Fathers don’t count

You see, I have six children in school. I think a lot about schooling at all times, especially amid COVID-19. I advocated closing schools back in March because we didn’t have data or science about the virus in schools yet, and I worried about school children’s safety. I fought like crazy over the summer when our county tried to close the Catholic schools where I send my children. I spend all my money and all my free time on my children’s schools. The book I wrote two years ago begins with me in the pediatric ICU with my baby and ends with the (slightly veiled) image of me walking my daughter down the aisle at our parish church.

So, yes, when the New York Times asked me to write about school reopenings, I focused on the science and made sure to note I was a father. That, to my critics, made mine another “dad op-ed.”

Other, anonymous, readers thought the specifics of my fatherhood were revealing in a disqualifying way:

It’s weird to believe that parents’ views on schooling deserve an eye roll. I would think parents’ views are the most important views on schooling. Yet, many teachers union and school board officials consider parents a mere nuisance.

One California school board was recently caught on tape sharing what its members think of parents. It’s as if the education bureaucrats and union leaders are wishing we would stop bringing them children to educate so that they can get back to running the schools without interference.

The most charitable version of this anti-parent view from teachers and school officials is that parents are asking teachers to take a risk the parents wouldn’t take. Of course, my entire op-ed is arguing (with lots of scientific evidence) that getting in a classroom is not especially dangerous. Yet, I got multiple responses along these lines.

Directing this science-denialism at school parents seems particularly inapt. Do they think that parents aren’t being forced to work in person, thus taking greater risks than the science tells us classrooms pose? And do they think that parents never do anything like getting in front of a classroom?

I teach Sunday school at my parish. I supported making it every week and in-person, and that’s now how we do it. In the fall, I organized and coached T-ball with 20 children. I was also an assistant baseball coach in the fall for 10- to 12-year-olds. I also organized and ran a baseball clinic for sixth- and seventh-graders over the summer.

I do all of this because I am a father. That’s one reason I think father and mother op-eds on school reopening deserve more, not less, respect and consideration. Teachers play a crucial role, but ultimately, we parents are the primary educators of our children. It rests ultimately on us to form our children into adulthood as responsible citizens who can contribute to the community.

I know what’s involved in spacing out desks, enforcing mask rules, having to teach through a mask, and having to limit fun activities to preserve distancing. I also think it’s odd that so many teachers would posit that just any op-ed writer could ably teach their classes in their place. Did they not train to do this? Are they not paid to do it? (Then again, maybe someone ought to take them up on it.)

The attitude that fathers don’t count isn’t limited to the issue of education. I’ve been seeing it in the discourse for years. For example, back in the “Me Too” era, it was deemed unacceptable for men to write from the perspective of a father about treating women with respect.

It’s an unfortunate notion, especially because, for generations, a main plague of the U.S. working class has been the lack of present fathers. But especially when we’re talking about school, why would anyone try to write off parents?