King Arthur or the Lone Ranger? Reflections on Fathers Day
Three years ago, Michael Kelly, editor of the National Journal, published an article called, "A National Calamity." Having just had his second child, he wrote of fatherhood -

"This is a good job, and one of the better things about it is the nice clarity it lends to life. Fathers (and mothers) relearn that the world is a simple enough place. They discover that their essential ambitions, which once seemed so many, have been winnowed down to a minimalist few: to raise their children reasonably well and to live long enough to see them turn out reasonably okay. This doesn't seem like a great deal to ask for until you find out that it is everything to you. Because, it turns out, you are everything to them."

Fathers may not realize how crucial they are to their children's entire future:

"According to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the largest national survey of its kind ever undertaken, the biggest influence on a teenager's decision to engage or not to engage in high-risk behaviors is not peers, but parents. When teens have a good relationship with their parents, and report they can communicate with them easily, they are far less likely to smoke, drink alcohol, do drugs, or become sexually active than those that don't." (Health writer Dr. Wade Horn, formerly Director of Outpatient Psychological Services at Children's Hospital National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.)

Other research shows that the most significant influence keeping teenage girls virtuous is the way they are treated and esteemed by their fathers.

In America, the phrase "single-parent household" means almost exclusively fatherless households. Today, four of every ten American children go to bed at night in homes in homes without fathers. What happens to children growing up in homes without their fathers is not good. Children growing up without their fathers are five times as likely to be poor as adults than children who grow up in two-parent homes. Boys without fathers are three times as likely to wind up in prison, and girls are twice as likely. Children whose fathers do not live in the same household are most at risk to fail in school or get fired from jobs.

Sociologists have noted the growing trend of what they call, "multiplied fatherlessness," when children grow up without fathers at home, in neighborhoods where most fathers are not living with their children. Presently only a few million children are in that category, rather than tens of millions, but sociologists warn us to look out. The number is rising, and when these children reach their mid-teens, it is expected that the crime rate will spike.

A teacher in a local school wrote that years of teaching have led her to understand, "The tragic impact of the crisis centering around the many children growing up without their fathers is too vast to be measured."

You have probably heard that half of all marriages end in divorce. That claim is derived from comparing how many people got married in a year with the percentage of married women who got divorced that year. In 1996, for example, there were an estimated two-point-three million weddings and one-point-one-two million divorces. But that does not mean that half of all marriages end in divorce because there are far more couples already married in any given year than there are couples getting married. So the claim that half of all marriages end in divorce is almost certainly not true. That's the good news.

The bad news is that more than a million divorces per year is a lot, and children are affected badly, even when the divorce is said to be "friendly," as if there could be any such thing. Dr. Horn wrote that it is "pretension" that divorce doesn't have negative consequences for the children. Not possible, he says.

When my wife and I got married, our parents gave us free advice. Lots of it. But the best advice was this: "The best thing you can do for your children is to have a strong marriage." Protecting our marriages and holding them inviolate is our number one responsibility as fathers (or mothers). Marriage counselors say that child-centered homes inevitably become dysfunctional to some degree. It turns out that the best way to ensure our children are nurtured is to displace them from the center of the family. This statement runs so contrary to what our culture, meaning Madison Avenue, promotes that parents recoil from it. Aren't we supposed to do anything for our children? No! Counselor after counselor agree that when the husband and wife put their children ahead of each other it sucks the vibrancy from their marriage, which harms the kids.

The fact is that what kids want is much less important than what married couples need. We need to operate our marriages at an adult level, with husbands and wives committed to one another rather than servanthood to their children.

When our children look at us, do they see a father who is firmly committed to his marriage? Fatherhood is a ministry. First and foremost, it is a ministry of presence, just being there at all. Rule number one of being a father is to stay married, living in the same home as your children.

We teach our children to be self-confident and self-reliant. We usually don't realize how uncertain of themselves they usually are, how insecure they often feel. They haven't learned what we big, tough guys have learned: to bury our frailties and insecurities under layers of routine. That means that our kids probably are more conscious than we are that to thrive in the impermanence of this world requires being anchored to something certain. This anchoring is especially important for teens, because the teen years are when our kids start to try out their own anchors rather than just hang on to the ones we plant for them.

Every anchor we give them they will haul up. They are going to do what we all did at their age, attempt to sail anchor-free. And they will succeed no better than we did, but they have to learn it for themselves. The time will come when they will have to anchor themselves to something. What anchors will they use?

Fathers are anchor makers. We should give our kids anchors that are keepers. I am trying to teach my sons (and my daughter) that the primary virtues they should develop are courage, commitment, competence, candor and compassion.

We men tend to model ourselves after two great myths deeply rooted in our culture. First is King Arthur, whose strength was his sword Excalibur. With Excalibur in hand, Arthur could overcome any enemy, vanquish any foe, win any lady, even the fair Guinevere. One of the best baseball movies ever made, "The Natural," is really a King Arthur story. Robert Redford plays Arthur with a little bit of Lancelot thrown in. Excalibur is his special bat, Wonderboy, forged from a tree struck by lightning. A superb movie, it succeeds because it blends the national pastime with the culturally deeply embedded Arthurian myth.

The other myth we try to live by comes from the Old West, the strong, silent loner. The Lone Ranger and some of the early Clint Eastwood movies are prime examples. So was the late sixties movie, "Vanishing Point," in which the hero drove a Camaro instead of a horse. The rock band Electric Light Orchestra had a hit song about this myth, called "Wild West Hero."

"Ride the range all the day/ ‘til the first fading light/ be with my western gal/ ‘round the fire so bright./ I'd be the envy of friends,/ ‘cause I live to be free,/ riding into the sunset/ I wish that was me."

These two myths say men can be and should be the complete masters of their own destiny and that even though our end may be tragic it can still be heroic. These myths appeal to us because they work, up to a point. That point comes to different men in different ways and times, but when we get there we suddenly realize that we don't have an invincible Excalibur to wield, we can't just ride away from life, and guess what - we're not Robert Redford. Where and what do we turn to then?

At the end of the day, we may hope to have turned out to be simple working stiffs who loved our wives and children, who were honest, hard-working, compassionate and courageous. And that's pretty good, I think.