Education is not simply a means of data transfer. It is not reducible to state-certified techniques. Education, when it succeeds, is the result of a child wanting to be like someone else. If you take away the drive train, can you really be surprised that the car won’t go? Fathers are essential to any successful school system, and no system of education can successfully compensate for the abdication of fathers.
Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger
Don’t Be This Parent
Here is a quote from Father Hunger by Douglas Wilson. He is commenting on what often happens when parents finally ask for outside help after experiencing persistent long term parenting difficulties.
When parents finally get real help from someone who is willing to be honest about what is going on in their family, and how they got to where they are, it is in the highest degree likely that father or mother, or both, will be offended. Part of the reason why they have gotten this far without hearing what they need to hear is that many of their friends instinctively know this. The temptation for the struggling parent will be to think that the person who finally speaks up “doesn’t understand,” or “has a simplistic approach,” or “doesn’t know the family dynamics,” and so on. And the longer it takes for someone to finally say something, the more it seems like an intervention when it finally does happen.
Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger
A Father’s Words
Words of reassurance, offered or withheld, are monumental in a child’s growth. Words of encouragement, or exhortation, or patient teaching, are the same. When a child has grown up under the devastation of unremitting harshness (and sometimes not so unwitting), or the devastation of neglect, the one thing a father may not say is that it “was not that big a deal.” Of course it was a big deal. The child is (hopefully) going to be praying the Lord’s Prayer for the rest of his life. What will naturally, readily, come to mind whenever he starts, whenever he says, “Our father…”? What does that mean to him in his bones, and who taught it to him?
Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger
Fathers and Blessing
When there is a fundamental estrangement between fathers and children, the results of that unhappy mess will be that God will come and strike the land with a curse. In short, when fathers are blessed, the land is blessed. When fathers are cursed, the land is cursed.
Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger