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Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Andy Harrelson.<\/em><\/p>\n In 1969, then governor of California, Ronald Reagan, signed into law the country\u2019s first no-fault divorce bill. Many other states quickly followed his example. Whether his signing the bill was the cause<\/i> of the skyrocketing divorce rates that were to come in the next decades or merely a reaction<\/i> to the already increasing divorce rate is up for debate. However, I strongly suspect the latter supposition to be true.<\/p>\n By the time my own mom and pop got together and conceived me in 1973, divorce was almost a rite of passage into middle age. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I encountered and struggled with the hardships brought on by our changing cultural values; hardships that I share with many other men my age. I didn\u2019t know, for example, how to defend myself from the bullies who wanted to test my resolve on the playground or in the halls of my high school. I have also had more than my fair share of trouble relating to the opposite sex. Heck, I even had to learn how to change the spark plugs in my \u201984 Bronco II from a Chilton manual! The primary cause of these deficiencies in me and many others were due to divorce or just plain old absenteeism. You see, we didn\u2019t have fathers around to teach us the virtues of behaving as proper men. Chances are, a lot of you reading this can relate, although even without a father figure around, you hopefully had enough sense to avoid the mistake of buying a Bronco II. That one was all mine.<\/p>\n My mother and father were divorced by the time I was 3 or 4 years old. He wasn\u2019t especially interested in continuing his relationship with me afterwards, either. My mother never re-married, and I\u2019m an only child, so not only did I grow up without a father, but without any other immediate family. I had my work cut out for me, but through it all I think I gathered enough experience to achieve one very important goal: how not to become my deadbeat father<\/b>. If you, too, want to avoid this or if you think you might be taking on the traits of your own absentee dad, maybe I can help you drop those bad habits<\/a> before they hurt you or someone you love.<\/p>\n Modern studies conducted by the Family Research Council<\/a> now indicate that about half of American kids won\u2019t reach adulthood without seeing the breakup of their parents. To be precise, only 45.8 percent of American children reach the age of 17 with both their biological parents married.<\/p>\n These statistics reflect that our culture is in need of a serious overhaul, and the job of fixing it falls to each and every one of us to do our part. The aim of this article is not to delve too deeply into the how or why of what got us to this point. Rather, I hope to bring your attention to several characteristics or personality traits possessed by men who had an absentee or abusive\/alcoholic dad growing up. If we can identify the garbage in our own characters, we can take steps to throw it out before it overflows and we end up passing our unhealthy traits on to someone else.<\/p>\n Adult children of absentee and\/or abusive parents are as varied as any other demographic group on the planet, but it has come to the attention of Dr. Janet G. Woititz and other researchers that this particular group shares certain characteristics in common. I\u2019m going to go over what I feel are the most important and potentially damaging of these characteristics. I\u2019ll tell you how these traits negatively affected me, and then tell you how you, as an alert and responsible man, might avoid these pitfalls in your own life and thus become better prepared for fatherhood yourself.<\/p>\n This is where it all started for me. There was no dad to teach me the value of assertiveness<\/a>, so mom became the gateway to personal validation. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I love and respect my mother. It takes a strong woman to be able to raise a son singlehandedly, and I wouldn\u2019t be half the man I am today without her guidance. But she ended up being the gatekeeper for me even into my young adult years. What I needed from a father figure was the confidence and self-esteem that would enable me to make important decisions on my own. Instead, I ended up compensating for a lack of confidence by seeking counsel from mom for everything from my diet to what kind of shoes to wear to job interviews and everything in between.<\/p>\n Breaking the habit<\/b>: Are you the kind of person who obsesses and needs validation over every little decision? Chocolate or vanilla? Staple or paper clip? I was like this, too. Please believe me when I say that this kind of thinking does no good for anyone, least of all you. You know all those jobs you\u2019re thinking about applying to that require \u201cindependent thinking?\u201d Well, that\u2019s not a description of you if you\u2019re going to be constantly running to the boss with trifles. You know deep down what\u2019s good for you and what\u2019s not; what constitutes work well done and what amounts to a shoddy job. Do you really need to seek someone else\u2019s opinion for such trivial matters? Take stock of the situation and the information at hand and make a decision. Be your own man<\/a>. You\u2019ll savor your victories even more.<\/p>\n Something was wrong with me, there must have been. Why else would all the other kids go home after school to houses with both moms and dads, while I walked back to an empty house or a babysitter because my mom was busy working 10 or 12-hour shifts to support us? It\u2019s easy for a kid to get down on himself without the proper support, and trying harder to correct your perceived faults isn\u2019t the answer. In fact, trying harder to \u201cfix\u201d myself probably just contributed to my self-loathing, since, given that I was not the cause of the problem, I was predestined to fail at repairing it.<\/p>\n Breaking the habit<\/b>: So you\u2019re a harsh self critic? So what? It\u2019s not all bad, you might be thinking. That punishing, inner critic can actually spur you on to great accomplishments. But you\u2019ve got to be careful. Would you offer criticism to other people with the same harsh voice you use to critique yourself? Probably not, unless you wanted to burn some bridges and end some friendships. The negative self-talk adds up, even if we\u2019re just talking to ourselves. If you know you\u2019re good at what you\u2019re doing, then cut yourself some slack and enjoy life. Like the old saying goes: \u201cBe happy while you\u2019re living, for you\u2019re a long time dead.\u201d<\/p>\n You know all that attention that dad wasn\u2019t giving me? Well, I found it somewhere else. All of the relationship building that should have been happening between my father and I was instead happening with people who did not have my best interests at heart, to put it mildly. But because I was so eager to find acceptance, I couldn\u2019t see straight, and I put my faith and loyalty in people who did not deserve it. Every kid makes some bad choices regarding friends when growing up — it\u2019s all a part of learning to judge character. But when the bad relationship choices extend into your adult life, you\u2019re inviting disappointment and outright heartache.<\/p>\n Breaking the habit<\/b>: Friendships are two-way streets and they are built on the commonalities between two people on equal footing. If you find yourself giving and giving without getting anything in return, if you take a close look at your \u201cfriends\u201d and find that you have little in common with them, if you find that you and the ones to whom you give your loyalty are from radically different walks of life — then it might be time to re-evaluate who your real friends are.<\/p>\n This one probably hurts the most. Looking back on my youth, I can\u2019t begin to count the number of opportunities I missed out on because I hadn\u2019t yet learned how to follow through. Dad wasn\u2019t around to show me that when things get tough, you need to lower your shoulder and run through the sh*t. Instead, if things didn\u2019t work out for me right away, I was more inclined to just drop what I was doing and move on. This is no way to experience life, as a young man or a grown one.<\/p>\n Breaking the habit<\/b>: This is purely a matter of willpower<\/a> and self-discipline<\/a>. Most people have no trouble recognizing all of the half-finished projects scattered around behind them, so the only real obstacle is apathy. It\u2019s difficult if you\u2019re attempting to overcome this later in life, but I think the only answer is to take a stand. No more coulda, shoulda, woulda. When you start something, you finish it. Period.<\/p>\n When evaluating your character, it\u2019s important not to play the blame game<\/a>. It\u2019s good to be able to identify your own deficiencies and how they developed, but in the end, it\u2019s you alone who are responsible for fixing them. For advice on how to start owning up to your mistakes, check out this AoM article on cultivating personal responsibility. <\/a><\/p>\n For even more enlightenment on the subject of absentee or abusive fathers, there are a couple articles from the AoM archive you might want to read: 6 Lessons I Learned About Being a Man from Growing Up Fatherless<\/a> is pretty self-explanatory, while A Generation of Men Raised by Women<\/a> is more about the reasons behind the phenomenon.<\/p>\n What lessons have you learned from having an absentee, alcoholic, or abusive father?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n _________________<\/p>\n Andy Harrelson grew up in the desert southwest of the United States, where he now lives (barely) and works (too often) as a starving writer. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Andy Harrelson. In 1969, then governor of California, Ronald Reagan, signed into law the country\u2019s first no-fault divorce bill. Many other states quickly followed his example. Whether his signing the bill was the cause of the skyrocketing divorce rates that were to come in the next decades […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":31344,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[253,6,42285],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-31337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fatherhood","category-featured","category-relationships"],"featured_image_urls":{"large":"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2013\/03\/vintagedad-405x280.jpg","aom":"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2013\/03\/vintagedad-372x230.jpg","reactor-320":"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2013\/03\/vintagedad-320x384.jpg"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31337"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":171007,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31337\/revisions\/171007"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31337"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=31337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Adult Children of Absentee, Alcoholic, and\/or Abusive Fathers Tend to:<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
1) Need constant approval to feel validated.<\/b><\/h3>\n
2) Be harsh self critics.<\/strong><\/h3>\n
3) Value loyalty to the exclusion of common sense.<\/strong><\/h3>\n
4) Have difficulty finishing what they start.<\/strong><\/h3>\n