FATHERS ESSENTIAL FOR HEALTHY SOCIETY

There are few things in life that I appreciate more than seeing a good father with his children. Partly that is because it is a beautiful, heart-warming sight. And partly it is because my past work in getting some thousands of homeless families out of homelessness, and welfare families into jobs and out of dependency, taught me some radical things about how essential good dads are.

These facts are well-known to researchers in the Social Sciences. But there is great reluctance to use them, or talk about them, because the political implications point to the need to encourage and protect marriage much more strongly than we do now.

Here are those facts:
1. Fatherlessness is the most reliable predictor of poverty. (Most of the poor are never-married mothers and their children.)
2. Fatherlessness is also the most reliable predictor of violent crime. (70% of the most violent young offenders in our prisons are fatherless.)

These facts DO NOT mean that most fatherless children will be poor, much less be violent criminals. The fact is that most fatherless children have valiant single moms who will see to it that neither of these things happen. What they do mean is that most of the poor, and most violent criminals, will come out of the pool of fatherless children. That shows the value of fathers in stark terms. (For more facts on how fathers make societies better, and keep them from being worse, see today's article "Father is the Best" at NRO online here.)

But fathers do much more than keep their children from poverty and from a life of violent crime. For one thing, they supply the model their sons will imitate, and that their daughters will search for in choosing a husband. Daughters learn from good fathers to look for a man like them, who thinks they are precious and to be cherished, not exploited. Because of their dads, they also learn to respect men, and to choose a good man and appreciate him once they get him. Because they see their dads do so, sons learn to respect and appreciate women, and to protect women and children.

Through fathers' relationship with their wives, they model for their sons and daughters what a marriage is, and what a man's role is in it. By their support of, and protection for, their wives and children, they live out the highest teachings of a good society. And even without words - they may not use much of those - they teach by their actions. Their children learn from watching them, just as they learn from watehing TV and movies.

Thanks largely to radical feminism and the sexual revolution, fathers have become, not only an endangered species, but a group under attack. How sad! Fathers are more precious, more valuable than we ever knew before we lost so many of them. Hooray for fathers! Long may they live and prosper. And multiply.