Low Expectations For Fathers Hurt Everyone

*Jorge logs on for our session right on time. We started working together after he had an affair with a woman at work. Jorge is the father of three teenage daughters, and he has been married to their mother for 22 years. He reports that he does not need therapy, but he has agreed to go so his “dramatic daughters will get off his back.”

Jorge says his daughters are angry, but he has no idea why. I try to investigate his lack of knowledge and insight, but he cannot explain their feelings to me. In fact, he seems utterly confused by the entire situation. He mentions that the woman he had an affair with has children who go to the same school as his daughters, but he doesn’t think that matters.

I can make a lot of inferences about how Jorge’s daughters feel about his affair and his attitude towards the whole ordeal, but what really fascinates me is how much he thinks this should not impact his daughters. “It was a marital issue. It had nothing to do with them. I love my daughters.” He finds their feelings to be overwhelming and a nuisance. “I ended the affair; it’s over. They need to let me handle this with their mother.”

Jorge cannot see himself as a member of a system. For him, his actions are siloed into [MARRIAGE], [FATHERHOOD], [WORK]. If he does something inside one of those silos, the people outside of that container have no right to be upset. His affair was a misstep in his marriage. It has nothing to do with his daughters.

Jorge is correct that he can have immense love for his daughters and still have an affair. However, his decision to step out of his marriage does impact them, whether he likes it or not. His choice to have an affair will make his wife upset and impact her ability to be a present mother. The other kids at school will gossip. The foundation of the family unit, their marriage, will be shaken. His coworkers know what happened, and it may impact his professional future. His behavior doesn’t exist in a silo.

The siloed father is a cultural product, not a personality flaw

What is happening with Jorge in my office is not unusual. He is doing what the cultural script taught him to do. He sees himself as a single person who occupies three separate boxes. He thinks the people inside one box are not entitled to a say in what happens in another. This is a story we have been telling fathers about their own lives for at least three generations.

Jorge has spent twenty-two years believing the parts of his life were unrelated to one another. When that belief breaks, which it always does, he has no model for what to do next.

Family systems theory tells us something most of you know: a family is not a collection of separate one-on-one relationships. It is a system. When one part of the system shifts, everything else shifts with it. A father is not a stand-alone person who happens to live with other people. He is a member of the system, and everyone is influenced by what he does and what he refuses to do.

The problem is, the cultural story we hand men about fatherhood does not teach them this. We teach men that a father's main job is to provide. We teach them that his second job is to discipline. His third job is to do the fun stuff on Saturdays. We do not teach him that his job is to be emotionally available, in a sustained way, to a set of people whose inner lives should be a priority to him. We teach him that the household is largely his wife's domain, that his children's emotional lives are her department, and that he gets to keep the parts of his life that are about him.

The script tells him this is freedom, but it’s not. It is a separation from his family and from himself that he will eventually pay for.

A 2023 Pew Research survey found that mothers carry most of the emotional labor of parenting. Fifty-eight percent of mothers say they provide more emotional support to their children than their partner does. A 2024 Pew study found that fathers are about 50% more likely than mothers to say they are less involved in their adult child's life than they would like to be.

We are looking at generations of fathers who, by their own reports, were not the primary emotional presence in their children's lives when their children were small. The same fathers, decades later, are surprised to find themselves further from those children than they wanted to be.

Jorge cannot make these connections. He thinks his daughters are being dramatic. He does not have a framework for the idea that emotional distance compounds or that his choices have a ripple effect on the entire family. He has been operating inside these silos his whole life, and he thinks they are “working.” He just does not know what it would actually feel like to be a part of his family, rather than just someone who exists in the home.

The bar for fathers has been on the floor

The expectations we hold fathers to are so low that even when they fail to meet them, we rationalize the failure as normal. A father who doesn’t know what grade his kid is in is just “old school.” A father who took the family's emotional labor for granted is just “tough.” A father who had an affair and told his daughters not to make it about them is “going through a hard time in his marriage.” We have built an entire cultural vocabulary around minimizing what fathers do and what they fail to do.

We say it as if we're letting him off the hook. We are not. We are setting him up for failure and loneliness.

When the bar is this low, a father never develops the skills he will need later. He does not learn how to sit with his children's hard feelings, so when his marriage cracks and a sixteen-year-old wants to talk to him about why he had the affair, he experiences her need as a nuisance instead of a chance to connect and repair. He does not learn how to repair after rupture, so when his coworkers find out about the affair, he cannot face them. He does not learn how to ask for help, so when his life gets smaller, he has no one to call. The bar is so low that he never builds the muscles that would carry him through his own midlife.

Woodford writes in the Atlantic that the modern father-daughter divide is rooted in a mismatch in expectations. Daughters today expect more emotional honesty and presence from the men who raised them than those men were ever trained to offer. However, the mismatch is not that daughters are asking for too much. It’s that the bar for fathers has been so low for so long that meeting it now feels, to the dads, like an unreasonable ask.

It is not an unreasonable ask. What daughters are asking for is what kids have always needed. To be known. To be asked. To be seen as a full person. The reason it sounds new to a lot of fathers is that nobody asked it of their fathers, or their fathers' fathers. So the request reads as a demand. It is not a demand. And a father who can do these things ends up with a different life than the one Jorge has now.

What the low bar costs him

We talk a lot about what the low bar costs the kids. We do not talk enough about what it costs him.

The man who built his life inside the silos is more isolated than he knows. In May 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory naming what he called an epidemic of loneliness, with social isolation raising the risk of premature death by an amount equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Men disproportionately carry that burden. The cultural script that told them they didn’t need anyone left them with no real practice in keeping a friend, leaning on a relative, or asking a partner for what they needed. Their social network was often built and maintained by their wives. When the marriage ends, or when the wife no longer wants to carry all the weight, the network goes with it.

An international meta-analysis of more than 100 million men found that divorced men are at roughly twice the suicide risk of married men. Separated men are at almost five times the risk. The risk peaks in midlife. The same generation of fathers who were under-involved during the parenting years are the ones at acute risk when the marriage cracks and the kids step back. The silos did not protect them. It left them extremely vulnerable.

Jorge's affair fits this pattern in a way he cannot see yet. He is not a man who fell helplessly into love at the office. The affair is a symptom of his isolation. His daughters can see this even if he cannot. They are responding to a father who has been quietly absent for so long that they recognize the affair as evidence of something they already suspected. The low bar set him up for this moment. And the cultural script that minimizes the affair, the one that says it was a marital issue and not a fatherhood issue, is the same script that will keep him from doing the work that would actually save the next twenty years of his life.

The cost compounds across generations

This is also where the story stops being only about him. Research on the intergenerational transmission of fathering suggests that the patterns persist across generations. Fathers who experienced emotional absence from their own fathers are more likely to repeat the pattern with their children. However, the cycle is not inevitable. Self-reflection, intentional emotional engagement, and access to other people who will tell the man the truth about himself can repair this pattern. The cycle breaks when a man stops thinking he is one person and starts seeing himself as an important member of a system.

Most fathers will not do that work. Most are inheriting the script and passing it down. The sons inherit the silos. The daughters inherit the expectation that men cannot be emotionally connected. The grandchildren inherit a grandfather they barely know.

Why we cannot name the father wound

Mother wounds have a vocabulary. We have shelves of books about neglectful, rejecting, absent, and cruel mothers. We have language for enmeshment, for the narcissistic mother, for the critical mother, for the absent mother. The culture has decided that what a mother is supposed to provide is large enough that her failure to provide it can be named.

Father wounds do not yet have that vocabulary in the same way. The phrase itself, “father wound,” still feels like therapy-speak to a lot of people. The cultural script does not allow us to put the same weight on what a father failed to provide, because the script never required him to provide it in the first place. In fact, daughters are often blamed for what their fathers couldn’t provide (“daddy issues” is a great example). You cannot name a wound that the culture has decided is not a wound.

Some scholars believe that the rise in estrangement reflects an increased cultural emphasis on individual happiness and self-fulfillment, and that some of what adult children are calling 'harm' is actually a generational shift in expectations rather than a clear-cut case of harm. The argument is: the bar should stay where it was. The kids are asking for too much. The dads were fine.

The dads are not fine. The dads, by their own reports, are drifting further away from their children than they intended or want. The dads are feeling the loneliness epidemic. The dads are dying earlier and at higher rates after divorce. The bar that protects them from accountability also keeps them from the help and connection they need.

I am not interested in keeping the bar where it was. I am interested in being accurate about what it has cost everyone.

What naming the wound does

Naming a father wound is not the same as blaming your father. You are just putting words to what you experienced and how it has impacted both of you.

Raising the bar is not punishment. It is the beginning of giving a man back the parts of his own life that the cultural script took from him. If we let men keep believing they live their lives in totally separate boxes, we deny them the chance to be a real participant in the only system that will be there when they are seventy and tired, and the rest of the silos have closed down.

Jorge will probably not take that in. He will leave my office still convinced that his marriage is a separate file from his fatherhood, and his fatherhood is a separate file from his work, and the people in any one box are not entitled to a say in any other. The distance will keep him safe from his daughters' anger. It will also keep him safe from his own grief about everything he has missed. It will keep him from any real relationships.

You cannot make your father see himself as a member of the system. You can name what is happening. You can name what you are responding to. You can put accurate language on what you have been carrying for years without permission to call it a wound. Naming the wound your father caused is not betraying him. If you have been told your whole life that your reaction to his behavior is the problem, this is the month to consider that the reaction was actually the only honest part of the story. And if the people who love a Jorge are willing to start telling him the truth and he is willing to listen, then there is a small chance he hears it before the silos close in for good.