The Fatherhood of Atticus Finch
What I Admire about One of My Favorite Fictional Dads
There are two types of dads I want to avoid becoming. One is the caricature of the traditional dad, a man like the character Garrison Keillor used to telephone in one of his recurring Prairie Home Companion skits. This man is masculine, but he fails to fully develop manly virtues. As a result, toughness and reserve degenerate into coldness and inability to say or to ask anything. This man is, of course, incapable of even choking out the words, “I love you.”
The other dad is the progressive Millennial dad. He means well. He desperately fears being remembered as the distant traditional dad. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know what he’s doing and lacks confidence. He compensates by copying his wife. All he achieves is becoming a pale imitation of her. He hovers ineffectively around his children, terrified that he’ll miss some key moment or someone will get hurt. Truth is, he’s kind of bored. His manliness is not warped but absent.
The character of Atticus Finch, father of Scout and Jem in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, offers a model of how to avoid becoming either of these two men. Atticus is simultaneously manly, connected, and effective.
Atticus has an interest outside of child-rearing, but he doesn’t use his hobby to isolate himself from the family. When he comes home from work, he does not stand around watching his children’s every move. He reads. His children are welcome to join him in the activity. Atticus’s daughter Scout often sits in his lap, and, when she does Atticus includes her by reading aloud whatever he’s interested in, even if it is rather eccentric material to share with a child – “the news of the day, Bills To Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow” – and running his finger under the words as he vocalizes them so that she can learn to read for herself. Atticus enjoys his hobby, but he also clearly sees Scout’s presence as enrichment, not imposition. He does not just bear with Scout but invites her to join him.
Atticus is a free-range parent. When his children are six and ten, they can walk to and from school alone and venture to “within calling distance of” home – three doors one way and two the other – without constant supervision. Within two years, they may walk all the way into town on their own.
But while Atticus eschews helicopter parenting he also avoids passivity. After a difficult first day of school, Scout heads for the porch rather than coming to read. Atticus intervenes by joining her there and discussing the problem. He also exercises discipline. He knows that letting his children walk all over him will stunt their characters and ruin their futures, so he does not let it happen. When Jem destroys the camellia bushes of a cantankerous elderly neighbor, Mrs. Dubose, to avenge her disparagement of Atticus, Atticus summons Jem in a “voice like the winter wind.” Then he gets Jem’s account of what happened and sends him off to make restitution. Jem ends up reading to this dreadful woman for a month, the last month of her life
Atticus does not use baby talk with his children. “When a child asks you something,” he says to another adult, “answer him, for goodness’ sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults.” He takes the time to explain things that are clear to adults, but he does it without making himself sound ridiculous or treating his children with condescension. The Egyptians “invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming,” Scout tells her father, passing on something she learned from Jem. In response, “Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts.” Sometimes, Atticus is so committed to speaking to his children as if they are sophisticated that he overshoots their comprehension level, as when he tells Scout that reading aloud to her “would be received with considerable disapprobation by the more learned authorities” at school. At such times, Atticus is capable of clarifying. When Scout responds with puzzlement, Atticus explains that Scout should not tell her teacher about their reading together because “I wouldn’t want her after me.”
Atticus uses his straightforward but simple communication style as one of his tools for teaching his children how to live virtuously. He hopes they will “come to me for their answers instead of listening to the town.” He teaches them to refrain from bitterness and violent revenge when he takes on an unpopular cause by defending a black man named Tom Robinson. He uses Jem’s times with Mrs. Dubose to force him to observe her battle to overcome addiction before she dies. His purpose is to teach Jem: courage is “when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.” And he recognizes that dispensing wisdom means nothing if a father doesn’t live out his own advice. One of the reasons he defends Robinson is that otherwise he would lose all moral authority with his children.
Atticus is shrewd. Sometimes he uses lawyerly language to answer his children’s question as a means of not revealing more than a youngster needs to know. When Scout asks what rape is, he straightforwardly says that it is “carnal knowledge of a female by force and without consent,” an answer so verbose it answers the question without saying anything an eight-year-old could make sense of. He sets Jem up to admit to making fun of the much-gossiped-about neighbor Boo Radley by using “the oldest lawyer’s trick.” Late one night, he holds a private conversation with his brother while Scout tries to listen in without being noticed. But Atticus knows, and he embeds into his conversation comments intended for Scout because “he wanted me to hear every word he said.”
Becoming either the hard dad or the soft dad is a discouraging thought. Since long before I first became a dad, I have found hope by imagining myself wearing the character of Atticus Finch.