Tag: father absence and youth
When Fathers Die Too Soon
We’ve built an entire public conversation around maternal health, maternal mortality, postpartum depression, and the challenges mothers face after childbirth. We should. These conversations have saved lives.
But there’s another conversation that barely exists: What happens when the father dies? Not years later. Not after retirement. Not after children become adults. What happens when a father dies while his children are still learning to walk, talk, and say the word “Daddy”?
That question remains one of the least explored realities in American family life.
The Current Conversation on Mentorship for Boys Excludes Responsible Fatherhood
Any national conversation about boys and men that does not center fatherhood risks misdiagnosing the problem and misdirecting the response.
Framing mentorship as a corrective for father absence must be handled with care. When mentoring programs are positioned as replacements for fathers rather than complements to parental involvement, they unintentionally reinforce a deficit narrative.
There Is No Such Thing as a Fatherless Child.
One hundred percent of biological children have a father. The question is not if he exists — it’s where. And when we fail to ask “where,” we teach children to believe he doesn’t exist.
Daddies, Daughters and Guns: My Reality of Protection
Seeing my daughter holding a shotgun, I had to shift my thoughts from the societal narrative taking place around guns and urge myself to understand how she felt about what she was doing.