My dad, piloting solo, was heading south along the Puget Sound shoreline and had left the wheel of his pride and joy – the inboard plywood boat he’d built – to address a matter near the stern. Unseen ahead was a sandbar which, had dad attended to proper steersmanship, he would have avoided.
As it was he ploughed a significant channel for a good distance into the land mine located where it wasn’t supposed to be, and dad found himself back at the steering wheel but only because he’d been thrown there by the impact.
Image SourceBumped and bruised but otherwise unhurt – except for his pride – embarrassed and sheepish to be sure, he awaited the turning of the tide, even fished – when there was enough water – in this most unlikely of spots to pass the time, and eventually floated free and finished the journey home.
Dad shared the story with me, thinking it would be a good lesson about the danger of leaving the wheel.
Our country has left the wheel and the chaos, confusion and catastrophic grief – and consequent outrage – are the cumulative effect of families without fathers.
In the wake of the Florida school shooting, Wisconsin Sheriff Dale Schmidt said that more gun control “will do nothing more than place a very small band aid on a much bigger problem.”
As Andrew Blake writes recently in “Blue Lives Matter”, Sheriff Schmidt said, “parents need to instill respect for authority in their children and discipline their children.”
But what if those parents lack the skills, capacity, wherewithal, time, patience, priority, etc. – or are even home – to properly set and enforce those all-so-important necessary boundaries?
“Among the 25 most-cited school shooters since Columbine, 75 percent were reared in broken homes,” writes Emilie Kao for “The Daily Signal”, this March 13.
“Psychologist Dr. Peter Langman, a pre-eminent expert on school shooters, found that most came from incredibly broken homes of not just divorce and separation, but also infidelity, substance abuse, criminal behavior, domestic violence, and child abuse.”
“The desperate cry of America’s boys” headlined the opinion piece by Suzanne Venker for Fox News this past February 18.
“Deeper even than the gun problem is this: boys are broken,” wrote Venker.
“Broken homes, or homes without a physically and emotionally present mother and father, are the cause of most of society’s ills.”
So, what to do? Where should our focus be?
“Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety,” reads an ancient proverb.
The word for “counsel” – synonym “guidance” – properly means “steersmanship” or “pilotage” according to one commentator. Lack of such guidance and counsel – missing a firm hand at the wheel – can not only sink a ship or, in my dad’s case, set it high and dry, but can prove to be the destruction of any organization, even an entire nation, comprised as they are of families.
The second half of the proverb declares, conversely, that “in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” Here, however, a further warning. Remembering that the synonym for “counselors” is “steersmen”, this suggests it is not the numbers of counselors but who in fact these counselors are.
It is not “the superiority of a popular government over the despotism of a single ruler,” that is here contrasted.
Rather “the caution of our homely proverb is net inopportune, ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth.’”
Many people, if not most, have relinquished the wheel of their lives to the so-called ‘steersmanship’ of pop-culture.
Or the majority.
Or follow-the-crowd mentality.
In all such cases we are – as leaders at whatever level – at great risk of relinquishing what is our number one responsibility while tending to other matters not near as important: the family.
It will take refocusing on the family to refloat America.
Picture Source
Up next in the argument: women should get out of the work force and back into the kitchen and home because somehow this is all our fault. *sigh*
The fact is the unstable home argument simply doesn’t make sense based on recent data. There have always been unstable homes—period. In fact, the divorce rate has gone down and reached 40 year lows in the last two years (https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/hemez-divorce-rate-2016-fp-17-24.html). The numbers dispute the idea of instability at home as the root cause of increased violence in our society.
Of course someone who has a terrible home life is more likely to get into trouble, and anyone who works in the public and with children needs to be highly trained in spotting early warning signs. But the real issue is lack of mental health resources and the stigma that still surrounds mental health. If schools and hospitals were better equipped to deal with depression and trauma (such as a terrible home life), then I think you’d see a noticeable decline in violence.
Having mommy at home and daddy around isn’t the root problem. I think it’s utterly naive to adopt such a viewpoint and it completely ignores the lack of resources for troubled people.
Unfortunately “…..the lack of resources for troubled people” is a remedial treatment after the fact: it most often is not a prophylactic preventing causation which is what Mr. Anderson’s article is about. The emphasis on “mental health” is a government sponsored Band-Aid which does not address the problem at its root but rather attempts to treat it and justify an enlarged bureaucracy. The causative agents are societal and cultural and that’s the tide that has to change if we are to become a more civil society. Broken homes, lack of fathers’ influence, the absence of parents in their children’s lives whether they both work or not, bias against males and pervasive violence in entertainment all set up “lost boys” for antisocial behavior.
If you have a wound, to use your metaphor, you bandage it up. When one is gushing blood, you do not stop to have a conversation with them about how they could have prevented the incident. You stem the flow of blood, otherwise triage, and then have that conversation once the person is on the mend. While the conversation about what caused the injury in the first place is an important one, treatment for the injury is necessary first, or at the very least, simultaneously. You say mental health is a bandaid, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Stop the flow of blood, and then let’s talk about underlying issues and where to go.
I, obviously, disagree that all antisocial behavior stems from a corrupt home life. Is that one aspect? Absolutely. But there are so many other factors to consider as well that I just cannot accept that as the quick-fix solution it was presented as in this article. Narrowing down issues to a single, reductive cause is dangerous because it stops the conversation from being about all contributing factors.
Simple scenario: you’re at a gas station and a pump is leaking gasoline on the ground. What’s your first instinct? Sop up the leaking gasoline or hit the emergency shut off? Mental health may be able to help those wounded persons needing help but at some point you have to stop the supply of wounded by addressing the root cause of their wounding…….otherwise you can never have enough mental health resources to deal with the problem. The low performing solution is typically to throw money, resources, technology at problems without changing that dynamics that create the problem.
I strongly (but respectfully) disagree with Nessa, above, and agree with Mr. Anderson. There have always been dysfunctional families, it’s true, but when society begins to normalize what is harmful and stigmas disappear, things only get worse.
The statistics showing fewer divorces hide other unfortunate undercurrents. For example, fewer young people are getting married, and if they do, they are marrying at older ages. More people are cohabitating instead of marrying and when those relationships end they aren’t counted in the failed-marriage statistics (and studies show when those relationships break up it can be as damaging to children as divorce). Not only that, the single, greatest predictor of poverty is divorce. Sometimes divorce is unavoidable, but it is a painful experience which leaves one parent to do the job of two–a herculean task. Don’t misunderstand; I have great respect for single-parents who manage to raise children while also providing for their families. Having two people sharing the work, however, simply makes the job easier.
Certainly not everything about our past society was good; no one would argue that. But some of the old-fashioned values which are so derided today produced many people who were willing to work hard and become self-reliant, productive citizens. I would argue 43 million people on food stamps is due, in no small part, to the large number of broken homes.
Nassa,you are wrong about what comes next is women at work. As i wrote here last month, what comes next is parents do not know haw to parent. The largest contributor is neighborhood dysfunction followed closely by lack of an on purpose program to teach our young parents to be how to parent. Normalizing or excusing part of the dysfunction is not a solution
The older generation has always complained about the new and the way they parent. Baby boomers were derided for their desire to be friends with their children. You now deride millennial parents for who knows what. I grew up dirt poor in a single parent household with an abusive absentee alcoholic father. My siblings and I are all productive members of society because we were part of a neighborhood and school system that had resources in place to help children like us.
It doesn’t matter how hard people want to work. If there are not good jobs with living wages, poverty persists. And in many cases, what you deem bad parenting is just someone working non-stop and unable to spare time. If they quit one of their many jobs and ended up on welfare, you would deem them lazy instead. It’s lose-lose.
Again, we need to make sure it is easy for people to meet the basic needs of their family, and then maybe some of these problems would disappear. It’s amazing what a lower stress existence does. But I think it is irresponsible to blame people when it’s the system itself that is broken.
The 9 million year old (nature) contract between men and women is dead. Killed by women who seek all the old benefits that men HAD without taking on fully the new responsibilities. It is going to get much worse. In just a few years women will not need to carry a child… But men will not need to have a women to have children. Men want children but not the standard child support created by feminists law makers and judges in family courts. Have to have permission to see your child… Any accusation of improper conduct is taken as absolute proof… cutting a man off from seeing his children.
Add that to the difficulty finding good pay jobs to support them…
I know of a case 50 years ago where a 14 year old girl decided she wanted to marry a man. She teased until she had a date, got pregnant, got married via a waver (NY State). Today he would go to jail and be labeled a “dead bet dad” for failing to pay child support from jail… There marriage lasted until he died at 78 and she is still leaving…
This is not progress. It is organized stupidity. Male and female are different and no laws are going to make DIFFERENT human structures the same or equal. All this wanting to change sex is part of the results. We lose our ancient wisdom and try to replace it with AI. AI has vast information, but no wisdom.