America’s Dad-Shaped Hole

Kevin Roberts (View Bio) • June 13, 2023 • View Transcript

EDIFY Transcript Kevin Roberts | America’s Dad-Shaped Hole America has spent about 60 years exhausting the alternatives to fatherhood—and the collateral damage is all around us. Broken families. Gutted communities. Betrayed women. And overflowing prisons. The evidence is so overwhelming that it’s not really controversial anymore. Children who grow up without their fathers carry the heaviest social, economic, and psychological cross social science can measure. The mountain of data is nothing short of Himalayan. Children raised in single-parent homes constitute:

63% of teen suicides;
90% of runaways and homeless children;
85% of behavior disorder patients;
71% of high school dropouts;
75% of teenagers in substance abuse rehab centers;
85% of young prison inmates [1].

If there was a way for a social worker or a bureaucracy or a government check to fill the Dad-shaped hole in America’s broken families, we would have found it by now. It doesn’t exist. Three generations of elites — from Washington to Hollywood — have promised young Americans that severing the natural connections between sex, marriage, commitment, kids, and parenthood would be “liberating.” As the statistics show, it’s been anything but. The only solution to fatherlessness is fathers. It’s so simple, but easy to miss, so I’ll say it again: The only solution to fatherlessness is fathers. Our culture has gone to such laudable lengths to de-stigmatize single motherhood that we now accidentally denigrate married fatherhood. We work so hard to affirm non-traditional gender roles and family structures that we have forgotten just how valuable they’ve always been. Fatherhood isn’t about being a male. It’s about being a man. The strength, courage, dependability, honesty, accountability, gentleness, toughness, and protectiveness that define real masculinity keeps children safe, wives happy, and trouble at bay. We know what actual toxic masculinity looks like. It looks like boys raised without men: insecure, vulgar, misogynistic, angry, confused, and above all, scared. In every poor community in America, every boy who doesn’t know how to be a man and every girl who doesn’t know she deserves one, is crying out into that empty void in their homes and in their hearts, “Father, father, why have you abandoned me?” That question cannot be answered, or that agony soothed, with universal health care or a “Build Back Better” plan. But the measurable and material benefits of intact families are the least important ones. What really matters is not what fathers do, but what they are. For two generations now, America’s elite institutions have devalued what they are, through a welfare state that penalizes work and marriage, through an education system that punishes boyishness and a culture that scolds chivalry as abusive and masculinity itself as toxic. It turns out, dads are just one more thing our failed elite class was wrong about. So pay attention: This is a reminder to you that what our broken culture, struggling single moms, and frightened kids need is not another program or policy, but a person. Dads: accept no substitutes. I’m Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, for EDIFY. [1] Rochester Area Fatherhood Network | Research and Statistics

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