The Epidemic of Absent Fathers

I suddenly saw the estrangement that we’d been studying was not innate to “the human condition,” but a direct result of how we isolate babies and young children. Personally, I could also see how the old wounds I thought I had handled in therapy were still there.

-- John Travis, MD

Why Men Leave—A Hidden Epidemic

by John W. Travis,
Metung, Victoria, Australia

Assertion: Modern culture is in the midst of a hidden epidemic of fathers leaving their families—usually around the time when the first child is born. Men leave their families in a multitude of ways. Even if they remain in the home, many fathers are often emotionally absent—through depression, workaholism, violence/aggression, physical or emotional abuse, or a retreat into addiction to substances, media, consumer goods, sports, food or sex.

This is a great article that is a seque into one that I will be posting -- It's the Baby's Birth. I am posting it here now because it shares the author's birth of the forties, during the height of obstetric intervention. Today, obstetricians continue to claim that birth in the hospital is safest for the baby and insist that interventions are not harmful. This is how they have the balls to continue to do non-medically necessary interventions on babies. My post -- AGAIN -- will ask you to consider that what we do to babies during labor and birth has critical impact on their nervous system. I will also post more about the impact of modern birth on men.

Travis writes:

I was born in the farmlands of western Ohio in 1943. Like most babies born in those days, I was drugged (via my mother’s general anesthetic, which took weeks to wear off), dragged out of the womb with cold, metal forceps, grasped by sticky rubber gloves, and plunged into bright lights—instead of being gently greeted with warm hands in subdued light. I was doubtless held upside down to drain my lungs (I’m not sure if I was slapped or not, but that was the norm of the day). Stinging silver nitrate was put in my eyes. I was wrapped in cold, scratchy fabrics instead of being allowed to mold my skin against the warm skin of the person with whom I’d been intimately connected for nine months. A little while later, I was taken to the nursery where I was placed in a plastic box beside Carol D., born earlier that day. I spent my next 10 days there (the norm for the early ‘40s). I was given a cold, rubber nipple with a bottle of a fatty, antigenic substance instead of the miracle food that three million years of evolution had prepared for me.
Then, a day or so later, I was immobilized on a board and the majority of the most sensitive nerve endings of my penis were amputated.

Then followed the standard “normative abuse” parenting practices of the 1940s:

1) artificial baby milk—probably Carnation or Pet Evaporated Milk,
2) a four-hour bottle schedule (I got hungry every three hours and cried that last hour, until I learned it was no use and made a decision about the world that is so basic to my brain’s neural organization that it still impacts almost everything I do—Asking for what I want doesn’t work—my needs will never be met.),
3) restraint in a crib or playpen,
4) deprivation of the continual movement of being carried in-arms,
5) sleeping alone in a separate room.

Most of these ’improvements’ were devised by men propagating, in the name of ‘modern child rearing practices,’ untested ‘scientific’ ideas, all of which have since been proven to be destructive to human bonding. I don’t blame my or other parents of that age: they naturally followed the cultural winds, and the promise of science and technology to cure the world’s ills was, in 1943, still an untarnished vision.

From the very beginning, I used depression as my primary defense against recognizing my inability to get my nurturing needs met. While my primary defense appears outwardly as depression—closing down my senses and feelings by withdrawing into my head—it’s just one of a standard set of defenses that unbonded children/adults cling to in their attempts to escape the pain of the early needs deprivation that still eats away at them. Other defenses include addiction, violence, chronic illness, and ecocide (destruction of the environment)—symptoms of what James Prescott named Somato-Sensory Affectional Deprivation Syndrome (SSADS) in his early bonding research.

I created a “safe” world in my head that allowed me a sense of control (since I had no control over being fed, touched, or held). The fact that I was disconnected from the matrix of my life by being isolated from others, most especially my mother, limited my ability to express my needs and get them met—hence the periodic depressions. No one recognized my depressions, including me, until I was in college—people just thought I was “quiet.”

Read the full article at http://www.compleatmother.com/articles2/why_men_leave.htm

James Prescott's work from his research at NIH is at www.violence.de

John W. Travis is a coauthor of the Wellness Workbook, co-directs the Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children: http://www.aTLC.org , and is available to speak on this subject and many other areas of wellness for both adults and children. His Wellness Inventory Online is available at http://www.thewellspring.com .