Violet has linked to my post The Dallas Shooting, which was actually based on some ideas put forth by Night Wind. Violet’s post is called “love and security or leadership and authority?”
First off let me say, love and security IS leadership and authority. No leadership and authority, no love and protection either. The two cannot be separated. Children who grow up in homes where there is no parental authority but plenty of freedom often wind up feeling very confused and emotionally abandoned. What protects us? Authority. No one ever stands behind the completely powerless, seeking safety, security. That would be scary and foolish.
Second of all, wayward Christians? Wayward in what way? Wayward means “difficult to control or predict because of unusual or perverse behavior.” Wilful, stubborn, defiant, headstrong, obstinate. So ironically Violet is calling me wayward because of my alleged unwillingness to comply with authority, hers, the left side of the political spectrum, secularism, progress, whatever. That’s somewhat funny. Where did MY love, security, and tolerance suddenly go? If we are rejecting all leadership and authority here, than surely I can’t be wayward and difficult to control? Isn’t “control” kind of an authoritarian word?
Violet apparently is not quite so willing to allow me to self identify as a Christian, a female, and a heterosexual one at that. IB wayward due to, “Wayward Christians and their obsession with ‘traditional family values’ that have actually never existed.”
Somewhat sad, after Violet’s complaint about US gun culture, she objects to my declaration that fathers are vitally important to children, to wives, to the culture in general. A lack of male leadership, fatherless homes, single parents, these things are all statistically relevant and become quite predictive in what challenges the children are going to face, and also the community at large. As wonderful as moms can be, there are just some things that fathers bring to the equation that mothers cannot.
Violet cites a study and than declares, “Because, believe it or not, decent role models for male children aren’t restricted to adult males. Children flourish when they are raised in secure, loving environments – regardless of the gender of the caregivers. The tendency to misattribute a lack of assumed gender stereotypes to poor outcomes for a child is wildly speculative at the least, but more probably agenda driven.”
No. No, there is some pretty hard core data based on numerous scientific studies that clearly indicate having an absent father is just not ideal. Then there is the human and emotional element, there is not a single human being that hasn’t felt that loss deeply at some point in their life. Those who try to declare otherwise really are agenda driven.
This stuff really isn’t rocket science. A child growing up without a father in a home where either fathers are not perceived as valuable or else dad has emotional issues and has proven himself harmful, is going to have major challenges trying to recognize and understand what positive masculinity even looks like. Girls and boys will both suffer, but boys who are learning to be men will watch and learn about how men are perceived in their household and internalize those messages, personalize them.
So, about those “Wayward Christians and their obsession with ‘traditional family values’ that have actually never existed.” Stuff happens and perfect families have never really existed. I realize that. Fathers have always died, abandoned families, had issues, but never before in any kind of recent history have we been so stupid as to try to suggest that gender doesn’t matter, that fatherhood is not important, and that to even suggest otherwise is to be wayward, counter cultural, perverse.
Fathers are so important for our physical, mental, and spiritual health, that we were all given two, an earthy father and a heavenly Father. The one upstairs is a great friend of widows, orphans, and the fatherless, and He can heal those losses, those wounds, but they are still wounds, because children were designed to have stable homes with access to two separate genders to teach them about themselves and the world around them. Children are not pawns for a political agenda, they are human beings in their own right who will grow up to walk in a world where 98% of the people will still self identify as the gender they are born with.
To say otherwise is not only false, it is cruel.
See, there's this thing called biology... 
I appreciate some of what you’re saying here, but I think you’re confusing the stability that a traditional family unit can bring, with your notion of leadership and authority, which you believe can only be delivered by a father. I think love and stability are the most important considerations, and, as you rightly point out, all of the variations on family structure that work for some families are a testament to that.
From my perspective, the issues arising from some modern family structures are fed by instability, which leads from a lack of family planning. Parents, whatever structure they come in, need to know they can provide a loving and supportive home for new human beings that can nurture and care for them. I don’t have all the answers, but I know the answers don’t lie in gender role model assumptions.
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A lack of family planning? Well, life has a way of happening in spite of our plans. So many have made perfect plans and yet stuff happens, we cannot control all the factors.
It is interesting you say you just know, “the answers don’t lie in gender role model assumptions.” How can one “just know” that gender role models don’t matter?
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” How can one “just know” that gender role models don’t matter?”
Well, for a start, the study I link to in my post. Secondly, gender role models vary from society to society, across cultures and time. They aren’t fixed. I’m not promoting the idea that anyone should raise children on a whim, or that the role of a father can’t be as influential as that of a mother, I’m simply critical of the notion that the presence of a father brings some vital and unique male qualities. The presence of a father in a loving home can certainly contribute to providing much needed stability and can ensure close ties with one of (hopefully) many adult role models to nurture a child. I just don’t see it as gender specific or relying on the qualities of leadership and authority that you cite.
And I do see this obsession with what you call ‘traditional’ families to be wayward. As I’m sure we’ve discussed many times before, family structures are another thing that varies enormously across human society. I could easily argue that the absence of younger involved grandparents and larger extended families from the daily lives is another thing that undermines stability for young people – again, nothing to do with leadership or authority or one particular gender.
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“Secondly, gender role models vary from society to society, across cultures and time. They aren’t fixed.”
No, I think the bottom line is that until recent history basic biology has always dictated that there is going to be a mom and dad, male and female. Two people who came together and made you. It’s really wrong to suggest that one of those people doesn’t matter, aren’t important, or to try to declare that only society and culture defines families, much like trying to state that gender is only a matter of perception, nothing more than culture. Those things are just not true.
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Ah but vi-
Perhaps we need to define your term ‘traditional family,’ or at least you should define it.
True, in some families there are the fatherless, there are the widows, there are the motherless, there are the childless, but good gravy, in what I have been taught as to the family structure, guiding a young one into ‘gender choices……….’ is not good
teaching, training, instruction, or nurturing,
and is actually anti family, using your own words: ‘traditional family.’.
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This recurring argument that men are not needed is moronic and just another effort to destroy the family so that our government can step on and fill the breach.
How’s that for a conspiracy?
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Now there is a post in the making: what is a man?
Hint: It is not being male as distinct from a female, because there are male foxes which are hardly men. I hear all the time W comments about ‘males’ as if they are ‘men’, and sorry to break it to the crowd, ‘males’ and ‘men’ are not twins.
The castration of men by the media, (two and a quarter men) ‘big bang’ crap, doogie hoogie md, etc, etc, and all the wimpy impressions of ‘men,’ are anything but, and yes, it would be kinda hard to instruct a boy into manhood when he has no real mentor, ie, as in following the natural steps which belongs to men alone.
Quit ye like men, be strong!!!
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Lots of truth there friend
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I’m with you, Wally. A simple and somewhat blatant conspiracy theory, but what else could it be if not an attempt to destroy families?
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Well that has been Satan’s tool since the Garden when he started with Adam and Eve. And it has never stopped. Why can’t we see it?
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“Why can’t we see it?”
I hear you, Wally. That is something that always frustrates me. I suppose it is related to how the father of all lies works to create so much deception. We can’t see because there are just layers and layers of lies that make the glass all foggy.
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Poor rural whites and poor urban blacks display almost identical social pathologies: drug addiction, unemployment, welfare dependency, and the random whelping of children with all the wisdom of a stray dog. The main difference between the two is homicide: poor black boys shoot each other, poor white boys don’t, even though the white boys, being rural, are armed to the teeth.
So I’d say you and Violetwisp are both wrong. It isn’t guns, and it isn’t fatherlessness. It isn’t genetic because middle class blacks don’t run around shooting each other (just in case there are any race realists creeping around here).
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So what do you suppose it might be?
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No idea.
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LOL! Really? Well, we have the existence of evil which factors in somewhere. Many people grow up under appalling conditions and somehow manage to thrive and other seem to have every benefit and don’t thrive at all. So what “causes” all this societal dysfunction is not a set of absolute factors, there are many variables going on too.
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I think a couple things..late here I know, but I grew up in a state primarily of poor, rural whites. The percentage of single mothers of poor, rural whites is not close to the percentage of single, black mothers raising children. That is one. Although, the percentage is climbing in the white population in general.
Also, it is a cultural attitude in raising children as far as violence. I feel that is another factor. In inner city, low income black culture they behave differently and raise their children differently than poor, rural white communities. Though, the drug problem is also climbing in the poor white communities as you said, the culture is far different. Just some thoughts to the conversation..two days late.
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a young mother named Kristy was left to raise her two young children alone by the Dallas shooting.
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That’s just so sad.
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Especially. She was a former Fresno State softball player and apparently Fresno State went half-mast for her.
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centurlylink.net is the weirdest name of an e-mail server ever. I made that mistake earlier this week trying to log into Amazon. I thought Amazon was being stubborn then I saw the “l” in there…
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“When you’re used to privilege, equality can feel a lot like oppression.” – a quote I saw on twitter a few weeks ago, I think.
Sometimes I wonder whether or not Christianity is correcting a perceived oppression (loss of privilege) by over-correcting itself trying to get back to some ideal that never really happened except for t.v. sitcoms. For so long, being married parents was the ideal, a job might be given to a working husband and father over a single woman who had to support herself, a working husband might be given a higher bonus than his secretary. Now that marriage is no longer the sacred cow in secular eyes what with half the world being single and all, Christianity has decided that marriage (and parenthood) is all that matters.
Firstly, single parents are not part of the problem or responsible for some of the ills of society and gun culture, a single parent is the authority in his or her home because single parents love their children. Secondly, gun culture, fear of police, racial tensions – these are things that are a long time coming. It’s proof that we never really managed to heal from decades-old scars. Back then, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s day, saying that racial violence was connected to fatherlessness wouldn’t have made the cut – in fact, you can see MLK Jr’s philosophy here: http://www.thekingcenter.org/king-philosophy Unless we’re dealing with a whole new kind of violence, if fatherlessness wasn’t a direct or major cause of violence in MLK’s time, then odds are it isn’t today.
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“Unless we’re dealing with a whole new kind of violence, if fatherlessness wasn’t a direct or major cause of violence in MLK’s time, then odds are it isn’t today.”
Well, I think we have to remember that in 1950 divorce rates and fatherlessness for blacks and whites were somewhat equal and on par. By 1998 black folks had three times the divorce rate. Today some 70% of black children are in single parent homes. So the true impact and the destruction of traditional families wasn’t really well known and observable until after MLK’s death.
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But even back then, there wasn’t a significant number of fatherless children picking up guns and shooting people randomly. MLK identifies poverty, racism, and militarism as three evils that exist in a vicious cycle that even today we haven’t been able to break free of them. After the big recession, poverty is still a pretty big issue. Most of my customers are on food stamps so I see it day in and day out. Racism is still a problem as well, And for us militarism tends to go by another name, but as a society there is a certainly a lot of violence that is glorified and accepted as just one of those things we can’t do anything about it. What’s the saying, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun?” That doesn’t seem to encourage non-violence. Which is much more needed than guns.
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I think one thing that encourages non violence is positive male role models, starting with fathers. In the absence of fathers, kids get their role models from Hollywood, the media, and the streets where it is all about how might makes right.
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Even in the presence of fathers kids get their role models from Hollywood, the media, and the streets where it’s about how might makes right – that was, after all, an idea from medieval England, under King Arthur was one of the earliest role models. Having a father means that kids get just one more role model to choose from. Non-violence shouldn’t be passed down from one generation to the next, but like freedom, a thing that is taught to every student, believed in and shared by everyone.
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Well, having one more role model to choose from is is kind of important if all your other role models are negative and self serving. All things are not equal, Hollywood is in the business of selling sex and violence for example, while fathers are in the business of teaching kids. So, we cannot even teach non violence to each generation if we have devalued and removed the first teachers.
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But in a society about the freedom of choice – one can’t blame kids for choosing Dr. Pepper over Dad’s Root Beer, a great many celebrities are also among the greatest philanthropists, they have gone to third world countries, started schools, brought awareness to life in refugee camps; the lot of them are bad influences like that – whereas a father is an entirely different sort of person, it’s hard for them to compete against other role models. Not all kids really connect with their fathers anyway. Some fathers are work-a-holics who haven’t the time to teach their kids, which gender role teachings told them was a mother’s job anyway.
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Fathers are so important that even in their absence, even as workaholics, they are teaching kids something. I do not understand what is behind the desire to dismiss and devalue fathers, but they are the first teachers and their influence good or bad, has a profound impact on us. We should be creating a culture where fathers are valued and recognized and families are nurtured and supported, because that stability is a big part of a kid’s future success in life. In the absence of those role models they face huge challenges. It is one thing to say those challenges can be overcome but it is another thing entirely to imply that fatherlessness doesn’t matter, that it should be the new ideal.
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It goes back to the first quote though, you perceive that secular society hates fathers / fatherhood, so you emphasize the need for fathers / fatherhood in order to correct where you think they’re going wrong. What is really going on is that for far too long there was too much power in the hands of fathers and society has recognized that it’s long past time to to work for true equality. Fathers now have an equal share as Mothers, and Wives need not ask permission from their husbands in all things. Marrieds no longer hold all the cards, not-marrieds have a hand in the game as well. The world, in short, no longer revolves around men/fathers/husbands and that’s unbiblical; but the world has always been worldly that way. You can’t legislate the morality of those who don’t agree with you, you can’t make everyone adore fathers as you do.
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I agree IB = positive male role models are critical to the complete growth of children.
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I have a somewhat different perspective.
We, as a society, have developed this cultural attitude that our children are a commodity, a lifestyle “accessory” that we can add or discard at will.
I have three grown kids who are all raising children of their own, all in different family configurations. My daughter is married and raising her kids with her husband in their home. My oldest son is divorced and shares custody and child care with his ex-wife. His boys live half of the week with their mom and the other half with their dad. My middle son is raising his girls alone – their mother is absent from their lives. Can you guess which of my grandchildren are struggling? Please understand, their mom is in a really bad place and I have nothing but compassion for her. My hope is that she will be able to get her life together so that she can be a positive presence in her children’s lives once more. But in the mean time, they are suffering with feelings of abandonment and worthlessness. Their mom’s absence hurts and no amount of reassurance from their dad is gonna take that away. They have plenty of other positive female role models in their lives – that’s not the issue. The issue is much, much deeper than that.
Can you imagine what it must be like to grow up knowing that you have so little value in your mom’s (or dad’s) eyes that s/he would simply walk away from you? That’s the message we are giving our kids. You are not worth it. Not even worth sticking around for. The cruelty with which we sometimes treat our children takes my breath away.
And then we wonder why our kids are angry and violent and screwed up.
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That’s a really good point. The absence of mothers impacts children too, no matter how good the dads are. The same is true for single moms, you can be superwoman, but you simply cannot be dad. That doesn’t mean these kids can’t survive or heal, but it does mean we shouldn’t be treating kids as if they were commodities for our designer families and the nature and structure of gender will have no impact on them.
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Designer families. Bingo. That is exactly what I mean when I speak of children as accessories.
I am far less concerned about the rights of the grownups to make families in whatever configuration they deem to be “right” for them than I am for the rights of children to have both biological parents in their lives.
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Brilliant insights, Antivan. I’d add that it hurts children even when the parents manage to both stay involved part time. It’s a tragedy for the children even when they manage to overcome it healthy ways and even when people manage to convince them it wasn’t a tragedy in their life to begin with.
I saw it with my own parents divorce and I’m seeing it with my own divorce that parents walking out on a marriage/family situation is a great burden to our children no matter how much the ideologues of our society try to force us all to how down to their philosophies and steal our children’s agency to feel the way they feel and understand that it naturally hurts and was bad. I’m right in the middle of it at the moment with a child who is angry, and understandably do but the ideologue viewpoint seems to be that I have to be opposed to her very correct understanding of what she’s angry at and why. I’m not sure what is going yo come of it yet. But I’m having a terrible internal struggle trying to figure out how to support her and stay as clean as possible legally and win secular philosophies.
I have so far refused to deny the validity of her feelings or the knowledge she has of what choices have been made that were utterly wrong for people to make. I’ve apologized about a thousand times for my own mistakes of the past and tried to encourage her to remain open to forgiveness and understanding. I’ve been praying for her daily throughout her life and so many more times per day for these last nine months. I’ve tried to offer her the option to go into counseling and to encourage her in a rather matter of fact way to know she’ll be ready to try that someday. Two days ago she referred back to my wanting her to get counseling and said she was ready. Praise God!
The basis and foundation of a family is not the existence or conception or birth of a child. The basis and foundation of a family is a marriage. In our way of reducing every thought and feeling down to a cliche and a meme we often refer to the people who choose us as our real family. This is both profoundly true and utterly flawed in its simplified form…even when we apply it to marriage and divorce and even when we apply it to the children who should have been able to count on that marriage. When we choose someone and that person chooses us, we committ to it. Or at least most do within successful, flourishing societies.
Sadly, we now live in a disintegrating culture where many chose to see that so-called commitment as just a passing notion. Many advocate for and celebrate getting out of it in order to pursue happiness elsewhere. Then they insist loudly across society that getting out of it is not the destructive decision that it is, that it does no inherent harm to the children who needed the stability of it it. And they bring out examples of broken people who dishonored their commitment as proof of people who can be walked away from. Sometimes the greater damage is done before the divorce happens but that doesn’t negate the principle of the significance of marriage as a real commitment. It only convicts those who treated their marriage so badly that the divorce looks like a relief and a necessity of terrible wrongs.
God gives us only two examples of ways to be released from the marriage bond once we committ to it and neither one of them are because you deserve to be happy or because you should never be expected to endure any hardship or unhappiness. Those are the ideals of mankind pasted over top of what God actually says.
I am going to get my sweet girl into therapy starting in about a week’s time. I’m going to pray for her constantly. I’m going to continue to let her speak openly to me without invalidating her thoughts and feelings. And I have no idea what I’m going to do about the fallacious and dangerous notion that some ascribe to that I am wrong if I “aid and abet her disobedience” by not forcing, coercing or pushing her to want to see her dad.
She was a member of a troubled but still stable/intact family. She respected him, obeyed him, prayed for him, worried about him and his spiritual state, and longed for more for herself from him in their relationship. He walked out destroying that family unit that she’d grown up in. It’s extremely troubling that our society has that so screwed up in the thinking of some people that they could ascribe her the same responsibilities and duties to him as a father and ascribe to him the same exact position and rights as a father as if he had not done that. It’s detrimental to children. And it has become a wildly out of control rollercoaster ride on a downward corkscrew with no end in sight where each successive generation of children who have had this view “taught” to them are manifesting more and more dysfunctions in their future “families”. It’s truly tragic.
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And while I was mentioning her true respect for her father while the family was intact I should have mentioned that she even made great sacrifices for him that he’ll apparently never know about now.
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Great comment, Scratchmom. I just wanted to say I’ve read your words and they are powerful.
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@fromscratchmom
My heart goes out to you and to your sweet daughter. I’m so glad to hear that she is able to talk to you and tell you how she feels. She didn’t do anything to deserve this and it’s only natural that she will have strong feelings about her family being torn asunder, and about her dad’s role in it. She is entirely entitled to her feelings. I thank God that she has a mom who recognizes this and I’m especially glad to hear that she is amenable to receiving counselling to help her work through this.
I don’t know if you’ve read any of my blog or not, but those who know me know that I have a pretty high view of marriage. I’m also pretty passionate about mental health issues and healthy child development. Undealt with childhood trauma has a way of following us for the rest of our lives. It gets in the way of having healthy relationships later in life. And then the cycle perpetuates itself all over again.
Marriage and family is the microcosm in which we learn how to be better people. Think about it. If we can learn to overcome dysfunction in our family relationships, we are much better equipped to go out into the world and serve our neighbour. That’s why I am so passionate about preserving marriage – I truly believe that marriage, done right, makes the world a better place for everyone.
I’ll be praying for you and your family. Keep your head up, mom! ❤
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Thank-you, Antivan, for your kind words. I’ll have to check out your blog. I keep hoping for, praying for, working to heal for a life of less trauma.
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Amen to that,scratchmom! A life with a bit less trauma,that is my prayer,too.
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Insanity, here’s a study that supports your position:
Click to access 0086.pdf
Conclusion: Compared to children who are raised by their married parents, children in other family types are more likely to achieve lower levels of education, to become teen parents, and to experience health, behavior, and mental health problems.
Curiously, the study contrasted same sex couples parenting performance with that of divorced couples, stating that there was no difference. But that’s just a politically correct way of saying that children raised in same sex couples housing are far more likely to develop problems than if they had been raised in a proper family unit (biological, heterosexual parents.) So a child definitely needs a mother and a father.
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Thanks, Emily.
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IB, just this week I saw a video interview with a football player who I suspect has read no studies whatsoever about households with or without a father figure. He said he and his brother (a year older than he) grew up with a single-parent mom, and that as great as she was, they didn’t have a male influence. But when he started playing sports, his coaches filled that void for him. I don’t think he has an agenda. I don’t know that he has a particular affiliation with left or right. He was simply telling about his own experience. Yes, it’s anecdotal and others can tell of the opposite experience, but with a very small amount of discernment, it’s possible to sort through which stories have an agenda and which don’t. Statistics can be skewered to say pretty much whatever we want, but when we talk to real people, the truth comes out!
Becky
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Becky I am sure glad you said that. Frankly these folks waving around studies from their ivory towers who have never experienced this somewhat irritate me. As you say, it is anecdotal but powerful nonetheless. I grew up with no male influence as did most of the boys I knew. That’s simply the sad truth of the urban poor. No dad. ..working two jobs mother. Boys with no direction. .as IB says..lost boys. These lost boys grow to be aimlwas angry men.
Some of us managed to get beyond it…Some dId not.
Good point there.
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I nominate you for the Blogger Recognition Award! https://designwithflair.wordpress.com/2016/07/12/722/
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While we’re on the topic…
http://nypost.com/2016/06/14/how-disney-teaches-contempt-for-dads/
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Good one anitvan, thanks.
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Thanks for the link. Very nice. I’d already shared IB’s post today on FB. So now I’ve shared this as well.
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Some further commentary:
http://nightwind777.blogspot.com/2016/07/family-values-matter.html
Since the early 1990s, when the Cultural Marxists derided Vice-President Quayle for suggesting that family values were important, the Left has been ‘deconstructing’ family. People can cite all the ‘studies’ they want; but the fact is that senseless violence, gender identity disorder, substance abuse and other social chaos have increased ever since.
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This is a great commentary that elaborates on some of the things we’ve been discussing.
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Thank you again. Another interesting point is the manner in which masculine fear of insignificance plays into these events. Most of these mass-killers, gang-members, and terrorists all seem to have as a common factor a desire to commit some dramatic act or engage in criminal activities as a means of self-validation.
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That’s another really good point.I’ve written about fear of insignificance before. I sometimes get angry at the media for almost glamorizing these kinds of tragedies, making them seem bigger than the are, the perp even more dangerous and powerful.
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God is a Father.
Do we need Him?
😏🕊☀️
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Well there you go! Truer words were never spoken 🙂
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Good post. Wow, the comments on here!
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Ha! Welcome to my world 🙂
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Great post! Check out my page for my current and upcoming theological and political posts. Follow for follow. Help me grow my viewership base by sharing posts you like! Thanks!
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