双语：没有父亲又如何？

are fathers ecessary?
没有父亲又如何？

a paternal contribution may not be as essential as we think.
——父辈的奉献也许并非像我们想的那样必不可少

by pamela paul

帕梅拉·保罗（pamela paul） 撰文 海瑞两千 译

even the most recession-walloped and otherwise diminished man can take pride in his essential role as father. fathers, barack obama intoned in a 2008 father’s day speech, are “critical” to the foundation of each family. “they are teachers and coaches. they are mentors and role models. they are examples of success and the men who constantly push us toward it.”

即便是在经济衰退中遭创最重，因而其他方面亦颜面尽失的男人，也会因其身为人父这个不可或缺的角色而自感岸然。巴拉克·奥巴马在2008年父亲节演讲中慷慨陈词：父亲，对每个家庭的基础来说，是“至关重要的”。“他们既是教师又是辅导员。他们既是贤明的顾问，又是楷模。他们是成功的样板，又是不断鞭策我们朝着成功迈进的人。”

none of this would seem particularly controversial. nor would the ominous statistics obama reeled off about kids who grow up without dad: five times as likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times as likely to drop out of school, and 20 times as likely to wind up in prison. obama was citing a commonly accepted and constantly updated body of research. the effectively fatherless obama is clearly a freakish outlier. as for the rest of the fatherless: insufficiently breast-fed, apt to develop attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, unable to form secure bonds, lacking self-esteem, accident prone, asthmatic, and fat.

这些似乎都没什么特别值得争议的。同样，对于奥巴马朗朗读出的那些一连串不良统计数字也是如此：与有爸爸的小孩子相比，没有爸爸而成年的小孩子在贫困与犯罪中度过的可能性是5倍、更容易辍学的是9倍、更容易坐牢的是20倍。当时奥巴马引证的是一份人们通常可接受的且会被不断更新的研究数据。这位实际上没有父亲的奥巴马，无疑是无父者中的一个特例。至于无父者其它方面的表现则是：母乳喂养不足、易于出现注意力不足多动症、不能形成稳固可靠的亲和力、缺乏自尊、易出事故、哮喘、以及肥胖。

liberal feminist moms—eager for the participation of our emotionally evolved, enthusiastically diaper-bag-toting mates in the grueling round of dual-career child rearing—are keen to back the data. dads, we tell our husbands, are essential influences on children, the source of unique benefits.

自由派女性主义的妈妈们不遗余力地支持上述数据，也迫切要求我们那些感情投入、满心热忱地手提尿布、菜篮子在抚养双职工子女的怪圈中精疲力竭的伙伴儿们的参与。我们告诉我们的丈夫说：爸爸，对子女有着本质上的影响，是唯一的收益来源。

there’s only one problem: none of this is proven. in the february issue of the journal of marriage and family, judith stacey, a professor of sociology at new york university, and timothy biblarz, a demographer from the university of southern california, consolidated the available data on the role of gender in child rearing. as stacey and biblarz point out, our ideas of what dads do and provide are based primarily on contrasts between married-couple parents and single-female parents: an apples-to-oranges exercise that conflates gender, sexual orientation, marital status, and biogenetic relationships in ways that a true comparison of parent gender—one that compared married gay-male couples or married lesbian couples to married heterosexuals, or single fathers to single mothers—would not. most of the data fail to distinguish between a father and the income a father provides, or between the presence of a father and the presence of a second parent, regardless of gender.

这里只有一个问题 ：以下所述没有一个被证明。在二月号的《婚姻与家庭》杂志上，纽约大学的社会学教授朱迪思·史黛丝（judith stacey)和来自南加利福尼亚大学的人口统计学家蒂莫西·比布拉兹（timothy biblarz），汇总了现有的有关子女抚养中性别角色的数据。史黛丝和比布拉兹做了这样的说明：我们关于“爸爸”的所作所为及所付抚养的概念，主要是建立在已婚双亲家长和单亲女性家长相比对的基础上的：一次苹果-柑橘式比较的演习，它把性别、性倾向、婚姻状况、生物遗传关系放在一起以多种方法进行比较，而不是一种真正“家长性别背景”——已婚男性同性恋力偶或已婚女性同性恋俪偶与已婚异性伉俪相比、或者单身父亲与单身母亲相比——意义上的比较。多数研究数据，往往把父亲与父亲所供给的收益作等量观，也不分别在世的“父亲”和在世的 “父母中的第二家长”（second parent），即对后者不做性别上的区分。