As we head into Father’s Day, it’s important to remember the millions of young Americans who don’t have dads in the house and who never had a male role model to look up to. According to Fox News, more than 18.5 million children are “fatherless,” and the United States leads the entire world in that category.
This is a record we surely do not aspire to and is clearly–at least partly–to blame for the dysfunction among today’s youth.
Think not having a father isn’t that big a deal? You’d be mistaken. According to Fox News, 85% of the children and teenagers with behavior disorders are from homes without fathers. This is in addition to more than 70% of adolescents who attend drug or alcohol treatment centers.
If you’re lucky enough to have grown up with a father who taught you how to behave, how to put a worm on a hook, how to ride a bike—how to be a good person—you know how important he was to you and your life. Take this beautiful Father’s Day tweet from Coach Kurt Hines:
The gifts my dad gave me helped me grow into the person that I am today.
1. He believed in me
2. Spent time w/ me
3. I loved you
4. Praise me
5. Be disciplined
6. Teach the dollar’s value
7. Let me fail
8. Prayed with me
9. My mother was my best friend
10. My coaches are here to coach you
— Coach Hines 🇺🇸 (@CoachKurtHines) June 16, 2022
You can’t imagine having any of this, or a male role model. Actually, we don’t have to imagine it: just look to our inner cities, where young men are shooting each other in astronomical numbers every single weekend. The majority of inner city residents are minorities. By 2020, 80 percent were black kids being raised by one parent. While more than half the Hispanic children were from single mothers,
What is the secret to our success? Many people feel former President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs contributed to the crisis by making it more beneficial to be an unwed mother than to be a married one.
An analysis of 2017 by Houston Baptist University University
Instead of encouraging single mothers to marry their fathers, the government funded them and expanded the range of welfare programs for those who had already experienced hardship and stress. This created a chain of serious problems that was often called a “tangle of pathologies”.
Many millions of Americans soon found themselves in constant chaos and dysfunction. The major metro areas contained blocks upon blocks of victims, their broken families and lives that were ruined.
There was a plague of fatherlessness that resulted in nearly 72 percent American black children becoming orphaned by their parents. It was becoming a distant and rare thing to get married.
Some blame pop culture for glorifying single mothers and ignoring absent fathers, who are often praised as able to go where they like without any consequences. You might ask yourself this question: When was the last movie/series about a male detective. The detective was a man of family. Probably not—almost always, such detectives are boozy loners with multiple ex-wives and strained relationships with their children.
Our sports and entertainment stars with multiple children by multiple women—none of them their wives—also give young people the impression that this is a glamorous way to live. The often tragic lives of these fatherless babies are rarely mentioned.
Hollywood’s anti-nuclear message is another reason for the American family’s decline. There are many examples, but here’s just one: In this Buzzfeed article, the author describes how the days of “Leave It to Beaver” are gone, and most sitcoms and streaming shows now just stress how screwed up family life is. The author concludes with these words:
I wonder what our society might look like if we saw all the familial humiliation and trauma playing out across our television screens — and perhaps in our own homes — and decided that enough is enough. You can live more lovingly, equitable, and expansively than the traditional nuclear family.
Buzzfeed is wrong. Buzzfeed says that the nuclear family was the greatest social structure in history. Even the left-wing Atlantic admits it, begrudgingly writing: “a nuclear family headed by two loving married parents remains the most stable and safest environment for raising children.” No duh.
This statistic is worth considering:
A strong family unit can bring many benefits to society, not only for our children. For example, regarding poverty, data shows that children without a father in the home are five times for likely to live in poverty than a child in a two-parent household.
I hope you, dear reader, have been lucky enough to have a father (or a step-father, let’s not forget them) who has helped guide you through life and provided a role model for you to look up to. To those who weren’t so lucky, I wish you find someone to fill that role in your own life. Fathers are vital to any society. I believe our culture should continue to celebrate their contributions and support them.
You can clearly see that the gradual disappearance of American fathers has had a devastating impact on U.S. society.
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