The Fatherless Epidemic: How Missing Dads Are Shaping a Generation

Fathers and mothers… at least in the beginning, you have to have both to create life… to create a child. But whether done over time or instantly after conception… fathers are disappearing from the picture altogether.

In fact, according to the US census conducted in 2022, in the US alone there are approximately 18.3 million children who live without a father in the home.

I’ve run the numbers for you… that is over 1 in 4 children living without a father.

But it doesn’t stop there, millions of children have fathers who are physically present, but are not emotionally present.

So why is this happening? And what effect is it having on our society?

In this video, I’m going to show you how the fatherless wave is becoming an epidemic and how it’s crippling humankind one child at a time. Plus, stick around to the end as I have something for all those of you who are single parents yourself.

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When did the fatherless epidemic start?

Way, way back in the good old days, a man got married to a woman and they stayed together until one of them died. Marriage was thought of as a very sacred union, or even a contract between two people and it took God himself to break it. This holy look on marriage lasted very strongly up until the mid-20th century. But in the 1960s something happened… the sexual revolution took the world by storm and shined a new light on what it was to be married and even more so… presented us with the idea that the marriage contract could be easily broken. That marriage could even be a swinging door.

Since then, the institution of marriage has quickly deteriorated. Not only do people enter and exit marriages now like a plane flight, but now people are avoiding marriages altogether.

The modern family doesn’t look like it used to. During that great awakening in the ‘60s promiscuity was normalized, females were okay entering into low-commitment sexual relations with men, and children were being born out of wedlock. Now approximately 40% of children are born to unmarried mothers.

While some see this period in time as just a blip in the history books or a time of freedom for women – the damage that has followed remains irreversible.

That is because sex once focused on procreation and family. But sex now has become weaponized and used as recreation.

Why fathers are not present?

While men and women are still getting married, marriage is happening less and less. And when people do get married, they are not lasting as long as they used to. Currently, the average length of most marriages is just 7 years. And yes… half of all marriages do end in divorce.

Of course, there are those toxic relationships or even abusive relationships that both women and men should not remain in. You simply must leave the significant other. But we as a society are normalizing divorce now more than ever. Marriage is suffering from the effects of what I call “tindertification”. You don’t like them? Just swipe and move on to the next one.

But when divorce is chosen as the easy solution, the quality and even quantity of the time that children spend with their fathers declines rapidly. Frank Furstenberg and Andrew Cherlin, authors of The Divided Families share that after just a few years after a divorce, only one in ten children actually still have weekly contact with their fathers. Even more shocking is that two-thirds of those children have no contact at all.

Let’s say even in the best-case scenario where divorced fathers maintain contact with their children, the time spent with them is superficial, short, and has little to no benefit for the child.

What’s interesting is that this dynamic after divorce happens because women and men think very differently from one another. Women view marriage as two relationships; one with their husband and one with their children. But Men on the other hand tend to view marriage and parenting as one all-inclusive package. So in their mind, if their marriage deteriorates, their fathering deteriorates with it.

You’ve heard the term, ‘Happy wife, happy life.’ Which leads us to believe if the wife isn’t happy no one is happy, so divorce becomes a solution. But on the other end of that is the common saying, ‘We stayed together for the kids.’ And trust me, when my parents got divorced I heard this phrase from both of them, and it was such an awful thing to hear.

So which road is better to go down? The one of happy individuals, but children that suffer? Or two unhappy individuals who stay together to create a better environment for their children?

I believe the answer is case by case… but what I can tell you is that the damage that goes on when children don’t have a present father is incredibly high.

While some fathers are not present due to divorce others are not present due to their own addictions. Addictions to drugs, alcohol, or the main addiction in our society… an addition to their smartphones.

But there is another element keeping fathers away from their children; work. We are living in a time when the cost of living is ridiculously high. Like, out of control high. This problem is now forcing fathers to work more. Fathers are now having to work 10, 12 hours a day, out of the house, away from their families just to financially support their families. This financial crisis is now creating the modern dynamic where the wife is raising the children alone.

Why we need both mothers and fathers

Whether emotionally or physically absent, the issue of absent fathers has reached just a high level that if being fatherless was a disease it would be an epidemic.

So whether by choice, bad luck, or forced to – what damage does a fatherless child experience?

Men and women are different. They just are. Each possesses innate biological differences which translate into different, yet complementary, parenting styles. When looking at the woman, she is more compassionate and relationship-oriented. Men on the other hand are more competitive, confident, and drawn toward risk-taking. These polar-opposite attributes complement each other in ways that a single parent can’t possibly manage. It is beyond difficult for a person to be everything to everyone, all at once.

Mothers provide children with a safe, nurturing, and emotionally secure environment. Something we as humans need. Fathers, however, challenge their children. They push their boundaries and help them cultivate autonomy. Again, we as humans need this too. And bust a myth here. The myth of the independent woman who can achieve it all. A great career and being single-mother all at the same time. That just isn’t true and it’s a myth many young women believe. Here’s why. As we said, women provide a safe, nurturing, and emotionally secure environment for their kids. But they simply cannot do that if they themselves do not feel safe, nurtured, and emotionally secure by their man. These are basic human emotions that if not met, then the woman crumbles, and the kids feel that. There’s no such thing as an independent woman or man. We are all interdependent.

We need both… we crave each element of that male-female dynamic whether we know it or not. As a child develops he or she needs the varying environments to grow and flourish. Our psychological health is contingent on meeting the need for independence while also knowing we are safe. As we grow up we need to be both challenged emotionally and physically, while also having a safety net that a mother offers.

The two very different genders when it comes to parenting are related to something fundamental in the human condition. Males and females each bring different qualities to children. In his book Families Without Fathers, David Popenoe explains, “The burden of social science evidence supports the idea that gender-differentiated parenting is important for human development and that the contribution of fathers to childrearing is unique and irreplaceable.”

That word irreplaceable hits our society hard. Because we think, if a father is absent, can’t he be replaced?

Yes, a father figure is great to have… but he can not replace a biological father. Stepfathers, who are praised and thought to be just as good – are actually not a reliable solution to the problem of fatherless children. In fact, stepchildren are often worse off than children of single mothers.

That is because the lack of genetic ties can cause a stepfather to be reluctant to invest time and energy into the child’s development. They swoop in as more of an older brother, or fun uncle figure than an actual father figure. It is even thought that some stepfathers are prone to see their stepchildren as competition for the mother’s attention.

The damage fatherlessness does to the child

When children find themselves without a father it can cause trauma and issues that affect their entire childhood and even adulthood.

It could cause abundant issues if the father left them. It could cause them to not take risks, or even have low self-confidence, not to know how to deal with challenging situations or even not to know how to express and develop their manhood in a healthy way, if they are boys. The list goes on and on when it comes to the damage it causes.

“The strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison, is that they were raised by a single parent”. - C.C. Harper and S.S. McLanahan

Many fatherless children likely end up in poverty. Drop out of school. Become addicts. And even end up in prison for various crimes. Here are some crazy (and scary) numbers for you to think about:

• 60% of rapists

• 63% of all youth suicides,

• 70% of all teen pregnancies,

• 71% of all adolescent chemical or substance abusers,

• 72% of juvenile murderers,

• 80% of all prison inmates, and

• 90% of all homeless and runaway children, came from single-mother homes.

That’s what fatherlessness does to our society. I’ll put the links to all the research in the comments below for those of you who want to dig deeper.

As Dr. Gabriella Gobbi said, “Growing up without a father could permanently alter the structure of the brain, and produce more children who are more aggressive and angry”.

The realization

The damage that the fatherless epidemic is having on children is alarming… but the ripple effect it is having on our society is becoming irreversible.

Families are pillars of our society. Strong and stable families contribute to the community, the environment, and the world. Cicero, De Officiis said,  “What society does to its children, so will its children do to society.”

The modern families we are creating where fathers are stepping out of the picture is going to reflect in the society we are creating.

Understand Childhood Psychology Promo

Chances are, if you're watching this video then you’re either a single parent or someone who has been affected by a single-parent upbringing. One of the recent revolutions in childhood psychology is the understanding of how children relate to their parents and how this relationship shapes the kids' perception of the world around them. From how we attach to our parents and how our parents interact with us, we develop the so-called attachment styles. Your style might be secure, avoidant, dismissive, or fearful, and the majority of us pass on all the issues that our parents passed on to us to our kids. If you want to break this cycle of fatherless children having issues, you want to learn how to understand childhood psychology, and you want to raise securely attached children – I have a course for you.

This course is also great if you want to understand more about your own childhood. I created an online program on understanding childhood psychology. In the 12 lessons of this course, I explain how children attach to their parents and how these attachment styles define all their relationships throughout life. We deep dive into how children develop their sense of self and identity and how their mind works, from stimulus to perception, all the way up to forming mental representations, and how these representations manifest into actual behavior.

Go to this link, and make sure to check the details on that page.

Final thoughts

I’ll leave you with this quote from David Popenoe from his book, Families Without Fathers:

“Indeed, almost anything bad that can happen to a child occurs with much greater frequency to the children of divorce and those who live in single-parent families.”

Thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next one.