Another question for you fathers, would you encourage your daughter to become a Doctor? Scientist?
I'm not regretting the extent to which I encouraged my daughters to be productive, but given the way that lines up with our culture, as well as that they are legally independent as of 18 years of age, there isn't much I can do to
prevent them from doing whatever they choose to do. So they will do what they want to do.
However, I
never encouraged any of my children to go to college. If they were passionate about pursuing a career that required college, I was very supportive of their own self-motivated efforts to do so, which included assisting Mercer in racking up all the background requirements for gaining admission to the Air Force Academy and even living 2 additional years in Pennsylvania so Naomi could become valedictorian. But, when they asked, I always told them I thought college wasn't worth the investment unless they had a specific career in mind among the minority that actually require some kind of diploma, because those degrees aren't worth what
students pay for them, much less the additional 200% that all the governmental and alumni subsidies amount to (Big Ed is one of the biggest rackets in this country).
As far as my daughters go, I failed to fully
prepare them to be good helpmeets, but what I
did do from birth on was encourage them to be prepared to have children within the context of being married, without necessarily even waiting until they were legal adults. I've long believed that we mistakenly encourage young women to wait too long to get married.
So I would never
encourage my daughters to be doctors or scientists, but if they were passionate about doing so, I would support their choice; however, I would certainly discuss with them the fact that that level of educational commitment would almost necessarily interfere with their desire (which each of my daughters has pretty consistently expressed) to have many children, as well as with their ability to have a significant in-person relationship with those children during their formative years. Research backs up that mothers are more important to children during their early years and that fathers are more important during puberty and what we call adolescence.
Kristin and I both probably would have been very encouraging to either of our daughters had they exhibited any desire to become midwives, but neither did. I certainly believe that's a calling that is likely almost entirely appropriate for women, but I don't know that I'd agree with the same statement being made about ob/gyn's. Our ob/gyn for our first three children was Dr. Joseph Tate in Atlanta GA, an Orthodox Jew who had to go before a rabbinical counsel to receive special permission to even go to school to become an ob/gyn. He is a world-renown leader in both cliterodectomy reversals and VBACs (vaginal births after Caesareans); he may be 90 years old now, but if he's still practicing both Kristin and I would wholeheartedly recommend him to
anyone. Incredibly supportive about natural childbirth.
I know I'm rambling, but, back to the original question: I have found with my daughter who is in college that, in discussing her motivations, probably the biggest one she has for getting a degree is to prove that she can make it on her own. She has a very difficult time ascertaining who her 'audience' is for doing such proving, but it's pretty clear to me: some is from her mother, but most of it is just a matter of that being the message she got from almost all of her teachers growing up in public school. Most of her teachers were women, and very few of them had children. In my own conversations with those teachers, they very consistently came across to me as being personally desperate to prove that they themselves were happy and that they didn't need to depend on any man; a great many of them are committed to never having any children but declare like robots that they think of their students as their children.
I can pinpoint a number of key points in my life where I made the wrong choices, and the pattern is one of demonstrating my weakness as a man. As they relate to my children, probably the biggest one was caving in about sending them to public school. I don't recommend it to anyone -- especially for the reason that drove Kristin to demand it for Felix: 'socialization.' They don't socialize children; they indoctrinate them and prepare them to be cogs in a 'socialismized' world. I'm proud of my daughters for making it through that gauntlet still insistent on being mothers, but that's just one part of a mental soup that includes being very driven to impress others that they can make it on their own.
)
