Let me add to Mike’s “Happy Fathers Day” with this from Instapundit (reformatted, emphasis mine):
VIRGINIA ALLEN: The Importance of Dads in an Increasingly Fatherless America.
There is a “father absence crisis in America,” according to National Fatherhood Initiative, and the results are sobering. Studies have found that children raised without a father are:
- At a higher risk of having behavioral problems.
- Four times more likely to live in poverty.
- More likely to be incarcerated in their lifetime.
- Twice as likely to never graduate high school.
- At a seven times higher risk of teen pregnancy.
- More vulnerable to abuse and neglect.
- More likely to abuse drugs and alcohol.
- Twice as likely to be obese.
- From education to personal health to career success, children who lack a father find themselves at a disadvantage to their peers raised in a two-parent household.
Brown was wrong and Dan Quayle was right.
As much as the Left hrumphs that “we have LOTS of family types now and they are all as good as another” – they are dead nuts wrong. More and more of these kinds of studies are validating these results. It’s the same Progressive nuttiness that has them claiming that ALL cultures are equally valid – which is patently and visibly wrong. Again, their push is to demolish traditions that have proven to work and undermine our own culture.
A single Mom can never provide the outlook and characteristics of a missing Dad. This I know personally. A single Dad can never provide the outlook and characteristics of a missing Mom. This TMEW knows personally. Both TMEW and I grew up in single parent families and we know, deep in our souls, that both of us missed significant portions of our lives because of it (my Dad died when I was 12, her Mom abandoned her family when she was 2).
The purpose of a nuclear family is not about the adults (which popular culture has bastardized into “it’s all about me; if YOU won’t give ME what I deserve, I’m bailing”) but the children. To love them, to raise them, to inculcate lasting principles and values that have withstood the test of time including that there is a God to whom you will be accountable to one day, that you should treat others better than yourself, that manners and chivalry are important for both sexes, that a sense of humility is important, that you help others along your way, always knowing that while you may be smart that others are smarter, and that while luck is nice once in a while that nothing beats showing up, working hard, and never giving up.
And realize God put you on this mudball and in this country so don’t screw it up.
Sure, having a solid nuclear family is not guarantee of successful outcomes – Life happens and waylays long held plans and dreams. Children take bad turns and turn out to be utter misfits – and some never learn the lessons above. For instance and as I earlier announced, we have adopted our Grandson after essentially raising him from birth because neither our son or the female he had hooked up with were about to be adjudicated to not be capable of being parents. Even though we are stable (we just celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary), we know that we are only stand-ins – we are his grandparents and not his real parents regardless of the legal proclamation now hanging on our wall. We do our best now, will in the future until we no longer can, do what we can but from our own personal history, TMEW will never be his Mom and I can never be his real Dad – and kids know the differences no matter how Progressive society tries to paper over and hide the differences.
The moral is that raising kids is hard and harder, and frustrating work; the outcome is never assured even in the best of conditions. Suboptimal conditions don’t help and the breakdown of the nuclear family is now evident in social problems (and like with all social issues, the attendant fiscal costs). Culture isn’t helping parents at all as they struggle to teach right from wrong with mixed messages all up and down the continuum.
We were at a beach party for our soon-to-be-official niece; one of the attendees was our soon-to-be-official daughter-in-law (ok, our Eldest and she were highschool sweethearts, apart during their military hitches and a bit afterwards, have been together for eight years) had her stepMom in attendance (yes, things are complicated and are about to get even more so).
It turns out that SHE now has full custody of her Grandson because her stepdaughter can’t carry out the needed responsibility.
Dan Quayle was excoriated at the time for going counter to that the scenario that TV show, Murphy Brown, showed a perfectly legitimate single Mom family. Twenty years later, “they” admitted he was right as out-of-wedlock births across all demographics have exploded. I knew it right away.
