As our bonds to historic roles loosen, fathers are finding new ways to express themselves within the family dynamic. In 2014 Pew Research Center identified two million stay-at-home-dads in the United States. Those men tell us that tending their children is more rewarding than chasing a paycheck. Being liberated from the hunter-gatherer role has allowed more men to incarnate aspects of the Father archetype infrequently seen since the industrial revolution. Being caregiver and homecreator does not diminish their experience of masculinity but rallies inner resources that had been set aside. Despite the national call for a redistribution of family duties and liberation from traditional paradigms, at-home dads face isolation, suspicion, and stigma. 

Historically, as father’s left the home to work at factories and offices, their presence in the family psyche dimmed. Children often lost touch with the significance of their fathers, and family courts consistently relegated them to providers of income. Poet Robert Hayden captures this ambivalence and regret in his poem Those Winter Sundays.

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Growth and change are central to Jung’s ideas. Making room for the incarnating Self in all its complex diversity is the task of humanity. When we muster understanding and support, cultural and personal transformation might be a little less painful 

REFERENCES

Dad Saves the Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6YmKIoUdZc, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEPq2rGLKZU
Farrell, W. (2019). The boy crisis: Why our boys are struggling and what we can do about it. BenBella Books. Available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/abRKOzW 
Hayden, R., & Glaysher, F. (2013). Robert Hayden: Collected poems. Liveright. Available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/ay0nLoi 
National At-Home Dad Network: https://athomedad.org/advocacy/statistics-on-stay-at-home-dads/
Pew Research Center: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/06/05/growing-number-of-dads-home-with-the-kids/#:~:text=Just%2024%25%20of%20stay%2Dat,%2Dat%2Dhome%20mothers).
Warren Farrell: https://warrenfarrell.com/ 

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Episode 240 - STAY-AT-HOME DADS: Emerging Potentials in the Father Archetype

The uses and abuses of ChatGBT artificial intelligence language model have taken the collective imagination by storm. Apocalyptic predictions of&nbsp;the singularity, when technology becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, frighten us as we imagine a future where human intelligence is irrelevant. Prof. Michael Littman joins us to contextualize the advancement of artificial intelligence and debunk the paranoid rhetoric littering the public discourse. Michael has made groundbreaking research contributions enabling machines to learn from their experiences, assess the environment, make decisions, and improve their actions over time in real-world applications. His later work expanded into multi-agent systems, investigating how several AI entities can learn to cooperate, compete, or coexist in shared environments. Picture a team of robots in a factory, each with different tasks. The challenge here isn't just for each robot to do its job effectively but also to collaborate with the others, avoid collisions, and adapt to changes in real time. Emerging concepts of 'intelligence' in artificial intelligence aren't about building machines that can perform tasks faster and more accurately than humans; it is about building machines that can think, learn, and adapt - machines that aren't just tools but collaborative partners. If we examine our resistance to this emerging technology, we might catch glimpses of our unconscious fear of regression and dependency. Observation suggests most people fall into one of two groups, those who idealize a world where they are free of demands and another where they are enslaved by superiors. When we realize the fear or fantasy of regression is not the likely outcome of artificial intelligence, we are free to imagine the innumerable creative applications of the new technology and the machines that use it. MICHAEL L. LITTMAN, PhD Michael L. Littman is University Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where he studies machine learning and decision-making under uncertainty. He has earned multiple university-level awards for teaching and his research has been recognized with three best-paper awards and three influential paper awards. Littman is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery. He is currently serving as Division Director for Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. His book "Code to Joy: Why Everyone Should Learn a Little Programming" (MIT Press) will be released October 3rd 2023.

FRIEND or FOE: The AI Debate with Michael L. Littman, PhD

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