Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First

Using the fatherhood revolution to "ease the burdens" on overworked parents where employers fail to acknowledge the needs of families is a start but in truth, Gloria Steinem's prophecy cannot come true without employer understanding of family dynamics and the time it takes to devote to family, to oneself, and to one's spouse. Are children entitled to parental intimacy? Can they expect to achieve adult intimacy without it? Is it sufficient to receive it from only one parent? Does it matter which one? Some call it bonding, but isn't it realyy more than that, in providing the foundation for the unconditional love they will be expected to provide to spouses, and to their own children later? Men who fall victim to routines that lack sufficient time for them to appreciate their valuable role in family life may just be spinning their wheels. But everything helps; at least, it's a beginning awareness of how children behave. Now if employer's studied the same topic with the same enthusiasm they study their Profit & Loss statements each week or month, families might be able to alter the dynamics so they have a real chance to learn to dwell with each other rather than simply pass each as ships in the night, struggling to get along. Congratulations on a fine topic of immeasurable value.

I found this an absolutely WONDERFUL book--moving, revolutionary in vision, and USEFUL in modeling how egalitarian families can function. Suzanne Braun Levine is really fair: she doesn't fudge the difficult challenges, but she also reveals the glorious rewards of genuine fathering--not only for fathers but for mothers (and certainly for children!). I'm going to give copies to every family I know. It's a ground-breaking book.

Despite some of its shortcomings, I do recommend this book to those men and women struggling to balance family and work responsibilities between them. 'Father Courage' gives voice to a diverse group of men who have confronted work-family dilemmas and you will likely find some that sound familiar (with an equal dose of those entirely foreign). I thought the book did a particularly nice job in exploring how men and women fundamentally approach household tasks and responsibilities differently (neither 'wrong'-just different), and how this causes friction in the home. There were a lot of times when I was nodding in agreement, thinking "Man, have I been through that before!" The shortcomings lie with the author's tendency to couch things in feminist terms: female attributes generally get a positive treatment while typically male ones less so, housework seems to be inferior to other responsibilities, "Gen-X'ers" are too individualistic for collective political action.... Occasionally, the author descended in what I felt was psychobabble like her claim that the male ability to compartmentalize subjects is a 'defense against penetration' and 'homophobic'. Uh-huh. Ultimately, the book offers little in the way of solutions, but it will help you understand some sources of stress and friction and perhaps help you and your spouse cooperate to eliminate them. For that alone, it performs a very valuable service.

Father Courage is the perfect gift for any working couple raising a family. It's a smart, detailed, practical book about American fathers who are actually changing the pattern and breaking with the past and reorganizing their lives so that they share in the parenting and the home building and the maintenance of the family. The wonderful thing about Suzanne Braun Levine's interviews is that they are not pie-in-the-sky success stories; they are about real men and women struggling to work out a new system that serves them and their kids better. Once you read this book, you see, it can be done; the old song about the father who worked all the time and never knew his kids and then as an old man bemoaned the fact that his son "had turned out just like me" -- that song doesn't have to be true any more. My boy just got married. I'm sending Father Courage to him as a post-wedding present.