A New Way to Think About Father's Day

Why are we still celebrating Father's Day? Why celebrate when there aren’t that many real fathers anymore who provide a positive role model, financially support a family, and help raise mentally healthy children? Father’s day should make us all reflect on today’s widespread absence of fathers in a home. In the U.S., across all demographics, 40% of children are born outside of marriage (in Blacks, it is 72%). Add to that the huge amount of divorces (40-50% of first-time marriages, still higher for second marriages). The problem of single moms having to work and raise their children alone is caused not only by irresponsible men but also by liberated females who seem quite satisfied with just a sperm donor.

We misleadingly excuse the present state of social turmoil as frustration over Covid restrictions and job loss and racism. These are surely aggravating factors, but not the underlying causes of our unraveling society. The real causes are the mental health disturbances of young people created by fatherlessness. We have now raised about two generations of troubled and dysfunctional young people who are plagued by anxiety, alienation, anger, depression, drug abuse, homelessness, welfare dependency, suicide, and anti-social behavior. Neither socialism nor ending racism nor a Covid vaccine will solve the underlying problem. The lack of fathers in the home means that the majority of young people grow up with insufficient parental guidance and instruction on how to cope in a complex, confusing, and unfair world. They are love-deprived. Consequently, they feel entitled, yet not realizing that they never received the one thing they were really entitled to: a loving father in the home. These young people are left to respond with their only resources of anger and tantrums. These young people and their single parents do not seem to regard family destruction as a problem, because to them it is now the “new normal.”  

In the old days, children were nurtured not only by a loving father but also by religious institutions. Now, numerous surveys show that today’s young people are by far the least religious of all age groups. The correlation of fatherlessness, religious rejection, and social discord is not a coincidence.