Fatherless Children Effects On Children

It is estimated that 50 percent of all American marriages end in divorce, and that 22 million children in the United States alone live without a father. My parents added to these numbers in 2002, when I was only 5 years old. My mother raised me solely. When I was young, I spent every other weekend traveling eight hours round trip to see my father, but for the past five years I’ve only seen him sparsely — maybe three or four times annually.

As a child it was, of course, upsetting — I wanted a daddy to come to my piano recitals and ballet performances like all the other girls — but the discontent only grew as I did. During the critical teen years of my life I felt the full effects of fatherlessness. There were things I struggled with for months

John P. Hoffman, an advocate of the National Center for Fathering, said, “There is significantly more drug use among children who do not live with [both] their mother and father, and adolescents living in intact families are less likely to engage in delinquency than their peers living in non-intact families. [Also,] 71 percent of high school dropouts are fatherless; fatherless children have more trouble academically, scoring poorly on tests of reading, mathematics and thinking

And Hoffman’s statistics are based in truth. Despite all the exceptions, there is no denying that for the most part, divorce has aversive effects on the children whose parents are split. How can such a high divorce rate be lowered?

It is said that pre-marital counseling is very beneficial in creating long lasting marriages.

Martha and Richard Korneisel have been marriage mentors for three years through both Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church and Nazareth Lutheran Church. Together they guide engaged couples through conflict scenarios and future-planning discussions, stressing concepts such as communication, patience and understanding. The church views marriage as a permanent bond of unconditional love, so much so that the Bible even speaks of man and woman becoming one body when they are united in marriage.

Korneisel said, “We’ve seen others experience divorce, and at the time didn’t feel like we did enough to prevent it. Now, we mentor to give the couples a way to deal with any issues that might arise, to prevent any further divorces. We bring up scenarios and talk about them with them — giving them example of things we’ve seen or how we’ve gone about resolving similar