Why Father’s Day Is More Significant This Year Than Any Other

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Commentary

Imagine if every neighborhood block on the south side of Chicago had one father living on it. In the most violent areas, you would see a dramatic fall in crime, guns, drugs, and assaults. Why? Because fathers have a powerful influence over teen boys.

Take, for instance, the Louisiana high school where violence was out of control. Forty dads decided that they had had enough, so each dad took one day to simply walk the halls of the school. What happened to the violence? It fell dramatically and quickly. Since they started “Dads on Duty,” there hasn’t been a single violent incident on campus according to The Washington Post.

Then there’s the famous study of adolescent male elephants killing rhinoceroses on an African Game Reserve in the 1990s. No one could figure out why the young elephants were killing them.

Apparently, young male elephants go through a violent period called “musth.” This word means “intoxicated” or “madness.” Essentially, they’re out of control. If you have a teen boy, you might be able to identify.

The researchers finally identified a commonality among the young elephants: Their fathers had been killed.

The game reserve in South Africa wanted to get the adolescent elephants under control, so they tried something. Among 85 elephants, they introduced six older bull elephants, and guess what happened to the violence among the young males? It stopped.

It has become vogue to berate dads and marginalize them. Hollywood claims that mothers don’t need a child’s father to help raise their child—they can do it alone. Well, talk to a single mother and see if she agrees. In addition to having a very hard life, if she has a boy, she may have a rough road when he’s a teen.

Think of your own childhood. Did you want a dad? If you had a good dad, you realize how important he was to you. If you had a tough relationship with your father, what would you have given to have had a better one? More than we would realize.

Kids know better than adults when it comes to the critical role dads play in their lives, so let’s listen to them. They would never say that they don’t want or need their dad. They would simply say that they wanted more from him—more time to cherish or more time to heal.

Among teen boys, violence is so out of control that if we don’t figure out what to do, our country is in peril. History shows us what we need to do. We must encourage dads as much as we can and help fathers engage with boys outside of their families. Then we’ve gotten serious about the problem of violence in teen boys.

This Father’s Day, thank a dad. Tell him how crucial he is to his family, his neighborhoods, and our country. And let us put a lid on criticizing dads and making them the butt of jokes. They deserve to know the truth about who they are.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.