"We all know that 93% of the prisoners are male, but what very few people know is that about 90% of those 93% are dad-deprived boys."

There lies the problem.

Children growing up without father in many households, Even in a "normal" family, mom, dad, kids, the children may have problems as they go through the formative years of adolescence.

Young people need guidance that prepares then for life. In the absence of this guidance, they become the victim of liberal professors in college.

Dennis Prager did a great Fireside Chat on reasons for rise in shootings. He included absent dads in his top reasons, but several other incontrovertible causes. Very logical, very common sensical. I recommend it to anyone ...

My father was my role model. He was scrupulously honest, gentle, and strong willed at the same time. He never tested above average IQ, but he was incredibly ingenious. The lessons he taught me about life, problem solving, and setting goals I could not have learned any other way without great difficulty.

My mother was a strong woman, and intelligent, but I realize that without my father I would not have learned patience or willingness to compromise. Without a demonstration of a strong male figure displaying a peaceful way to end a conflict, it's not surprising that so many young fatherless males are unthinkingly impulsive and somewhat irrational.

Great post Blair!
The good news today is the same as the bad news. The good news is, and the bad news is, that we need fewer men and males for war. Males are not the sole breadwinner in most cases anymore and … they don’t have as much pressure to go to the top of a ladder and die sooner as a result of that pressure. But the bad news is that they don’t have purpose.

The purpose void is actually a wonderful opportunity if a boy has a mother and father that are helping him discover his own unique self and the purpose that might emanate from the unique self. But when he doesn’t have a mother and father, oftentimes … the mother will be very supportive of him discovering his purpose.

But then he doesn’t have the discipline and the postponed gratification to achieve his purpose. So he becomes disappointed in himself that his special gifts that are recognized at home are not being achieved by, you know, being an actor because he doesn’t have the discipline to rehearse all his lines.

So, he starts to be afraid to dream. And when he’s afraid to dream, he becomes depressed. … When a boy has a purpose void and a dad void, those are the ingredients of the boy crisis.

When dad is saying, “It’s not good enough to have a dream to be a musician, you’ve got to practice six or seven hours a day. You want to be in the Olympics? I’m sorry, that’s a trade-off. You can’t go out with Joe and Jane and go out at night and get drunk and whatever. … You’re not going to be an Olympic star if you do that. So you don’t give me this stuff about wanting to be in the Olympics if you’re not willing to do what it takes to be there.”

I would NOT have done well without my Dad...he's the reason I didn't find myself in Jail.

If Dad's had been moe present, schools would not have been able to take over the children's minds as they have.As the daugher of a very present dad, I learned to stand up to authority for right, but I found many moms did not want to rock the boat, even for their kids.
great article. It is the opposite of what the lib women in Congress are calling for, to get rid of men. Cortez, the one from Hawaii, Omar, they all want men out of Congress even. Just minority women is teir goal. Teir actions and inappropriate calls fro violence, never even consider how the young shhoters became so messed up. It i time this comes into the light.

This is an important and powerful article that describes something that may be responsible for mental health issues in young adults.

I call the phenomenon described in the article "momism". My guess is widespread TV-like devices with unlimited games and kids' programming led to it. Until around 1990, kids got on their parents' (moms' and dads') nerves and they would send them out to play. 24-hour kids programming made it possible for the kids to stay under their parents' supervision for longer. This made them grow up slower. Traditionally women were responsible for infants and men were responsible for more of teaching kids to go out into the world. This "momist" trend resulted in kids staying in the "mom" domain longer.

In the 90s, for reasons I don't really understand, this idea appears that kids must be in "structured activities", never just out playing learning to solve their own problems. La Leche League around the same time gets their classes and literature overstating the benefits of breastfeeding into mainstream hospitals. This makes it harder for women who accept this to stay in the workforce. They don't feel comfortable saying they'll be housewives, as their grandmothers would have, so they invented more complicated structured activities. Everyday sporting events commonly require parents to bring a snack, usually made by mothers not father.

So, as the article says, the "fatherly" attitudes have less influence. I'm not sure exactly what causes what, among video screens, structured activities, breastfeeding, and general anxiety, but the end result is kids not growing up, people age 18 thinking of themselves as children rather than women and men. They have experimented with sex, drugs, and other risky behaviors much less than my generation. They call doing basic adult activities without their parents "adulting". When some adult problem arises that their parents can't solve, they're thrown into severe anxiety or depression. They never experienced simple playground disputes as children or even dating issues as teens.

I think all this amounts to an international crisis. We're blessed to have cheap yet amazing tablet video devices and video games, but we've got to send the kids out to play. We've got to be therefor them if they come to us but not hover.

I have seen parents of 8 year old kids make the "eyes" gesture with two fingers to indicate that their kid should not run behind a large tree the park. "I need to be able to see you." This is at a park that all of us road our bikes to at age 6 with no supervision besides the older kids who may be at the park. "Times have changed," they say, but we need to think about if we want them to change in the direction of paranoia and holding our kids back at each stage of development.

The "mom" and "dad" scenarios in the article ring true. I think we've gotten more "mom"-mode, for lack of a better word, than the typical mom in the 70s.

I can't go along with the "faith-based" stuff. I also don't think divorce is necessarily Immoral.(Though it's better to be careful to make the right choice in the first place.) But a lot of what he says makes sense. A good father in the home is important. (I think maybe, in a way, more for a girl than a boy. Though my parents didn't divorce until I was 34.)
When I was about 4 and a half, my father got a job in an electrical plant, and he worked there about 25 years. Living on the blacktop, I got a (mistaken) impression that my neighbors' father was mean and brutal. Later, I saw a big guy on the front porch holding the youngest boy in a bear hug. That made me afraid of men in general. For a long time. (Maybe about 3 weeks.) One evening, I was with my father in the yard, and, as I recall, he was cutting grass. And I realized that, even though I was scared of men, Daddy was a man, and I wasn't scared of him. And I may have said, "You're a man, aren't you?" Or maybe I only thought of saying it. But I realized then that he was a man, and I wasn't scared of him, so there was no need to be scared of all men. (Later I found that that neighbor wasn't all that bad, either.) If my father had been rarely around, I might not have been afraid of him, but he might have just been a non-entity who wouldn't have offset that impression. (Oh, he slapped me sometimes, and made me afraid to undergo specific punishments, but that was different from being afraid of him as a person or a man.)