We cannot receive a holier name!

Bill Cosby jokes that "Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is Soap on a Rope". We fathers should know that Mr. Cosby was joking and playing on the issue of sacrifice and moral building in the eyes of those who look up to us. Research in several studies to include those of which place under a glass, the relationship between adolescence and psychological distress in adulthood and paternal involvement in the developing stages, point to the fact that absence of a father can directly be linked to low academic scores. Some studies have indicated and confirmed that children in single mother families, as opposed to families with a father figure present, generally tend to have lower academic scores and cognitive ability. Also, they may have a higher risk of delinquency, deviant actions, school drop out rates and pregnancy outside of wedlock. Some of these are alone not necessarily anything to be concerned with, however the attainment of all of these factors, tends to suggest that we "patriarchs" play a bigger role than most of us realize. Freud states that a child’s greatest need is that of a father's love and affection. Freud also says that a child who is denied this great need will have low self-esteem, be prone to depression when faced with real or perceived losses and grow to be an adult never being able to feel deserving of love. Whether you agree with Freud or not, it is easy to trace statistics to the undoing of the traditional "nuclear" family unit due to growing social and economic changes. Generally these changes develop into one with a lack of the "paternal" figure. Freud also goes on to suggest that the lack of a paternal figure in children’s lives prior to the age of five has severe, long-lasting, and profound effects. The father/ daughter relationship commonly is referred to as "Daddy Issues". This is a factor most men in our generation are familiar with, as it may have affected our mothers, sisters, girlfriends or wives. The lack of a this positive relationship is directly connected to the a daughter's ability to trust and relate to men as well as in the son to be able to treat women as the people they are, and not as property to be abandoned, neglected or reclaimed when the male figure decides. As a father to a wonderful, smart and gorgeous daughter, who lives 15 hours away, and the stepfather to a talented, eccentric, and stunning and equally outgoing to my stepdaughter, I am well familiar with both sides of this equation. The simple idea is that, we all, admitted or not crave the attention of our fathers. It is and was detrimental in the developing of our ideas of success, failure, integrity and ethic. I am looked on everyday professionally and privately as a man who has the answers. I admit that I am no scholar or great genius. However, I am as I should, we should be a dedicated and hardworking paternal figure. Whether it is to my actual family or my extended, I have made a commitment to teach, learn and grow with my brood. I will always strive to be the man, father, brother, son, friend, husband and confidant I would choose for myself. This is a thought for the day. How do your actions, perceived or invisible affect those around you? And are you being the man you want the world to remember? I should hope we are, because it matters to more than we realize. William Wordsworth states in his ecclesiastical sonnets that "Father! - to God himself we cannot give a holier name."