The Need for Fathers

A student at Pacific Life Bible College (Amalea B.) posted this and I thought it worth re-posting as we approach Father's Day.

"Something special happens when a father tells his daughter that she is beautiful, that she is a woman, and that she has a reason to be respected and loved by a good man. If she doesn't get this message from her dad, she will look for it from men who have less pure motives. Women tend to become victims when they grow up without good fathers. Men tend to become oppressors. I heard recently that 94 percent of people in prison are men. And 85 percent of those men grew up in fatherless homes." - Donald Miller, "Father Fiction: Chapters for a Fatherless Generation" (reading that book right now... so good... just in time for father's day too.

A few other things I found online:

The California Men’s Center created this list of statistics about children who grow up in a home without a father.

1) 43% of US children live without their father [US Department of Census]

2) 90% of homeless and runaways are from fatherless homes. [ U.S. Bureau of the Census]

3) 80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger come from fatherless homes. [Criminal Justice & Behaviour, Vol 14, pp. 403-26, 1978]

4) 71% of pregnant teenagers lack a father. [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services press release, Friday, March 26, 1999]

5) 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes. [US D.H.H.S., Bureau of the Census]

6) 85% of children with behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes. [CDC]

7) 90% of adolescent repeat arsonists live with only their mother. [Wray Herbert, “Dousing the Kindlers,” Psychology Today, January, 1985, p. 28]

8) 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. [National Principals Association Report on the State of High Schools]

9) 75% of adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes. [Rainbows for all God’s Children]

10) 70% of juveniles in state operated institutions have no father. [US Department of Justice, Special Report, Sept. 1988]

11) 85% of youths in prisons grew up in a fatherless home. [Fulton County Georgia jail populations, Texas Department of Corrections, 1992]

12) Fatherless boys and girls are: twice as likely to drop out of high school; twice as likely to end up in jail; four times more likely to need help for emotional or behavioral problems. [US D.H.H.S. news release, March 26, 1999]