Father's Day 2018: Share these quotes and images with your dad.
Father's Day is typically celebrated on the third Sunday of June each year. This year, Father's Day will be celebrated on June 17, 2018 in most countries, including India. And while we know a mere 24 hours is not enough to honour our dads and father-figures, it's always nice to tell them how much we love and appreciate them. Whether you're planning to take your dad out for a meal at his favourite restaurant or going to shower him with handmade cards and gifts, we're sure your father will appreciate whatever you've got planned for him this special day. And, in case you can't find the right words to tell your father how much you admire and respect him, we've compiled a list of 10 inspiring quotes about the joys and struggles of fatherhood. These Father's Day quotes are perfect for you to share with him on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp or - if you're going old school - a greeting card."Some people don't believe in heroes, but they haven't met my dad." - Unknown"To the world, you are a dad. To me, you are the world." - Unknown"My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person: He believed in me." - Jim Valvano"He adopted a role called being a father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a protector." - Tom Wolfe"A father is someone you look up to no matter how tall you grow." - Unknown"A father is neither an anchor to hold us back nor a sail to take us there, but a guiding light whose love shows us the way." - Unknown"To a father growing old, nothing is dearer than a daughter." - Euripides"By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong." - Charles Wadsworth"A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms, even when his hands are empty" - Unknown"What you teach your children, you also teach their children." - Unknown Looking for Father's Day wishes and messages? Click here.How are you celebrating Father's Day this year? Let us know in the comments section. Happy Father's Day!Click for more trending news
The purpose of Father’s Day, an annual holiday that falls in the U.S. on the third Sunday in June is clear: families spend some quality time with dad, maybe buying him a gift, to show their appreciation. But the work they’re appreciating — the role that Americans expect fathers to play throughout the rest of the year — is a complicated one.
In practice, every family — and what that family expects from a father, if one is present — is different. But that has never stopped anyone from imagining that there’s a certain way to be a “good” dad.
Some of the tensions there are near-constant, like the contradictory expectations between going out and being a breadwinner and staying home and spending quality time with the kids. Some of them are distinctly modern, like the impact of social media. And over time, as the role of the American dad has been subject to increasing analysis, there’s been less and less agreement on the right way to be a father.
The American Dad Emerges
In the early years of the United States’ existence, the concept of what it meant to be a dad was something that, as far as historians can tell, people just didn’t think all that much about. In that period, a good dad imparted faith and knowledge, and that was that.
“The topic of fatherhood was not commonly discussed in Colonial American sources,” historian Shawn Johansen, author of Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America, told TIME in an email. “Fathers were to teach their children religious piety and doctrine, while inculcating good work habits and the necessary knowledge to succeed in a mostly agrarian economy.”
That began to change — like so much else — in the 19th century, in the years after the Civil War. The growth of the U.S. commercial economy meant that it became more common for a family’s primary source of income to be a job performed outside the home rather than a farm or family business, meaning that someone, usually the father, left every day for work. This shift jump-started the rise of a middle class, just around the same time that children started to be seen more as individuals with rights that must be protected rather than just another pair of hands. Kids started to leave home for public school, too, and it was the responsibility of the father to guild them, especially sons, to later finding their own jobs. (Johansen notes another “surprising” change in this period when it comes to American fatherhood: this is when some men in the middle class start to be present in the room when their children are born.) Industrialization led to a unique set of expectations for working-class fathers, too.
“Fathers’ identities revolved around bread-winning and their ability to place children in work positions,” says Johansen. “The vagaries of industrial work, however, made working-class fathers’ authority more vulnerable than even the middle-class fathers.”
In American cities, as immigration boomed, dads in those communities faced their own challenges, as they struggled to balance expectations that a father would control his family against the common situation in which his children were the ones better assimilated into their new community.
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New Fatherhood
So by the time the 20th century begins, bread-winning is the primary characteristic of society’s idea of a good American father. But, perhaps not surprisingly, there was soon a swing back toward recognition — if not accommodation — of the rest of a father’s job.
Around the turn of the century, expectations for American kids evolved quickly, and fathers’ roles changed accordingly. Families were having fewer children — Johansen points out that the typical white American woman bore six children in 1800, and only three in 1900 — which meant parents might concentrate more on each one. Amid the growing professionalization of psychology, child development (including the impact of the father) became more widely studied. The psychologist G. Stanley Hall led Americans to recognize adolescence as a life stage, and to take the minds of young people seriously.
But at the same time, the trend continued toward men spending more and more time working outside the home. Urbanization and suburbanization, the institution of the 40-hour work week and the spread of the automobile all contributed.
“I think the key change for the invention of the modern father is in the 1920s,” says historian Robert L. Griswold, author of Fatherhood in America: A History. “The advent of the automobile” is part of the broader growth of consumer society, heaping on the pressure on breadwinners to “earn more bread,” as Griswold puts it, just as families were also realizing just how much a father’s non-economic role in the family mattered.
In what’s often billed as the beginning of a “New Fatherhood movement,” a surge in literature argued that men should be changing diapers, imparting words of wisdom and playing with children when they weren’t at work.
Not coincidentally, this is the same period when Father’s Day becomes a thing. The Great Depression was hard on marriages, especially as society expected fathers to provide for their families but female-dominated service jobs were hit less badly than male-dominated industrial jobs were. Some advocates thought there should be a national holiday to raise the self esteem of unemployed and under-employed men. (Despite the push, Father’s Day would only become law in 1972 when President Richard Nixon signed a measure making the day official for the third Sunday of June.)
Even so, recognizing the importance of fathers didn’t mean it was easy for dads to spend more time with their kids. During World War II, fathers went from being “absent from work during the Depression, to absent at war,” as Griswold puts it. Fathers weren’t drafted until late 1943 — contributing to a spike in marriages, as starting a family was a way to avoid the draft — because of experts’ concerns about what kind of impact the draft would have on the American family. U.S. Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT) argued that “slackers” in “government bureaus” should be sent to war before “American homes are broken up.”
The Modern Father
The next major shift is one that continues to this day. Since the women’s liberation movement took off in the late ’60s, leading to more opportunities for women pursue a wider range of job and education opportunities, the image of the family breadwinner changed. The rise of no-fault divorces also led to more kids splitting time between homes. Though there had always been women who supported their families, and families that didn’t conform to the mom-dad-kids model, in the late 20th century American society began to recognize that truth in a new way. And as Americans in families of all types struggled to figure out what it meant to be a “good” parent, fatherhood was part of the battle.
In keeping with the spirit of the times, the “New Fatherhood” movement came back in full force, with renewed concern about the role fathers would now be expected to play in the family as it evolved.
“More children will go to sleep tonight in a fatherless home than ever in the nation’s history,” TIME declared in a cover story on fatherhood that hit newsstands for Father’s Day 1993, amid increased public awareness of this situation. “Talk to the experts in crime, drug abuse, depression, school failure, and they can point to some study somewhere blaming those problems on the disappearance of fathers from the American family. But talk to the fathers who do stay with their families, and the story grows more complicated. What they are hearing, from their bosses, from institutions, from the culture around them, even from their own wives, very often comes down to a devastating message: We don’t really trust men to be parents, and we don’t really need them to be.”
The idea that fathers get the message that they’re not needed — especially now that social media has increased the platforms by which ideas about good parenting can be offered — is still an issue. For example, a study that recently appeared in The Journal of Child and Family Studies suggests that such as “maternal gate-closing,” the idea that mothers still know the most about childcare, could be overwhelming fathers and negatively affecting their confidence in their own ability to parent.
Clearly society has not yet arrived at the perfect image of the “good” American dad, so the evolution continues. And thinking about the evolution is an element of that process. One of the most important parts of this centuries-old balancing act, that recent study’s author Lauren Altenburger told TIME, is for fathers and mothers all to “communicate openly about parenting.”
A Father’s Day resistance movement is brewing out on social media.
It’s not new, but I’ve been watching it grow on my Facebook feed, more this year than ever.
In the past few days, some men have noted that our yearly fathers fest serves only to remind them they have no children. Others, male and female, have remarked that the hoopla serves only to trigger memories of fathers they never knew, who abused or abandoned them, who have died.
“Well,” one man posted, “here comes another fathers day. I would have liked to have known him.”
A commenter on that man’s post responded: “The older I get, the more I’m convinced that these made-up holidays often do more harm than good.”
Another Facebook friend, Steve Bogira, wrote that he wished there was a Parents’ Day instead of separate days for mothers and fathers. The division, as he see it, reinforces stereotypes of men and women and their parental roles.
“Still today, in 2018, society’s view relegates us largely to aloof and distant roles, as opposed to ones that involve actual nurturing,” he wrote.
He made his post after listening to a radio show that asked listeners to call in with the best and worst jokes your dad ever told you. He continued:
“‘How did your dad used to comfort you?’ I wish a radio show would ask. And yes, I know, in most families, mothers are indeed still the primary nurturer. But Mother’s Days and Father’s Days are among the multitude of banalities that keep us stuck in stereotyped parenting.”
To which one of his friends replied: “Not to mention heteronormative. Plenty of gay families with no dad or mom.”
All of that leads to the question: Is Father’s Day outdated?
A lot of people seem to love Father’s Day (and Mother’s Day), though probably fewer than the bubbly media coverage suggests. It can feel phony, like culturally enforced reverence, or, as Bogira says, stereotyped. Like any day that sets up expectations, it’s bound to disappoint many people.
Social media exacerbates the discomfort. Out in the social ether, where lives are compressed into a photo and a paragraph, Father’s Day can seem like a contest.
Best Dad Ever. Most Handsome Dad Ever. My Father, My Hero.
All those handsome, heroic dads parading through the ether can disturb people whose fathers fell far short of the ideal, or whose fathers are gone.
I don’t mind Father’s Day but I’m sympathetic to the resistance.
That’s why last Father’s Day I wrote a salute to all the good men who don’t have children, who help to hold other people’s kids and families together.
It’s why when I’ve written about my father, I’ve talked about his flaws. He was not the best dad ever, but he taught me important things and I loved him deeply, so for a couple of years after he died, I hated Father’s Day because it made me feel excluded.
For different reasons, it makes a lot of people feel excluded.
And yet it serves a purpose.
“It gives you a chance to call your dad and let him know you’re thinking of him,” said a man I know when I floated this notion past him. “For a lot of guys of my generation there wasn’t a lot of outward affection between sons and dads. I remember calling and (if I’m not just gauzing it over with sentimentality) thinking that saying happy Father’s Day was at least a way of showing that I loved him, since I would never come right out and say that.”
Should we need an official day for that? No. But many people use it that way.
I asked a gay friend, who is raising a son with his husband, how he felt about Father’s Day.
“This mostly comes up for us on Mother's Day,” he said. “We’ve sometimes rechristened it Mothering Day, so it's more about the role/function than it is about the gender. Same could be done for Fathering Day. My lesbian sister, for example, tends to do more ‘fathering’ than her partner.”
Despite his sensitivity to gender roles, though, he likes Father’s Day more than he once did, not because he wants to be honored but because it’s a nudge to honor his father.
“I have come to appreciate my own father’s fathering more since becoming a father,” he said. “He always took a bad rap — for teasing us, laying on expectations, instilling questionable ethics, etc. But he had a knack for passing along humor and wisdom and life-hacks (as they’d be called now) and for making sure we knew he was always on our side, all of which I try to do and all of which is not as easy as I’d have thought. So I think it's more like updated than outdated, at least for me.”
I like the notion of updating Father’s Day according to your own perceptions and preferences.
If it doesn’t mean taking dad to brunch or telling him you love him, take a moment in the day to reflect on your father, whoever he was. Or on what you think parenting means. Or on the way our gender-based ideas of parenting are shifting.
Or just go out and enjoy the day your way.
mschmich@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @MarySchmich
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Hillary Clinton
"My dad was highly opinionated to put it mildly ... I learned that more than one opinion could live under the same roof ... I also learned that a person was not necessarily bad just because you did not agree with him, and that if you believed something, you had better be prepared to defend it."
