Father's House Blog

At Father’s House Trust, one of our primary objectives is to influence the seven mountains of culture – namely, Entertainment, Business, Education, Family, Government, Media, and Religion. We want to influence the influencers in all seven of these spheres. We want to see leaders raised up that have a fiery passion to put fatherhood back on the map and an equally fiery passion to address and deal with the pandemic of fatherlessness. This is something we are praying about all the time. It’s something we are working towards by networking with key, strategic people in each of these seven aspects of culture

It is encouraging to me that there have been signs recently that people are beginning to over-ride the political correctness that has so dominated the debate on fatherhood and promote very publicly the importance of fathers, and aspects of fathering.

The recent Conservative Party conference was revealing in this regard. At FHT we are not a party political organization but we took great heart from David Cameron’s closing speech at the conference where he broke from the usual political rhetoric to speak personally and powerfully about fatherhood. His painful experience of losing his son Ivan fuelled what he said

“For me and Samantha this year will only ever mean one thing. When such a big part of your life suddenly ends nothing else – nothing outside – matters. It's like the world has stopped turning and the clocks have stopped ticking. And as they slowly start again, weeks later, you ask yourself all over again: do I really want to do this? You think about what you really believe and what sustains you."

Then, moving from his private life to the public domain, he went on to add this critical statement

“I know how lucky I've been to have the chances I had, unlike children growing up in Britain today who will never know the love of a father and who are born in homes that hold them back, who go to schools that keep them back. I want every child to have the chances I had. That is why I'm standing here."

Notice that little phrase, ‘who will never know the love of a father’. It’s heartening to me that the leader of one or two major parties, and the man who is most likely to be the next Prime Minister, has so openly stated the importance of a father’s love in a child’s upbringing. Let the country hear: ‘every child needs a father’s love. That is a basic human right'

To encourage us even more, last weekend reports came out of some research undertaken by an organization called DEMOS. I have the one hundred page document in front of me right now as I write. It is about how parents are the architects of a fairer society and it was all over the news on Sunday and Monday

A substantial part of it is devoted to the importance of the parent’s role in building character in young people. The report stresses the importance of developing an atmosphere of warmth and control. I call these two things ‘loving affection and loving authority’ (I regard them as the two key ingredients of fatherhood in particular). The consistent message of existing research, both theoretical and empirical, is that ‘the most successful parents combine clear, consistently enforced rules with warmth and responsiveness’. The report identified four parenting types:

                          

It exposes the need for ‘tough love’ in the raising of children. A laissez faire, permissive style of parenting is destructive. An authoritarian style of parenting that lacks warmth and responsiveness is also destructive. What children need is both loving affection and loving authority from parents. Children who come from families where both parents have created this kind of culture end up being more socially responsible, co-operative and self-regulating than those who don’t. The report highlights that if we want to develop children of ‘character’ in Britain, then children need parents who combine attachment and warmth with loving rule enforcement.

And here’s the point. Tucked away in a little sentence on p.38 is the following statement: ‘children with married parents, both of whom are the child’s biological parent, do best’. The report adds, ‘this group is around twice as likely to be in the top 20% of child outcomes scores as are children from lone parent families or step-parent families’. While being the child of a lone parent step parent does not adversely affect child outcomes in itself, being the child of two biological parents clearly affects these outcomes positively

At FHT we are committed to seeing Broken Britain healed. If that is to happen, then we know we are going to have to make it one of our primary objectives to influence our culture to accept the utter indispensability of a father’s love in the raising of a child. And that love will need to be a combination of both authority and affection, of discipline and warmth.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, it is time to go back to God the Father’s blue-print for healthy and effective living – the Bible! As the Apostle Paul wrote 2000 years ago,

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. "Honour your father and mother"-which is the first commandment with a promise- "that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth."

Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

Ephesians 6.-14