Fatherhood At 65

Ebony, June, 2000 by Lynn Norment

Renowned child-rearing expert practices what he preaches with baby daughter

DR. ALVIN F. POUSSAINT has a lot to be proud of. As a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of books and numerous articles, he is widely known as a child-rearing expert. And he helped make history by advising Bill Cosby on what a father should do and not do on his long-running television show.

But these days the 65-year-old psychiatrist is changing diapers and otherwise practicing what he preaches as the proud father of a baby girl, Alison, who was born last November.

"When my wife, Tina [Dr. Tina Young Poussaint, a neuroradiologist at Children's Hospital in Boston], was pregnant, we--and my son--decided to keep the AL-thing going," he says of choosing a name for his daughter. "She's adorable. Nice temperament. She smiles a lot."

According to friends and family, baby Alison looks like her daddy and already has him at her beck and call. Dr. Poussaint is among an increasing number of older fathers who have decided to give parenthood a second shot when in fact they are already grandfathers or at least old enough to be. Among other well-known older fathers are CNN's Larry King, noted actors Tony Randall and Anthony Quinn, and Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow, who was 84 when his fifth wife had a daughter last December.

While Dr. Poussaint's chest is probably protruding just a bit more these days, he is not oblivious to the questions and issues that weigh heavily on the older father's mind. "At first I was very concerned about being a father at this age," he admits. "I worried about ordinary things. I wondered about my ability to keep up. Raising a baby can be very taxing. I worried whether I would bond with her at my age the same way I would if I were younger.

Dr. Poussaint says he anticipated the baby's birth with excitement. "I looked forward to her being a girl," he says, "since I had a son already." (He and his former wife, Dr. Anne Ashmore-Hudson, have a son, Alan, 21, a junior at Princeton.) "I love her, but I feel that I will not live to see her as an adult," he says of his daughter. "One of the things that older dads and parents think about is are you going to be around to see your child graduate from college. And I probably will not be. You have to accept that reality, and the reality that you might in fact be slowing down, or should be slowing down, but you have a child who needs nurturing. But I counterbalance that with a wife who is in her 40s, and who is there.

"I realize that you can't predict life," continues Dr. Poussaint, who in 1992 co-authored the book, Raising Black Children, with another children's expert, Dr. James P. Comer. "A lot of people with children die of disease or accidents. That is a reality of life. You just try to give to her as much as possible. I feel that already she has very strong relationships, even at 4 months old, with me and my wife. She has already contributed to my life, as I have contributed to hers."

Dr. Poussaint has contributed to the lives of many children and their parents. Last November, when little Alison was born, the Boston Globe ran an item announcing her birth, noting that she weighed in at 7 pounds and 14 ounces, and that her father is "the pre-eminent expert on Black child-rearing." As director of the media center at Harvard's Judge Baker Children's Center, he scrutinizes the media and its impact on American youth. He is very concerned about media images and issues regarding the needs of children and the changing family.

Dr. Poussaint also consults with private companies on various issues and with government agencies on television-rating systems. He became involved in media consulting when Bill Cosby asked him to be production consultant for The Cosby Show when it first aired in 1984. He also was a consultant for A Different World and other NBC shows, and for the ABC Television president. Currently he is script consultant for Little Bill, a pre-school children's show that was created by Cosby and which airs on the Nickelodeon network.

Dr. Poussaint frequently writes articles that advocate the needs of families and children. Yet, he also is an expert on racial issues and often writes on that topic. In recent months he has written an article, "They Hate. They Kill. Are They Insane?" that focused on the August 1999 shooting at a Los Angeles Jewish community center. He points out that many of his professional colleagues do not agree with his assertion that extreme racism, such as that which motivated the gun-man in that incident, is a mental disorder. In January, he wrote another piece titled "What A Rorschach Can't Gauge," which focused on controversial (and racial) statements made by baseball player John Rocker. In October, he wrote a piece on stemming the high rate of suicide among Black males.

This fall, Dr. Poussaint will release the book Lay My Burden Down: Unraveling Black Suicide and the Black Mental Health Crisis, which he co-authored with Amy Alexander. He says he is concerned that the suicide rate among young Black males has doubled since 1980, while the overall Black suicide rate is lower than that of Whites. At the same time, Black women have a low suicide rate that is about half that of White women.