Is Forgiveness in Fatherhood and Family Dead?

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

For much of my life, I believed my father had chosen not to be present, and his absence became part of the story I carried about myself. 

Like many boys who grow into men without answers, I filled the empty spaces with assumptions. I believed my father had taken something from me by failing to give me what I needed from him. I blamed him for the years of not knowing, for the questions I couldn’t ask, and for the parts of myself I had to assemble without his help.

It took me nearly 50 years to understand that the story was more complicated.

I eventually learned that members of my mother’s family had played a significant role in keeping my father away. By the time I understood what had happened, he was already dead and buried. There would be no conversation between us. I would never have the chance to ask why he hadn’t tried harder. I couldn’t tell him that I was sorry for judging his entire life through the narrow window of what I experienced as a child.

That new information didn’t compensate for the years we lost. It didn’t suddenly provide the guidance, affection, or relationship I’d needed. What it did was force me to confront an uncomfortable truth: I had spent decades withholding forgiveness from a man without knowing his whole story.

Data can tell the truth without telling enough of the truth. So can memory. That’s one reason I find myself asking a difficult question on this observance of forgiveness: Is fatherhood and family forgiveness dead?

We’re living through a time when public life seems increasingly organized around accusation. We attack, cancel, blame, expose, and condemn. Loyalty has become conditional, disagreement is often treated as betrayal, and people are sometimes reduced to the worst thing they’ve ever said or done. That spirit doesn’t remain confined to politics or social media. It follows us home.

Family has always been one of the hardest places to practice forgiveness. 

We can choose our friends, but we don’t choose the people connected to us through blood, marriage, parenthood, or history. Families carry long memories. A sentence spoken carelessly can live within a relative for decades. A confidence shared in vulnerability can become a weapon. A promise broken by a parent can shape how a child understands love, trust, and personal worth.

Some injuries are even deeper. There are families living with abandonment, betrayal, abuse, addiction, violence, infidelity, and years of unresolved conflict. Forgiveness can’t be discussed honestly if we pretend every wound is small or every relationship should be restored.

Forgiveness doesn’t require forgetting. It doesn’t excuse harmful behavior, erase accountability, eliminate consequences, or automatically restore access to your life. Reconciliation requires participation from more than one person. Trust must often be rebuilt through truth, changed conduct, and time. Where violence, abuse, or serious danger exists, forgiveness must never be used to pressure someone into surrendering a necessary boundary.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are related, but they’re not the same.

Forgiveness is an active and conscious decision to release resentment, anger, and the desire for revenge. That decision may eventually make reconciliation possible, but it may also allow a person to move forward without resuming the relationship. You can forgive someone and still refuse to return to the conditions in which the harm occurred.

In more than two decades of working with fathers, I’ve learned that forgiveness isn’t a side issue in fatherhood. It’s often at the center of the work.

Many men enter fatherhood carrying unresolved feelings about their own fathers. They’re trying to forgive their fathers’ absence, disappointment, emotional distance, harsh discipline, broken promises, or the loss of a relationship they never had. Some are angry because their fathers weren’t present. Others had fathers in the home who remained emotionally unavailable. Residence and relationship aren’t the same thing.

These injuries don’t remain neatly contained in childhood. They shape how men see themselves, how they handle conflict, how they communicate, and what they expect from the people they love. A man may swear that he’ll never become his father, only to discover that pain can reproduce itself in unfamiliar forms.

The child who needed to forgive eventually becomes the father who needs forgiveness.

That’s one of the humbling truths of parenthood. We begin by examining what was done to us, but maturity eventually requires us to consider what we may have done to others. Some of our mistakes were made out of ignorance. Others came from fear, pride, anger, immaturity, or selfishness. A few may have been intentional in the moment and regretted for years afterward.

Regardless of the origin of these mistakes, there may come a day when we need forgiveness from our children, spouses, co-parents, siblings, or friends. The desire to receive grace should make us more thoughtful about our willingness to extend it.

A good friend of mine, Darryl Green, has spent much of his life speaking about forgiveness. His understanding didn’t come from theory alone. Darryl forgave the man who murdered his brother. Watching his journey taught me that forgiveness is deeply personal. No one can force it, schedule it, or manufacture it on another person’s behalf.

The person who caused the harm may apologize, deny it, minimize it, or never acknowledge it at all. Forgiveness remains an internal decision. It belongs to the person carrying the wound.

Unforgiveness can feel like power because it allows us to hold the offending person permanently indebted to us. We imagine that if we remain angry enough, withdraw long enough, or inflict enough pain, the other person may finally hurt as much as we do. Yet resentment rarely confines its poison to its intended target.

Holding on to pain guarantees that pain will continue to have something to hold on to.

I once described unforgiveness as trying to inhale polluted air while believing we can keep its toxicity out of our bodies. We can’t remain continuously connected to an injury without allowing some part of it to live within us. The offense becomes a daily companion. It influences our decisions, enters new relationships, and consumes emotional space long after the original moment has passed.

Forgiveness interrupts that connection. It allows us to stop organizing our lives around what someone else did. It isn’t surrendering our power. It’s reclaiming it.

Still, I don’t write any of this from a mountaintop. I write as a man who continues to wrestle with forgiveness. There are people I know I should forgive. There are actions for which I hope others will forgive me. There are relationships in which forgiveness may never produce the restoration I want.

Perhaps that’s where many of us are. We understand forgiveness intellectually while struggling to practice it emotionally. We want freedom, but we’re uncertain about releasing the debt. We fear that forgiving someone will make the harm appear less real or suggest that what happened no longer matters.

The harm mattered. The loss mattered. The years mattered. Forgiveness doesn’t change these facts, but it does change what authority these facts exercise over the remainder of our lives.

So, is fatherhood and family forgiveness dead? I don’t believe it’s dead, but I fear we’re losing confidence in its value. We’ve become skilled at identifying offenses and less practiced at creating pathways toward accountability, repair, and grace. Families can’t survive indefinitely if every failure becomes a permanent identity and every injury becomes an inherited conflict.

On this day, I’m not asking anyone to pretend. I’m asking us to begin. Tell the truth about what happened. Establish the boundaries you need. Seek accountability where it’s possible. Release the desire to make another person suffer as payment for your suffering.

You may not be ready to forgive completely today. Perhaps you can become willing to consider it. Perhaps you can loosen your grip on one memory, one offense, or one unpaid emotional debt.

I never had the opportunity to speak with my father after learning the fuller truth about his absence. I can’t recover that conversation. What I can do is refuse to let the conversation we never had imprison the life I still have.

Forgiveness deserves that chance. So do our fathers. So do our families.

And so do we.