There’s a question to ask with the statement, “I need ….” Why do you need it? What do you need it in order to do? You might find out, by exploring the question, that you may only want something, but not really require it. Or you may find that you do require something, and you’ll come to understand why that thing is essential.
The other day Andrew Klavan (how many times have I quoted
him at the top of a post lately? It’s from 7 minutes onward in this clip)
suggested that one trouble with woke, or leftist, culture is that it is
forgetting obvious things that have always been known. He says,
Every great civilization dies by forgetting the obvious thing….
And they want to make sure that your children forget it too. The culture war is
the war.
I believe that among these forgotten things is the fact that
we need fathers.
Why do we need fathers? What do we need them in order to do?
We need them to fill the role in the basic unit of civilization—the family—that fathers must do.
Dennis Prager recently put out one of his 5-minute videos asking and answering the question, “Are Fathers Necessary?” Yes, is the answer. Yes, fathers are essential.
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| screenshot from Dennis Prager's PragerU video "Are Fathers Necessary?" |
After listing several publications showing the answer has
been forgotten, Prager quotes Barack Obama, from a 2008 speech, saying fathers are “critical”
to families, that “they are teachers and coaches; they are mentors and role
models; they are examples of success; and they are the men who constantly push
us toward it.”
That speech wasn’t disqualifying to Obama as a candidate, so
that must mean, as recently as 2008, this basic truth was in the public consciousness. So
it’s only recently that it has been forgotten.
But it’s still true.
Prager goes through some of what we know through social
science data[i],
showing that both boys and girls need fathers. First, for boys:
A boy has no built-in understanding about how to be a man—meaning
a good and responsible man. Male nature is wild—most obviously regarding sex
and violence. If a boy does not have a father who models how a man controls
himself, he will most likely not know how to control himself—let alone want to.
That's why most males in prison for violent crimes grew up without a father.
After days of riots in the UK in 2011, quite like the 2020
riots in America, Cristina Odone wrote a column for The London Telegraph
whose title says it all: “London riots: Absent fathers have a lot to answer
for.” In the column, she wrote, “The majority of rioters are gang members….
Like the overwhelming majority of youth offenders behind bars, these gang
members have one thing in common: no father at home.”
The way social science data works is, it’s about the odds.
It doesn’t mean that mothers never successfully raise boys on their own. It
means the odds are against them. It means that, if you take a large number of
people where boys are raised without fathers and compare them to large numbers
of boys with both parents, the fatherless boys have a much higher likelihood of
bad outcomes than boys raised with both mother and father.
According to family researcher Glenn T. Stanton, in Secure
Daughters, Confident Sons,
Anthropologists tell us that the primary problem in every
human community throughout time and place is always the same: the unattached,
undisciplined male. His male nature—with its raw physical strength and
energies, appetite for food, drink, and sex and even violence—needs to be
domesticated and even socialized.
Next, for girls, Prager says this about fathers and daughters:
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| Mr. Spherical Model and granddaughter. Masks are still required on the tram ride at Space Center Houston, but we had fun taking yet another generation there. |
As regards daughters, the father is the man girls learn to
relate to. Without a father to relate to and bond with, there are at least two
destructive consequences. First, she will not know how to choose a man wisely. She
will not know how a man should treat her, and she may well end up with a man
who mistreats her. Second, to fulfill her desire to bond with a man—as primal
a yearning in most women as bonding with a woman is in most men—she will go
from man to man. Girls without fathers in their lives are far more likely to be
sexually promiscuous, and to begin sexual activity at an earlier age, which in
turn are reasons many young women are depressed. Few women find sleeping with
man after man fulfilling. Most find it ultimately depressing.
It isn’t a matter of simply having two parents—of whatever
sex—to help with the parenting; it is that fathers and mothers contribute
particular things to the family. Some of this is borne out in data
surrounding children raised by two same-sex parents. There’s this summary of the data from 2013, in a piece by Michael Bauman:
Compared to children who were raised in intact homes with
both the biological father and mother present to raise them, the children of
homosexual parents grow up to:
• Be Much more likely to receive welfare.
• Have lower educational attainment.
• Report more ongoing “negative impact” from their
family of origin.
• Be more likely to suffer from depression.
• Have been arrested more often.
• (If they are female) Have had more sexual
partners—both male and female.
If they were the children of lesbian mothers, they are:
• More likely to be currently cohabiting.
• Almost 4 times more likely to be currently on
public assistance.
• Less likely to be currently employed full-time.
• More than 3 times more likely to be unemployed.
• Nearly 4 times more likely to identify as
something other than entirely heterosexual.
• Three times as likely to have had an affair
while married or cohabiting.
• An astonishing 10 times more likely to have been
“touched sexually by a parent or other adult caregiver.”
• Nearly 4 times as likely to have been
“physically forced” to have sex against their will.
• More likely to have “attachment” problems
related to the ability to depend on others.
• Use marijuana more frequently.
• Smoke more frequently.
• Have more often pled guilty to a non-minor
offense.
Whenever a family is missing a mother or a father, the children are missing something essential to their upbringing. If we recognize that this father-shaped piece is missing, we might be able to compensate—with another father figure, maybe a grandfather, uncle, coach, teacher, or minister.
There’s a dad who saw what was lacking, and took it upon himself to fill in a bit. He teaches people, through short videos, how to do basic skills that typically a father would teach. “Dad, How Do I?” shows how to tie a tie, how to iron a dress shirt, how to shave, how to jumpstart a car, how to fix a toilet, and even something as important as how to have integrity. A video might not make up for the absence of the father, but at least it’s a resource to help out the moms, who can’t teach it all.
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| screenshot from "Dad, How Do I" video on how to iron a dress shirt |
But if we fail to notice what has been obvious to
civilizations for millennia—that children need a mother and a father—and
suddenly think we know better, we leave that gap. And it’s the children who
suffer.
We’ve looked here at what happens with a missing father. But,
in honor of Father’s Day coming up soon (a week from Sunday), let’s also list
what fathers-doing-the-dad-thing-right provide. I offered this list in 2019. And when I wrote it, I had adapted it
from this article.
· Children who come into families with loving
fathers know they were wanted, planned on, and welcomed. If affects their
identity in positive ways today’s society should know better than to take for
granted.
· Fathers fill a need. Without a father in that
role, there’s a father-shaped hole in the child’s life that good mother can’t
fill.[ii]
It’s not just about love; it’s about the security and protection that a good
father represents, allowing a child to feel secure enough to explore the world
and grow to potential.
· Fathers work to generate the wealth necessary to
provide for a wife and children—far beyond the typical earnings of non-fathers,
and also far beyond what non-resident fathers provide even when required by
law. These good fathers create a sense of worth in the child that some other
resource—such as welfare or even charity—could provide.
· These good fathers modify their behavior; they
become more civilized personally. They control their anger, their language,
their aggression around the woman and children they love—thus modeling civilization
for that next generation.
· Good fathers have a particular effect on their
daughters. Daughters need the respect and love of a father to know to value
themselves with the men in their lives. This helps daughters grow socially,
with self-respect, better able to accomplish their personal goals and better
able to resist men who would not be good partners in marriage.
· Good fathers have a particular effect on their
sons. Boys in particular need the example of male role models in order to grow
into civilized, socialized men.
· Good fathers channel the use of power toward
defense and protection, rather than toward aggression. They protect the family
both physically and morally. This eliminates male predatory behavior toward
women and children. And it eliminates aggressive force among larger societies—nations—for
any reason but defense.
The forgetful—those pressuring for some experiment that doesn’t include mother-father families—ought to try a better experiment. As I said in 2019 and still stand by:
If all men were
living civilized lives within families, many of the world’s ills would
disappear: war, famine, poverty, tyranny, bullying, abuse. We would still have
illness, accident, and natural disasters. But we’d also have the strong help to
face those things.
[i] I
suggest this compilation of social science data: “Why Marriage Matters, Third Edition: Thirty Conclusions from the Social Sciences” by family scholars, for
the Institute of American Values, 2011.
[ii]
The piece I adapted my list from included this anecdote: “And that longing can
hardly be extinguished: a never-married San Francisco professional with a young
child was stunned by it: ‘My son began asking for his father before he was two.
I’ll never forget it. He said, “Why no daddy?” with the reference to Maggie
Gallagher, The Abolition of Marriage, pp. 54-56.
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