Friday, March 29, 2024

The Importance of Fathers

With progressive leftists and cultural Marxist groups like Black Lives Matter  vowing to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family,” Father’s Day reminds us now more than ever of the importance of fathers and of the fatherlessness epidemic plaguing America today.

Declared a national holiday by the Nixon Administration in 1972, one modern origin story of Father’s Day goes back to 1909 when, at age sixteen, Sona Louise Smart Dodd requested that her hometown of Spokane, Washington establish an official holiday to celebrate fathers like her own – who, as a widower, raised Dodd and her five younger brothers alone.

Another story tells of Grace Golden Clayton, who decided to honor local fathers (and help their children), after the worst mining disaster in U.S. history left 1,000 local kids without a dad.

Every third Sunday in June since, people across the Western world and beyond join together to honor fathers and their role in families and communities – an unfortunately shrinking role.

According to United States Census Bureau, 19.7 million or more than one-in-four children, live without a father in the home.

KNOW THE FACTS: The National Fatherhood Initiative finds that father-absent homes produce children twice as likely to drop out of high school, twice as likely to suffer from obesity, four times more likely to experience poverty, and seven-times more likely to become pregnant as teenagers.

Fatherless homes also disproportionately damage young men who lag behind their female counterparts on numerous metrics already.

With declining baseline levels of proficiency in core subjects, loss of interest in sports and extracurriculars, and increased diagnoses of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADD or ADHD), young boys have become dominated by the success of young girls.

As school systems in the United States aim to eliminate competition and assertive sociability in an effort to foster risk-free, feeling-centered, and sedentary environments – the gap between the success of young boys and girls inside and outside the classroom grows.

Young girls receive higher grades than boys at all ages, including in STEM fields. Later on, women also earn more college degrees than men, outnumber men in grad school 137 to 100, and earn a majority of all doctoral degrees.

READ: Dr. William Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, believes fatherlessness plays a large role in the disparity.

Analysis by Dr. Farrell determines that boys with absent fathers are much more likely to abuse alcohol, use drugs, be depressed or suicidal, be violent, go to prison, and commit mass shootings.

“Dad deprivation is the most significant predictor of male suicides,” he says. “[Their] current rate is three times that of girls between age 15 and 19, and 4.5 times that of girls between 20 and 24,”

Dr. Farrell believes involved fathers and two-parent households benefit young children immensely.

With the highest rate of children living in single-parent households of any country in the world, the fatherlessness crisis in the United States significantly impedes the success of American children.

Unlike other European countries that rely on mass immigration to combat declining birth rates, Hungary recognizes the importance of the traditional family unit and actually incentivizes pro-family growth through subsidies and tax reductions.

Hungary’s Family Housing Support Program, enacted in 2016, provides married couples who have a third child with up to 10 million Hungarian forint ($37,000 USD) for newly constructed homes in addition to preferential loans and exemptions from value add taxes.

Hungarian Minister of State for Family, Youth, and International Affairs told White House officials, Republican members of Congress, and evangelical leaders gathered in D.C. for a 2019 “Making Families Great Again” conference that, from 2010 to 2018, marriage rates in Hungary increased forty-three percent – the highest in twenty years.

Fertility rates, breaking another twenty-year record, also increased twenty-one percent while divorce rates and abortion rates decreased twenty-two percent and thirty-three percent respectively.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban credits Hungary’s success to his government’s family-first policymaking approach. Hungary’s new constitution, passed in 2012 by Orban’s Fidesz party, explicitly pledges to protect “the institution of marriage as the union of a man and woman.”

“According to Hungarian beliefs, every child has the right to a father and a mother… When we talk about family and family subsidizes, we support traditional families.”

As such, Orban staunchly opposes NGOs funded by Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros that – like Black Lives Matter – seek to dismantle the traditional family unit and deter Hungary’s commitment to family values and structured homes.

The presence of a father-figure in the home is integral to the success of young children.

Not all fatherless homes produce troubled children, of course, but the progressive left’s intentional destruction of the family unit wreaks havoc on youth across America and on young men in particular.

Like Sona Louise Smart Dodd, Americans across the country should recognize and celebrate the vital role father-figures play in a child’s life, not erase it.

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