Help with Fathers Day talk in church

I would just ignore the topic they gave you, and give the talk you want to give. It can hardly be inappropriate to give a talk about fathers on Father’s Day.

Maybe you do a spin-off of Elder Oaks’ talk about Priesthood and focus on a father’s responsibility to teach children to access priesthood authority and power in their own lives. If it helps, you can see how I have discussed that talk with the youth in my Sunday School class and perhaps adapt some of that to fatherhood.

Or you could ignore the topic and give whatever Father’s Day talk you’d like to give. 🙂

I have no problem blowing off the assigned topic and speaking on what I want. I’m just looking for somehting interesting about Fathers. Ray, I like your idea of using Oak’s talk, I’ll look into that.

My talk isn’t all about Father’s Day, but I pan on saying something about it. I was thinking something along the lines of the relationship between Jesus and Heavenly Father and how we call God Father because of Jesus. I think father is a noble title and shouldn’t be taken lightly, including here as earthly fathers. While we don’t know much about the relationship between Joseph and Jesus, it is apparent that Joseph treated him as his own son and apparently did a pretty good job of raising him.

In choosing Mary, God also chose Joseph.

I’ve also thought about the father of the prodigal son.

Hi Sheldon. I can’t speak for biblical. Introduction but what I can say is a lot of what people assume about fathers is wrong. The science has been complied for over 20 years now and I first have a talk when it was first introduced.

You might actually have dinosaurs or your dinosaur attraction …errr… You might actually have fathers in your Father’s Day talk.

With that said a lot of what people assume fathers role is and what he can and can’t do in relation to mothers is now known to be wrong for the past 20 ish years.

The assumption is—and has been—that mothers matter more than fathers to a child’s health and development. As a result, the image of fathers and their contributions to their children’s lives is more negative than positive, more myth and stereotype than fact.

Dismissing dads as essential to children’s wellbeing has prevailed decade after decade. In his 1945 edition of his book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, Dr. Benjamin Spock, wrote, “Of course, I don’t mean that the father has to give just as many bottles or change just as many diapers as the mother. But it’s fine for him to do these things occasionally. He might make the formula on Sunday.”

The stereotyping of dads as inconsequential lingers even in the face of solid research that shows the innuendos, labels and jabs are wrong. Once society latches on to a notion, it is difficult to move to new, more accurate thinking.

In his new book, Do Fathers Matter? What Science is Telling Us about the Parent We’ve Overlooked, Paul Raeburn reminds us of Michael Lamb, one of the primary advocates of research on fathers. Lamb “showed babies and fathers become attached in the same way—and at the same time developmentally—that mothers and babies do.”

According to a Pew Research Center report, the number of stay at home dads who care for their children has jumped significantly over the last two decades.Nonetheless, the prevailing idea that fathers play only a supporting role persists. For instance, in a series of commercials for Procter & Gamble that ran during the Olympics about the athletes who were competing, the tag line was, “Thank you, Mom.” “Fathers’ contributions were being erased even in sports, where stereotypes would suggest that they might be the more important parent,” Raeburn points out.

Raeburn’s exploration of the scientific evidence concludes that fathers have a profound influence and, in some instances, fathers are indeed shown to be more important than mothers:

Fathers make unique contributions to language development in their children; fathers actually matter more in this sense. When fathers use more words with preschool children during play, children have more advanced language skills a year later.

Children whose fathers play with them, read to them, take them on outings, and help care for them have fewer behavioral problems in their early school years and a lesser likelihood of delinquency as adolescents.

When fathers are absent, there is a “robust association between father absence—both physical and psychological—and accelerated reproductive development and risk-taking in daughters.”

Linda Nielsen, professor of educational and adolescent psychology and the author of Father-Daughter Relationships: Contemporary Research & Issues, underscores this influence: “The well-fathered daughter is also the most likely to have relationships with men that are emotionally intimate and fulfilling. During the college years, these daughters are more likely than poorly-fathered women to turn to their boyfriends for emotional comfort and support and they are less likely to be “talked into” having sex. As a consequence of having made wiser decisions in regard to sex and dating, these daughters generally have more satisfying, more long-lasting marriages. What is surprising is not that fathers have such an impact on their daughters’ relationships with men, but that they generally have more impact than mothers do.”

Alyssa Croft and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia asked the question, “Do Parents’ Gender Roles at Home Predict Children’s Aspirations? Clearly they do. Here again, the emphasis was the effect of the father on his daughters. Their conclusion: Fathers who help with household chores are more likely to raise daughters who aspire to less traditional, and potentially higher paying, careers.

As more attention is paid to fathers’ roles in their children’s lives, we can only hope that the bad rap dads have been getting as more irrelevant than relevant dissipates. Do fathers matter? For sure, and Raeburn’s deep dive into the history, science, biology and psychology of fatherhood illuminates fathers’ substantial contributions that until now were fairly well-kept secrets.

We can no longer ignore or dismiss the important role that fathers play in their sons and daughters’ lives—starting as early as during a partner’s pregnancy. Raeburn makes a convincing and eye-opening argument that fathers deserve to share the stage in every way with mothers who have long held top ranking stemming from the “sacred mother-infant bond” as Kyle Pruett, a Yale University psychiatrist, put it. Pruett rightly believes that not looking at the impact of fathers and children on one another has given the entire field…a myopic and worrisomely distorted view of child development, a view with staggering blind spots.”

Raeburn has succeeded in opening our eyes.

Resources:

Croft, Alyssa and Toni Schmader, Katharina Block & Andrew Scott Baron. “The Second Shift Reflected in the Second Generation: Do Parents’ Gender Roles at Home Predict Children’s Aspirations? Psychological Science, submitted March 14, 2014. http://news.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/FULL-submitted-version-PSCI-13-1163-R2.pdf

Livingston, Gretchen. “Growing Number of Dads Home with the Kids.” Pew Research Center’s Social and Demographic Trends Project, June 5, 2014. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/06/05/growing-number-of-dads-home-with-the-kids/

Nielsen, Linda. “How Dads Affect Their Daughters into Adulthood.” Institute of Family Studies, blog, June 3, 2014. http://family-studies.org/how-dads-affect-their-daughters-into-adulthood/

Raeburn, Paul. Do Fathers Matter? What Science is Telling Us about the Parent We’ve Overlooked. New York: Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

Spock, Benjamin. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1945.

Copyright @ 2014 Susan Newman, Ph.D.

If you could tie the misconceptions in with the scriptures fathers would be my personal take. The attitudes and miss information that fathers can’t form the nurturing bond to children that mothers can has been proven to be false. With the great rise in stay at home dads it plays importance I. Dispelling them myths tied into scripture. Anyways I thought that this information plays well into Father’s Day since these traits are overlooked or not acknowledged at all for the most part.

Fathers and others short change themselves as well as being short changed through others in what effect they have and what they can it can’t do in relation to mothers.

Thought it would be a fact worth spreading to fathers and others on you know, Father’s Day.

Remembering that Father’s Day is only part of my talk, I’m going with things we learn from the father of the prodigal son and a very dear statement from my missionary son on why he won’t call his trainer his father.