Effective Fathers With Flawed Ideals
The problem with girls raised by good (but not godly) dads
We are likely all aware that there is a boy crisis, and boys can’t learn to become men without examples. Fatherlessness is a huge problem. But beyond the absent fathers, there are plenty of men who are bad fathers, and then there are good fathers, but many of the best fathers have been surreptitiously guided into passing on virtues that compound the fathering problem for future generations.
That last part is ultimately what I aim to discuss, and especially as it pertains to fathers of daughters. As I mentioned, the problem is mainly with the good dads. To point to reasons why, here are two sources that I recently came across that bolster my hypothesis.
One is an article from a few years ago called “The Rise of the Sheconomy”, which touts the fact that by 2030 45% of women will be single and career focused, and presents this as a win for our society. 1
The other is a more recent tik tok video of a young woman who was taught by her father to value independence. She learned this lesson so well, that with an upcoming wedding, she has decided to walk herself down the aisle, rather than be given away by her father. Her lament was that in response to this request, her father has enabled her to become even more independent by refusing to finance the wedding.
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It’s tempting to say that these women are in fact being fathered poorly, but I do not think that is the case. To further explain my hypothesis, I want to define terms and explain what I am describing when I refer to good and bad fathers.
What does it mean to be a good father? There are two ways to answer that. The first is about effectiveness.
An effective father successfully passes on the virtues and values that he embodies to his children. An ineffective father produces children that live in contrast to the virtues and values he espouses.
The second meaning of a good father is about goodness as a moral virtue. Which virtues and values does the father hold as most important? Do they ultimately point toward good or evil?
In reality, every father is a mixture of these attributes, and he succeeds and fails to varying degrees in different arenas of life. Every father will be effective in passing on some things, likely both good and bad, and ineffective in others, also a mix of good and bad.
This matrix can account for some surprising results. One would be that the father who is both ineffective and immoral often ends up promoting virtues over vices, like an alcoholic. His ineffectiveness makes the child want nothing to do with the lifestyle he embodies, and since his addiction is a vice, his children may embrace responsibility and moderation.
A similar example could be the new age and hippie dads whose kids embrace ordered and conservative lifestyles. This isn’t perfect, nor are the results as good as those who are intentionally fathered well, but it is an interesting phenomenon.
The worst example is the effective father who promotes vice over virtue. This is something more like the high-functioning alcoholic, who is able to make things work in his life enough to perpetuate his warped lifestyle into the future. Because effective fatherhood is very closely related to being an effective husband, it's more likely to be enabled by a codependent spouse. “It worked for mom and dad” is a very hard argument to ignore.
Similarly disastrous is the ineffective father of virtue. This could be closely related to the dad in the previous scenario, if we take the words they claim to espouse in contrast to what their actions actually model. The alcoholic dad could give lip service to virtues like faith and honesty, but his authority is undermined by his powerlessness over drink.
The worst example of this is the dad who is a classic sucker. He believes in truth and honesty, faith and family values, but he can’t get his act together. It doesn’t have anything to do with substance, he’s just terribly inept. He doesn’t provide well, he doesn’t stand up to his wife and kids. No one respects him, and therefore his children don’t respect his values. The virtues he believes in are equated with foolishness. This man is probably the type of man who makes bad choices in regard to his spouse. He may be married to a woman who bosses him around.
Imagine a situation where a man marries out of obligation because he let himself become involved sexually with a woman. If he wasn’t in control then, it’s an uphill battle to master himself within marriage and family.
The final category is of course the effective father of virtue. This is the kind of dad that our world needs. They are out there, but they are becoming rare. The best among them likely represent a great legacy of fine fathers who have collected an embodied form of wisdom over countless generations.
Why are these good fathers becoming so rare? Why are they not the ones having the most children and leading the charge? I believe there are a variety of factors.
The first is virtue drift. The old world was ruled through an aristocracy, or a system of aristocracies. The elite families did not receive their positions arbitrarily, but through excellence and virtue. While these virtues must not necessarily be religious virtues, they must at least be good for the community. Tyranny does not last.
This is made clear in the term ‘gentleman’, which once simply meant a person in charge of lands, but now means a person with good manners. How did this come to be? Those who were able to keep their lands were the gentlemen who treated their subjects and neighbors with fairness and respect. The virtues became synonymous with the title.
We still have aristocratic families, but their virtues have drifted towards the material. Wealth, power, status, and reputation are the virtues that are propagated by the leading class. The underclasses mirror their influences in striving for the same goals.
The second reason is what I call virtue shift. Whereas the first category represents a drift away from the highest virtues to lower ones, the second represents a change in the virtues themselves. The elite know that wealth is not a higher value than justice. Their aim has drifted from higher values to lower ones. But in the virtue shift, what we perceive the highest values to be has changed. The reason that truly good fathers have become rare is that the effective fathers, those who do a good job of passing on their values, have been sterilizing their children.
Not in the literal sense - although that is now happening. I would consider any parents who are allowing their children to receive so-called ‘gender affirming care’ to be bad parents, either for actually understanding the issue and going along with it, or for taking the advice of so-called experts on faith.
The chief virtue that fathers have failed to pass on to their children is the value of family itself. If marriage and family are valued, it is only as a means to an end. Francis Schaeffer rightly identified the primary values of our society as personal peace, and affluence.2 Personal peace is a negative framing of this value; it reflects what people don’t want, which is to be told what to do or what not to do.
The positive way it was taught to children was that a high value was placed on personal fulfillment, or happiness. Parents were taught to examine the trials of their own upbringing, including parental discipline, as tragedies, and in response, they emphasized a strong desire for their own children “to pursue what makes you happy”.
This is criticized more openly (especially by conservatives) when we see it leading to the hippie culture of the sexual revolution, but it was not criticized when children pursued the other modern value of affluence. In one sense, the battle for primacy between these two values is split along the liberal/conservative divide, but they are really two faces of the same idol.
The roots of this can be seen in the social justice movement, including the sexual revolution, and the widespread adoption of feminist ideas. The campaigns that advocated equality of rights perceived the uniquely different roles played by men and women within the family to be antithetical to their quest for justice in society. They co-opted language and ideas from racial justice advocates, who rightly argued that there was no valid reason to segregate people according to skin color, and applied those arguments to deconstruct the different societal roles of women and men.
These events have changed the cultural values of our society. Not all of these changes are necessarily bad, and they did positively correct some injustices. Christian churches have gone along with these value shifts roughly in correspondence with their cultural status and emphasis on education. The fundamentalists have not changed much if any, while the mainline churches went all in.
This means that the distribution of these ideas was more heavily slanted towards more educated and prosperous demographics, which means it also had a greater impact on effective fathers than ineffective ones. Stable marriages and economic security are both big factors that lend themselves towards effective fathering, and those are more common in the places where people attend more mainline and evangelical churches rather than the strict fundamentalist type churches, or the Catholic churches in working class communities. Fathers in the first group had a cultural advantage in passing on their values to their children, while fathers in the latter group had less impact in comparison.3
So what effect did these changes have on fathers and the choices they made in raising their children? Here’s my hypothesis. First, the principles in play are the push for a greater emphasis on the egalitarian virtues of education, career, and financial security. As mentioned before, those are good things. What was not expected was the consequence of privileging those values above the virtues of marriage, family, and community.
I’m going to focus on two groups where I think these virtues have done a great disservice for our society. The first is on the children of skilled laborers. Many immigrants and uneducated men, from the late 19th century to after the second world war would pursue careers in building trades, factory work, and small business ownership. These jobs were perfectly adequate to secure “The American Dream” of stable housing and the ability to provide for a family. So much so, that many fathers were able to provide their children with something they were not able to attain themselves - a college education.
That provided more opportunities for many of those children to out earn their parents, and secure a solid financial future for themselves. This is in fact the story of my Grandfather, and his three sons, all within the generation known as baby boomers. The problem is that now there is a surplus of college educated men among the following generations (Millennials and Zoomers), while the value of a degree has suffered from inflation. Masters degrees are now the norm for many positions that once required bachelors. The family businesses were sold off or shuttered, and we now face a lack of skilled trades workers, where the sons of entrepreneurs could have inherited those jobs and businesses, securing them for future generations.
The second category that is not closely examined is that of women. Fathers always had an important role in the life of their daughters, but it wasn’t in the area of teaching them how to be feminine or how to become good wives and mothers. Those were roles learned from the matriarch of the family. But with the shift in values from traditionally separate and gendered roles to more egalitarian ones, there was no longer a strong emphasis on preparing women to become wives and mothers. Because it had once been assumed, it was likely not even mentioned, the emphasis was placed solely on the novel options for women in career and education.
This change probably had as much to do with the generations as the story of the immigrant laborers above. The women prior to and during the first world war had little choice but to marry and have children. Until the 20th century, marriage was the main way a woman secured the fulfillment of basic needs. Because working outside the home was only a necessity for women in lower income families, it was not seen as a luxury or novelty.
Work was only a novel experience for the women who had a choice, and for upper class women, it likely only followed if they had first attended college, or something like secretarial school. But as these choices became more feasible for the women in the middle class, there was undoubtedly an increase in mothers encouraging their daughters to choose the paths opened up to them by education.
If we think about it logically, it’s likely the daughters of ineffective fathers who were first pushed outside the traditional role. When the mother said “don’t make the same choice I did”, she was referring to a life as a wife and mother. But which women would say this to their daughters? The ones with bad husbands, the wives of bad fathers. So the effective and virtuous fathers were likely still perpetuating the traditional roles of marriage and family and passing them onto their children.
We can see this in the fact that marriage rates have been consistently higher in the upper reaches of economic success. This is not in regards to the success of marriage, which also correlates, (the more successful a couple is financially, the less likely they are to divorce) but in regards to what percentage of people marry at all. Higher education and economic success increases the likelihood of marriage, and since the likelihood of becoming educated and successful is closely linked to the success of your parents, it naturally follows that the more effective fathers and mothers will see their adult children get married at some point.
The marriage data shows an interesting trend over the 20th century.4 Prior to 1945, college educated women were the least likely to get married. That would correlate with the women whose mothers were most likely to discourage them from following in their footsteps. At that time, marriage was normal, and college was rare. After 1945, the education levels of women rose overall, and the marriage rate of college women rose precipitously, while the overall rate of marriage began to fall. In fact, from 1925 to 1945, the highest marriage rate for women aged 18-25 was among those with less than a Highschool degree, from 1946-1964 it was among women with more than Highschool but less than college. For older women (26-35) in those decades, the raters were higher among those with at least a Highschool degree prior to 1945 (and lowest among women with college degrees) while after 1945 it was highest among women with a degree.
What that seems to suggest is that for a period of time, women would embrace their greater access to education, but if the opportunity to get married presented itself, they would no longer pursue education. So having a Highschool degree became the norm, and if a college freshman or sophomore met a junior or senior to marry, they would quit college when their future husband graduated. If a woman didn’t meet a man, she would continue her education and potentially get married later on.
What this trend suggests to me is that as women made their way into mostly male dominated areas of higher education and the workplace, the novelty of being a female minority was beneficial for helping them find a husband. Since marriage and family had previously been seen as a good thing, and a worthy pursuit for women, they would willingly cease their own academic and career path to marry. But as the ratios of men to women became closer to 50% in college and the workplace, the total percentages of women getting married was falling.
As these trends have continued, college and the professional workplace have gone beyond the point of equality. The percentage of students graduating from college is now 60% female to 40% male. Men are now more likely to quit college before graduating than women. Over the course of this time, marriage rates have continued to fall, with divorce rates continuing to rise, until making a slight decrease in recent years.
Why has this increase in women becoming educated and having careers had such a detrimental impact on the rate of marriage? Some of the possibilities have already been mentioned in the scenarios above. During the second half of the 20th century, we could easily imagine a recent college graduate marrying his sophomore fiance; it’s a common image that fits the American dream from the post-war era onward. But how many graduating women were searching for jobs to help support their sophomore husband while he finished up his degree? A statistically insignificant amount.
Many bitter men in the “red pill” movement have criticized the problem of female hypergamy as one of the great ills of our current society. Women want to date and marry men of higher socioeconomic status and age. In the age of the internet, instead of men and women sorting themselves out amongst the population of the local town, the attractive women can move to the city and find big earners (though usually not as husbands) while the local joes are fighting over the scraps.
But men also desire the inverse. Very few men are actively seeking an older woman to provide for them in exchange for being a husband, housekeeper and babysitter. Certainly these instinctual patterns can go off the rails. There’s a problem with making financial earning the only marker of success, and there’s a huge issue with the fact that many young women trade the asset of their sexual attractiveness on boyfriends who do not plan to marry them, not realizing that beauty, youth, and fertility are declining assets, and the assets that increase over time, the ones that make a woman valuable to a husband, are only really acquired within marriage.
So what effect have fathers had on these developments, and how have the effective fathers contributed to the problem overall? Here is my hypothesis, and I think the arguments here lend credence to it. The best fathers, the ones not only most able to provide well for their children, but most interested and capable of passing on the virtues and values of their family tradition fully embraced the opportunity for their children, both male and female, to access better levels of education. That is a good thing!
But here’s where the shift in overall cultural values had a nefarious impact. Once the potential earning of the college educated began to really outstrip that of those with less education, it became the only viable choice for high achieving families. As the current education system became more egalitarian, it actually tipped towards favoring females over males. For centuries physical strength and endurance were the key assets that allowed men to protect and provide for their families.
The industrial revolution changed that in a huge way. While men were still the primary workers in many industries, the machinery was a massive strength multiplier. Whatever strength was required to do the jobs was likely calibrated to the abilities common to man. If men were weaker, the engineers would have calibrated things differently to accommodate for that. That is in fact what has happened over time, as progressive advancements in technology have required less and less physical human strength. Now almost anything can be accomplished with nothing more than keystrokes.
Let us think about this progression though, the first industrial jobs assumed the strength of men because men were the ones who went to work, while women stayed home to manage the household and children. Men invented the factories and machines, and men were also assumed to be the ones managing them. The school system that arose during the early parts of the 20th century was designed to produce workers and managers for industrial factory jobs; the same bells used to alert shift changes were implemented between classroom periods.
So the education system was designed to sort according to certain abilities. Those with physical strength and mechanical ability would work on and repair the machines. The intellectual men would become the managers and bookkeepers. Organization was key to their success. These men, who would have been seen as far less desirable husbands and heads of household on the frontier, out-maneuvered their strong bodied counterparts by mapping the territory of the newly industrialized world, and created an aristocracy for themselves, much as the early landowners had created for their children.
Women were always working in factories, especially in the creation of textiles. But as the factory jobs became more streamlined, the physical differences between men and women became less important. The iconic image of “Rosie the riveter” is a testimony to women’s ability to contribute in the same way that only men would have been able to decades earlier.
But as the education system became more widely available to all, the traits sought after for the managerial class were actually far more abundant and easily acquired in women than in men. Once the social norms of men being in charge were pushed away, women were actually able to surpass the bookish men who had previously risen to the top of the professional academic system. Girls learn to sit still, listen and take notes earlier than boys. This early advantage in behavior means that they can achieve a place at the top of the class early on, and only the most ambitious men will put in the work to supplant them.
What happened once these changes were all in place? Over the course of the 20th century, and into today, good fathers have had more of an opportunity to influence their daughters than ever before. In prior centuries, a good father had a profound influence on his children of both sexes in regards to passing on beliefs and values, but a more direct influence on the conduct and vocational training of his sons. A father with only daughters would entrust the teaching of how to be a lady to his wife, while exhibiting the type of values they should seek in a husband.
But in the era of egalitarian opportunities and modern schooling, a father can have just as much influence on how his daughter’s conduct themselves academically as he does on his sons. So take as an example a man with a son and daughter - fraternal twins, the same age. The daughter may very well take an early lead in her academic career. The father is an egalitarian man, and he does not want to impose strict social roles on his children, so his fatherly energy is now devoted to helping his daughter pursue academic excellence. His son will also benefit greatly, but he may remain in the second seat as far as pure academic success.
His son will not have any issue finding a wife, because he is successful and has been well raised by his father. But his daughter will have the unfortunate choice of marrying down, or waiting for someone spectacular to come along. She may continue her academic career and get an advanced degree, or get a job and start building a career.
Here is where the natural tendency for hypergamy in females goes wrong. As her accolades grow, the requirement for a suitable husband also grows in lockstep. But her physical beauty and reproductive capacity are in a steady decline. If she does not meet and marry a man before some terminal point, her chances of having a family will dwindle.
Consider that perhaps both she and her brother have both made the decision to focus on career, but then decide to get married. If they are thirty, she is looking for a man past thirty who is more successful than she is. Her brother can easily marry many young women who end up in his social circle. At thirty five, her options have dropped precipitously, while her brothers have remained the same, or increased as he acquires wealth and success.
Another scenario is the father with only daughters, a situation I currently find myself in. A father may have dreams of how he would like to train up a son, to give him an advantage greater than whatever he grew up with. Perhaps the father loves sports, and wanted his son to play baseball. He can instead invest in teaching his daughters to love softball, or basketball, or another athletic field. Now she is in a position where embracing marriage and family would end her athletic career. Or a father could simply put the same energy in helping his daughters pursue excellence in whatever field they enter into. His effective fatherhood gives them a competitive edge, but by shifting their pursuit towards a career, it makes them far less likely to choose to settle down.
Now there is no doubt a certain number of “power couples” that arise out of these kinds of dynamics, including athletic couples. But the statistics are showing that marriages are continuing to decline, and it’s especially severe for women who have been high achievers in college and career. As both the college and career tracks trend towards females, there will continue to be a surplus of women who are unable to accept the tradeoffs to become married mothers.
Many of them are pursuing single motherhood. While they may be wealthy and successful, women are not fathers. Fatherlessness is an issue for children growing up in both the penthouse and the ghetto.
What are the options here? Some fathers may come to the conclusion that it’s best to discourage their daughters from pursuing college or careers. There’s nothing wrong with that if it aligns with the young woman’s goals and interests. College is expensive, and student loans are a foolish debt to take on if someone isn’t going to end up earning an income to pay them off. However colleges (especially Christian ones) can be good places to meet spouses, and if a young woman plans to become a homeschool mom an education can be a worthwhile investment.
Many women still do have careers and end up getting married and having kids as well, but the idea of material success or wage earning as the measure of status needs to be challenged. Despite what happens in counter-cultural Christian enclaves, the trajectory of society at large still seems to be heading in the direction of greater opportunities for women, and dwindling ones for men. Unless there is a major civilizational collapse, greater physical strength is not likely to become the most financially valuable asset again.
In a Biblical marriage, the particular roles of man and wife are truly not so important. Despite the now ubiquitous projection of a 1950’s style suburban sitcom with the office going husband and housekeeping wife as “traditional”, the Biblical text is much more faithfully represented by a corporate family style that has persisted far longer, with shared work between all members of the family.
In those days women would help with the farm work and men with the household duties. In the same way, today’s men can cook and clean, while women can work in an office. This may not stroke the ego of many men, but the point of submitting to Christ is that “it is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Christ modeled the behavior first seen by a forgiven prostitute when he washed the disciples feet. A man should certainly be able to do the same for his children or his bride.
We have created symbols to represent wealth, but all too often we mistake the symbol for wealth itself. Money is a representation of time, work, and potential. Silver and gold, printed paper, or numbers on a screen, none of them are truly valuable on their own. They are only truly useful when used to help people to, survive, grow, flourish, and reproduce.
When we look at the text of scripture, there is no indication that the pursuit of material goods should be a central aim of a person's life. In fact, Abram, who was a wealthy man, did not care about the possessions he acquired as long as he lacked a child to pass them on to. In the covenant meeting in Genesis 15, when God tells Abram that his reward would be very great, he essentially tells God, “what will you give me? I remain childless!”
Father Abraham was chosen by God because he valued the same thing God valued. Likewise, when we view David, the man after God’s own heart, he was willing to walk away from the throne rather than harm his own son Absalom. The core exercise of the Christian faith, springing out of its Jewish roots, is that we love God by obeying His commands, and trust that He will equip us to accomplish the tasks. Perhaps we see the command to “Seek first the kingdom of God” as supplanting the command to “Be fruitful and multiply”. I think this is an error. We are adopted into God’s family, but for a family to grow through adoption, we need people to come from somewhere. For people to be born again, they must be born a first time.
The unique methods through which God grows His kingdom and His household do not negate the natural ones. Though God could have raised up children for Abraham out of the stones, He chose to do it through the womb of a woman. How can we understand that God loves us as a father, if we never become fathers ourselves? How can we understand the blessing bestowed on Mary, if we never become mothers?
We need to re-center our economy to focus on what God values. He values people, and He values them in such a way that He desires many, many children. He values them even if their lives are hard, or they don’t have every experience and opportunity that we think a child ought to have. He values them if they suffer, because He suffered, and thought it a worthwhile price for the joy of living and knowing others.
Parenthood is not possible for everyone, nor is it necessary for salvation. But the relationship between parents and children is the means through which people learn to love and be loved. Each one of us represents the latest link in an unbroken chain of children who became parents, and raised children who did the same. This pattern begins with frustration and antagonism, as new parents and young children struggle to understand their opposing desires and needs. But as it continues, with parents becoming grandparents, and children becoming parents, forgiveness and understanding transform pain into a longing that future generations will gain the wisdom of their struggles, without the high cost.
The cumulative effect is that children today have a far greater chance of being born healthy, surviving and thriving into adolescence and adulthood, and securing the opportunity to continue that chain. In another century or another millennium, who knows what the experience may be for the average child? But for there to be any future, there needs to be a child. If the adults raised by the best parents of the previous generation become the final link in that chain, the wisdom accumulated over centuries will vanish in mere decades.
Christians especially should seek to marry for the opportunity to become parents. The Bible repeatedly speaks of marriage and children as being good things - things good in and of themselves, as part of God’s good creation. Paul’s advice to the contrary was directed to immoral people who were fixated on the reproductive act as a means of pleasure. 5
Sadly this is the way that many people view sex and marriage today. The physical pleasure of sex and the companionship of marriage are both good things, but they are not options to be selected à la carte according to our whims or preferences. If those are our chief goals for seeking marriage, we should consider Paul’s words carefully, for no pleasure or companionship can satisfy us if we are not first satisfied in Christ.
But the entirety of the Biblical corpus points to a God who gladly answers the prayers of those who desire to be parents, whether in providing a spouse, opening a womb, or bringing together children and young people with adoptive parents and mentors. This request reflects God's own deepest desire. Through the experience of raising a child, we understand both the great love shown, and the great cost paid for us through the saving work of His Son.
All our actions in the world should be done in the hope of hearing Christ say ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’6 The one group of people who will surely be praised for serving Christ in this way are mothers and fathers. Not only for loving their own children; the patience of loving selfish children transforms us into people who truly know how to love. If we are the type of fathers that can effectively pass our values on to our children, what higher value could we pass on than a love for people? That is the virtue that continues to be fruitful and multiply.
https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/womens-impact-on-the-economy
These were highlighted in both the book and video versions of “How Then Shall We Live?”
I am not citing studies, but simply using the common sense reasoning that lower income fathers spend more time working, and especially during the hours when they could have access to quality time with their children. Family leisure time is a luxury of the middle and upper classes. The fact that a father is absent at work reinforces the idea in the child that upward mobility and increased education are goals worth pursuing,
Most of the data was taken from https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2016/2/3/socioeconomic-patterns-of-marriage-and-divorce
“Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: it is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.” 1 Corinthians 7:8-9
Matthew 25:40
Treating unmarried parents as sex offenders attracting 100 lashes per illegitimate offspring would address the problem of widespread illegitimacy.
this is now on Minds