The Heart of the Matter: Families and Fatherhood

Sad little boy hugging his mother. Shutterstock

Embedded in MacDonald’s article are the real reasons for juvenile crime and incivility, both in and out of school: the breakdown of families and absentee fathers.

About 33 percent of American children live in single-parent households. Among African-Americans, approximately 72 percent of children live with a single parent, most often the mother. Family breakdown, MacDonald asserts, is the “cause of urban crime and disorder.”

As is so often the case, however, we look to the government for Band-Aids rather than getting to the root of a problem. Many Americans, liberals and progressives, yes, but even a large number of conservatives, turn to the government for help when there are problems with our young people. Every time these people genuflect to the federal government, they not only allow that government to take the place of the traditional family, but they also hand over more power to an entity that is both inept and greedy for control.

Many observers understand the devastation done to our culture and society by the implosion of the family. Which raises the question, as MacDonald does in the article: Why don’t our politicians and others begin a campaign to “revalorize fathers and men?”

Such a campaign would cost little money but might bring great gains in nearly all parts of our society. Think what might happen if local leaders, business executives, pastors, teachers, the media, Hollywood, members of the Congress, and the president himself made an effort, whenever the opportunity presented itself, to stress the importance of the intact family. Think what might happen if we began a serious national dialogue on the importance of fatherhood. Think what might happen if we put aside our current disparagement of men and manliness, our assaults through the law and culture on marriage, and the sneering attacks, mainly from radicals in so many of our universities, on the traditional family unit, and instead promoted the family: mothers, fathers, and children.

Such a program might diminish the battalions of inmates in our prisons, decrease the discipline problems in our schools, increase the capabilities of our students, and reduce monies spent on federal welfare programs.

Perhaps most importantly, by making the family once again the foundation stone of society and by stressing the importance of men and fathers to our culture, we might recover our diminishing freedoms, liberties lost to the government as the family has broken down, a crack-up predicted over 50 years ago by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

“The family is the test of freedom,” G.K. Chesterton wrote, “because the family is the only thing the free man makes for himself and by himself.”

Revalorize fathers and men. Revalorize the idea of family. And maybe in the process, we will revalorize the United States of America.

This post “The Heart of the Matter: Families and Fatherhood,” was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Jeff Minick. He is a freelance writer and teacher living in Front Royal, Virginia.