The Decline of Fatherhood

Who and what caused it, and a dismal prediction for why it will come back

I have to start this with a Dad joke:

How do you order a Dad joke in a restaurant?

Extra lame, hold the funny.

Yesterday was Father’s Day, when everyone feels obligated to write praises to Fatherhood. While this is only proper, today I want to take a slightly different tack. Today I’ll be mourning the decline of Fatherhood, point a finger at some of those responsible, and offer a dismal prediction for the rise of fatherhood in the near future.

Fatherhood is a dying institution by any objective measure. I recently saw a meme about how roughly half of young boys grow up in fatherless homes, and about 80% of teachers are female. This means that 40% of boys have little to no male influence in their lives. The precise numbers don’t really matter, mainly because they’re so awful.

Far too many children don’t have a regular father figure. Little boys have no one to teach them how to be men, and little girls don’t have anyone to show them how real men should treat women.

Why does this matter? Because little people learn how to be big people by watching and imitating the big people around them. Don’t have the right big people around? Kids wind up having to get it catch-as-catch-can or make it up as they go along, and that never ends well. This is basic child psychology, as well as being an inescapable truth. It’s also several thousand pages of psychoanalytic literature boiled down to its most concentrated form. You’re welcome.

The marriage and divorce statistics aren’t any better. Marriage is now a coin flip, with half ending in divorce. Divorce courts are notorious for being biased towards women, and don’t think that young men haven’t noticed. There’s a good reason so many young men aren’t getting married—an old saying about not buying cows when milk is free comes to mind, but it’s more than that. Why buy a cow when it’s likely you’ll only get milk for a few years, then the cow will decide to kick you off your farm and make you pay her, besides?

Let’s be brutally honest: marriage is, and has always been about two things: progeny and property. Romantic love only really became a thing a few centuries ago, and sex is a commodity that’s available on the open market. Don’t like to hear that stated so openly? Sorry, not sorry. It’s the harsh truth, and if you wanted pleasant fiction you’re in the wrong place. Try the romance section on the Kindle store.

So, progeny and property, especially how to keep men reassured they wouldn’t be slaving away for the cuckoo in the nest. It’s the rare man indeed who’ll willingly raise another man’s children (and they’re generally to be commended or committed to an asylum, as appropriate). Add this to the inescapable biological facts that women are born with all the eggs they will ever have and those eggs have a very definite shelf life, mix in multiple waves of increasingly toxic feminism and bake in the alimony/child support oven.

That’s the recipe for what we have now: too many middle-age men who are supporting an ex-wife who walked away with the house, the kids, and half the money…and a new generation or two of young men who see that and are saying “thanks, no thanks”. You also have a group of middle-age women who can’t compete with their younger cohort in looks and only have rotten eggs in the fridge. Some of them put off having a family in favor of a career, and it just didn’t work as well as they were promised.

News flash, ladies: men aren’t quite as stupid as you think we are. Guys do talk to other guys, especially about women, even more about women who’ve screwed them over. Men have been passing wisdom down from one generation to the next over beers ever since you women invented it (thanks for that, btw! Good job!). You harpies that delighted in raking your hubby over the coals in divorce court have made young dudes look at every sweet young chick as a potential vulture wanting to feast on his liver.

And yes, it’s usually women that leave a marriage, not men. Again, harsh but true.

So, what killed Fatherhood in America? There’s no one thing you can point to, but there are several things that, in aggregate, gave us the mess we have today. California’s 1969 no-fault divorce law set the precedence other states would follow, and may be the single biggest reason. Idolizing the nuclear family, instead of the extended family structure that worked so well for eons, was a mistake. It turns out that little boys need granddads, too, to help them grow up to be men. The unending war on all things male, especially trying to turn little boys into little girls in the public indoctrination centers (what we laughingly call “schools”) has payed a major factor. Feminism, of course; that it just gets more toxic with each wave is hideously apparent. Equal pay for equal work is one thing—ranting about “toxic masculinity” while inflicting your suppurative vaginismus on all and sundry is quite another, dearie.

Like America itself, Fatherhood took several body blows from the federal government in the 1960’s that may yet prove to be fatal. The Great Society and War on Poverty subsidized bastardy (yes, that’s what we called it back then, when shame was still a thing) and thus, we got more of it. You can’t tell me nobody saw that coming…but we are talking about a bipartisan effort, which multiplies the usual stupid factor in Congress several fold. They also financially castrated men by paying women to NOT have a man in the house. Again, more than the usual Congressional stupid factor was apparently in play. The War on Drugs—conceived as a way to link pot smoking to black jazz musicians to the Watts riots to terrorize white southern voters into voting for Richard Nixon—not only made crime pay VERY well, but locked up more fathers than any other first (and most second) world nations. (See Dan Baum’s Smoke and Mirrors: the War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure for an excellent deep dive into this topic.) With the 1965 Immigration Act, these policies undercut the employment opportunities of lower-class men, collectively weakened families and fatherhood, and preferentially whacked poorer, especially Black, communities.

I honestly don’t think Johnson and Nixon could have demolished Black families any better if they’d tried. For all I know, that was the plan all along! If it was, it certainly worked.

Don’t believe me? Check the body count from this Father’s Day/Juneteenth weekend in Chicago (if they release it) and then tell me I’m wrong.

Nonetheless. I do see a few—very few—signs of hope for families and the Fathers that lead them. I know it won’t come from the government, which is too busy looting the treasury, fighting a proxy war to protect their corrupt Eurasian puppet state and conspiring to keep Donald Trump out of the White House to do anything useful. A White House that flies the Progress Flag in a position of preeminence isn’t going to do squat for Fathers and families.

What’s hopeful is that some young women are starting to realize that having a husband and a family first, before a career, is actually a pretty good idea. They realize that with just a little bit of encouragement, the right man will change the light bulbs, kill the spiders, raise her kids, protect his family and work harder than a Hebrew building the pyramids to keep his family fed, warm, and safe. With her young looks and fresh eggs, she’s a high-value prospect…for only a short while, and the smart ones know it.

Young men, on the other hand, are a little skittish because of what they’ve seen the older bulls go through, and they also know they’ll be making good sperm for decades. They may not know what the Jackdaw Syndrome is, but they know all about trophy wives. There are cougars out there who are desperate for that young sperm and more than willing to spend their alimony checks at the spa to get it. For many, this is all they’re after, which thins the pool of eligible young men.

What’s left are those young men who actually want a good woman to be their wife, helpmate and mother to their children. They want to be Fathers, not baby daddies, boy toys or check-writers. They know they won’t find what they’re looking for at a Woke-cause rally, pro-abortion protest or any parade where pussy hats are in evidence. They’re forced to fall back on traditional methods to find these traditional girls—family connections, churches, pro-traditional values events.

Getting these men together with like-minded women is an awkward, complicated, messy dance—in other words, it’s as old as humanity itself. Little by little, these kinds of traditional families are growing and, by and large, prospering.

It’s a good thing, too, because what’s coming is going to make real Fathers a truly valuable commodity. G. Michael Hopf said “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” We have been ruled by weak men for far too long, running on the inertia and achievements of strong men. In the hard times coming for America, strong men will be created, and they will thrive while others fail. These strong men—Fathers and Fathers-to-be—will be the ones who lead us through the hard times, and carry their families with them.

Like it or not, America is about to learn just how much she needs her Fathers. Not ex-husbands or baby daddies—Fathers.

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