The Importance of Strong Fathers

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Children are born with an innate need for fathering. The early needs of an infant and toddler are more specifically met by it's mother. But from early childhood onward such needs as emotional and psychological development, encouragement, gender identity formation, physical affection and verbal affirmation, when addressed by a devoted father.

Wade Horn of the National Fatherhood Initiative (an organization which tracks the interaction and involvement of a father in a child's life) remarked, "the greatest social tragedy of the last 30 years has been the collapse of fatherhood. According to long-time fathering researcher Henry Biller, the average daily amount of one-to-one father/child contact in the United States is "less than thirty minutes". Biller also found that fewer than 25 percent of young boys and girls in two-parent households experience an average of at least an hour a day of individualized contact with their fathers ( Biller, "The Father Factor"...) In one major national study of students in grades six through twelve, conducted by the Search Institute of Minneapolis, almost 20 percent of the children reported not having had a good conversation (lasting at least ten minutes) with their mom or dad within the last month.( Benson, The Troubled Journey Minneapolis: Search Institute, 1993, 84 )

Indeed, not only has the importance of a father's role been challenged, but also the very idea that fathers are even necessary at all. Out of this debate there has emerged a negative portrayal of the male gender and traits that seem to be innate in the masculine psyche, leaving a virtual vacuum in terms of any standard by which young boys and youth can attempt to aspire. Henri Nouwen, a parish priest and author, accurately pred...

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... 7.Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, "Dan Quayle was Right," Atlantic Monthly, April 1993, 66.

8.Douglas Nelson, Kids Count (Baltimore: Annie E. Casey Foundation, 1995), 7.

9. Sara McClanahan and Karen Booth, "Mother-Only Families," Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 51 (August 1989): 563, 565.

10. Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Family Matters: The Plight of America's Children," Christian Century, 14-21 July 1993, 710; cited in Council on

Families in America, Marriage in America (New York: Institute for American Values, 1995).

11. McLanahan, S. & K. Booth, (1989, 1994) Mother-only Families: Problems, Prospects, and Politics. Journal of Marriage and the Family 51, 557-580.

12. Summers, Christna Hoff, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men. New York, Touchstone, 2000.

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