When I was foster parenting back in the day, 8-year-old Davie was sent to me for two days of respite.
Respite is a period of time off for a foster parent who needs a break. The child is placed with another foster parent for a day or two, or more. This practice is used when an emergency situation occurs, or it may be just to avoid the burnout so often experienced by foster parents. Not all foster parents agree to accept kids for respite, but as long as I had a bed, I was willing to do it.
Davie was a joy. He had been raised by a single mother and his foster parent was a single mother, as well. I may have been the first father figure he had ever experienced.
He had been with me perhaps 30 seconds when he said, “Can I call you dad?”
“Of course,” I said, “If you’d like to.”
For the rest of that two days it was “dad” this and “daddy” that. “Dad, can I do this?” “Daddy, look at me!” It was sweet, joyous, and at the same time heart-wrenching. When a father is needed, some kids will invent one.
So it was with Sam, age 10. Sam had a different twist on it. “I have a dad,” he said, “But he’s not real.”
“What do you mean, not real, Sam?”
“Well, see, his name is Herman, but I call him ‘dad.’ I just invented him so I’d have someone to talk to or play with. See, I can bounce my ball off the garage door and it comes back to me, but it’s like dad is throwing it back to me, and he says, ‘Nice throw, Sammy!’ and stuff like that”
Very sweet, but very sad.
Of course, you don’t have to be a foster kid to have an absent father. There are plenty of single moms out there doing all they can to fill the void. Lots of them do it commendably.
So are fathers essential? Of course not, and there are a whole lot of single-mother homes where boys have been raised happily and successfully. Research has demonstrated many times over that it’s the quality of the parenting, not the gender of the parents, that counts. But I’m talking here of those fatherless boys who would disagree. To them a father is very important.
Mothers of boys in this category have a number of avenues open to them:
Recruit male figures from their families, or family friends, or men from the community to be in their sons’ lives.
Look into summer camps, athletic programs or church groups where adult male figures are there to counsel and play with the kids in those programs — especially one in which those adult males may be able to step outside the program itself to devote one-to-one time to those kids who need it.
Investigate Big Brothers or similar programs in which male volunteers have made themselves available to be with fatherless boys for a few hours a week.
Guide their sons toward noteworthy male role models in real life or in fiction to respond to and emulate.
Visit the local high school and talk with a counselor who may be able to recommend a student — preferably a junior or senior— who could take a couple of hours a couple of times a week to shoot hoops or just talk.
It may be surprising to note that boys in these non-conventional families where some of these approaches have been utilized may have more adult male contact than those boys in a traditional family where workaholic dad is always at the office or trucker dad is on the road two weeks at a time.
Perhaps these kids are inventing fathers, too.
Robin C. Harris, an 18-year resident of Lake County, is the author of “Journeys out of Darkness, Adventures in Foster Care.” A retired educator, he is a substitute teacher for Lake County schools and has recently completed two works of fiction for children and teens. He is available for tutoring in first through eighth grades. Harris can be contacted at harris.tke@att.net.
