Stories about fatherhood

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“Stories are habitations. We live in and through stories. They conjure worlds. We do not know the world other than as a story world. Stories inform life. They hold us together and keep us apart. We inhabit the great stories of our culture. We live through stories. We are lived by the stories of our race and place. It is this enveloping and constituting function of stories that is especially important to sense more fully. We are, each of us, locations were the stories of our place and time become partially tellable.”  Mair, M. (1988). The Psychology of Story telling. ç

What are the stories that get evoked for you when you hear the word Dad? Where did the stories you have about Fathers originate? What are the stories in society that are really empowering about fathers as parents and which ones might be limiting or problematic? Also, I would be curious where there seems to be an absence or limited number of stories about what it means to be a father. My favorite Ted talk is by Novelist Chimamanda Adichie entitled The Danger of a Single Story and I think it has application for how we talk about fatherhood. 

One of the things that has stood out to me during the past few years is how little is said about Dads in popular parenting books. Usually they are just absent in parenting books. Or, what is written assumes that Dads only have a secondary or supportive role to the real parenting that Moms do. The story that creates does not seem beneficial for anyone. 

Think about the last book you read about parenting. What story did it promote? 

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