According to Warren Farrell and John Gray in The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, it turns out that fathers are critical for the wellbeing of their sons and daughters, especially the wellbeing of their sons.
Imagine that.
Finally, someone is pointing out the obvious: a fatherless epidemic (or “dad – deprivation” as Warren Farrell and John Gray call it) is happening in America (and the rest of the developed world as well) and is having a massive deleterious impact on boys. That conclusion is one of the most important takeaways in Farrell’s and Gray’s book.
Warren Farrell: A Leading Authority on America’s Boy Crisis
Warren Farrell, the book’s primary author, is known as a champion of both women’s rights — he has served on the board of the National Organization for Women (NOW) — and men’s rights — he is currently the chair of the Coalition to Create a White House Council on Boys and Men and the author of Why Men Are the Way They Are and The Myth of Male Power.
Farrell has also been featured as an authority on men and boys on numerous talk shows, and articles written by and about him have appeared in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, People, the New York Times, and this one recently in Newsweek: “Meet the Man Leading the Charge on America’s Boy Crisis.” (You might also find this podcast interview of Warren Farrell by American Thought Leaders helpful.)
Did Warren Farrell’s Boy Crisis Solution Break Up the Beatles?
(Incidentally, I alluded to John Lennon’s “Imagine” at the beginning of this post because Warren Farrell’s story in The Boy Crisis about how he met Lennon is one of the funniest stories I’ve ever read. It’s worth the price of the book alone. By Farrell’s telling, his view on the advantages of men sacrificing their careers to stay home and raise their children is the reason why the Beatles broke up!)
Warren Farrell does an excellent job summarizing and documenting the boy crisis in four different areas: boys’ mental health, physical health, economic health, and educational attainment.
But when it comes to the causes and consequences of these boy issues, Farrell’s analysis breaks down.
What is the Real Cause of the Boy Crisis?
According to Warren Farrell, the problems boys are experiencing are caused by “easier access to the means of survival” on the part of parents, creating a greater tendency to divorce, which in turn results in “dad – deprivation”. And dad – deprivation affects boys much more severely than it does girls.
However, contrary to Farrell, divorce is not the primary source of fatherless homes in the U. S. As I describe in my recent post, Fatherless Boys in Perspective, the U. S. Census Bureau says never married couples are the leading cause of fatherless homes (48% vs. 30% as of 2014).
Also, if “easier access to the means of survival” ultimately results in more fatherless homes, then upper and middle class homes should experience more fatherlessness than lower class homes. But in fact, it is just the opposite. For example, the percent of Black and Hispanic fatherless homes in 2020 was 46% and 24% respectively, while the percent of White fatherless homes was 16%.
Issues Affecting Boys that Farrell Fails to Consider
These statistics point out another problem with The Boy Crisis. Warren Farrell fails to discuss the impact of race on fatherlessness, along with the impact of government actions that have helped create the fatherless crisis in the first place (i.e., AFDC and no fault divorce laws).
Something else Farrell ignores is the impact the increasing secularization of American culture specifically, and Western civilization in general, is having on views of sex, marriage, and children.
The middle of the twentieth century marked one of the greatest intellectual and cultural shifts — that is, from a dominant Christian worldview to a dominant materialistic worldview — in the history of the world, resulting in sixty years of disastrous and chaotic social experimentation.
One would think that having been disabused of “irrational” and “magical” religious thinking, young people would be making massive advances with respect to their mental, physical, economic, and educational wellbeing.
But on almost every measure the opposite is the case. We are seeing more family breakdown, more depression, more suicide, more drug abuse, more crime, more incarceration, more…almost everything, than we ever saw in the early 1900’s. It seems that the more godless we are, the more godforsaken we become.
Ineffective Solutions to the Boy Crisis
When it comes to actual solutions to the boy crisis, Farrell’s offerings seem superficial. For example, one can imagine already stable nuclear families sitting around the dinner table for a once-a-week Family Night Discussion, featuring prewritten questions to spark conversation with parents and children. But it is questionable that this would ever actually happen on a large scale basis.
It is especially hard to imagine these types of conversations happening in poverty stricken neighborhoods where stable family structure is almost non existent.
Warren Farrell’s Surprise Solution to the Boy Crisis
What is fascinating — and surprising — about The Boy Crisis is that Warren Farrell does admit that Christianity can be a key component to solving it; something most secular authors would never acknowledge.
In a section he entitles, “When the Biological Father Is Missing, Can God the Father Help?” he writes about how he met with some impoverished inner city boys who “found Christ.”
After giving a sermon/workshop at St. Paul Community Baptist Church in one of the country’s poorest communities, Bedford–Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, I met with a few men’s groups the church had sponsored . Of the approximately twenty-five young African American boys, about twenty had four more things in common: 1. They had little or no time with their dad. 2. They spent time in jail. 3. They found Christ and a strong church community with a committed reverend. 4. They felt inspired to discipline themselves toward constructive rather than destructive lives.
Did faith in God help these young men? Yes. Almost all the young men said that they would still be involved in the life that landed them in jail if they had not been redirected by their faith in God the Father.
I saw in that experience how dad deprivation seems to engender a spiritual deprivation. The guidance, approval, and boundary voids the boys felt from their fathers’ absence led to their receptivity to guidance, approval, and boundaries from gang leaders and other pseudoauthorities, as we saw earlier in the case of ISIS.
The Bedford–Stuyvesant community was one of the most dangerous in the country. When Reverend Jerry Youngblood came in and organized a strong church community with a strong message, he offered the boys the guidance, approval, and boundaries that helped fill that void.
Warren Farrell is to be commended for including this account in his book, though one could wish that he had dedicated more than one page (out of 450!) to the impact Christianity can have on the boy crisis. If faith in Jesus Christ can transform teen boys — teens who live in one of the most impoverished and violent neighborhoods in America — the way he describes, then doesn’t it merit a more thorough discussion?
Farrell is also to be commended for describing God as “God the Father.” One would think referring to God this way would be abrasive to his friends at NOW, and it may be the reason for his disclaimer that not everything he says in his book is “politically correct.”
It was refreshing to read this passage in an otherwise very secular book. It was especially refreshing to see Farrell affirm that fatherless boys can be helped by believing in God the Father himself.
Imagine that.
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.
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