Fathers of New Mexico

Johnny Wilson showing what fathers in New Mexico can do. Photo by Clarke Condé.

Happy Father’s Day! Too bad it’s not all that happy for all fathers. Nobody said it was going to be easy to be a father, but the challenges can be overwhelming in a culture that often views fathers as secondary in a child’s life. Bias manifest in social services, schools and courtrooms. That's where Fathers New Mexico often comes in.

Fathers New Mexico works has worked with hundreds of dads in New Mexico over the years to help them become better fathers. They are among the few organizations that specificly advocate for dads and their important role in children's lives. The Albuquerque Courier’s editor Clarke Condé sat down with Johnny Wilson, Executive Director of Fathers New Mexico to find out how society views fathers and what kind of challenges that creates. The following is an edited version of that interview.

Clarke Condé: So I wanted to start by sharing with the readers the Margaret Mead quote I’m sure you’ve seen a million times, “The most important task of any civilization is to teach its young men how to be fathers.” How do we do that?

Johnny Wilson: That's a great question. That important job, even if you're not ranking it up at the top like Margaret Mead does, that important job is not something we do at all. I mean, I shouldn't say that we don't do it at all. It's not something that we focus on in our society. Why is that job important? One of the reasons is just the basic biological reality of children. The mother carries them, and that's why we always have to respect the intensity of a woman's experience of becoming a mother, biologically speaking. But of course, becoming a parent is intense regardless and there's a different sort of prep that men might or might not experience. Obviously, the more preparation and support for fatherhood the better and I think Margaret Mead recognized that there are circumstances where that's not adequately attended to and things go sideways. When that's the case, fathers don't get engaged. Fathers don't know how to engage without a social construct where they learn about how to be fathers. If they're not engaged, then children miss out on a very important bonding relationship and men miss out on a very important relationship in their lives.

What are the challenges you see that can threaten the connection that fathers have with their children?

There is a myriad of potential challenges. At Fathers New Mexico, we try to focus on families that are more likely to experience challenges. We tend to work, not exclusively by any means, but we tend to work with fathers that are younger, sometimes teenage fathers. We tend to work with fathers from neighborhoods that have more concentrations of poverty, more concentrations of police action and that kind of thing. I would definitely say that poverty is a significant challenge. That's for everyone. Every member of the family that's living with poverty. Accessing resources is very difficult. It's very complex. It takes a lot of time. If you look at fathers, there's a whole litany of special circumstances. One, if a father wants to engage resources in support of his family, it's very likely that the resource that he tries to engage won't know how to deal with him. They won't understand why a man is standing in front of them. They won't have had a lot of experience working with a man. They may even feel threatened because it's a man and they won't treat him right.

We talk a lot about toxic cultures and toxic environments. Does this speak to a toxic cultural view of fathers?

I think it does.

What is it about the culture we have here in New Mexico in respect to our view of fathers? What is toxic?

I'm not sure that it is that unique in New Mexico, but definitely in the United States, we have a language of suspicion about fathers' motives. We have a language that suggests that we expect men to try to avoid the responsibility of fatherhood. Even when we have positive views of men as fathers, wanting to be fathers and doing their best, we tend to look at them as kind of bumbling, ridiculous creatures that, though loving, are not particularly helpful in child-rearing and nurturing.

Like a Homer Simpson?

There you go. Yeah. That's a great example. You see it in advertisements. You see it all over the place. I think in New Mexico, it’s maybe exacerbated by poverty again. I keep coming back to that, but I think that's the reality, particularly in circumstances like when two parents are living separately. We don't understand that the vast majority of fathers in those circumstances are actually working to figure out how to parent their children. They're working to figure out what the best things are for their children. They're working to partner with the other parent to make sure that they have enough time with their child, to have the bonding that the relationship requires. There are a lot of barriers to all of that. 

Why is there such a stigma around fathers asking for help?

I don't know. I think part of it is a cultural idea about masculinity. Men aren't supposed to ask for help in general. All of these facts are exacerbated if you are young and brown, quite frankly, because all of folk's prejudices that they may not even be aware of that influence their interpretation of people. Those things play a part. We definitely see where, maybe a young we’ll say Hispanic dad is, without any substantive justification, accused of being a danger to their child. Well, quite honestly, with a 35-year-old male, there would need to be more than just an accusation made, whereas with a young, Hispanic male that might be enough to require that young man have supervised visitations, which is not a simple thing. That's a very limited amount of time you get with your kid. Most of the time you're having to pay for that visitation, which is not cheap. It's probably during the workday, I mean, all of these things.

You're saying there's a bias associated with the family court system?

Yes. I don't think that they are any more biased than the average person on the street. I'm not accusing anyone in that system of being vindictive towards people of color or young men. I just think that we, as a culture, are likely to respond to accusations about male violence with a positive assumption that male violence did happen, even when there are motivations in the other party making the accusations.

Getting back to Margaret Mead, the statistics are pretty clear about potential negative outcomes for children without father figures in their lives. If we acknowledge that those are outcomes that we don't want, how do we put fathers into a more primary role of caregiver to their children?

I have a few answers. First of all, all family services that are provided to families need to look at their own data. When New Mexico home visiting programs look at their data, they see that under five percent of participating parents are fathers. I know some of these folks that are involved and they're recognizing that as a challenge. Everyone else needs to as well. Everybody needs to look at their data and say, ‘Oh, look, we have a very low participation rate of fathers. Okay, we're gonna do our part to change that.’ Also, we need to be talking to boys and men in a different way. Not with the expectation that you will depart when the going gets tough or expensive as you're dealing with becoming a father or parenting. Don't put that out there as an expectation, because it's not what men want to do. They want to be present. The court system needs to look at this because the interruption that happens between children and their fathers as a result of decisions made in courtrooms happens consistently. Very often there does not appear to be a really good reason for it happening in my experience. We need to recognize that working with men is different because one of the problems is the internalized masculinity messages. If a young man who's coming into manhood wants to show the world that he is the man that he's supposed to be, and part of that is supposed to be not asking for help, well, that young man's going to be disinclined to ask for help. A lot of these young men have also experienced life with interactions with systems that are very negative. Even if they haven't been involved in the court system in any way, the schools may have [not been positive]. They have not been encouraged to engage systems. In fact, they've been discouraged.

It's about breaking the cycle?

We need to break that cycle of mistrust. We need to create services that understand that there's a new process of relationship building and engagement that happens before even the services are delivered.

For more information on Fathers New Mexico

see their website, Fathersnewmexico.org