By Reverend Eli Williams

Miami Valley Partnership for Fathers / Urban Light Ministries

Nadya Denise Suleman, known as Octo-Mom in the media, is closer to realizing her dream of having all fourteen of her children at home. The California woman had each of the children via invitro fertilization with help from a male friend. Suleman is unemployed and on food stamps. The now famous single mother of octuplets and six older children still refuses to identify the father of all fourteen children. I won’t use this column to further vilify Nadya, but rather to heighten awareness of the importance of the father’s supportive involvement in the raising of children. I have yet to see a news article or commentary asking “Who’s Octo-Dad?” Don’t fathers matter in today’s culture?

According to Kyle D. Pruett, M.D. in a 1997 article titled How Men and Children Affect Each Others Development, “Children who’s fathers are not in their daily lives start looking for their father as soon it becomes clear to them that kids have moms and dads.” This father hunger can be insatiable. Moms can’t be dads. Children need both. Seven in ten adults believe a child needs a home with both a mother and a father to grow up happy. The bottom line? Daddies matter. Yet, sixty-three percent of black children, thirty-five percent of Hispanic children and twenty-eight percent of white children are living in homes absent their biological father. Annually, billions of dollars in government and charitable dollars are being spent dealing with the consequences of this father absence crisis. Frankly, it isn’t working. 

This is a call to men (fathers, step fathers, father-figures, etc), to step up in greater numbers to our responsibility to be involved and supportive when it comes to the rearing of children. It is also a call to society, media included, to acknowledge the important, God-given role of fathers.

TOP TEN FATHER FACTS

Fact #2                     

Nearly 20 million children (27 percent) live in single-parent homes.