What Boys Become Without Male Authority -- A Warning From Britain

By Albert Mohler @ http://www.albertmohler.com

What happens when boys grow up without the influence of male authority? Stewart Dakers warns that the absence of engaged males in authority -- fathers in particular -- leads to brutal, crude, dangerous, and narcissistic teenage boys and young men.

In a brilliant essay published in The Guardian [London], Dakers introduced his readers to two teenage boys, "Split" and "Pole," who are an intimidating presence in a London shopfront. From this Dakers moves to the heart of his story:

Split's mum is effectively single and has devoted her life to bringing up Split and his sister, Paige. Pole's mum has been on the edge for years, following her discovery that she did not really like children after all. By then, she'd had another two. While neither young man could be expected to appreciate the full implications of this, they know well enough that they owe their mums big time. And they resent it - as the immoderate language shows.

"I can sort her all right. Just don't wanna have to listen to her all the bleedin' time." Both of them have indeed become good at "sorting" their mums. They have an instinct for weakness in others, which is daily expressed in small acts of intimidation in malls, at bus stops, in queues. These are the symptoms of a more chronic disaffection. They are masters of manipulation.

Dakers explains that far too many boys are now raised by women, virtually alone. Even when husbands and fathers are still part of the family picture, they do not give attention to their progeny or invest in their children. They have no emotional attachment to their sons and they do not discipline their boys. All the emotion, care, guidance, and discipline -- what discipline there is -- comes from females. Boys raised in a female environment learn quickly to become masters of manipulation, Dakers advises. They first learn to manipulate their mothers, then move on to other females:

From a very early age, they demanded attention - Pole because his mother starved him of it, Split due to competition with a smarter, older sister. When the guerrilla tactics of smash and grab failed to deliver the goods, Split learned trickery, cheating, inveigling, flattery. Their success was due to the overwhelming preoccupation of their mothers simply to survive and provide.

With the years, both boys had acquired level-five NVQs in getting their own way: treats, early smoking, bunking off school, avoiding domestic duties, getting the trainers, the bling. Once they had their mothers under their thumbs, they moved on to girls. They were first to lose their virginity - and take that of others. After a few fumbles, they quickly discovered that their skills of manipulation were equally effective up against the back wall.

Dakers explains that boys and young men learn two basic ways to manipulate their mothers and the other female authorities in their lives -- "sweep her off her feet or pull the wool over her eyes." They make their way through a progression of bad behaviors, manipulating their way around and through female authority.

And female authority is virtually all many boys see. As Dakers reports:

It is not necessarily the absence of fathers. Split's was around, during those intervals between being a guest of Her Majesty. Pole's is around all the time, but might as well not be. He lounges around expecting food, drink, TV, clothes, sex - OK, so he handles the remote. He offers words of wisdom, shouts instructions, but anything unpleasant - tantrums, homework - is women's work. And on the occasions when anything requires discipline, handling, he'll find some pressing errand in the shed, under the car, down the pub, to excuse himself.

Which reflects the reality of the wider world. At the sharp end, the rock face, there is hardly a man in sight. In their early years, up to puberty, authority is exercised on young men exclusively by women - shop assistants, teachers, health visitors, social workers and, of course, sisters and mothers.

As the boys get older, the problems grow more serious:

When the hormones kick in, when they move up to the more serious stuff - vandalism, graffiti, shopfront intimidation - here again, the delivery of reprimand, caution, assistance is delegated primarily to women. When it is a male voice, it is likely to divert the miscreant to the parent - and we know which. Even statutory stuff, in the pupil referral units, special schools, probation office, youth offending service, disciplinary hearings, the staff are overwhelmingly female.

Boys are increasingly raised without fathers and without the force of male authority. They are coddled, entertained, and reinforced in self-assertion by a constellation of female influences. So many mothers and other women give themselves selflessly to the raising of these boys, but boys need the controlling force of male authority -- the male voice they cannot ignore. They need a man -- a father or father figure -- who knows what boys are up to when they try to manipulate, and who will put down an insurrection the moment it starts.

They need the influence and discipline of a man who will say no and make it stick, who will hold the boy accountable, and who will provide the necessary instruction in becoming a man. They need the male voice, but so many boys hear only the voices of women.

Stewart Dakers puts the blame on men, many of whom are fathers only in a biological sense, who pour themselves into professions and activities but have little to do with their boys. As Dakers relates, too many fathers "stand back or walk off" when their boys need attention -- especially discipline -- leaving mom all alone. This blame is rightly extended to an entire culture of males who shirk their responsibilities to the young, especially to boys and young men -- and to a society that creates a feminized world of social assistance, education, and care.

Split and Pole spend their time strutting their exaggerated masculinity as they intimidate citizens on a London sidewalk. Rest assured that the boys and young men who do the same in American neighborhoods and shopping malls are doing so for the same reason -- the absence of male authority.

We no longer have to wonder what a society of boys raised without fathers would look like. That society is taking shape before our eyes.

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We discussed this issue Thursday on The Albert Mohler Program. [Listen here]

The Disappearing Father

By Albert Mohler @http://www.albertmohler.com

Is notion of fatherhood becoming obsolete? Researchers at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in Great Britain say they are on the verge of creating sperm cells from bone marrow. This would allow women to conceive children completely without men.

In essence, this technological development would render men obsolete and completely unnecessary in the process of breeding babies. This is the ultimate feminist and lesbian dream -- men completely out of the picture.

This technology may never actually emerge from the laboratory, though there is no real reason to believe that it is impossible. The British researchers are continuing their work and claim that the experiments are ethical "so long as it's safe."

Meanwhile, Kay S. Hymowitz argues that an existing technology, widely used in the United States, is already redefining the family -- artificial insemination (or "AI").

In "The Incredible Shrinking Father," published in the current issue of City Journal, Hymowitz explains that our culture is fast moving to recognize a class of persons who never existed before -- children without fathers.

As she observes:

[A]ided by a lucrative sperm-bank service industry, an increasingly unmarried consumer base, a legal profession and judiciary geared toward seeing relationships through a contractual lens, and a growing cultural preference for individual choice without limits, AI is advancing a cause once celebrated only in the most obscure radical journals: the dad-free family. There are multiple ironies in this unfolding revolution, not least that the technology that allows women to have a family without men promotes the very male carelessness that leads a lot of women to become single mothers in the first place. And fatherless families are a delicate proposition, as AI families are discovering, since all the scientists' technology and all the lawyerly contracts can't take human nature out of human reproduction.

The background to this development is very interesting. Hymowitz is correct in arguing that early advocates of artificial insemination had no intention of redefining the family. Their only interest was in allowing couples to have children. But, as Hymowitz also observes, this approach was both short-lived and naive. "From today's vantage point," she explains, "the approach seems typical of a time too enamored of family secrets and overly cowed by medical authority. Yet if the mid-century approach to artificial insemination was excessively protective of the feelings of infertile men and failed to grasp that family secrets have a way of unraveling rather messily, it also recognized, as did the culture at large, that a child needs both clarity and an intact home."

Since then, technological, moral, and social developments have transformed the picture. Commercial sperm banks added a huge profit motive to the equation and market economics drove an expansion of available services. On the moral front, the massive transformation of sexual ethics further decoupled reproduction from heterosexual marriage. Social and legal shifts also added momentum, leading to what Hymowitz calls "artificial insemination's almost entirely unregulated march into the mainstream of American life."

The biggest issue is what Hymowitz identifies as the "unmarriage revolution." Even in the 1970s, some lesbians were turning to artificial insemination in an effort to have babies, but this was usually without the service of a doctor or a sperm bank. Today, the picture is quite different:

Now they're more likely to go to the sperm store like everyone else, especially since a 2006 American Society for Reproductive Medicine Ethics Committee report calling for equal access to fertility treatment for gays, lesbians, and singles. These days, anyone can buy sperm: married couples, gay couples, and single women; women on the AARP mailing list, women barely out of college, 40-year-old women who have tried desperately to find husbands and have no other hope of becoming mothers, and 20-something women who--well--just want to, that's all; rich and famous women like Annie Leibovitz, Wendy Wasserstein, and Mary Cheney; and divorced third-grade teachers who live in modest two-bedroom condos and are fed up with men. Whoever. The California Cryobank, the country's largest, estimates that about 40 percent of its customers are unmarried women. The Sperm Bank of California says that two-thirds of its clientele are lesbian couples. Most professionals believe that about 1 million American children are the progeny of sperm donors--the large majority of them anonymous--with 30,000 more boosting the ranks each year.

The courts have generally made a mess of the questions surrounding AI, and those questions are truly important. As Hymowitz explains, "In unwitting alliance with a fertility industry fiercely protective of anonymous gamete donation, the courts have given their imprimatur to two nonsensical biological conditions: children who have no fathers and fathers who have no children. The old Uniform Parentage Act had it that a donor had no paternal standing, because at the time the law needed to resolve the potential problem of two fathers: the donor and the mother's husband. It should be obvious that in the case of a single or lesbian mother, the problem is quite different: there is no 'other father.'"

The legal questions surrounding artificial insemination are constantly increasing. Consider these:

Can a sperm donor be a father? Can his mother be a grandmother? Can a child conceived through AI inherit property from her biological father? Can a child have two mothers and no father? How about two mothers and a father? Can the lesbian partner of a biological mother have custody rights if the couple breaks up? Can she be required to pay child support? And, again, who are the grandparents?

The courts have no mechanism or tradition of reasoning that is up to the task of answering these questions -- largely because these questions would never have made sense in the past. So now we have courts ruling that children have no fathers, multiple parents, two mothers, two mothers and a father, and so on. It should be no surprise that sociologist Amy Agigian would argue that artificial insemination, while originally intended to support the traditional family, would end up undermining the very notion of a traditional family.

Hymowitz's article deals with issues most families never discuss around the dinner table, but this is hardly an issue intelligent Christians can ignore. As with so many other reproductive issues, evangelical Christians have been in the habit of assuming that a technology like artificial insemination is basically benign. By now it should be obvious that this is a misplaced confidence. Artificial insemination, largely because of its widespread availability and unregulated commerce, is redefining marriage, paternity, and family right before our eyes.

Furthermore, Hymowitz observes that many European countries such as Switzerland, Britain, the Netherlands, France, Iceland, and Norway have placed significant restrictions on artificial insemination . . . but not the United States.

As she concludes:

It would be a good idea for Americans likewise to abolish anonymous sperm donation. But let's not kid ourselves that such a ban would also put an end either to fatherlessness or to male fecklessness, both nourished by our cultural predilection for individual choice unconstrained by tradition, the needs of children, or nature itself. To modify that preference, we'll need something much more radical than government regulation.

Something more radical indeed. In fact, nothing less than a reversal of current moral and social trends would be necessary. If left unchecked, these trends will mean something radically new in the human experience -- the complete disappearance of the father from the picture. Never there . . . not even missed.

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Those wondering what this new picture might look like should see "Our Sons Don't Need a Father!," an article published in the May 18, 2007 edition of Britain's Daily Mail. In the article, a lesbian couple defies the notion that children -- even boys -- need a father:

"While there will always be some people critical of what we have done, we feel there is nothing any dad could give our sons that we can't give them," says Anna, who the twins refer to as 'Mummy'. Her partner is known as 'Mummy Jane'.

"We are not man-haters - we have many male friends. But we can kick a football like anyone else, and we will cheer our sons on from the touchline as well as any father."

But does this doubling of roles - parenthood, rather than 'motherhood' and 'fatherhood', really work? What sort of future lies ahead for these little boys, who are so far - some would say blissfully - unaware of the way in which they were brought into the world?

Jane and Anna claim friends and family are thrilled for them and that no one "bats an eyelid" about their unusual family set-up.

OK, So Dads Make a Difference. This is News?

By Albert Mohler @ http://albertmohler.com

The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, California is out with a big news flash -- dads matter in the lives of their children. Sandra Stokley reports on the formation of "DADS," a group dedicated to encouraging men to be more involved in the lives of their children.

The news story is nicely done, featuring the work of Robert Garcia, a father of three who is highly involved with his kids. From the story:

Garcia faces a 90-minute daily commute from Glen Avon to his job as a quality engineer in Costa Mesa. He also drives his three children to school every morning and walks them to class.

He makes it a point to be home at least three nights during the workweek to sit down to dinner with his wife and children. Family dinners on weekends are a given.

He taps into his vacation days so he can chaperone school field trips. He recently took a vacation day so he and his wife could take birthday cupcakes to his son's classroom at Pedley Elementary School.

And even on business trips, he fields calls from his children when they need help on their math and science projects.

For men willing to face the challenges that might block a healthy relationship, the rewards are enormous, Garcia said.

Robert Garcia is clearly a dad who loves his wife and children and is dedicated to being a father --not just a "male parent." His commitment to his own family is admirable and his leadership in forming the DADS group is to be appreciated.

More:

In January, Garcia took over as president of DADS -- Dedicated, Assuring, Devoted Special -- a Jurupa-area group that promotes greater involvement by fathers in their children's lives.

Garcia and DADS members say the premise of the group is simple: fatherly involvement engenders personal fulfillment and pays big dividends for society as well.

"My research shows that if fathers get involved with their kids, they (the children) score higher on tests and stay out of trouble," he said.

Since its incorporation last June, DADS has sponsored three events that organizers hope will act as a springboard to help fathers bond with their children.

"The reality is that fathers are role models for their sons and daughters," said local businessman Tim Adams, who is one of the group's founders. "And you really see a difference in the attitude of kids whose fathers are involved in their lives."

The importance of fathers to the family dynamic has been documented in numerous studies, said W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and author of "Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands."

"There is a real connection between fatherless households and delinquent and criminal activity on the part of adolescent males and young men," Wilcox said in a telephone interview.

Fathers provide a template for their sons on how to handle difficult situations, conflict and frustration and how to interact with women, Wilcox said.

Daughters with involved and affectionate fathers are more apt to postpone sexual activity, Wilcox said.

Children in general benefit from seeing a father and mother treat each other with affection and respect, Wilcox said.

"It's important in different ways for both boys and girls to have a father in the house who is modeling certain types of behavior," Wilcox said.

The research is clear -- fathers play a vital role in the formation of their children. The presence or absence of fathers, and the relative quality of the dads' engagement with their children, makes a huge difference in the lives of both boys and girls. Professor Bradley Wilcox's research is very revealing. Boys need to see dad as a role model for the man they should become. Girls also need dad, and it shows. Just look at the research.

The fact that The Press-Enterprise saw this as a news story worthy of coverage is very revealing in itself. We should appreciate the story. At the same time, it is sobering to reflect on the health of a society in which such a development ranks as news. Here's the scoop -- dads matter. Somebody call a press conference.