We have a friend who is a doctor. Bruce is a family practitioner who, because of the smallness of the town in which he works, has quite a number of maternity patients.
One day he was tired but elated after having been up most of the night delivering a baby. “A beautiful boy,” he enthused, describing the birth.
Bruce’s elation was unusual for a man who delivers a lot of kids. “Why are you so happy about this particular baby?” I asked him. “After all, you deliver a lot of them.”
“Yes, but when I deliver a baby to an intact two-parent home, it’s a double blessing,” he said.
As a family-oriented Christian doctor, Bruce sometimes faces ethical conflicts in his practice. He also sees trends others outside the medical profession might miss. One such trend was exemplified several years ago when a single working mother and a caretaking grandmother came to him as a last resort, asking for Ritalin to control a young boy’s ADHD.
Bruce described the boy in his office as a typical recipient for Ritalin: rowdy, defiant, cruel to animals, malicious, a bad student, impossible to reason with, wantonly destructive. In short, a monster.
This was not the request of a radical feminist mother intolerant of boyish mischief or high spirits. It was a desperate plea from two loving women who could no longer handle him. The mother was working full-time to support them. They had tried everything else, including counseling and parenting classes, controlling his diet, exercise, bedtime and television viewing … nothing had worked. His teacher, no doubt exhausted from trying to handle the boy along with her other students, had suggested medication.
After taking a history and doing an exam, Bruce prescribed the Ritalin. Then he went to his office, buried his head in his hands and wished for a different line of work.
Through decades of practice, Bruce says he has never seen a request for Ritalin coming from an adult, intact, two-parent home in which the father is employed and the children are theirs by birth or adoption. Not once. The common factor in all these cases – either Ritalin for boys or antidepressants for girls – is the lack of a father.
I do not interact with large numbers of children on a daily basis. But teachers, doctors, counselors and other professionals do. Are they seeing the same trend?
Bruce thinks so. “When Dad is not there – ‘there’ as in living there in the home –” Bruce wrote in a heart-tugging article that appeared in the May 2008 issue of Touchstone Magazine, “something deep in a child’s psyche perceives a critical deficit, a desperate and frightening imbalance that preys on the child’s particular vulnerabilities, causing him to careen off into unhealthy extremes.”
Read that whole thing again. Desperate and frightening imbalance. A child’s vulnerabilities. Unhealthy extremes. I find this terrifying.
At some point over the last few decades, many women decided they needed men with the same urgency fish needed bicycles. Sure, their involvement in motherhood was necessary at the point of conception, but after that the attitude became, “Hey, I’m strong, I’m tough, I don’t need the dad to help raise my kid!”
Coupled with appalling welfare rules that encouraged fathers not to live with their own children, the results have been generations of children raised without dads. Everything from failing schools to soaring crime statistics have resulted from that societal lurch.
It’s been demonstrated again and again that boys need fathers to teach them to be decent men. Girls need fathers to teach them to respect their bodies and find the right kind of man to marry.
To blatantly disregard the need for a father in a child’s life despite all clinical, societal, medical, psychological, historical and common-sense evidence is at best stupid and at worst evil. But still, social scientists try to pervert the need for dads. An article in the Atlantic lauding research showing kids of various creative combinations (i.e. lesbian couples) do just fine concluded with: “The bad news for Dad is that despite common perception, there’s nothing objectively essential about his contribution.”
There’s nothing objectively essential about his contribution. And what message does this give our sons? That they’re expendable? Unnecessary? Is this the radical feminist rhetoric that will shape the future husbands of our daughters?
The contempt continues. “Insufferable feminist Lena Dunham unsurprisingly composed one of the most ridiculous Father’s Day posts floating around the internet on Sunday,” observed a 2017 Daily Wire article. “On the one day of the year meant to celebrate the men who do the incredibly important job of raising and supporting their children, Dunham saw fit to dismiss the need for a father entirely. ‘You don’t need a father – so many families work so many ways – but if you have one he better werk,’ [sic] wrote the ‘Girls’ creator.”
(Incidentally, Lena Dunham once used Mother’s Day to promote abortion. Nice lady.)
Yes, there are bad fathers out there, men who are abusive, addicted to drugs or drink, or prone to multiple affairs. (Please, ladies, choose carefully.) But to deliberately exclude a decent father from a child’s life will only result in another generation of males, not men. Like father, like son.
Of course children have succeeded in life despite not having a father, but that’s a “despite” not “because of.” There will always be a dad-shaped hole in the heart of any child who grows up without a father.
Remember, men: like father, like son. Don’t abandon the sons (and daughters) who desperately need you – unless you want them to abandon their sons and daughters.
Remember, women: Kids need dads. Don’t force your child’s father from the home for stupid feminist reasons. Treat him with respect and watch your family flourish.
Life is messy. Things happen. Spouses cheat. People die. Addictions cause ruin. Poor judgment causes pain. I cannot and will not condemn those families in which fatherlessness occurs through human weakness or accidents or death.
But please – please – don’t do it on purpose.
And to all you dads who are doing the right thing and raising your kids, thank you, and Happy Father’s Day.
