of summer nights spent riding bikes, and the neighbor’s Doughboy swimming pool, and the women on the cul-de-sac who dubbed themselves the Dewey Dames.

This is Clark’s benchmark in the world, the standard against which he measures his own family life. But there was something absent from his childhood, an emptiness he never quite grasped. It is only now, having explored his own role as a father through a San Diego-based program called Dads University, that he can put his finger on it, saying openly: “I missed my dad.”

There is no criticism here; Clark wants to get that straight. “He provided a great home,” Clark said. “He was a good man.” But he was a busy man, with a job as chief engineer for Southern California Edison at a time of explosive growth in the region. And he was cut in the mold of men of his day.

“When my dad came up,” Clark says, “you’d see your father for about 10 minutes in the morning on the way to work. Then he comes back from work and he’s exhausted. So you didn’t have much time.”

It was not until 17 years into his own life as a father that Clark came to see how closely he was following in those footsteps.

His first child, Stephen, was born in 1976. Three years later, Michele came along. Another two years after that, Lindsay was born. These were the building years, when Clark and his wife, Margi, bought a two-bedroom house (they later added two more bedrooms) in the little community of Rancho Penasquitos.

They liked the town because it was small--just 6,000 people back then--and in the desirable Poway school district. The neighbors were middle class, like them: teachers, Navy men, a plumber, two cops. The house was on a cul-de-sac, which reminded Clark of Dewey Street. He signed away $38,000 for the place, shunning a slightly more expensive model because it would have meant selling his yellow Volkswagen Beetle.

He carved a career in real estate while Margi stayed home with the kids. Money was tight; eventually, Clark opened a small mortgage-lending company. He was his own toughest taskmaster.

As to the child-rearing, that was Margi’s turf. Over the years, Clark became less and less involved. Soccer games and gymnastic meets started to slip by the wayside. When his kids talked to him, he often found his mind wandering to the next business deal. He was not Alan Clark, father of Stephen, Michele and Lindsay. He was Alan Clark, owner of the Residential Funding group.

He explains this in the second person, referring to himself: “You’re a guy who goes to work, comes home, goes to work, comes home. You play with your kids, you hug ‘em, you love ‘em, but then you start thinking about tomorrow and work, and you’re exhausted. Even though you would be at home and you’re physically there, you might not be there mentally. Even though you’re not taking your briefcase home, you’re taking it home in your head.”

‘Paternal Deprivation’

This is hardly unusual, said Henry Biller, author of “The Father Factor.” The University of Rhode Island psychology professor estimates that more than 75% of American children face “paternal deprivation,” often because their fathers are too busy to spend time with them.

Even in two-parent households, fewer than 25% of young children average an hour a day of one-on-one contact with their fathers.

“It was very typical for dads to have less than a half-hour of time with their kids each day,” Biller said.

As director of the National Fatherhood Initiative, Wade Horn is trying to change this ratio by changing society’s perception of fathers. Even in the progressive 1990s, Horn says, men still think of themselves primarily as breadwinners--an image that Horn’s group will seek to counter through a series of radio advertisements to be unveiled this month.

“What we set out to do,” Horn said, “is to change the culture, to change the message about what it is fathers contribute to their kids, to say that the role fathers play as nurturers, as disciplinarians, as mentors, as moral instructors, these roles are far more important than money.”

Indeed, social scientists long have known that there is no substitute for a good father--not even a good mother. Fathers play differently with their kids, teaching different lessons. They throw babies up in the air and help toddlers hang upside down from jungle gyms. Mothers wince and tell their kids to be careful.

A father’s rough physical play, experts say, arouses extreme emotions in young children, teaching them to regulate their feelings, a skill that is crucial to getting along well in society.

“When fathers are involved in the lives of their children, we know a lot of interesting things happen,” said Dr. Kyle Pruett, a Yale University child psychiatry professor who has studied families where the father stays home with the kids while the mother works. “We know that kids stay in school longer, they are better at coping with frustration and failure. We know that they stay in relationships, in marriages longer, and that in general self-esteem is improved.”

And Pruett found it is not only children who reap the benefits. Men who are involved as fathers, he says, tend to be happier and more stable, at work and at home.

While Pruett has spent 20 years quietly researching the benefits of father involvement, the media and public policymakers have focused on other studies showing the devastating consequences of absent fathers. In one widely publicized 1988 report, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that children growing up in single-parent families are more likely to abuse drugs, become pregnant as teenagers and drop out of school.

Such studies have prompted dire warnings. As author Blankenhorn said: “The dividing line of the next century is not going to be so much a dividing line of race or gender. The dividing line between the haves and the have-nots will increasingly be patrimony--which of us have a father.”

But Pruett and other social scientists caution that Blankenhorn’s message is overly simplistic. “The quality of fathering is really what’s important, the same as the quality of mothering is important,” said Parke, the UC Riverside professor. “It’s not only presence, but quality of presence.”

Fatherhood Pioneer

The sign at the door says “Family University,” but that is misleading. This is not a school; it is a three-room suite in a pale pink stucco office complex, overlooking Interstate 15 about half an hour’s drive north of San Diego.

This is what Paul Lewis calls his “university without walls,” and it is where Clark came to improve, as Parke says, the quality of his fathering.

Lewis, a 52-year-old father of five, is something of a fatherhood pioneer. He never set out to make promoting fatherhood his life’s work; he is a graphic designer by trade. In the late 1970s, troubled by a friend’s divorce, he started a little hobby business, a newsletter for men called For Dads Only.

The newsletter soon blossomed into book contracts; Lewis now is known as the author of “Forty Ways to Teach Your Child Values” and “The Five Key Habits of Smart Dads.” In 1990, he founded Dads University--later expanded to Family University to accommodate mothers--with a half-a-day seminar called “The Secrets of Fast-Track Fathering.” (Lewis’ phone number is equally catchy: 1-800-ALL-DADS.)

Today, more than 15,000 people, mostly men, have taken Family University courses. The Coast Guard is offering the fathering seminar; the Navy, Army, Air Force and Marines have just signed on; and several major employers--including Sears, Roebuck & Co.; Price Waterhouse and Arthur Anderson--are providing Family University courses and literature to their employees. (The cost is $39 per seminar in community settings, such as churches; Lewis says corporations pay an average of $110 a seat.)

Lewis’ message is simple: Men, he says, must become “intentional” about being fathers. His courses are filled with tips about how to be a better dad:

Write your children into your daily appointment book, just as you would a business meeting. Take your kids out to breakfast once a week. Call them from work in the middle of the day. If you make a mistake, admit it; don’t be afraid to say you’re sorry. Read your kids’ high school textbooks; you’ll never be at a loss for a conversation topic.

“Most dads can get a lot of fathering done if they know how to use five minutes well,” Lewis said. “I tell men, ‘I can’t give you back more hours in the day. But I can help you use the time you’ve got better’ ”

Listening to Kids

When, in 1993, a business acquaintance told Clark about “The Secrets of Fast-Track Fathering,” he thought the whole idea sounded, well, just “a little bit cornball.”

But he was worried about his kids, especially Lindsay. The thought that she might be exposed to drugs frightened him. He was searching for a place, he says, “where you could go to learn information about what is going on. When is it that kids are being offered drugs? If they are, how do you talk to a kid about that? What does it mean as a father to be more involved in their growing-up time?”

Cautiously, he signed up for a class with Lewis. He came back a fatherhood convert, clinging to the Family University gospel like a drowning man grabbing for the last raft in the sea.

He worked harder at listening to his kids. He started calling Lindsay in the middle of the day. He snuck out to 10 p.m. movies with Michele and once drove 40 minutes just to catch the tail end of one of her diving meets. He got there in time for her final dive.

He took a close look at Stephen’s heavy metal music; one night, he gathered the family in the living room and asked his son to read the lyrics out loud. The boy was so embarrassed he tossed his Megadeth CD in the trash.

He quit complaining when his girls had pajama parties, counting his blessings instead. He made peace with his own father, flying to Arizona to take him to lunch and a round of golf, to tell him in person how much he loved him.

He bought 10 tickets to a “Secrets of Fast-Track Fathering” course and gave them to his buddies. He arranged for Lewis to give seminars at his church. He started coaxing his pals--guys who could talk a blue streak about sports or current affairs--to swap child-rearing stories instead.

His kids thought he was a little nutty, but secretly, they noticed the difference. “It wasn’t a huge change,” said Lindsay, now 15. “I just noticed that he came to me a lot more. He invites me to the movies now. He hangs around the house more.”

In a nation of 54.7 million fathers, one, at least, has been reborn. “I think Alan has always been a good father, but he’s more aware now,” Margi said. “He tries to take advantage of all those little bitty moments of time.”

But it is 17-year-old Michele who, without realizing it, offers the highest compliment of all. “A lot of my friends’ dads, they’re always too involved in their work,” she said. “I don’t even know my friends’ dads. But everybody knows my dad.”

Next: Working mothers.

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Fatherly Advice

A sampling of suggestions for dads who want to do better:

* Take photos of your kids doing things right: daily chores, cleaning their rooms, doing homework. Set aside special pages in the family album for the snapshots.

* If you have to go out of town, tape-record yourself reading bedtime stories for your children to listen to while you’re gone.

* Kidnap your child for lunch. Find out the time school breaks for lunch, notify the office and show up outside the classroom door.

* Switch places at the dinner table; have everyone sit in someone else’s customary chair and behave like the person whose chair they are in.

* Take your appointment book to dinner. Show each family member your schedule for the next two weeks and write in a date with each of them. Two weeks from now, do it again.

* On your business card, under your title, insert the line: “Father of--” followed by the names of your children. The card will make your kids feel they get equal billing with your career.

* Find a magazine devoted to your child’s personal hobbies or interests. Then give him or her a subscription and read it together.

* List the names of the five best dads you know. Then create an opportunity (a phone call, lunch, etc.) to ask them these two questions: What key ideas guide you as a father? What three family activities do you most enjoy?

Source: “The Five Key Habits of Smart Dads,” By Paul Lewis, founder of Family University