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Fathers and Sons
Exploring This Complex Relationship
By Teri Brown
Dr. Michael Diamond from Los Angeles, Calif., is a man on a mission. After 30 years of working with men, both individually and in groups, he wants people to know just how important the father/son relationship is and the impact it has on each progressive generation of sons.
His most recent book, My Father Before Me: How Fathers and Sons Influence Each Other Throughout Their Lives (WW Norton, 2007), explores the complexities of the father/son relationship and how it affects men – long after they have sons of their own. The seeds for this book grew from both his practice and the realization that his father's influence affected his own fathering.
"I began teaching courses in men's psychology and leading men's therapy groups nearly 30 years ago," Dr. Diamond says. "Soon thereafter, and over two decades ago when I was becoming a father myself, I initially examined the hopes and dreams, as well as the anxieties and needs, of men in the process of becoming fathers and thus wrote my first professional paper in this area on becoming a father."
Several years later, Dr. Diamond's studies prompted him to examine how fathering helps men to establish their sense of manhood toward understanding the specific impact of fathers on their sons throughout their life span and, in turn, how a son influences his father's own parallel development. Most recently, his research has focused on how fathers help to shape their sons' sense of masculinity and how this masculine identity shifts during the course of a man's life.
"In particular, there are three primary circumstances that led to the actual writing of this book," Dr. Diamond says. "One, the emergence of my own children into young adulthood and leaving the nest; two, a coalescing of my professional study, teaching and writing on fathering and masculinity for nearly 30 years; and three, a strong need to 'give back' to the broader circle of men (and women) my acquired understandings of fathers and sons throughout the life cycle."
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