Absentee Dads

We are going out of our way to grow irresponsible males.

— Phil Donahue1

   I don't agree with feminist Gloria Steinem about many things. But I am in hearty agreement with her when she says, "Most American children suffer from too much mother and too little father."2

   Unsure and frustrated in their roles of husband and father, and lacking adequate role models, American men are deserting their families in droves. Of all the tragedies that their flight creates, none is sadder than the abandoned child — unless it is the child who was never wanted in the first place.

Phantom Fathers

   In numbers never before witnessed, men are refusing to take upon themselves the responsibility of being fathers to the children they helped procreate. The most blatant abdication of responsibility for one's children is abortion. Most people think of abortion as a woman's

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problem. But recent research suggests that of the over one-and-a-half million abortions performed in this country annually, a very high proportion are performed at the instigation or insistence of the baby's father, or because the mother knows she cannot count on the baby's father for any kind of support.3

   Of the children who are allowed to be born, a distressing number are not born into stable families. In the last four decades the annual rate of illegitimate births has exploded! In 1994, a full thirty percent of all children born were born out of wedlock.4 By the end of the decade that number will reach forty percent.5 One reliable source predicts that fifty percent of all American children will be born out of wedlock within the next twelve to twenty years.6

   Imagine the confusion and human suffering that will reverberate through our culture in the third millennium, when fully half of all American children will be fathered by men who desert them before they are born.

   The role of the male in bringing children into this world has been so downplayed that fatherhood is all but a non-issue. Fathers might soon be viewed, at least in the eyes of some, as what columnist John Leo labels "irrelevant inseminators." Leo goes on to observe:

Alas, the American open market in sperm [currently 3,000 children each year are conceived through artificial insemination], virtually unquestioned and undiscussed, institutionalizes this view of the irrelevant, irresponsible male. Men can spawn children

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with no responsibility. Women can raise them without putting up with a male.

   Biological fatherhood was once understood by society to carry with it permanent moral obligations to the child. Now it can involve nothing more than a financially strapped college student masturbating into a cup for $50 and writing a vaguely caring letter to an offspring he will never see or care about.7

   And the government, instead of requiring men to become more involved and responsible for the children they beget, has developed public policy that actually does the opposite. We now have a situation in poor families, writes psychologist Wade C. Mackey, where "government agencies . . . compete with the traditional father role in providing goods and services to children." Because "a man would have to be paid in excess of $16,000 to match what the federal government is able to allot to a woman and her child," a working-class father earning the minimum wage, or just above it, confronts "a vexing problem: his efforts cannot match the resources available from government agencies."

   "It seems plausible," Mackey concludes, "that government competition serves as a real disincentive to fathering."8

   Over the years I've worked with numerous people whose serious problems of hostility can be traced, at least in part, to a latent insecurity they've carried with them for years. The cause of that insecurity? For many

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it was the anonymous father who deserted them before they were born.

The Divorce Dilemma

   But an even more prevalent source of missing fathers is the national divorce disgrace. When speaking to a group of conservative Christians about their aversion to the gay rights movement, former Secretary of Education, William Bennett, observed, "I understand the aversion to homosexuality. I understand the difference between approval and tolerance. But if you look in terms of damage to children, you cannot compare what the homosexual movement, the gay rights movement, has done with what divorce has done to this society."9

   Bennett is right. Divorce has virtually devastated American society. We dispatch our spouses with a frequency unmatched anywhere else in the world at any point in recorded history. The average husband and wife in this country head to divorce court just seven years after they march down the wedding aisle. In America, it's statistically probable that your dog will be with you longer than your spouse. There were over 1,200,000 divorces granted in the United States in 1994.10 That's about one divorce for every two marriages performed. Of the 2,396,000 marriages reported in 1988, over 44 percent involved a bride who had been previously married.11

   And contrary to the wishful thinking of articles proclaiming the maturity and stability of remarriage, the hard facts tell a different story. The rate of divorce is

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higher among second marriages than among first marriages.12

   This century, of course, has seen the divorce rate skyrocket. In the last seventy years in America, the annual number of divorces granted has increased by an incredible 1,420 percent! The baby boomers of the fifties have grown up, and are leaving their mates at twice the rate of their parents.

   And pity the poor kids left behind! To them, having parents go through a divorce is a typical part of growing up. Consider this report: "More than 1,000,000 youngsters a year live through the shocks of a marital breakup. 'Today's children are the first generation in the country's history who think divorce and separation are a normal part of family life,' says sociologist Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University."13

   A husband and wife in Southern California recently went to a Back-to-School Night at their son's public high school. In the curriculum packet passed out by the health teacher was a handout on the "Stages of Life." It listed birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, marriage, divorce, old age, and death. We live in times in which our kids are taught that divorce is as normal a part of family life as is adolescence or death!

   In America today, divorce almost always means that children are without their fathers. In 1994, thirty-one percent of American children under the age of eighteen did not live with both parents. Those children are almost eight times more likely to live with just their mothers than with just their fathers. In fact, they are

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more likely to live with neither parent than they are to live with just their dads.

   When these missing fathers become what the law calls "non-custodial parents," they often become dead-beat dads, who rarely visit and often contribute nothing, or next to nothing, to the economic needs of their children. I have a parishioner who works for the local district attorney's office. The entirety of his job, along with that of several other people in the department, is to track down and try to force financial responsibility out of deadbeat dads.

   The trauma of divorce is a major source of the emotional stress suffered by children. Noted child psychologist and best-selling author Dr. David Elkind wrote in the early 1980s:

   We see many more children who show symptoms of stress — headaches, stomachaches, low mood, learning problems. As they get older, many feel that they have missed an important part of their life. They feel used and abused. My concern is that if they don't feel cared about, then they can't ever care about anybody else — or about themselves. We may be creating a large number of children who are emotional misfits.14

   Dr. Elkind's words are proving to be prophetic. For despite naive, politically correct assertions to the contrary, the undeniable reality is that divorce does great and lasting damage to children.

   Following the example of the culture, Christians are

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increasingly becoming a part of these divorce statistics, too. Even though the Scriptures teach that God "hates divorce," Christians are throwing away their marriage commitments at alarming rates.

   I remember hearing — and preaching — from the pulpit, not too many years ago, the oft-repeated claim that the divorce rate among Christian marriages was low compared to that of the non-Christian world. But things have changed. Instead of Christians bearing witness to the secular culture, that culture has converted the Christians. The divorce rate among Christians now runs pretty close to the national average.

   Christian and non-Christian alike, men are jumping ship. Through the plague of divorce, they are contributing to the pains of sorrow and rejection felt by the fatherless family. What does this epidemic of departure mean? It signals the desperate need to return to responsible manhood.

   Real masculinity involves a willingness to remain committed to loved ones no matter what circumstance arises. The collapse of adequate models of Christian manhood is producing self-absorbed and often cowardly men who bail out when the going gets tough. These men are destroying their children by their absence.

Visible but Not Present

   But wait. There is yet another category of absentee dads. This largest group of absentee fathers is hidden from the view of statisticians. They are the ones still living at home! They are there, but they are not making contact.

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   These fellows have minimal communication with their wives and are almost totally oblivious to their children. According to a California school superintendent, "The average American father does not give three minutes per day, but only 35 seconds of undivided attention to his child each day."15

   In my thirty years of ministry, the most consistent complaint I have heard from Christian wives is that their husbands lack personal contact with them and their children. It is a charge I hear repeated over and over and over again. Fathers are there physically, but not emotionally or spiritually.

   It is probably fair to say that hundreds of thousands of American men have forsaken their responsibilities toward their families so that they can pursue other interests. For some, it's wealth and possessions. They have submitted their lives unconditionally to highly competitive industries so that they can climb a status ladder. Their time belongs not to the family, but to the corporation.

   For other men, it's not status or wealth per se, that captivates them, but work itself. They go at it for endless hours. The salesman on the road, the CPA who brings his ledgers home, or the executive who schedules meetings morning, noon and night — they never seem to stop. The workaholic has nothing left to give his family. Tired of people and conversation, once he gets home he merely wants to be left alone. In the morning he may shower and leave before the family is even awake, and then he shifts into high gear as he pours every once of energy he possesses into his job. And lest

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I sound immune, we pastors can become churchaholics without realizing it.

   "Regular guys" who punch the time clock at 8:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. can be included in this category, too. Some of them stubbornly resent having to listen to tales of family member's daily experiences around the supper table. Such men swap paternal responsibility for personal pleasure. Imagining they have worked harder than their wives — which they haven't — they plop down in front of the TV for the evening. With expertise that comes from careful practice, they learn to tune out their children.

   To this man, a wife exists to care for his needs, the house, the children, and the pets — in that order. Instead of viewing his home as a place to love, serve, and lead his family, he sees it as a place to rest himself, refresh himself, and amuse himself.

   Mark it well: a tuned-out father, consciously or subconsciously, prefers to watch the six o'clock news rather than speak with this own children. He would rather eat take-out food by the glow of a rented movie on his VCR than join his wife for a candlelight dinner. He would rather lose himself in the distant world of ESPN than toss a football with his teenage son. Always self-absorbed, he would rather zone out than serve the needs of his family.

   Listen to a letter I received from the wife of a Christian friend which tragically expresses the feelings of countless women in America today. I include this with her permission.

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The kids are in bed. There's nothing on TV tonight. I ask my husband if he minds if I turn the tube off. He grunts. As I walk to the set my mind is racing. Maybe, just maybe tonight we'll talk. I mean have a conversation that consists of more than my usual question with his mumbled one word answer or, more accurately, no answer at all. Silence — I live in a world with continuous noise but, between him and myself, silence. Please — oh, God, let him open up. I initiate (once again; for the thousandth time). My heart pounds — oh how can I word it this time? What can I say that will open the door to just talk? I don't have to have a DEEP MEANINGFUL CONVERSATION. JUST SOMETHING!

As I open my mouth — he gets up and goes to the bedroom. The door closes behind him. The light showing under the door gives way to darkness. So does my hope. I sit alone on the couch. My heart begins to ache. I'm tired of being alone. Hey, I'm married. I have been for years. Why do I sit alone? The sadness undergoes a change slowly — then with increased fervor I get mad. I AM MAD. I'm sick and tired of living with a sissy. A wimp — a coward. You know, he's afraid of me!

Hostile, you say? You better believe it. I'm sick and tired of living in a world of passive men.

My two sons like sports. They're pretty good. They could be a lot better if their Dad would take a little of his precious time and play catch with them. (I'm sorry, catch once a year at the church picnic

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doesn't quite make the boys into great ball players.) But Dad's too busy. He's at work. He's at the health club. He's riding his four-wheeler. He's working on the car. He's playing golf. He's tired. He's watching a video movie. So who plays catch with my boys? Me. My husband says, "You shouldn't be playing men's sports." So who's going to do it? He says he will. But he doesn't. Remember? He's too busy. Satisfying himself doing what he likes. So my poor sons have to be second-rate in sports. They could have been good. Really good. Yeah — I'm mad.

My daughter is a teenager. She likes boys. They notice her. They pay attention to her. She responds. I know what's coming. I try to talk to her. But it's not me she wants. It's Dad. Yeah Dad! If he'd just hug her, notice her, talk to her — just a little — she wouldn't need those boys so much. But no ... so she turns elsewhere for attention and love. And there's nothing I can do.

A mom isn't enough. Kids need a father. And not just a body, a passive, silent presence.

And here's the killer. My husband's father did the same number on him. Didn't hug him. Didn't take him to anything let alone watch his baseball games. And he HATES his father. Now my husband's doing the same thing. Will our sons grow up passive? Will they be cowards?

   Since this letter was written, her husband has continued to be withdrawn, and this poor lady's worst fears

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have all come true and then some. God save us from passive fathers. Taking the initiative to actively lead the family is a trait of authentic masculinity. Like the father described in this letter, countless American men have been neutered through the acquired passivity that is characteristic of the way they relate to their families.

   Fatherhood is rapidly becoming a lost art, and its loss is threatening the stability of an entire society. Dad's disappearance, whether physical or emotional, is exacting a disastrous toll.

Children of AWOL Dads

   Today over four out of ten American children do not live with their fathers, and kids without fathers grow up damaged. Dramatic events can intervene to change this sad scenario, but in all likelihood they won't.

   This unpleasant reality is not very popular with the political-correctness crowd. According to researcher Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, "Those who argue that it [fathers' absence] poses a serious threat [to children] are dismissed as being pessimistic or nostalgic, unwilling to accept the new facts of life. The dominant view in the popular culture is that the changes in family structure are, on balance, positive."16

   But this point of view is just wishful thinking. The effects of single-parent families on children are real and they are devastating. Several years ago the National Commission on Children concluded, "Rising rates of divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing and absent parents

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[nine out of ten of whom are fathers] are not just manifestations of alternative lifestyles, they are patterns of adult behavior that increase children's risk of negative consequences."17

   Noted Harvard sociologist Amitai Etzoni concurs: "The body of data leads to the inescapable conclusion that single parenting is harmful to children."18

   In his blockbuster book, "Fatherless America," David Blankenhorn calls fatherlessness "the leading cause of declining child well-being in our society." He goes on to say:

There is debate, even alarm, about specific social problems. Divorce. Out-of-wedlock childbearing. Children growing up in poverty. Youth violence. Unsafe neighborhoods. Domestic violence. The weakening of parental authority. But in these discussions, we seldom acknowledge the underlying phenomenon that binds together these otherwise disparate issues: the flight of males from their children's lives.19

Dads and Daughters

   Though boys suffer in a different way from father-absence than do girls, not having a man around the house has a wrenching effect on daughters as well. Bryce Christensen writes, "Young girls who see their parents divorce are likely to grow up to be depressed women."20

   Girls have a much more difficult time developing a

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positive image about themselves when their father is not around, even if his absence is just in terms of passivity. Consider the pain expressed by a high-school senior:

   Have you ever heard of a father who won't talk to his daughter? My father doesn't seem to know I'm alive. In my whole life he has never said he loves me or given me a goodnight kiss unless I asked him to.

   I think the reason he ignores me is because I'm so boring. I look at my friends and think, if I were funny like Jill or a super brain like Sandy or even outrageous and punk like Tasha, he would put down his paper and be fascinated.

   I play the recorder, and for the past three years, I've been a soloist in the fall concert at school. Mom comes to the concerts, but Dad never does. This year, I'm a senior, so it's his last chance. I'd give anything to look out into the audience and see him there. But who am I kidding? It will never happen.21

   The lack of attention from her dad led this poor girl to the conclusion that she was dull, unintelligent, and all-around boring. Hardly what you'd call a healthy self-image.

   Fathers are the main source from which girls develop their image of their femininity. Without the warmth and affection of a present father, young girls begin dating and pairing off at a much earlier age. They become desperate for male attention and approval.

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   I recall from my high-school years that the most vulnerable girls were those without fathers. They were the ones the boys picked out to "put the make on." Lacking the natural affection and protection a father provides at home, such girls responded eagerly to almost any male who showed them gestures of kindness. Innocent as these girls might have been, they usually fell into sexual abuse and then rejection.

   I have worked with unmarried teenage mothers over the years. Most of these girls did not have a father present. Some of the dads were absent because of desertion, divorce, or military duty. Others were emotionally gone because of alcohol or drug abuse, or plain old self-absorption. Tragedy of tragedies, these daughters of fatherless families all began fatherless families of their own.

   The reality, as researchers Shapiro and Schrof point out, is that "young women who were reared in disrupted families are twice as likely to become teen mothers. Growing up with both parents turns out to be a better antidote to teen pregnancy than handing out condoms."22

Shattered Sons

   But it is not just the daughters who suffer when dad is not there. Sons are also devastated. Studies show that father-absent sons "tended to have an unrealistic and feminine fantasy picture of what a father was or should be, behaved in a much more dependent manner and reacted submissively and immaturely to peer influence." Such boys will also

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"have a strong inclination toward depression."23

   More and more often, that depression reaches its ultimate low point. Americans were shocked by the heartbreaking news of six students who committed suicide in a middle-class Texas town. One of the six boys was a good-looking football player on his high-school team. His mother, in a TV interview, revealed the struggle of her son. She said that in response to her question about his apparent depression, her son told her, "Mom, you don't understand. You don't know what it is like to not have a father."

   And it's not just older boys who sense great loss. Dad's disappearance affects his son even at a very early age. James Herzog has been a psychiatrist at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston. He once studied seventy-two young children from single-parent homes in neighboring suburban Brookline. His conclusion? "Absence of an active father figure was harmful, and most harmful to male toddlers 18 to 24 months old. These children had recurring nightmares about monsters," which Herzog interprets as a sign of displaced aggression and vulnerability.24

   Boys without fathers are far more likely than any other children to perform poorly in school, become classroom discipline problems, or have a run-in with the law. More than seventy-five percent of the juveniles arrested are boys. Most of them come from broken homes. A juvenile is three times more likely to be a delinquency statistic if that broken home has no father than if it has no mother.25

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   Boys without fathers simply have a tough time growing up into well-adjusted men. Men's abdication of responsibility affects boys not only at home, but in the female-dominated world of school as well.

Why Is Johnny Nonacademic?

   Boys, by virtue of their gender, are entering American schools with startling disadvantages. It appears that from the very onset of their education, the deck is stacked against them. Patricia Sexton, professor of sociology and education, has directed research projects on poverty and the schools for the National Institute of Mental Health and the U.S. Office of Education. She reveals the following statistics:

   Sexton sums things up by saying, "Thus with respect to vision, hearing, speech, writing, manual and physical control — all the senses and physical capacities through which people learn — boys are disadvantaged."26

   These facts have been borne out repeatedly in my wife's teaching experience. Barbara has taught for over

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thirty years. For ten years, she was a Special Education Resource teacher in three different elementary schools. This is a service of the public schools to children with learning handicaps. Without exception, the vast majority of her students were boys. She once worked with twelve students who were so seriously disadvantaged that they were removed from a regular classroom setting and put under her care on a full-time basis. Guess who the students were? All but one were boys.

   Report cards of elementary school children show higher marks for girls than boys. Girls appear more often than boys on the honor roll, and they are not held back a year as often as boys. Girls also score higher on aptitude tests. There are more male than female underachievers.

   The trend continues all the way through college, where, as Peter Brimelow reports, "men are less likely than women to attend college (46% v. 54%) and less likely to graduate from college (45% v. 55%)."27

   There is a reason why males do not do as well in the eyes of their teachers. When they enter school, they are ready to learn things that contribute to the formation of their masculinity, but they are not ready for the restrictions that come upon them from a feminine atmosphere. Therefore, compared to girls, who more naturally conform to the feminine structure of the elementary school system, boys appear immature.

   Because of this dilemma, every year the same question comes up from parents inquiring about the welfare of their five-year-old boys: "Should we wait one more

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year before we send our son to school? We don't want him lagging behind the others." It is a question that is rarely if ever asked about five-year-old daughters.

   Even after their son has attended school, parents ask, "Do you think it will hurt our son to be retained one year? He seems to be a whole year behind the other students." These kinds of concerns expressed by parents almost always relate to boys.

   Some experts say the average boy is not mature enough to begin school until he is six-and-a-half years old, while the average girl seems to be ready for the classroom at age five years and nine months. I agree that many boys are not ready for school at the usual age of five. But this is not necessarily because they are immature. Could it not also be that teachers are not ready for normal five-year-old male behavior? Momism author Hans Sebald argues,

All too often these boys' fundamental learning process is left exclusively to females — the mother, the Sunday school teacher, nursery and kindergarten personnel, and the elementary school teacher. Thus, boys are exposed to the continuous authority and teaching of agents whom they may not imitate, but whose guidance and information about what they should be, they are expected to accept and practice.28

   More than eighty-three percent of all teachers in public elementary schools are women!29 As I said, my wife is one of them. This works fine for girls who are

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ready to play school by participating in a feminine atmosphere. They sit quietly and listen to the teacher and take notes with their newly acquired writing skills. Reading stories and gaining facts from books come easily for most girls. They are usually eager to repeat the assignments that they have been asked to memorize.

   Boys, on the other hand, are quickly bored with this seemingly passive style of schooling; they have little interest in sitting still and being quiet. Reading and memorizing do not fit into the real world of young males. No matter how many words pass through the air, staying seated in one place for long periods of time does not connect with the natural processes by which boys learn. And most boys intuitively know it.

   Those first years in elementary school come at a time when a boy is developing inherent masculine tendencies. He is shaping his skills for courage and strength. Thus, he is constantly seeking action. While girls tend to want to think and feel, boys would rather see and do. They want to participate with vigorous verbal contact and aggressive physical action.

   When class ends, the boys stampede onto the playground to accomplish some small acts of bravery. If a girl joins them, she is called a tomboy. Whether shooting at the air with bursts of imaginary bullets, hanging by the heels from playground bars, or simply shoving and pushing an opponent, boys will be — and need to be — boys. These very normal actions that boys display do not evoke the approval of a female-dominated system, even on the school playground. What is natural to

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young males is often viewed as bad behavior. Therefore, many normal boys are labeled "bad boys" early in life, when they are simply trying to discover their masculinity through innocent exercises in competitive game-playing.

   David Blankenhorn summarizes the situation this way: "Schools are institutions run by women in which women and girls are seen as disadvantaged and boys are seen as a toxic problem. In school the goal of getting girls to achieve is wonderful. The goal for boys is making them behave."30

   Allow me to be personal for a moment. It was difficult enough to have a sister three years ahead of me in school, but the bigger problem was that she was an "A" student and an outstanding musician. Actually, things weren't too bad until I landed in Miss Billings' music class in the seventh grade. I had no interest in music. Since both my mother and my sister were pianists, I instinctively felt it would be disastrous for my painfully emerging manhood if I played the piano, too. But Miss Billings was not sympathetic. Within the first week in her class, she publicly mourned the fact that I was not a musician or a wonderful student like my sister.

   That was fine by me. I didn't want to be like Joyce. She was a girl, and I was a boy. If, in Miss Billings' class being an achiever meant being like my sister, I was determined not to achieve, but to turn my creative resources to mischief. This woman, dedicated as she was, had done her part in teaching me the misconception that being masculine meant being "bad." No

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credit to me, she suffered greatly through prank after prank that I pulled on her for the rest of the semester.

   Fortunately, I escaped the plight of many of my friends, who ultimately gave up and joined the ever-growing army of high-school dropouts — most of whom are male.

   Other boys resolve the woman teacher / male student conflict by totally submitting to the system in order to obtain the academic awards bestowed upon achievers' heads. They become bookworms. Picture the young genius with his horn-rimmed glasses who seeks his teachers' approval to the point of alienating his male friends. We called him "teacher's pet," but only if the teacher was female. For him, playground combat becomes a mental game. He scratches and beats up other boys with his wit and caustic remarks.

   Let me be quick to add that there are very masculine men who also excel academically. Not all honor students are wimps. Take Bill Bradley, a retired U.S. Senator who was not only a Rhodes Scholar but a professional basketball player as well. Or my good friend, Dr. Jack Sparks, a brilliant scholar and chancellor of a school of theology, who was also a top-notch college athlete. This is not to say that only jocks can be masculine. I've already debunked the false equation of masculinity with athletic ability in the last chapter. Men who excel academically can certainly be masculine without any athletic involvement whatsoever. My point here is that men who excel both academically and physically are the exception, not the rule.

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As Patricia Sexton remarks:

Besides noting the carnage left by the war between boy and school, I began this inquiry with the hunch, based on a life spent in classrooms, that boys who rise to the top in school often resemble girls in important ways. While they are a more diverse group, those boys who hide under the surface or sink to the bottom are less likely to be taken for girls. It is the baby fat that usually floats and the muscle that sinks. Scholastic honor and masculinity, in other words, too often seem incompatible.31

   Unfortunately, it is usually this honor student who returns to the classroom to teach his feminized values to the young lads who enter his domain. Sometimes, the only thing worse for boys than a woman teacher is a feminized male teacher who confuses and antagonizes them.

Coach Sam

   In today's schools, one of the few reinforcers of masculinity is the male high-school coach. Sports provide an acceptable arena for boys to display a normal aspect of their development.

   Sam Della Maggiore was a well-known city councilman in San Jose, California, where I grew up. He was also our high-school wrestling coach. We were aware that Sam didn't coach for the money; he did it because he loved sports and boys. That was enough to motivate us,

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but perhaps even more compelling was how we felt when we were around him — we felt like men.

   This man chased away cowardice like vapor by his very presence. He was always encouraging us in our workouts by doing things like standing below us during the rope climbs and offering a friendly swat on our behinds with a paddle if we lingered within his swinging distance. He always took his team's side against any unjust referee or opponent. Coach Sam insisted that each person do his best. For him, we couldn't do anything less. His masculine leadership resulted in his team's taking first place in the city's high-school wrestling league for nineteen years straight, the length of his career as a coach at San Jose High.

   When Coach Sam retired, the team began to lose. What was his magic? I believe that in him young men recognized a true masculinity that combined strength, love, courage, and loyalty — the kind of example that young men need.

   Athletics are one of the last frontiers for boys to secure their identity as males. Now even that is being tampered with. My son's elementary school soccer team was coed; all-girl teams are permissible, but all-boy teams are forbidden. More than one girl has won a lawsuit to gain admittance to the local high-school football team. Similar developments are happening all over our nation.

   America's schoolboys are troubled. From the very onset of their formal educational experience, they are subjected to a host of feminizing forces that create a

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sometimes unresolvable tug of war between being "good" and being "male." Too often boys resolve this tension by accepting this false dichotomy and heading down a path of delinquent behavior.

   In an insightful article entitled "The Fragile Sex," we read, "Boys clog the court system, fill juvenile detention centers and threaten public safety. Juvenile arrests for violent crimes — which almost always involve males — increased by 50% between 1987 and 1991. The murder rate for teens — victims were almost all male — is up 104% from 20 years ago, and last year, nearly 7,000 boys between ages 15 and 24 were killed."32

   In the 1980s, University of Chicago criminologist Franklin E. Zimring concluded that "in a large measure America's crime problem is its youth problem and vice versa."33 In the intervening years his observation has become more true than when he made it. For over three decades now, crimes by children have been rising at a faster rate than the juvenile population. In 1992, there were over 118,000 people under the age of eighteen arrested for violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault). Juveniles account for almost a third of all serious crimes.34

   Crime is really a male affair. Over eighty percent of all juveniles held in public or private custody are male.35 The percentage of the adult population of state and federal prisons that is male is even higher. And there is a definite connection between juvenile hall and prison. A Washington Post survey showed that almost two-thirds of adult prison inmates surveyed said they were

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involved in crime before their eighteenth birthday and that the "median age of an inmate's first incarceration was sixteen."36

   In my trend-setting home state of California, we've been on a prison-building binge for over a decade now. Other states have followed suit. But overcrowding is still a problem, because the rate of criminal activity continues to escalate faster than prisons can be built to house these male perpetrators.

Crime and the Father Factor

   Why am I talking about crime in this chapter on divorce, illegitimacy, and withdrawn fathers? I am doing so because the missing father is the single most prevalent factor shared by those involved in criminal behavior.

   Popular wisdom would have us believe that poverty and racial problems are the real instigators of criminal activity, but it just isn't so. "The popular assumption that there is an association between race and crime is false," writes Patrick Fagan. "Illegitimacy, not race is the key factor. It is the absence of marriage and the failure to form and maintain intact families that explains the incidence of crime among whites as well as blacks."37

   The evidence is consistent and compelling. David Blankenhorn tells us, "Scholars look at things like educational status of the mother, family income, race, quality of the neighborhood. And time and again, the evidence clearly suggests that the absence of a father is a more important predictor."38

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   According to Harvard Law School graduate and Arizona Assistant Attorney General Andrew Peyton Thomas, an incredible seventy percent of inmates in prisons and juvenile facilities come from fatherless homes. So strong is the correlation that Thomas maintains if you removed the fatherless prisoners from the statistics, the correlations between race and crime and between poverty and crime would disappear.39

   But why is there such a strong connection between fatherlessness and criminal behavior? David Blankenhorn puts it this way:

Both clinical studies and anthropological investigations confirm the process through which boys seek to separate from their mothers in search of the meaning of their maleness. In this process, the father is irreplaceable. He enables the son to separate from the mother. He is the gatekeeper, guiding his son into the community of men, teaching him to name the meaning of his embodiment, showing him on good authority that he can be "man enough."

   In this process, the boy becomes more than the son of his mother, or even the son of his parents. he becomes the son of his father. Later, when the boy becomes a man, he will reunite with the world of women, the world of his mother, through his spouse and children. In this sense, only by becoming his father's as well as his mother's son can he become a good father and husband.

   When this process of male identity does not

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succeed — when the boy cannot separate from the mother, cannot become the son of his father — one main result, in clinical terms, is rage. Rage against the mother, against women, against society.40

   He concludes by saying, "Put simply, we have too many boys with guns because we have too few fathers. If we want fewer of the former, we must have more of the latter. There is little evidence to suggest that any other strategy will work."41

   Earlier in this chapter I aligned emotionally disconnected men with men who were physically separated from their families through divorce and illegitimacy. My personal pastoral experience confirms that when children of intact families become involved in out-of-wedlock births, substance abuse, delinquent behavior, and run-ins with the law, the father of the family is almost always passive or emotionally distant from his children.

   While I quickly acknowledge that children in intact families are far less at risk than those from fatherless families, my experience has taught me that risks are not completely eliminated by a father's physical presence alone. In other words, men not only need to be with their families; they need to genuinely connect with their wives and children.

   We live at a time when the men of America are bailing out on their families at a rate never before known in our society's history. Whether through illegitimacy, divorce, or emotional withdrawal, American

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men are jumping ship at precisely the time in history when they should be leading their families to safe harbors.

Chapter 4  ||  Table of Contents

1. The Phil Donahue Show, NBC, Feb. 17, 1986.

2. Partnow, Quotable Woman, Vol. 2, p. 387.

3. Frederica Mathewes-Green, Real Choices (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Books, 1994).

4. Joseph P. Shapiro and Joanie M. Schrof, "Honor Thy Children," U.S. News & World Report, Feb. 27, 1995, p. 42.

5. William J. Bennett, "What Really Ails America," Reader's Digest, April, 1995, p. 198.

6. Patrick F. Fagan, "The Real Root of Violent Crime: The Breakdown of the Family," IMPRIMIS, Vol. 24, No. 10, October, 1995, p. 4.

7. Wade C. Mackey, as quoted in The Family in America, New Research, May, 1995, p. 4.

8. John Leo, "Promoting No-Dad Families," U.S. News & World Report, May 15, 1995, p. 26.

9. William J. Bennett, as quoted by John Leo in "A New Values Vocabulary," U.S. News & World Report, Oct. 3, 1994, p. 22.

10. Shapiro & Schrof, "Honor Thy Children," p. 42.

11. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1994, pp. 139, 140.

12. Norman M. Lobsenz, "How to Make a Second Marriage Work," Parade Magazine, Sept. 1, 1985, p. 12.

13. Alvin P. Sanoff, "Our Neglected Kids," U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 9, 1982, p. 57.

14. David Elkind, "Youngsters Under Stress — What Parents Can Do," U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 9, 1982, p. 58.

15. Cole, Maximized Manhood, p. 142.

16. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, "Divorce and Kids: The Evidence Is In," Reader's Digest, July, 1993, p. 119.

17. John Leo, "A Pox on Dan and Murphy," U.S. News & World Report, June 1, 1992, p. 19.

18. Ibid.

19. David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 1, 2.

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20. Bryce Christensen, "Depressed Women," The Family in America: New Research, May, 1995, p. 1.

21. Abigail Wood, "The Trouble with Dad," Seventeen, October, 1985, p. 38.

22. Shapiro & Schrof, "Honor Thy Children," p. 39.

23. Hans Sebald, Momism (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1976), pp. 58, 59.

24. John Leo, "Single Parent Double Trouble," Time, Jan. 4, 1982, p. 81.

25. Daniel Amneus, Back to Patriarchy (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1979), p. 64.

26. Patricia Sexton, The Feminized Male (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 14.

27. Brimelow, "Gender Politics," p. 46.

28. Sebald, Momism, pp. 111-112.

29. Sexton, Feminized Male, p. 29.

30. David Blakenhorn as quoted by Michael D'Antonio, "The Fragile Sex," Los Angeles Times Magazine, Dec. 4, 1994, p. 18.

31. Sexton, The Feminized Male, p. 13.

32. D'Antonio, "The Fragile Sex," p. 6.

33. Donald MacGillis, Crime in America (Randor, PA: Chilton Book Co., 1983), p. 143.

34. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1994, pp. 205, 206.

35. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1993, p. 339. 

36. MacGillis, Crime in America, p. 32.

37. Fagan, "The Real Root of Violent Crime," p. 4.

38. David Blankenhorn, as quoted by Richard Schlinin, "Family Dynamics," San Jose Mercury News, April 22, 1995, p. E10.

39. Richard Neely, "Too Many Divorces and Not Enough Guns," Wall Street Journal, Friday, March 24, 1995.

40. Blankenhorn, Fatherless America, p. 30.

41. Ibid., p. 31.

Chapter 4  ||  Table of Contents