Is a nation’s strength and identity affected when fathers are absent from their children’s lives?
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2016 statistics, 30% of American children live in a household with one parent, or no parent. 23% of children are raised in a single parent household where the sole provider is their mother. Several factors account for this, including an increase in the percentages of men and women who made choices for premarital cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing, and expanded sexual options, according to National Health Statistics Reports. This in addition to divorce, incarceration, and a lack of commitment to financial support has changed families so that fathers are becoming more absent from their children’s lives.
The short-term effects on individual children who grow up without a dad around are profound, according to David Blankenhorn’s Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem. The National Fatherhood Initiative states, “There is a father absence crisis in America. 24 million children, 1 out of 3, live without their biological father in the home. Consequently, there is a father factor in nearly all social ills facing America today.”
How might this reality affect a nation generations later? Would a nation of children who are robbed of their fathers really affect the strength and identity of that nation one, two or even three generations later? A recent article by Lynne Marie Kohm and Ashley Michelle Williams, The Tragic Tapestry of Father Absence and National Strength, 13 Liberty U. L. Rev. (2018), examines this question and how father absence could be affecting national strength by considering the circumstances of two very different but nonetheless comparable nations – the United States of America and the eastern European nation of Belarus. “We examine the plight of 1930s Belarus, the result of somewhere between 200,000 and 1.5 million men being executed en masse, considering how that loss was felt in families across that nation at that time, and how it is still felt today. Analyzing that nation’s strength and national identity three generations later, this article shows that Belarus continues to struggle with both, setting it as an example of the results of father absence. Though quite different from how father absence has occurred in America, this article also examines in what manner the illustration of Belarus might nonetheless demonstrate how America’s plague of father absence could have some similar results in two or three generations as those now characterizing the population of Belarus.”
Download The Tragic Tapestry of Father Absence and National Strength now to discover this comparison and learn some solutions that can work toward family restoration, even for fatherless families.
A comparative exploration of the devastating effects brought on by father absence in the United States today and the brutal father loss experienced in the forests of Kurapty and throughout Belarus under Stalin rule in the 1930s presents an opportunity for consideration, evaluation, correction, rectitude and mending. The United States stands at a crossroads in this regard as current public policy may be duty-bound to firmly consider the importance of fathers to the tapestry of a nation.
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