"'Father' only means that you're taking care of your children -- that's what it is to be a father. 'Father' doesn't mean that you're havin' some babies. Anybody can have a baby. Havin' a baby does not make you father. Anybody can go out and get a woman. But not anybody can take care of that woman. There's another word for it: It's called 'responsibility.'" --Malcolm XNOONTIME SUN-DAY SCHOOL LESSON
According to David Blankenhorn in his book Fatherless America:Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problems-The United States is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father. Today, an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood. The astonishing fact is reflected in many statistics, but here are the two most important.
Tonight, about 40 percent of American children will go to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not live. Before they reach the age of eighteen, more than half of our nation's children are likely to spend at least a significant portion of their childhoods living apart from their fathers. Never before in this country have so many children been voluntarily abandoned by their fathers. Never before have so many children grown up without knowing what it means to have a father.
Fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation. As a cultural idea, our inherited understanding of fatherhood is under siege. Men in general, and fathers in particular, are increasingly viewed as superfluous to family life: either expendable or as part of the problem. Masculinity, itself, understood as anything other than a rejection of what it has traditionally meant to be male, is typically treated with suspicion and even hostility in our cultural discourse. Consequently, our society is now manifestly unable to sustain, or even find reason to believe in, fatherhood as a distinctive domain of male activity.
However, the core question (remains)..."Does every child need a father? Increasingly, our society's answer is "no," or at least "not necessarily." Few idea shifts in this century are as consequential as this one. At stake is nothing less than what it means to be a man, who our children will be, and what kind of society we will become. Therefore, to the grandfathers, new fathers, old fathers, stepfathers, visiting fathers, "part-time daddies" and even so-called "deadbead dads," remember this, despite what is said about you, your children still need to know you, still need to love you, and still need you in their lives. Why? Because, according to Ps: 127:3 Children are a gift from the LORD; they are a reward from him. (bobbeethehater.blogspot.com)
