Little Bit of Green

In order to understand what I mean by a good father, I first need to awaken you a bit by bringing up some negative things, in hopes of illustrating what we’re faced with. To that end it is that I will unveil the negative trends and portrayals of fathers we’ve seen through the years.

The Good Father’s Purpose
One could argue that the alarmists have focused blame on what’s wrong with our youth and pointed to the parental figures in the home as the culprits, in many cases. While this may have been done many times for different reasons, it is extremely appropriate, at this time, to examine the impact of fathering in our youth’s culture.

If you were to randomly survey people off the street to ask them to define a good father, you may be very surprised by what you hear, unless you focused your efforts on a group of people who see the need for a strong family leader. You might hear that the father typically gets the sympathy of the rest of the family members and especially the attention of his spouse. He may go about this in a childish manner, begging for attention. This I imagine has been drilled into our population by the one-eyed monster, we call television, that graces most all our homes.

I digress, as television can only be held responsible to an extent. Through the years, our society has become liberal to the degree where strong leadership is feared by many, and at the best, avoided by the vast majority. Rarely is a genuine person of character with positive leadership skills elected to be our public officials. This goes for the father image as well. If we see a strong-charactered, God-fearing head of a household reflected in real life or in fiction, we will immediately come to the conclusion: he is going to scar his children by his domineering personality and make the some type of servile individuals for the rest of their lives.

I could not disagree with this more! Conversely to this assumption, leadership is ONLY passed along through example. To my dismay, nearly all the examples of paternal leadership is concerned, have disappeared, so we are left without much to perpetuate this image. The young man grows up with a weak father and does not have anyone with whom to identify, so he does not know what a real man is. He may see dad refusing many responsibilities and neglect his family in many other ways, only for the good mother to be left to do it all.

Youth Home
I am sure that at this time you are wondering if I am ever going to get around to telling you what I think a good father is. No doubt, by describing the deficiencies of a bad father, I am telling you what a good father is. The good father is the antithesis of the weak and poor father. I would much rather see a strong-character, righteous man walk by his children, and in doing so, observe them somewhat flinching as they became fearful that he might just swat them, then see the reaction of most children to their father today. Maybe I’m a bit old fashioned, but I really feel children of all ages should have a type of fearful respect for their fathers: not because he is going to harm them physically, but because they have been brought up to the point that they dread him giving them even a glance of disdain.

Protecting your child in a seductive world
The good father is involved in the lives of their children, doing the things we typically image father doing with child. That is, play ball with his son, take him fishing, have a close father daughter relationship with his girls, and all in all, be a kind and sympathetic person. It’s his job to do all of these things, but first and foremost he must be the leader of his family. He has to take the helm of leadership and guide the household through the storms it is going to face as the years go by.

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