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[Are Fathers Necessary?, Citation: Charles Colson, How Now Shall We Live (Tyndale, 1999)]
In How Now Shall We Live, Chuck Colson notes the disturbing realities that plague children who grow up without a father:
Children in single-parent families are five times more likely to be poor, and half the single mothers in the United States live below the poverty line.
Children of divorce suffer intense grief, which often lasts for many years.
Even as young adults, they are nearly twice as likely to require psychological help.
Children from disrupted families have more academic and behavioral problems at school and are nearly twice as likely to drop out of high school.
Girls in single-parent homes are at a much greater risk for precocious sexuality and are two and a half times more likely to have a child out of wedlock.
Crime and substance abuse are strongly linked to fatherless households.
Statistics show that 60 percent of rapists grew up in fatherless homes, as did 72 percent of adolescent murderers, and 70 percent of all long-term prison inmates.
In fact, most of the social pathologies disrupting American life today can be traced to fatherlessness.
An Online survey revealed that, while the average donation to beggars was less than 30 cents, the average daily donation to a panhandler is $56, ranging from a low $15 to $100 per day, or a surprising $30,000 a year untaxed for a few fortunate ones (www.pbs.org/weblab/needcom).
In 1993, social scientist Nicholas Zill reported that children of divorced parents are, regardless of their economic circumstances, more likely to have poor relationships with their parents, drop out of high school and receive psychological help.
Uses the following statistics to support his conclusion. According to Zill, the
high school dropout rate for teens whose parents are not divorced is 13% while the dropout
rate for those in single parent homes is 31%. Teens from divorced families are 3 times
likely to dropout than kids whose parents stay together even if they are not happy with
each other.
The teen pregnancy rate for among two parent families is 11% whereas the teen
pregnancy rate among divorced families is 33%. Teens from families where divorce occurs
are 3 times more likely to become pregnant than teens whose parents stay together.
Zill said, "Many people were saying single-parent families are just different, not necessarily worse or better, and the factors that link kids to problems have to do with poverty," Zill said. "But my research didn’t support that explanation."
Quoted in The Los Angeles Times, 5/27/96, page A16.
THEY NEED A FATHER
... “almost 75 percent of American children living in fatherless households will experience poverty before the age of eleven, compared to only 20 percent of those raised by two parents. Children living in homes where fathers are absent are far more likely to be expelled from or drop out of school, develop emotional or behavioral problems, commit suicide, and fall victim to child abuse or neglect. The males are also far more likely to become violent criminals. As a matter of fact, men who grew up without dads currently represent 70 percen...
Jeff Strite
CRADLES OF EMINENCE
In a famous study by Victor and Mildred Goertzel, entitled Cradles of Eminence, the home backgrounds of 300 highly successful people were investigated. These 300 subjects had made it to the top. They were men and women whose names everyone would recognize as brilliant in their fields, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, Albert Schweitzer, Clara Barton, Gandhi, Einstein, and Freud. The intensive investigation into their early home lives yielded some surprising findings:
* Three fourths of the children were troubled either by poverty, by a broken home, or by rejecting, overpossessive, or dominating parents.
* Seventy-four of 85 writers of fiction or drama and 16 of the 20 poets came from homes where, as children, they saw tense psychological drama played out by their parents.
* Physical handicaps such as blindness, deafness, or crippled limbs characterized over one-fourth of the sample.
And yet from such poor circumstances, God was able to bring success.
SOURCE: Cradles of Eminence by Victor and Mildred Goertzel. Little Brown & Company, June 1962
- Did you know that the first modern-day lottery was started in 1963 in the state of New Hampshire. And now there are 37 states who have lotteries, including Illinois. And in 1997, statewide lotteries suckered $16 Billion dollars from Americans.
- Did you know that the state of Massachusetts, started their lottery in 1972 with 50 cent tickets and a drawing once a week. It now has 33 different games to choose from their sales have
soared from $71 million in the first year to $3 Billion today.
- Did you know, that in Colorado, the lottery organizers spend more than $400 million dollars each year trying to lure residents to gamble on lotteries. And in a $25,000 study called Mindsort they analyzed the left and right sides of the brain to understand how to manipulate players behavior in order to get them once hooked, always hooked.
- A Massachusetts Lottery Ad sums up the point I am trying to get across perfectly. In the ad they offer two choices for how to "make millions." Let me quote,
"Plan A: Start studying when you’re about 7 years old, real hard. Then grow up and get a good job. From then on, get up at dawn every day. Flatter your boss. Crush competition ruthlessly. Climb over backs of co-workers. Be the last one to leave every night. Squirrel away every cent. Avoid having a nervous breakdown. Avoid having premature heart attack. Get a face lift. Do this every day for 30 years, holidays and weekends included. By the time you’re ready to retire you should have your money. Or Plan B: Play the Lottery."
Despite its Christian heritage, the United States leads every other nation in the industrialized world in the percentage of single-parent families (23%), abortion rate (22.9 per 1,000 women aged 15-44), sexually transmitted diseases (syphillis rate is 6.3 per 100,000 and gonorrhea rate is 149.5 per 100,000), teenage birth rate (42 per 1,000 girls aged 15-19), use of illegal drugs by students (44.9 % using in 1998), and the size of the prison population (327 per 100,000). Our rate of child poverty (20%) is likewise abysmal.
Source: "Lost in America" by Tom Clegg and Warren Bird
James Reston was a syndicated columnist for The New York Times for more that thirty years. In his final column for the newspaper, he wrote, “In America, we have learned something about how to deal with adversity since the Great Depression, but not much about how to deal with prosperity. We are very rich, but we are not having a very good time. We are producing so much food that we don’t know what to do with the garbage, while half of the human race goes to bed hungry every night.”
Reston’s words become more haunting when you consider that the US wast...
WHERE ARE THE HAPPIEST KIDS?
Where do the happiest kids in the world live? A study released in 2012 titled "The New Definition of Childhood" produced by an agency headquartered in Chicago found that the happiest kids in the world live in Mexico--despite its many social ills and widespread poverty.
The study asked 4,000 children ages 6 to 12 in 12 countries what it’s like to grow up today. According to the first-ever Global Kids Happiness Index, kids in Mexico were the happiest in the world, followed by Spain, Brazil, and Germany. American kids scored fifth. Across almost all countries, the most important source of happiness for kids is close family and friends. The solution to nearly all our social ills always seems to come back to relationships with the most important people in our life.
(Halee Gray Scott, www.christianitytoday.com, "Want to be Happy?")
NOW – you may be wondering what the red cups on the stage are all about… NO – they’re not Christmas decorations… I brought them here to illustrate how rich we really are when compared to billions of people in this world…
CHECKOUT – the statistics on the screen…
World-Wide Income… (6.2 billion people)
Avg Yearly Income % # of people on avg
who make less
America 36,924 97 6 billion
Poverty 9,359 86 5.3 billion
World 675 0 0
The average American spends $ 2,600 a year on eating out… That is 4 times the average person in the world’s yearly salary… The movie and popcorn and coke you had last night would set back the average person in the world almost half their monthly income. YOU SEE – it’s all in who you compare yourself to…
NOW – for the cups… [note I had 1,672 cups on a table and 30 cups on another table – each cup represented 1,000 dollars]
(how much money we will pass through our hands in our lifetime; 45 years of working)…
$ 1,661,580 each cup represents $1,000 AVG AMERICAN
$ 30,375 AVG PERSON IN THE WORLD
