A Generation of Sons Seeks Stronger Ties

The generation gap of the ‘60s and ‘70s distanced sons from their fathers, and many baby boomers are discovering it is time to seek love, not war, in their own families.

“As baby boomers age, we become aware of our mortality, that our fathers aren’t going to be around forever,” said Leonard Szymczak, 51, a family therapist at the Family Institute at Northwestern University. “There may be more of an impetus to try and reach out to them, to find out who they are.”

In some ways, says Szymczak, men are learning what women have known all along.

“Women are more aware of relationship issues,” he said. “For men, that hasn’t been our area of expertise, but we’re starting to move more into that particular arena.”

In recent decades, as more women began to work outside of the home, baby boomer men formed closer bonds with their children than they had known with their own fathers. In many cases, these relationships have taught middle-aged men that family ties are singularly important--and have brought them back to their own fathers, he said.

Aaron Kipnis is a clinical psychologist, author and president of the Fatherhood Coalition, a nonprofit organization that helps fathers in their relationships with children and spouses. He says fathers and sons who draw closer to one another are overcoming a culture of reticence that particularly is evident among men who lived through World War II.

“I think the ethos of that time was that you didn’t want to burden your children,” he said. “You didn’t complain, you did your work, you did your job and there wasn’t a sense of exploring the psychological issues, the deeper issues.”

Previous generations of American fathers were molded by military values, said Kipnis, a Santa Barbara resident who wrote “Angry Young Men: How Parents, Teachers and Counselors Can Help ‘Bad Boys’ Become Good Men” (Jossey-Bass, 1999).

“Whether a man goes to war or not, every generation of men in America has been engaged in a major conflict; so, to some degree, society is conspiring unconsciously to train them to become a soldier at some point and soldiers aren’t supposed to complain,” Kipnis said. “They’re supposed to do what they’re told, do their duty. . . . We see that same attitude in political leaders, community leaders, business leaders.”

The stories that we hear from our fathers not only give us an understanding of them, they help us understand ourselves, says Sylvie Taylor, an assistant professor at the California School of Professional Psychology in Los Angeles.

“The adage that you don’t really know where you’re going until you know where you came from holds true,” Taylor said. She has written “Books for Our Children, Books for Ourselves: An African-American Parent’s Guide to Reading Children’s Literature” (Healing Villagers Press, 1999). The book, which recommends other books enhancing cultural identity, also urges parents to tell stories about their own lives to children.

“It’s using reading as a way of bridging one generation to another and fostering the connection between the parent, the child, the ancestors who came before and allows parents to understand the perspectives their children have on the world,” Taylor said.

Time passes quickly, experts stress. For some boomers, it is too late. Their fathers are gone, their stories buried with them and their sons left with the tragic question: Who were they?