Absent Fathers and Mother-Bound Boys

There are more mother-bound boys in the modern day than there ever were in the past. The reasons for this are many, and intricately entangled, but the most pervasive factor is the absence (physically and/or emotionally) of the father. Essentially, if a boy does not experience - for whatever reason - the support of his father he will gravitate to his mother because she is all that he has.

Fatherhood has eroded in the Western world because fewer and fewer men have been willing to do the work necessary to keep the connection strong. There are so many circumstances that work against that connection. Right from the time of his child's birth a father faces an uphill battle to assert his presence and influence. An infant naturally cleaves to its mother, with whom it enjoyed a symbiotic relationship and upon whom it is now still utterly dependent. The father, whose purpose is more to serve as a bridge between the child and the outer world, often feels obliged to wait.

But by the time the son matures, it may already be too late. The years of turning to the mother for mental and emotional nurturance may have fixed the course of the boy's life. Then, even if he spends time with his father, he is seeing his father (at least to some extent) through the mother's eyes. He peers through the lens of her fears (which he may be overly sensitized to) and her beliefs - most crucially, her beliefs about men, which impacts not only his impression of his father but also of himself.

A boy who misunderstands his father must question his own nature. There is his primary symbol of what being a man means, but the image is distorted by his mother's ideas - all that the son has absorbed of her emotional reality, consciously and unconsciously. A boy who grows up with little or no fatherly presence has even less defense. More often than not, he capitulates without even knowing that he's done so.

Then he becomes a man who loves to please (and, oftentimes, secretly resent) women, rather than a man who seeks the father's world. And if he marries and has children, he'll be as easily supplanted as his own father was.

There seems to be some collective shame within men that allows this dynamic to happen and also perpetuates it from generation to generation. Healing that shame is probably the first step in healing the rift that it's caused between fathers and sons.