Where Have All The Fathers Gone?

 WHERE HAVE ALL THE FATHERS GONE?

Father's Day is upon us once again and social media will be a buzz with single parent women bashing absentee dads and praising themselves for "doing it alone," which is raising a child without any support from the BABY DADDY. Raise your hand if you hate that term.  It is hard to look past these women and their difficult situation of anger and frustration. We wonder how the child is feeling knowing they have a father who is neglecting them. 

Of course there will be praises for the good dads which will make those who never experienced what it was like to have a good dad in their lives feel some type of way. My mother and father divorced when I was one years old and I only saw him twice in my life. There has never been a Father's Day in which I wondered what I missed without a dad. I just never did, but many fatherless children do. YOU CAN'T MISS WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW was my thing I guess.

My advice for women may cause rage but we as women must not have babies by men in which we have fallen in love with or are in a relationship with. We should keep our hymen (virginity) until we have a diamond (engagement ring or married). Have our sexual exploits really been that good as to possibly to produce a child?  We love to blame men for not being there, but we are responsible for our reproductivity and it begins with SAYING NO TO SEX BEFORE MARRIAGE. Enjoy the man but don't be his deposit for sperm and you have no withdrawal power on the account.

What about the men who go around fathering children without a care and do not participate in the raising of those children? Well the Bible tells us in 1 Timothy 5:8 "But if any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he has denied his faith, as is worse then an infidel." An infidel is a person who does not believe in religion or adheres to a religion of his own making. Men will answer for not caring for their SEED.

HOW MANY BABIES LIVE WITHOUT FATHERS?

Since 1970, out-of-wedlock birth rates have soared. In 1965, 24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to single mothers. By 1990 the rates had risen to 64 percent for black infants, 18 percent for whites. Every year about one million more children are born into fatherless families. If we have learned any policy lesson well over the past 25 years, it is that for children living in single-parent homes, the odds of living in poverty are great.

 Many say a father does not have to be married to the woman who birthed his child to be a good father and this is true. Many unwed fathers are great fathers. But the father actually being in the home offers more quality time and for more engagement with the child (many fathers in the home are not engaged with their children and are bad fathers even though they are present).

10 Facts About Father Engagement

1. Fathers and infants can be equally as attached as mothers and infants. When both parents are involved with the child, infants are attached to both parents from the beginning of life.
2. Father involvement is related to positive child health outcomes in infants, such as improved weight gain in preterm infants and improved breastfeeding rates.[2]
3. Father involvement using authoritative parenting (loving and with clear boundaries and expectations) leads to better emotional, academic, social, and behavioral outcomes for children.
4. Children who feel a closeness to their father are: twice as likely as those who do not to enter college or find stable employment after high school, 75% less likely to have a teen birth, 80% less likely to spend time in jail, and half as likely to experience multiple depression symptoms.
5. Fathers occupy a critical role in child development. Father absence hinders development from early infancy through childhood and into adulthood. The psychological harm of father absence experienced during childhood persists throughout the life course.
6. The quality of the father-child relationship matters more than the specific amount of hours spent together. Non-resident fathers can have positive effects on children’s social and emotional well-being, as well as academic achievement and behavioral adjustment.
7. High levels of father involvement are correlated with higher levels of sociability, confidence, and self-control in children. Children with involved fathers are less likely to act out in school or engage in risky behaviors in adolescence.
8. Children with actively involved fathers are: 43% more likely to earn A’s in school and 33% less likely to repeat a grade than those without engaged dads.
9. Father engagement reduces the frequency of behavioral problems in boys while also decreasing delinquency and economic disadvantage in low-income families.
10. Father engagement reduces psychological problems and rates of depression in young women.

According to Psychology Today, researchers have found these narratives to be true. The results of father absence on children are nothing short of disastrous, along a number of dimensions:

1. Children’s diminished self-concept, and compromised physical and emotional security (children consistently report feeling abandoned when their fathers are not involved in their lives, struggling with their emotions and episodic bouts of self-loathing)
2. Behavioral problems (fatherless children have more difficulties with social adjustment, and are more likely to report problems with friendships, and manifest behavior problems; many develop a swaggering, intimidating persona in an attempt to disguise their underlying fears, resentments, anxieties and unhappiness)
3. Truancy and poor academic performance (71 percent of high school dropouts are fatherless; fatherless children have more trouble academically, scoring poorly on tests of reading, mathematics, and thinking skills; children from father absent homes are more likely to play truant from school, more likely to be excluded from school, more likely to leave school at age 16, and less likely to attain academic and professional qualifications in adulthood)
4. Delinquency and youth crime, including violent crime (85 percent of youth in prison have an absent father; fatherless children are more likely to offend and go to jail as adults)
5. Promiscuity and teen pregnancy (fatherless children are more likely to experience problems with sexual health, including a greater likelihood of having intercourse before the age of 16, foregoing contraception during first intercourse, becoming teenage parents, and contracting sexually transmitted infection; girls manifest an object hunger for males, and in experiencing the emotional loss of their fathers egocentrically as a rejection of them, become susceptible to exploitation by adult men)
6. Drug and alcohol abuse (fatherless children are more likely to smoke, drink alcohol, and abuse drugs in childhood and adulthood)
7. Homelessness (90 percent of runaway children have an absent father)
8. Exploitation and abuse (fatherless children are at greater risk of suffering physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, being five times more likely to have experienced physical
9. Abuse and emotional maltreatment, with a one hundred times higher risk of fatal abuse; a recent study reported that preschoolers not living with both of their biological parents are 40 times more likely to be sexually abused)
10. Physical health problems (fatherless children report significantly more psychosomatic health symptoms and illness such as acute and chronic pain, asthma, headaches, and stomach aches)
11. Mental health disorders (father absent children are consistently overrepresented on a wide range of mental health problems, particularly anxiety, depression and suicide)
12. Life chances (as adults, fatherless children are more likely to experience unemployment, have low incomes, remain on social assistance, and experience homelessness)
13. Future relationships (father absent children tend to enter partnerships earlier, are more likely to divorce or dissolve their cohabiting unions, and are more likely to have children outside marriage or outside any partnership)
14. Mortality (fatherless children are more likely to die as children, and live an average of four years less over the life span)

 WHY WON'T HE MARRY ME AND MAKE A FAMILY AND BE A FATHER?

Men avoid marriage because It's too risky and too costly. Men are not marrying because, for many men, the rewards for getting married are far less than they used to be, while the cost and dangers of it are far higher. Divorce rates are sky-high: 45% of marriages end in divorce, and women initiate 80% of them. Here are a few pointers for the woman who wants to have children within a marriage with a father present. Yes, women, we must take responsibility and accountability for trying to be married before having children.

• Most men who graduate from high school start thinking of marriage as a real possibility when they are 23 or 24.
• Most men who graduate from college don’t start considering marriage as a real possibility until age 26.
• When men go to graduate school, it takes them longer to get into the working world, and they’re not ready to get married until a few years after that.
• Ninety percent of men who have graduated from college are ready for the next step between ages 26 and 33; this is when they are most likely to consider marriage. But this window of opportunity stays open only for four to five years, and then the chances a man will marry start to decline.
• A majority of college graduates between 28 and 33 are in their high-commitment years and likely to propose.
• This period for well-educated men lasts just a bit over five years. The chances men will commit are sightly less when they are thirty-one or thirty-two than when they were between 28 and 30, but they’re still in a high-commitment phase.
• Once men reach 33 or 34, the chances they’ll commit start to diminish, but only slightly. Until men reach 37, they remain very good prospects.
• After age 38, the chances they will ever marry drop dramatically.
• The chances that a man will marry for the first time diminish even more once he reaches 42 or 43. At this point, many men become confirmed bachelors.
• Once men reach age 47 to 50 without marrying, the chances they will marry do not disappear, but they drop dramatically.
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According to author John Molly, men were far more likely to marry when they got tired of the singles scene. there is a point at which men are likely to be ready for the next step, but the specific age depends on the man’s maturity, education, and profession. If a woman wants to know whether a man is ready to get married, she should ask him how much he enjoys the single's scene. If he says it isn’t as much fun as it used to be, he’s a very good prospect, because he’s ready to move on to the next step, but there’s more to it than that: The woman should also ask the man a number of questions, including his age.

If you’re dating a man who has had one or more long-term relationships with other women and didn’t marry them, there’s a real possibility he’s a stringer. A stringer is a man who strings women along. He likes having a woman, sleeping with a woman, eating with a woman, possibly sharing his life with a woman without ever making a real commitment. If you think you may be involved with a stringer, establish a deadline. If he doesn’t commit to you within six months, get rid of him. Pay no attention to his excuses.

Many older men are eager to marry because their biological clock was running. Yes, men have a biological clock too. They want to be young enough when their sons come along to teach them all the things fathers traditionally teach their sons-to ride a bicycle, to fish, to play ball, and so forth. The most important reason older men have for marrying is that if they wait much longer, they wouldn’t be able to be active fathers.

The Huffington Post gives reasons why men don't get married.

1. You'll lose respect. A couple of generations ago, a man wasn't considered fully adult until he was married with kids. But today, fathers are figures of fun more than figures of respect. 

2. You'll lose out on sex. Married men have more sex than single men, on average - but much less than men who are cohabiting with their partners outside of marriage, especially as time goes on. Research even suggests that married women are more likely to gain weight than women who are cohabiting without marriage.

3. You'll lose friends. "Those wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine." That's an old song, but it's true. When married, men's ties with friends from school and work tend to fade. Although both men and women lose friends after marriage, it tends to affect men's self-esteem more, perhaps because men tend to be less social in general.

4. You'll lose space. We hear a lot about men retreating to their "man caves," but why do they retreat? Because they've lost the battle for the rest of the house.

5. Single life is better than ever. While the value of marriage to men has declined, the quality of single life has improved. Single men were once looked on with suspicion, passed over for promotion for important jobs, which usually valued "stable family men," and often subjected to social opprobrium. It was hard to have a love life that wasn't aimed at marriage, and premarital sex was risky and frowned upon. Now, no one looks askance at the single lifestyle, dating is easy, and employers probably prefer employees with no conflicting family responsibilities. 

BEFORE BEING A MOTHER CAN YOU BE A WIFE?

The nursery rhyme says "First comes loves then comes marriage then come mommy with a baby carriage." Or something like that. Both sexes need to prioritized the order of their lives and their children's lives. No matter how children come they are a blessing. But each child should have an opportunity to have the love of both mother and father in a stable loving family unit. While we bash men for not being fathers, we women should also take time to think are we WIFE MATERIAL? Here is what men say they want in a wife in a count down. These traits also make for good mothers.

No. 10: Ambition and Industriousness: It is clear that men find a woman's drive, determination and energy attractive qualities in a life partner.

 No. 9: Desire for Home and Children

No. 8: Good looks: Perhaps because modern marriages are more likely based on love and attraction rather than practicalities (like wealth or status), physical attractiveness is more desirable.

No. 7: Good Health: Both sexes are living well into their 70s, and often older, making good health a predictor of a long-lasting marriage.

No. 6: Sociability: Because today's married couples are more likely to be friends and have mutual circles of friends, it makes sense that this has become a more attractive characteristic.

No 5: Pleasing Disposition

No. 4: Education and Intelligence: A woman's education and intelligence are more attractive to men than ever before.

No. 3: Emotional Stability and Maturity: They want a woman who is grounded and secure in herself. 

No. 2: Dependable Character: They want a wife who will stand by their side 

No. 1: Mutual Attraction and Love: Above all, men want to marry a woman they love and are attracted to. Now, both men and women are marrying for love first and foremost, and marriages have become unions of passion, friendship, support and mutual attraction. 

This Father's Day let's think how we can contribute to giving our potential children the gift of a FATHER. Fatherhood has been happening to often by accident and they are leaving the scene of the crime.