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Dr. Edward Kruk wrote a decent article in Psychology Today on fatherlessness. In particular, I want to take some of the discussion in the article with some quotes and paraphrases for commentary on Father’s Day about the impacts of fatherlessness on sons.
Most reasonable people perceive a problem with the lives of modern boys and young men. Sometimes, they frame this from the compassionate view about boys and young men. Other times, and more often, they frame this in an ideological perspective directed towards the wellbeing of women.
How will the decline of boys and young men impact the lives of young women who want families and husbands? Answer: they may not want to have children based on the failures of men around them. Women also may choose to become single mothers. However, neither case, even combined, creates an enduring, lasting, and robust culture, historically speaking.
I want to frame this within the other perspective, though the declines do affect most women’s wellbeing and remain a concern and a valid perspective. However, how will fatherlessness impact boys and young men who become men?
Kruk said, “According to the 2007 UNICEF report on the well-being of children in economically advanced nations, children in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. rank extremely low in regard to social and emotional well-being in particular.”
He directed attention to several theories about it. The problems for the boys. The main issue of fatherlessness. The theorizations of the experts, who spend professional lives in care study. They sit. They wait for data. They do experiments. They compare data. They hypothesize other theories.
They examine other cultures. This is done for decades. Some theories point to child poverty, race, and social class as the variables for the problems in, for instance, boys. Father absence damages kids.
“First, a caveat: I do not wish to either disparage single mothers or blame non-residential fathers for this state of affairs. The sad fact is that parents in our society are not supported in the fulfillment of their parental responsibilities,” Kruk cautions, “and divorced parents in particular are often undermined as parents, as reflected in the large number of ‘non-custodial’ or ‘non-residential’ parents forcefully removed from their children’s lives, as daily caregivers, by misguided family court judgments.”
The importance of proper policy and laws to change the landscape of North American culture and several advanced industrial technologically advanced societies becomes more than noteworthy.
This can become a crucial linkage from the theories and evidence to the practical improvement of our lot. Children need mothers, as is known. They need fathers too, as is less acknowledged as an important factor.
Kruk stated, “More often than not, fathers are involuntarily relegated by family courts to the role of ‘accessory parents,’ valued for their role as financial providers rather than as active caregivers.”
He notes this with the fact of fathers sharing caregiving responsibilities with the mother prior to divorce in two-parent, intact families. Kruk continued, “This is both because fathers have taken up the slack while mothers work longer hours outside the home, and because fathers are no longer content to play a secondary role as parents.”
Modern dads continue to love the idea of being active, involved dads. Dads of prior eras may have wanted to become more involved with their children, but could not. They, in a sense, felt forced or compelled to work. They failed to be fathers by culture.
Women failed to be professionals by culture. Think about the lost time, love, care, and the vast regrets of those old, and now those dead and gone, fathers who wished to be fathers before they grew old, but could not. All of them gone – time and them. Distant memories and generations colored by regret.
“Most fathers today are keen to experience both the joys and challenges of parenthood, derive satisfaction from their parental role, and consider active and involved fatherhood to be the core component of their self-identity,” Kruk opined.
However, the institutional structures and supports of the culture do not permit the ability of parents to be fully engaged parents, argues Kruk. Children who lack fathers undergo a severe cascade of life tragedies and character failures.
He explained, “…children’s diminished self-concept, and compromised physical and emotional security (children consistently report feeling abandoned when their fathers are not involved in their lives, struggling with their emotions and episodic bouts of self-loathing).”
The children will have behavioral problems. We see this especially in the prison populations with the men who were troubled, fatherless boys and young men. The men who work to show off machismo as a mask for their real selves.
“…truancy and poor academic performance (71 per cent of high school dropouts are fatherless; fatherless children have more trouble academically, scoring poorly on tests of reading, mathematics, and thinking skills; children from father-absent homes are more likely to play truant from school, more likely to be excluded from school, more likely to leave school at age 16, and less likely to attain academic and professional qualifications in adulthood),” Kruk elaborated in depth.
The impacts of fatherlessness extend into the realm of delinquency and youth crime as well. With the 8% number of youth in prison having an absent father, the adults come from the same house arrangement. Fatherlessness becomes a predictor of being a prisoner.
This impacts the promiscuity and pregnancy rates too. “…fatherless children are more likely to experience problems with sexual health, including a greater likelihood of having intercourse before the age of 16, foregoing contraception during first intercourse, becoming teenage parents, and contracting sexually transmitted infection,” Kruk notes.
The shows in girls with an “object hunger” for males. They experience emotional loss of fathers, especially those who egocentrically reject them. Women become exploitable by the adult men in their lives. One may surmise the men become the exploiters with similar backgrounds, possibly.
The fatherless do drugs, drink, and smoke throughout life more than those with fathers. 90% of runaway children have an absent father. The majority of the homelessness are men. The exploitation and abuse probability rise as well.
Kruk explained, “…fatherless children are at greater risk of suffering physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, being five times more likely to have experienced physical abuse and emotional maltreatment, with a one hundred times higher risk of fatal abuse.”
Psychosomatic illnesses emerge more from the fatherless children too, e.g., asthma, chronic pain, headaches, and stomach aches. This comes to the mental health disorders too. Anxiety, depression, suicide, and mental health problems emerge from the fatherless sons.
If alcoholism amounts to a family disease, and if depression equates to an individual psychological disease, and if criminality is a moral and behavioral failing or disease in a way, and so on, then this would seem to imply fatherlessness as a total life disease along statistical and probabilistic lines based on the aforementioned risks.
“…life chances (as adults, fatherless children are more likely to experience unemployment, have low incomes, remain on social assistance, and experience homelessness),” Kruk explained, “… future relationships (father absent children tend to enter partnerships earlier, are more likely to divorce or dissolve their cohabiting unions, and are more likely to have children outside marriage or outside any partnership).”
It creates a cycle of lower lifespans too. Child die sooner. The fatherless live four years shorter over the lifespan. These problems of individuals, families, and societies correlate fatherlessness more than any other factor.
“…surpassing race, social class and poverty, father absence may well be the most critical social issue of our time. In Fatherless America, David Blankenhorn calls the crisis of fatherless children “the most destructive trend of our generation,” Kruk described.
Some identify this as a public health issue. That is, a society-wide problem of serious consideration now. The problem seems more pertinent for focus on during Father’s Day.
Leonard Sax, Philip Zimbardo, Nikita D. Coulombe, Christina Hoff Sommers, Hanna Rosin, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin, and many unlisted others commented, in the past and present, on different facets – from sometimes vastly different angles – directly or indirectly associated with these problems of boys and young men and the men who they become in their futures.
“Many fathers’ advocates have stressed the need for fast, low-cost, effective ways for non-residential parents to have their court-ordered parenting time enforced,” Kruk said in a concluding statement, “While access enforcement is important, legislating for shared parenting would be a more effective measure to ensure the ongoing active involvement of both parents in children’s lives.”
This becomes the presumption of shared parenting as important with the primary parenting done by not one or the other parent, but both. Parents need respect and consideration. In particular, they need this in order for the best interests of the child, even if the parents separate. They can amicably deal with the shared responsibilities as the next generation, and their legacy, develops at any rate. We owe that to them: fathers, mothers, and sons and daughters.
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Image Credits: Pixabay