The elephant in the room is Dad
Lori Borgman | Monday, Oct 19, 2009
In my bulging file folder marked marriage and
family, is a tidbit on a 60 Minutes show from 1999. It was a
segment on an overpopulation of elephants on an African game
preserve.
The best solution at the time was to move baby elephants to
new preserves. The babies were transported and appeared to be
doing fine. About a decade later, however, the young male
elephants began attacking and killing rhinos, behavior very
uncharacteristic for elephants.
Researchers concluded that these young males had grown up
without sufficient male models – without fathers. Despite
cynicism that it was too late to do any good, the young males
were transported to locations with large mature bull elephants.
The mature bulls set things straight with the young males and
the violent attacks and killing stopped. As Diane Sollee,
director of Smart Marriages, wrote at the time, “Daddies do
matter, even in elephants.”
We can host conferences on youth violence every day of the
week and funnel money into the schools that house the worst
offenders, but those actions don’t target the heart of the
problem. The real problem, just like it was for the elephants,
is the daddy deficit.
The most important factor in explaining violent crime is not
race or income, but family breakdown. For years we have fueled
our own breakdown by indulging in the nonsense that mothers and
fathers are interchangeable.
We have chased the male bulls away telling them that they
aren’t essential. We waved goodbye and told them that as long as
they were financially responsible, they were doing their job.
Fatherhood has been reduced to an economic tradeoff – dads for
dollars.
There is more to being a father than footing the bill.
Fathers fill critical emotional and psychological spaces in the
hearts and lives of children that only fathers can.
This is not to say that there aren’t female-headed households
doing a good job. But when one person does the job of two, the
job is considerably harder. And try as she might, a mother can
never be a father.
A father teaches a boy what it means to be a man by example.
He teaches a son how to work, how to handle aggression, exercise
self-control and how to treat a woman. A father encourages risk,
tells a kid to run faster, climb higher, and picks up the pieces
on the heels of defeat.
Fathers are the male bulls that protect the herd. Generally,
larger, louder and more muscular, fathers provide a sense of
safety so that boys in particular are less likely to look for
protection on the street or in a gang.
A father is equally critical in the life of his daughter. His
relationship with her is the number one predictor of her sexual
behavior prior to marriage. A father shapes his daughter’s
expectations of men and even influences the success of her own
marriage.
The perils of fatherless families cut across the lines of
color and culture. It is a family matter that matters to every
family because we’re all sharing space on the same preserve. As
Pope John Paul II once said, “As the family goes, so goes the
nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”
When there is an obvious truth that no one wants to talk
about, we say there’s an elephant in the room. The elephant in
the room today is the absence of male elephants.
