Encouraging Men to Be Good Dads

This is a fact.

Boys learn to become men in the company of other men as they walk and grow through the challenges of life together.

But in disturbing numbers across our culture, that isn’t happening.

In fact, our video curriculum, The Family Project, reveals the tale of the tape.

Sadly, statistics show that 85 percent of men in prison didn’t have a dad while growing up. Seventy percent of teen suicides occur in homes where there isn’t a dad. And, sadly, 24 million kids today are growing up in homes without their father. One out of every three children doesn’t have a dad living with them.

Then there are all those dads who are physically present, but they aren’t engaged in their kids’ lives.

As much as there can be a silver bullet to a cultural problem, absent dads are it.

It’s a problem that perpetuates itself. Kids with poor role models for fathers often grow up to be poor role models themselves.

It’s difficult to become what you don’t see and to give what you never had.

There are spiritual overtones as well. Earthly fathers can become a stumbling block for kids seeing God as a heavenly Father. The enemy of our soul wants to stop people from coming to the Gospel. A key way to do that is to have dads be disaffected, dangerous, and uninvolved in any way possible. Children won’t readily believe there’s a loving heavenly Father if their earthly father has been a poor example or no example at all.

What can Christians do to bring a solution to this?

How can churches get fathers engaged and point men in a better direction with their families?

That’s what we’ll be taking a look at on tomorrow’s program, “Encouraging Men to Be Good Dads.” Please make a point to listen.

Our guest will be Roland Warren. He’s an author and the former head of the National Fatherhood Initiative, which encourages men to be great dads to their kids. He’s also the CEO of Care Net, the largest network of pregnancy resource centers in the U.S.

We’ll discuss ideas for creating a robust community of fathers to be models for young boys and young girls – men who will teach boys to be men and offer girls a healthy example of what they can aspire to have in their life, for themselves and for their children.

You can hear the program on your local radio station or listen online or via our free, downloadable mobile phone app

Topics: Family and Home Tags: broadcast, family, kids, parenting March 24, 2015 by Jim Daly with Paul Batura