Pope Francis: The Heart of Spiritual Fathers

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A guest post by Pastoral Solutions Institute Clinical Pastoral Counselor, Dave McClow, M.Div, LMFT.

Image via Shutterstock. Used with permission.

Image via Shutterstock. Used with permission.

Cardinal Kasper thinks that “heroism is not for the average Christian.” Can you hear Jesus say, “Be mediocre, as your heavenly Father is mediocre”?  Or, “If it is hard to do, don’t bother picking up your cross”?  Or, “Lay down your life if it’s convenient”?  I don’t think sooo….  Men need to be challenged!  They need to be loved, but they definitely need to be challenged to live a heroic life.  In fact, I think that all men are created to live heroic lives as spiritual fathers, to make a difference in our world.  The real question is not if, but how, do we live heroic lives as spiritual fathers?  During Pope Francis’ recent visit, he provided some answers.

In a Catholic vision of masculinity, I have suggested that spiritual fatherhood is the summit of being a man.  Pope Francis speaks to this new order of fatherhood: “[A pastor] will enable his brothers…to hear and experience God’s promise, which can expand their experience of…fatherhood… (Mk 3:31-35)” (Meeting with Bishops, 11/27/15).  Jesus instituted this new spiritual family or household when he said, “whoever does the will of God” is my family (Mk 3:35).

What gets in the way of living out a heroic life as a spiritual father?  Since the fall of Satan there has been a battle that creates fear in the world!  Pope Francis proclaims, “Bishops [spiritual fathers] need to be lucidly aware of the battle between light and darkness being fought in this world” (To the US Bishops, 11/23/15); and he encourages us to teach our “children to be excited by every gesture aimed at overcoming evil” (WMF, 11/27/15).

Pope Francis believes that our consumer culture that “discards everything” is destructive, saying it produces “a radical sense of loneliness.” We seek empty things including “accumulating ‘friends’ on [a] social network.”  The result: “[l]oneliness with fear of commitment in a limitless effort to feel recognized” (Meeting with Bishops, 11/27/15).

I think that fear is at the root of most, if not all, sin and always disrupts love and relationships.

What is the remedy to fear?  It is heroic spiritual fatherhood, which always starts with receiving love in the heart! The Apostle John writes, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear” (1 Jn 4:18). Pope Francis chimes in, “‘[L]ove consists in this, not that we have loved God but that he loved us’ first (1 Jn 4:10). That love gives us a profound certainty: we are sought by God; he waits for us.  It is this confidence which makes disciples encourage, support and nurture the good things happening all around them” (WMF 11/27/15).

Pope Francis speaks of the heart: “It will do us good to think back on our lives with the grace of remembrance.…of the amazement which our encounter with Jesus Christ awakens in our hearts” (Vespers, 11/24/15).  Memory is the key to the heart and to our faith!

Maybe you have not had this amazing encounter with Christ.  You must find ways to experience his love in your heart as a beloved son!  Talk to your priest or someone you know who is living the faith.  Go to a conference; go to a men’s meeting; go on retreat; listen to Catholic radio; or start reading the Gospel of John.  And above all else, start talking to God as a friend, which is simply prayer.  You can’t give what you don’t have!

If you have had this amazing encounter with Christ, remember it, relive it!  Our identity is based on remembering who we are in Christ, and it leads us to joy.  “[T]he joy of men…who love God attracts others to him” (Vespers, 11/24/15).

Authentic Catholic men receive love as sons and offer it as spiritual fathers.  Love must be encountered, received, and experienced in our heads, hearts, and hands for us to be fully integrated or wise.

How do we heroically live out love as spiritual fathers?  Pope Francis explains, “[a] grateful heart is spontaneously impelled to serve the Lord and to find expression in a life of commitment to our work. Once we come to realize how much God has given us, a life of self-sacrifice, of working for him and for others, becomes a privileged way of responding to his great love” (Vespers, 11/24/15).

Our response to this love must be lived heroically, but not necessarily conspicuously.  The Pope states that happiness and holiness are “always tied to little gestures….These little gestures are those we learn at home, in the family….quiet things.…little signs of tenderness, affection and compassion….small daily signs which make us feel at home” (WMF, 11/27/15).  As spiritual fathers living out our priesthood, we must give blessings and hugs upon awakening or before bed.  We must have little ways of acknowledging our friends and co-workers.  Our daily liturgy consists of these little rituals and routines that communicate our love for others.  Moreover, “the heart of the Pope [and spiritual fathers] expands to include everyone. To testify to the immensity of God’s love is the heart of [our] mission…”

Pope Francis knows “there is always the temptation to give in to fear [and self-pity].” “But we also know that we have been given a spirit of courage and not of timidity” (To the US Bishops, 11/23/15).  To conquer fear, we must experience and remember in our hearts God’s love for us as sons.  This will “impel” us to action with “boundless generosity,” sacrifice, and love for our spiritual children—our neighbor and the fatherless.  We must then challenge our spiritual sons to live from their hearts as spiritual fathers.

On St. Joseph’s Feast Day, 15 Reasons Dads Matter (#15 Will Shock You!)

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Image via Shutterstock

Image via Shutterstock

St. Joseph is the Patron of Fathers and in honor St Joseph’s Feast Day today (March 19th), I thought it would be good to take some time to remind us all how important dads are.  Check out these great dad facts!  (Teaser:  I saved the most surprising fact for last!)

1.  Fathers’ interaction with babies (engaging in cognitively stimulating activities, emotional warmth, physical care) reduced their infants’ chances of experiencing cognitive delay

2.  Children whose fathers are involved in rearing them (“sensitive and responsive fathering”) fare better on cognitive tests and in language ability than those with less responsive or involved fathers.

3.  Fathers who are involved in their children’s schools and academic achievement, regardless of their own educational level, are increasing the chances their child will graduate from high school, and perhaps go to vocational school, or even to college.

4.  A fathers’ involvement in children’s school activities protects at-risk children from failing or dropping out.

5. Positive father involvement decreased boys’ problem behaviors (especially boys with more challenging temperaments) and better mental health for girls.

6. Fathers who are more involved with their children tend to raise children who experience more success in their career.

7.  Fathers being involved in their children’s lives protects against risk factors that pose harm for children (such as problematic behavior, maternal depression and family economic hardship).

8.  Father involvement is associated with promoting children’s social and language skills.

9.  Involved fathering is related to lower rates of child problem behaviors, including hyperactivity, as well as reduced teen violence, delinquency, and other problems with the law.

10.  Father involvement is associated with positive child characteristics such as increased: empathy, self-esteem, self-control, feelings of ability to achieve, psychological well-being, social competence, life skills, and less sex-stereotyped beliefs.

11.  Children in foster care who have involved fathers are more likely to be reunited with their families and experience shorter stays in foster homes.

12.  Children who grow up in homes with involved fathers are more likely to take an active and positive role in raising their own families. For example, fathers who recall a secure, loving relationship with both parents are more involved in the lives of their infants and more supportive to their wives.

13.  Both men and women who remember having loving, supportive fathers had high life satisfaction and self-esteem.

14.  Educational programs that successfully increased father involvement produced positive changes in children’s behavior.

15.  Most importantly, when it comes to passing our faith and values on to our kids it is critical for fathers to take the lead. When mom and dad are regular churchgoers, 33% of their children will be regular churchgoers and 41% will at least attend irregularly.  BUT SHOCKINGLY WHEN DAD ALONE IS A CHURCHGOER, FAITH RETENTION RATE ARE EVEN HIGHER!  It turns out 38% of children with irregular churchgoing mothers but active fathers grow up to attend church regularly and 44% of children with non-active churchgoing moms but faithful dads grow up to go to church regularly.

Obviously that doesn’t mean moms shouldn’t go to church with their families, but it does mean that the more committed and active dads are, the more likely it is that the children will follow his lead with regard to faith and values even when mom isn’t involved.  By contrast, if the father is an irregular churchgoer and the mother regular, only 3 percent of the children will subsequently become regulars themselves, while a further 59 percent will become irregulars. Thirty-eight percent will be lost.  LIKEWISE if the father is non-practicing and mother regular, only 2 percent of children will become regular worshipers, and 37 percent will attend irregularly. Over 60 percent of their children will be lost completely to the church!

The bottom line?  Dads matter. A lot.  For more thoughts on ways to be a great, involved, faithful dad, check out Parenting with Grace (especially our “Dad’s Da Man!” chapter) and Then Comes Baby (especially our chapters on involved fatherhood).  And Happy Feast of St. Joseph!

 

(Facts gathered from: Bronte-Tinkew et al., 2008; Chang et al., 2008; Flouri, 2008; Lamb & Lewis, 2004; Lamb & Tamis-Lemonda, 2004; Pleck & Masciadrelli, 2004; Sarkadi et al., 2008; Haug & Warner, 2000)

 

The Prodigal Father: Benedict XVI on Fathering

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Check out this great post on Catholic fatherhood by Dave McClow.  Dave works for me as a clinical pastoral counseling associate with the Pastoral Solutions Institute’s Tele-Counseling Practice. He has some great insights.  I hope you enjoy!

The “prodigal father” is the story of our time.  It is the story of fatherlessness in our families.  Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is and has always been highly aware of the crisis of fatherhood and its implications for society (see my previous blog).  He knows that when fatherhood is gutted, “something in the basic structure of human existence has been damaged” (The God of Jesus Christ, p. 29).  But he is also supremely insightful about what happens in the family, both positively and negatively, because of fathers! Let’s start out with the problems:

Prodigal Fatherhood

“A theologian has said that to­day we ought to supplement the story of the Prodigal Son with that of the prodigal father. Fathers are often entirely occupied by their work and give more wholehearted attention to their work than to their child, more to achievement than to gifts, and to the tasks implied by those gifts. But the loss of involvement of the father also causes grave inner damage to the sons” (God and the World, pp. 274-275).

I’m not sure why he leaves out daughters, but the effect is just as devastating for daughters.  Are you leaving behind the gift of your children for busy-ness or business?  Are you too task and achievement oriented?  Part of this over-focus is the religious nature of our masculinity—our natural inclination toward sacrifice for a cause.  This is masculine spirituality that is often not acknowledged by men or women.  If men can’t relate to God as men, they turn to things which are not ultimate—that is, to things Scripture calls idols.  This is why work, hobbies, and sports can become all-consuming.

Fear is another component of turning to non-ultimate things.  Sometimes a lot of men view the murky waters of relationships and emotions at home like a foreign country to be feared. They would rather turn elsewhere to feel like a success.  We need to invoke my vote for St. John Paul II’s #2 motto (after “Totus Tuus, Totally yours, Mary”), “Be not afraid!”  We need to have courage!  There is nothing wrong with work, hobbies, or sports, but they must be rightly ordered—they must not take precedence over people or God.  Even virtues in the extremes become vice.

As Pope, Benedict XVI includes in the problem list broken families, worries, and money problems, along with “the distracting invasion of the media” in our daily life.  All of these things “can stand in the way of a calm and constructive relationship between father and child.” “It is not easy for those who have experienced an excessively authoritarian and inflexible father or one who was indifferent and lacking in affection, or even absent, to think serenely of God and to entrust themselves to him with confidence” (General Audience, January 30, 2013).

Zeus

He nails the problems of modern life including technology; and the perennial problems of fathers who can be excessively rigid, indifferent, lacking in affection, or even absent.  These things damage our view of God and make it difficult to trust.  Next, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he contrasts two very different fathers: Zeus and God the Father.

If we look for a moment at pagan mythologies, then the father-god Zeus, for instance, is portrayed as moody, unpredictable, and willful: the father does incorporate power and authority, but without the corresponding degree of responsibility, the limitation of power through justice and kindness (God and the World, pp. 274-275).

If you are the kind of father who wants your kids to obey just because you’re the father, you’re in the Zeus camp, which uses the power and authority of the role without the responsibility which limits that power through justice and kindness.  This father uses domination and fear to lord it over the kids and demands obedience.  Consequently, because they don’t like the master/slave relationship, the kids usually have a temper problem and find ways to rebel.  Or as Protestant apologist Josh McDowell has aptly put it, “Rules without relationship leads to rebellion.”  The master/slave idea is found more in Islam, a word which means submission. Allah is not a loving Father—in fact, this idea is blasphemous to a Muslim.  Allah is an all-powerful God who must be obeyed.

God the Father as our Model

Zeus shows us how not to be a good father.  The Pope Emeritus says that Scripture helps us know of “a God who shows us what it really means to be ‘father’; and it is the Gospel, especially, which reveals to us this face of God as a Father who loves” (General Audience, January 30, 2013). The Father uses power and responsibility with justice and kindness, which is a more relational approach. As Cardinal Ratzinger, he unpacks this idea:

The Father as he appears in the Old Testament is quite different [from Zeus], and still more in what Jesus says about the Father: here, power corresponds to responsibility; here we meet a picture of power that is prop­erly directed, that is at one with love, that does not dominate through fear but creates trust. The fatherhood of God means devotion toward us, an acceptance of us by God at the deepest level, so that we can belong to him and turn to him in childlike love. Certainly, his fatherhood does mean that he sets the standards and corrects us with a strictness that manifests his love and that is always ready to forgive (God and the World, pp. 274-275).

So the Father loves us first (1 Jn.) and is devoted to us, and this love creates trust, acceptance, and belonging!   (READ MORE)

 

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI on the Crisis of Fatherhood

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“Something in the basic structure of human existence has been damaged!”

A Guest Blog by Dave McClow, M.Div., LCSW, LMFT, a clinical pastoral counseling associate of the Pastoral Solutions Institute.

I am a collector of quotes (well…books, too), and I am thinking through a theology of masculinity.  I think a theology of what it means be to a man culminates in spiritual fatherhood always, and at times in biological fatherhood that is lived out in chivalry as priest, prophet, and king.  Manhood certainly includes and passes through sonship, brotherhood, and husbandhood.  These states of being always have a spiritual side, and only sometimes is there a physical side as brother or husband.  I’ll write more about those things later.  Our culture has inflicted a sustained attack on men and fatherhood, which has resulted in soaring rates of fatherlessness, creating dire consequences for individuals, families, and societies (see my previous blog). I wanted to highlight a few quotes from Cardinal Ratzinger, and later from Pope Benedict XVI, on the crisis of fatherhood, which he sees as a threat to human existence.  These quotes support my call for the Church to lead the way in developing a theology of masculinity.

The Crisis

Of course spiritual and biological fatherhood have their roots in God’s Fatherhood (Eph 3:14), and human fatherhood has a tremendous impact on our perception of and relationship with God.  In 2001, in an address to a congregation in Palermo, Italy, Cardinal Ratzinger basically argues that if you destroy human fatherhood, you destroy humanity.  (A similar case could be made for

God himself “willed to manifest and describe himself as Father.” “Human fatherhood gives us an anticipation of what He is. But when this fatherhood does not exist, when it is experienced only as a biological phenomenon, without its human and spiritual dimension, all statements about God the Father are empty. The crisis of fatherhood we are living today is an element, perhaps the most important, threatening man in his humanity. The dissolution of fatherhood and motherhood is linked to the dissolution of our being sons and daughters.”motherhood.)

 

Later in this talk he appears to link this threat to humanity with the ability to turn people into numbers and exterminate them in concentration camps.  He restates the threat in the book The God of Jesus Christ: Meditations on the Triune God:

The crisis of fatherhood that we are experiencing today is a basic aspect of the crisis that threatens mankind as a whole. Where fatherhood is perceived only as a biological accident on which no genuinely human claims may be based, or the father is seen as a tyrant whose yoke must be thrown off, something in the basic structure of human existence has been damaged (p. 29).

 

This a powerful indictment of our culture that ridicules men and makes fathers irrelevant, from TV programs, through Government programs, to the ability to conceive babies outside of a sexual relationship—indeed “something in the basic structure of human existence has been damaged.” Cardinal Ratzinger continues his connection between the destruction of human fatherhood and our perceptions of God’s fatherhood:

Human fatherhood can give us an inkling of what God is; but where fatherhood no longer exists, where genuine fatherhood is no longer experienced as a phenomenon that goes bey

ond the biological dimension to embrace a human and intellectual sphere as well, it becomes meaningless to speak of God the Father. Where human fatherhood disappears, it is no longer possible to speak and think of God. It is not God who is dead; what is dead (at least to a large extent) is the precondition in man that makes it possible for God to live in the world. The crisis of fatherhood that we are experiencing today is a basic aspect of the crisis that threatens mankind as a whole (The God of Jesus Christ, p. 29).

Cardinal Ratzinger is not known to exaggerate!  Clearly he sees a threat to humanity in the attack on fatherhood.  St. John Paul II would agree with the nature and scope of the problem and points out that it is not a new attack: “Original sin, then, attempts to abolish fatherhood, destroying its rays which permeate the created world, placing in doubt the truth about God who is Love and leaving man only with a sense of the master-slave relationship” (Crossing the Threshold of Hope, p. 228, emphasis in original).

The Damage and the Remedy

The damage to our existence is that men and thus God are seen only as tyrants.  While some men are tyrants, most are not.  Those who are tyrants definitely need our help to live out authentic masculinity and fatherhood.  We, as the Church, need to lead the way in defining masculinity and fatherhood.

God is most certainly not a tyrant.  In fact, he goes to extreme lengths to demonstrate this: he allows us to be the tyrants, complete with murderous rage toward him, and he allows us to kill him.  No one is exempt from this responsibility. It is no mistake that in the Palm Sunday and Good Friday readings of the Passion it is we in the pews who speak the line “Crucify him!”  And what is the response of Jesus?  “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do” (Lk. 23:34).  If the Father or Jesus were going to be a tyrant here, humanity should have been wiped off the face of the earth for merely threatening the Son of God with death.  Instead, God the Father is demonstrating his love through Jesus on the cross by absorbing, and loving us in spite of, our rage, our shame, and our sin.  I think this is one of the most profound psychological truths of our faith: we are loved even when we rage at God. There is nothing more extreme and nothing more healing.  The world would be a different place if we were to allow Jesus to absorb our shame and rage as he came to do—if we were to direct our rage for others toward him, have him absorb it all, and receive his tender love for us.  The cross is God’s antidote to this attack on fatherhood—it destroys the perception of God as a master and tyrant, revealing him as the true Father that he is.

God’s Fatherhood, Memory, and Our Identity

Pope Benedict XVI further develops the importance of the proper view of God’s Fatherhood.  To remember that God is a good and loving Father helps us know who we are—it forms our identity!  Identity is critical for us as human persons.  I might say that most, if not all, psychological disorders come from identity problems, especially through distortions that come from abuse and neglect.  Benedict gave this reflection on the Sunday readings in a homily at the World Meeting of Families in 2006:

Esther’s father had passed on to her, along with the memory of her forebears and her people, the memory of a God who is the origin of all and to whom all are called to answer. The memory of God the Father, who chose a people for himself and who acts in history for our salvation. The memory of this Father sheds light on our deepest human identity: where we come from, who we are, and how great is our dignity. Certainly we come from our parents and we are their children, but we also come from God who has created us in his image and called us to be his children. Consequently, at the origin of every human being there is not something haphazard or chance, but a loving plan of God. This was revealed to us by Jesus Christ, the true Son of God and a perfect man. He knew whence he came and whence all of us have come: from the love of his Father and our Father.

Memory and remembering are integral parts of our faith, the Eucharist—“Do this in remembrance of me,” and our identities.  Think of the devastation families feel when their par

ents’ memory is gone and they don’t remember their children.  Knowing and remembering our true Father in heaven is crucial for our identities.  It lets us know we are his children and that we are loved even when we have trouble loving him.  Holy Mother Church is not unaware of the difficulties that parenting blunders create for her children and suggests that they must be cleansed and purified:

 

2779 Before we make our own this first exclamation of the Lord’s Prayer, we must humbly cleanse our hearts of certain false images drawn “from this world.” … The purification of our hearts has to do with paternal or maternal images, stemming from our personal and cultural history, and influencing our relationship with God. God our Father transcends the categories of the created world. To impose our own ideas in this area “upon him” would be to fabricate idols to adore or pull down. To pray to the Father is to enter into his mystery as he is and as the Son has revealed him to us. (See also 239)

 

Summary

 

There is a crisis of fatherhood. If fatherhood and men are seen only as “biological accidents” to be ridiculed or as “tyrants” to be thrown off, then God the Father’s face is so disfigured that it is not recognizable and our identities are distorted threatening life itself—indeed “something in the basic structure of human existence has been damaged.”  A theology of masculinity is needed—one that restores the basic structure of human existence:  fatherhood.  Men are spiritual sons, brothers, and husbands first, but the summit of being a man is being spiritual fathers always, and biological fathers sometimes. If the summit of being a man is spiritual fatherhood, then the source and model of that fatherhood is God the Father.  This needs to be proclaimed from the pulpit regularly as a part of the New Evangelization to form men to be authentic spiritual fathers.

 

Men of God, in the meantime, begin your own work in prayer and purification of the false parental images that distort the Father’s true face.  Tear down the idols! If you get stuck, get help!  Start the healing: talk to a priest, a friend, or a counselor; go to a men’s group; or call us at the Pastoral Solutions Institute

Poverty Sucks! The Pope, Research, and Fatherhood The Pope –Guest Post by Dave McClow.

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The following is a guest post by Pastoral Solutions Institute clinical pastoral counseling associate, Dave McClow, MDiv, LCSW, LMFT.

The Pope

It seems that Pope Francis’ favorite topic is the poor.  His new Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, The Joy of Evangelism, is not even the latest evidence, because every other homily or statement includes the poor.  And it is right “the poor are the privileged recipi­ents of the Gospel” (EG, 48).  They are the summit in kingdom ethics; they are where we meet Jesus— ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’ (Mt. 25:40).  They are to be the first and the focus of our missionary energy (EG, 48).   Pope Francis is concerned about some of the obstacles in our spiritual lives that are obstacles to loving the poor:

Whenever our interior life [I would add our exterior life here at Christmas time] becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor. God’s voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades. This is a very real danger for believers too (EG, 2)

 

And, as if he hasn’t been clear yet, he says, “We have to state, with­out mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor. May we never abandon them” (EG, 48).

The Research

So I was intrigued by a blog by Chris Brown, at the National Fatherhood Initiative, titled Poverty Sucks: How Father Involvement Alleviates It.   He pointed me to some fascinating international research on IQ and poverty that helps us understand the poor better:

In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults….

This picture of cognitive bandwidth looks different. To study it, the researchers performed two sets of experiments. In the first, about 400 randomly chosen people in a New Jersey mall were asked how they would respond to a scenario where their car required either $150 or $1,500 in repairs. Would they pay for the work in full, take out of a loan, or put off the repair? How would they make that decision? The subjects varied in annual income from $20,000 to $70,000.

Before responding, the subjects were given a series of common tests (identifying sequences of shapes and numbers, for example) measuring cognitive function and fluid intelligence. In the easier scenario, where the hypothetical repair cost only $150, subjects classified as “poor” and “rich” performed equally well on these tests. But the “poor” subjects performed noticeably worse in the $1,500 scenario. Simply asking these people to think about financial problems taxed their mental bandwidth.

“And these are not people in abject poverty,” Shafir says. “These are regular folks going to the mall that day.”

The “rich” subjects in the study experienced no such difficulty. In the second experiment, the researchers found similar results when working with a group of farmers in India who experience a natural annual cycle of poverty and plenty. These farmers receive 60 percent of their annual income in one lump sum after the sugarcane harvest. Beforehand, they are essentially poor. Afterward (briefly), they’re not. In the state of pre-harvest poverty, however, they exhibited the same shortage of cognitive bandwidth seen in the American subjects in a New Jersey mall.

Putting aside the problem of defining the rich as making $70,000 per year (…who knew?), it is interesting that cognitive bandwidth or functioning goes down when faced with the stress of an overwhelming financial problem.  The researcher’s methodology gives a new way to measure interventions with poor.  Obviously handing out $1500 to get the car fixed seems like it would help!

But I wonder how a supportive, caring relationship would impact this.  The interpersonal neurobiology field would suggest that it would.  We are designed to connect with others when we have big emotions and stress.  It is patently obvious with babies.  You have to pick up the baby to calm the little bugger down, that is if you don’t want to overload him or her with stress hormones.  Of course you will want to make sure the baby isn’t hungry, or check for a loaded diaper or some other problem first.  But physical contact and a soothing voice help calm the vagus nerve in the body and release all kinds of natural narcotics in the brain, calming the baby.  We are no different, except hopefully we have given up the diaper thing.  Caring, supportive relationships help the different parts of the brain to integrate.  Brain integration helps us be sane and is a good definition of mental health (see Dr. Greg’s post on the 9 components of mental health).  Relationships that are patterned, repetitive, and predictable in an accepting and loving way create security.  In adults, being in a state of relative calm allows the prefrontal cortex to be online, and that means the intellect, the ability to see consequence (conscience), and the ability to have empathy are all online. So I wonder if caring, supportive relationships would increase the IQ when facing these kinds of financial situations.

Fatherhood

 

One kind of relationship is extremely important to alleviate poverty, as noted by Chris Brown at the National Fatherhood Initiative, and that is the father/child relationship:

But it’s not enough just to have fathers present in their children’s lives. They must be involved, responsible, committed fathers….

Father involvement is a vital part of the solution to poverty and the chronic stress and poor parenting it creates. We know, from a macrolevel perspective, that communities with higher levels of father absence have higher levels of poverty. We also know, from a microlevel perspective—and common sense, that an involved father provides the human capital families need to perform the parenting functions that parents, children, and families need to avoid chronic stress and thrive.  

So fathers are key in alleviating poverty!  Wouldn’t it be nice if radical feminism and politicians would figure this out!

 

And even if the research never supports that having caring, supportive relationships do increase IQ in the poor, Jesus, Pope Francis, and the Church command us to love our neighbor, especially the poor.