I'm 45 and I still need my dad...

Is it merely coincidence, divine interaction, or a subconscious ploy of my own that I am currently reading To Own a Dragon, by Donald Miller, while I have been taking Adolescent Development and now Adult Development in school?

My college of choice for my Human Development degree is Hope International University, which to this point has done a pretty good job at integrating the values found within the Christian faith in the classes I have taken. Nevertheless, because of accrediting issues or few choices for texts, the majority of our reading material comes from a secular humanist perspective. Last spring I took a class called Social Problems, which mostly blamed the U.S. Government and white men (not necessarily in that order) for all of the problems found in our society today.

One quote that caught my eye in the text was one that said that kids who grow up without a father in the home do just as well as kids who grow up in two parent households. I do not remember what data that the authors cited to come to their conclusions, but I wonder if the authors have lived the experience that they claim is not so bad for the kids.

Over the past few years I have become aware of just how important a father is in the life of his children-leading me to conclusions that are quite divergent from those of the published “experts” that I, and thousands of others, have been taught in class.

I lost my father to cancer when I was eighteen and a half years old, and only in recent months have realized how much that loss affected me as a young adult. I had moved out of our family’s home just a few months prior to his death, and by conventional wisdom his responsibility to me was finished. I was a legal adult, and had moved away to a new city; I was practically on my own. However, there is no way that I could measure the negative impact of not having my dad around all these years has had on me.

Today I am thinking about a family we know with a struggling single mother, trying to raise her kids on her own. Her kids are passing classes in school, which would support the claims of the authors mentioned above. What cannot be measured is the inside stuff that goes on and cannot be found on a graph or spreadsheet: the guilt feelings inside a mother that come from a life of financial struggles; the disrespect that comes because the mom has been too soft on the kids for too many years; the depression that comes from doing it all by herself; the lack of a father to be an example to a son of how a man should love his wife; there is so much more.

Donald Miller tells of the time when his mother was the only female father in his Boy Scout troop. He remembers the embarrassment and awkwardness of having his landlord’s son stand-in as his “dad” during a campout…

more coming...