About a month ago, one of my friends ECM committed suicide. He used to send me a lot of stories for this blog. Whenever we talked about his background, he would always point to his parents’ divorce as something that really hurt him badly, and caused him to abandon the faith of his childhood for drinking and promiscuity in college. I found an editorial on Fox News that talks about some of the things that he told me he had experienced.
Suzanne Venker writes:
Broken homes, or homes without a physically and emotionally present mother and father, are the cause of most of society’s ills. “Unstable homes produce unstable children,” writes Peter Hasson at The Federalist.
He adds, “On CNN’s list of the “27 Deadliest Mass Shootings In U.S. History,” seven of those shootings were committed by young males since 2005. Of the seven, only one—Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho—was raised by his biological father throughout childhood.”
Life for Nikolas Cruz was no different. His adoptive father died when Cruz was very young, and his adoptive mother had a difficult time raising him.
America’s boys are in serious trouble. As Warren Farrell’s new book, The Boy Crisis, explains, boys are experiencing a crisis of education, a crisis of mental health (as in the case of Nikolas Cruz), a crisis of purpose. And at the root of it all is fatherlessness.
Indeed, there is a direct correlation between boys who grow up with absent fathers and boys who drop out of school, who drink, who do drugs, who become delinquent and who wind up in prison.
And who kill their classmates.
The reason why so many people on the left want to ban guns as the solution to violent crime they don’t like is because they don’t want to address the root cause of the problem: fatherlessness. And why don’t they want to address it? In a second editorial, Suzanne Venker explains why not.
Excerpt:
To point out that boys need their fathers is to shine a spotlight on divorce and single mothers; and that is, admittedly, uncomfortable. But there’s no way to address fatherlessness comfortably.
The fact is, divorce and family breakdown—which, to answer my emailer’s question, is the root of fatherlessness—is catastrophic for children. There’s more than one reason why, but an obvious one is that in the majority of cases, divorce separates children from their fathers.
This is destructive to both boys and girls, but each sex suffers differently. Girls who grow up deprived of their father are more likely to become depressed, more likely to self-harm, and more likely to be promiscuous. But they still have their mothers, with whom they clearly identify. Boys do not have a comparable identification and thus suffer more from father absence. They also tend to act out in a manner that’s harmful to others, which girls typically do not.
[…]More often than not, children lose contact with their fathers—for two reasons. One, mothers remain the default custodial parent in the average American divorce and thus retain most of the control. Second, it is usually women who consider themselves the aggrieved party, as evidenced by the fact that wives initiate 70 percent of divorces.
The unfortunate result is that some divorced mothers use any opportunity to undermine their children’s relationship with their father or, if not that, dismiss the significance of a father’s role.
[…]And the saddest part is most absent fathers aren’t absent by choice. The “deadbeat dad” exists, but not in spades. In many instances, women are divorcing perfectly good husbands in their search for what they believe will be a better match—which is a natural outgrowth of no-fault divorce. Certainly, women who are married to abusive or dangerous men must file for divorce. But such husbands and fathers cannot account for the 70 percent female-led divorce rate.
Seventy percent of divorces are initiated by women, and most of those are for flimsy reasons like unhappiness. As if marriage is about feeling good, and it’s the other person’s job to make you feel good. And if they don’t make you feel good, then you can nuke the relationship. It can be very difficult for men to make women feel anything. Most men do the normal male roles in marriage: protect, provide, lead on moral and spiritual issues. But it’s becoming very common for women today to not be “happy” with the normal male roles.
Personally, I think it’s because of the pattern of hedonism that they build up with alcohol and promiscuity in college. The more men that women have sex with before marrying, the higher their likelihood of dissolving their marriage.
Previously, I blogged about a Swiss study that showed that children tend to rebel against the religion of their parents if the father is not actively promoting it to them. Studies of prominent atheists find that their fathers are defective in some way – absent, immoral, unfaithful, weak, etc. It’s not use crying about crime later if we as a society have decided to stay silent when women choose men poorly, and choose the timing of sex in relationships poorly. If women chase bad boys and make babies with bad boys, then we should be asking them why. This is a community, and poor decisions about who to make babies with costs us all in the long run.
