Affirmation Crisis : Healing The Wounds Of A Fatherless Generation

There is an Affirmation Crisis. It is the result of fatherlessness. Generations have grown up without a father. Whether physically or emotionally absent, it leaves in the child a wound of absence. Fatherlessness has become a major social problem in America, even an epidemic, with approximately 50% of children under the age of 18 not living in the same home as their biological father. It has been documented in many ways and, yet it is a secret hidden in plain view. Over the last fifty years the family has been under attack.

Concepts and opinions concerning the family have changed and a new perception of family has emerged. Much of the destruction of the family has been popularized and normalized through the media and arts and entertainment. The large percentage of marriages that end in divorce and the increasing trend of out of wedlock births, seems to have contributed to a widespread belief that being a single parent is somehow a noble venture, and that the father is unimportant to raising children. There are indeed many exceptional single parents. But these are the exceptions to the rule as statistics prove.It is as if there were a systematic scheme in the works to destroy our society by using progressive cultural engineering. The influence of popular approaches to the family in the media, that rejects traditional and biblical norms of family construction, is creating a confused, depressed, and fractured population. Men and women with a confused self-identity and self-confidence are the product of this fatherlessness epidemic and this affirmation crisis.Today, after over a hundred years of cultural fatherlessness, we have seen multiple generations who have grown up without the father’s emotional and often physical influence and support. Combine that with two world wars, economic challenges, media influence, rising divorce rates, sexual identity conflict, and you are left with a generation of wandering fatherless children. Many of these fatherless children are wounded adults who continue to live their lives not knowing that they are suffering from the wound of absence referred to as the “father wound.”The “father wound” in short is the absence of the emotional blessing that only the father can provide to the child. One of the major responsibilities of the father is the modeling and impartation of true fatherhood. A father is the God given instrument that identifies the child as well as gives the child a sense of self and self-confidence. This is true