CHILDREN WITHOUT FATHER

FATHERHOOD

Among test-tube babies, single mothers and divorces, the “father model” is in crisis, as the concept of “family” itself.
In 1990, 65% of Americans were happy to have children, today the percentage has dropped to 45. Over the past 10 years in Spain the number of marriages has dropped from 270,000 a year to 160 thousand. Even in Brazil, the birth rate fell from 4.3 children per woman to 1.9.
“I would my father back home,” this is what Telemachus, son of Odysseus, says in Homer’s Odyssey, while scanning the horizon.
Not many things have changed since then, because today, the father figure is often missing and his absence is felt by a lot of children.
This has created a cascade of social and psychological effects not very positive.
Today, Telemachus can be compared with a child got by artificial insemination, then facing an odyssey in search of his biological dad. For a lot of them it is not enough to know that he/she has been conceived through a sperm donor whose specimen is identified by a simple number.
In this regard, the documentary “Anonymous father’s day” by Jennifer Lahl, is very comprehensive, describing the “genealogical confusion” and the adolescents trouble, dealing with the uncertainty of their origins.
To many the father figure may be the future, which through the comparison by meeting and clashing life gets “new force”, while children deprived of their father feels as if they fled the test of life that would make them be adult. Without a dad they lose the sense of pain and the memory of who they are. Parents death leads to make sense of destiny and give continuity to the progeny. It is a way to conquer death, and know where we go.
It was once said that young people psychologically unstable or inclined to become gay, were those who grew up without the presence of a male figure.
According to David Brooks, who writes in the New York Times, people are better if they have family and children. The commitments deriving therefrom, leads them to take care of people and future of the nation.
Also, according to some statistics of some American “advisory council”, family where the father is lacking, they are more poor and a risk factor for children (health, drugs, delinquency). Not for nothing Obama said, “….doing more to encourage fatherhood – because what makes you a man isn’t the ability to conceive a child; it’s having the courage to raise one….”
Obviously, there are also those who do not want to hear about fatherhood, for whom it means pain, loss, lack of care, violence, a sort of cultural heritage from the past better to get rid of. The opposite of the efforts in the work of Robet Bily through his writings and the movement “The mythopoetic men’s“, considered a “revolutionary” by liberals.
Because in the end it is easier to speak evil of the father than do without him.

People with the most children

MAN WHO FATHERED 30 CHILDREN

Lately I read a news about an American man who has fathered 30 children (till now!) and was asking the courts for a break on child support.
Please, someone tell him that there is the condom, a contraceptive gadget since early 1900!
Gee whiz, in courts shoes I would ask for a chastity belt or his sterilization!
He now complains that isn’t able to live with the salary, despite some sons are getting from him few dollars a month only,  but I wonder what he was thinking about when was discharging his semen around.
Everyone likes to have sex and with different partners even, easy! –  but the difference between a child and a man lies in the awareness of what you’re doing, what to expect and what it means to have children. After he already had fathered six, eight or ten children, what does his maturity and sense of responsibility have advised him then?
Nothing evidently!  10, 20 or 30 children are the same for him. Unless he wants to reach Ziona Chana or Ramon Revilla record, also if his name already is in the “List of people with the most children” in the world now.
Compliments!