Repressed, Alone, Betrayed, Rudderless and Hopeless: How it Feels to be a Fatherless Boy

“Rejection is the defining characteristic of the fatherless generation.”

William Pollack

[Note: This post is taken from an article by Herb Reese entitled, “A Comprehensive Church-Based Ministry to Fatherless Boys.”]

In this series of posts on fatherless boys, I now turn to the psychological aspects of fatherlessness.

Repressed: Fatherless Boys and The Boy Code

It is tough being a teenage boy. It is even tougher being a fatherless teenage boy.

As they navigate the treacherous waters of puberty and peer pressure, many teenage boys find it difficult to genuinely express their feelings.

In his excellent book, Real Boys’ Voices: Boys Speak out about Drugs, Sex, Violence, Bullying, Sports, School, Parents, and so much more — a book I highly recommend to all parents of teenage boys and to anyone who works with youth — Dr. William S. Pollack, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Director of the Center for Men at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, calls this hesitancy to deal with feelings on the part of teenage boys “The Boy Code.”

“The Boy Code [is] old rules that favor male stoicism and make boys feel ashamed about expressing weakness or vulnerability. Although our boys urgently want to talk about who they really are, they fear that they will be teased, bullied, humiliated, beaten up, and even murdered if they give voice to their truest feelings. Thus, our nation is home to millions of boys who feel they are navigating life alone–who on an emotional level are alone–and who are cast out to sea in separate lifeboats, and feel they are drowning in isolation, depression, loneliness, and despair.” ¹

Combine The Boy Code with fatherlessness, and one gets an even more toxic mix of the emotional issues boys face.

I personally experienced the pressure — and consequences — of The Boy Code when I was a teenage boy talking to a friend who was fatherless and also a teenager. During our conversation, he mentioned that he had been suicidal. I immediately felt embarrassed that he had admitted such an intimate detail to me. I just froze. I didn’t follow up on his comment because I didn’t know what to say.

My friend and I were unconscious victims of The Boy Code.

After that awkward encounter, I wondered if he meant that he had been suicidal at some point in the past, or if he was suicidal at that moment. I decided I needed to call his mother.

But before I did, my friend killed himself. That experience has haunted me ever since. I share this story with you with the hope that you will remember that many fatherless boys are subject to The Boy Code and are dealing with issues like this in silence, issues that we need to take seriously and that will hopefully motivate us to provide a safe environment for boys to talk about.

As Pollack warns, we should not let The Boy Code keep us from taking action.

“The Boy Code, which restricts a boys’ expression of emotion and his cries for help, has silenced the souls of our sons and paralyzed our natural instincts to reach out to them. Our boys are exceedingly isolated. And unwittingly, we — their parents, teachers, adult mentors, buddies, and girlfriends — are still leaving them out in the cold.” ²

Alone: Fatherless Boys and their Deceased Fathers

Uncle Oscar was an amazing man. During WWII he ferried newly built war planes across the U.S. After the war, he worked as a test pilot, risking his life test flying some of the first commercial jet planes.

Always looking for adventure, one day Uncle Oscar suddenly quit his lucrative job — along with Southern California’s frenetic culture — and moved his family to Nevada, where, in spite of the fact that he knew nothing about raising cattle, he bought a large ranch out in the middle of nowhere.

When I say nowhere, I mean nowhere. Uncle Oscar’s ranch was seven miles away from his closest neighbor and forty-five miles away by dirt road from the nearest town, which had only 200 people in it.

His one hundred year old ranch house had no running water and no electricity. His intrepid wife got water from a nearby creek and cooked on a wood burning stove. They entertained themselves at night by reading books next to the dim light of coil oil lamps and by secretly listening in on their distant neighbors phone conversations with their phone’s party line.

I guess Uncle Oscar just wanted to be alone.

There are a couple of other things that are notable about Uncle Oscar: he had been a fatherless child and, in spite of a strong Christian upbringing, he rejected Christianity as an adult.

Perhaps this is why.

When my grandfather, Sivert Reese, died of tuberculosis in 1928 at the age of 52, he left behind his wife and five children. My father, Ben Reese, was 23 at the time and was the oldest child. But Uncle Oscar, Dad’s youngest brother, was only 13.

Compounding the tragedy of their father’s early death was the death of their brother and my uncle, Ed Reese, in a terrible car wreck four years later.

Uncle Ed was 25 and engaged to be married when his car was broadsided by a car driven by a drunken high school student, killing Uncle Ed along with three teenaged passengers in the other car. Since Uncle Ed’s death happened just a couple of days before Christmas, his funeral had to be held on Christmas Eve.

Uncle Oscar never talked about why he rejected Christianity. But my guess is that the traumatic deaths of his father and brother while he was coming of age had a lot to do with it.

Knowing what I know now about Norwegian stoicism, and how the Reese side of my ancestral family raised it to a fine art, I’m thinking Uncle Oscar never had a healthy emotional way to deal with such massive loses.

If only some compassionate Christian man from his church had come alongside him during his teen years as he experienced those tragedies, perhaps things would have turned out differently.

Instead, I’m thinking Uncle Oscar just dealt with it alone.

Betrayed: Fatherless Boys and their Divorced or Separated Fathers

It is one thing for a boy to lose his father to death. But as tragic as that is, it is quite another thing for a boy to lose his father to divorce or separation.

At least most boys who’s fathers have died can assume their fathers loved them. But when a father willfully chooses to leave the home, his son suffers not only the pain of loss, but also the pain of betrayal.

And it is here that Pollack, as insightful about boys as his book is, falls short.

Pollack writes: “Perhaps the worst thing about this rejection is living with the knowledge that someone has chosen to turn his back on you. Someone has chosen to leave you. Someone has determined your value and decided you are not worth having around—or that he would be better off someplace else, without you.” ³

But, contrary to Pollack above, it is not just a feeling of rejection that boys of divorced and separated fathers have, it is a feeling of betrayal that gnaws at their souls. It is not just “the knowledge that someone has chosen to turn his back on you,” but the knowledge that someone who is extremely important to your existence — in fact, one of very reasons that you exist at all — someone you trusted to care for you, someone whom you thought loved you, someone you thought was committed to you, someone you might have even wanted to model your life after, that person has turned his back on you.

In this sense, then, a father leaving the marriage he founded with his wife, and abandoning the children he birthed with her, is the cruelest kind of betrayal for a boy, and it is the reason why God reserves his harshest judgment for that father (1 Timothy 5:8).

And the betrayal that fatherless boys feel because of their fathers’ abandonment extends to the entire culture they live in. For the past sixty years, American culture, including even the church, has turned a blind eye to fatherlessness and, in the case of our culture specifically, even encouraged fathers to abandon their wives and their children.

Here are some examples:

In the 1960’s, the federal program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), decimated Black families by making the federal government, instead of fathers, their primary provider, resulting in a massive explosion of fatherless families in the Black community.
In the 1970’s, then California Governor Ronald Reagan’s No Fault Divorce law, which in some form has been adopted in all fifty states, resulted in another explosion of fatherless families by making divorce almost effortless, regardless of what the other spouse in the marriage wanted.⁴
The pervasiveness of porn has resulted in men “marinating themselves in pornography,” as Kay Hymowitz puts it, rotting the foundations of marriage and making sexual infidelity acceptable.
Some feminist leaders have promoted fatherless homes with their “Men, who needs them?” mentality.
Our culture constantly portrays fathers as foolish “man-boys” in entertainment and advertising, implying they are useless family appendages.

Thus, it is not just their own fathers who have betrayed fatherless boys, everyone has betrayed them.

Rudderless: Fatherless Boys and their Never Present or Never Married Fathers

But the ultimate insult to a fatherless boy is when he comes from a home where he has either never known his father, or his parents separated after having never married.

In these situations, the fatherless boy not only has no male role model, or — as in the case where his father leaves his unmarried mother — loses his male role model, he also has no proper social model of what committed, married love looks like.

When it comes to marriage, sex, and raising children, such a fatherless boy is completely rudderless. He has nothing to guide him, no template to grow up into, no external family forces to nudge him in the right direction. He not only has no solution to his problem, he doesn’t even know what his problem is.

“In Man Enough, Frank Pittman states, ‘Men without models don’t know what is behind their shame, loneliness, and despair, their desperate search for love, for affirmation, and for structure, their frantic tendency to compete over just about anything with just about anybody.’” ⁵

Hopeless: Fatherless Boys without God

During my twenty years as a pastor, whenever I hired pastoral staff, I made it a practice to ask what kind of relationship the prospective staff member had with their father.

The reason I asked that question was because I noticed that staff members tended to duplicate the kind of relationship they had with their father with me, since I, as the senior pastor, served in a type of father role to them.

Once one potential staff member I was interviewing answered my question about his father-son relationship by saying that he had no relationship at all with his father. He and his father were estranged and he hadn’t spoken to him in years.

Normally, I would not have hired him, but he was a gifted man and I hired him anyway. That turned out to be a mistake. He indeed wound up duplicating his dysfunctional father-son relationship with me and it resulted in a significant amount of pain.

Father-son relationships provide sons with a template for how to relate to authority and, ultimately, how to relate to God the Father himself. When that relationship has been broken, or nonexistent altogether, it affects how sons perceive God.

In the case of fatherless sons, where the fathers have betrayed their sons by abandoning them, these profoundly traumatic experiences can cause fatherless sons to reject God as well.

As John Sowers writes in his book, “Fatherless Generation”, “Fatherless children often believe that God, like their earthly father, is now gone. He does not inhabit their bleak and ashen existence. He does not speak a meaningful word to their postmodern existence. And this theme—alienation from God—is repeated over and over by young people growing up without their fathers, struggling with their experience of rejection, and trying to understand God in the midst of it all.” ⁶

When a father who, along with his wife, brings a son into the world — a father who is supposed to love, financially support, protect, nurture, and discipline his son — instead abandons him, the natural reaction of that fatherless boy is to conclude that there is no God the Father at all.

*A single mom and her fatherless child with their team of men*

Since 2003 New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North America and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt widows, single moms and fatherless children in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church at newcommandment.org.

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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom

and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.