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The time from adolescence to young adulthood is perhaps when children most need their parents involvement, but least desire it. It can be helpful to consider family life up until 100 years ago. Most people lived and died where they were born. Families were large and one’s best friends were usually siblings and cousins. Many more children followed their parents religion simply out of inertia and limited alternatives.

After WWI the increasing use of barrier type contraception resulted in a steep decline in the number of children born. (As a side note it is interesting how many Christian women are unaware of the number of chemical abortions caused by oral contraceptives}. The convenience of fewer children is rationalized in a number of ways, however, the effect is to raise what children that are born to see life in terms of the material advantages to themselves of fewer children. One might not think that this single decision would have a significant impact on their children, but it contributes to the idea of self being more important than others.

In the 1950s the declining birth rate began to rise again.. Veterans and other young people moved to the suburbs with every expectation of happy lives. They gave their children every toy and indulgence they could and refrained from discipline like Dr. Spock (a supposed authority on raising children at the time) said. With children at public school and husbands commuting to work, the discontent of housewives should have been an early indicator that all was not well in suburbia. The youth of the late 1960s in the pursuit of drugs, sex ,and rock and roll was an unmistakable indication that something was wrong.

God gives children to parents so that they would raise them. The disconnection of children from parents seems attractive at first because it seems easy and efficient. Sadly, a point is reached where each generation has less and less of value to give their children until it doesn’t matter if parents are involved in the lives of their children or not.

I would have preferred that my parent’s church could have compensated to some degree for the poor influence their parents had. however, both parents and church had come to be “broken cisterns’ incapable of being filled.

For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. - Jeremiah 2:13

Into this vacuum children receive instruction in public values that have been purged of any mention of God, Jesus, the bible, or even the words father or mother. Even more sad, is the fact that most churches have also been emptied of anything of real value.

A Catholic friend once told me that a priest had told his parents group that sometimes the parents of a troubled teen would bring him to the church and ask if they could give him religion as if it were some sort of inoculation. The priest said they would try but if they didn’t have the kids before they were ten years old it was pretty much a lost cause. To me this was an interesting insight by someone familiar with the religion business. However, what was desired was conformable behavior as opposed to independent self-regulation.

One can observe the statistics of children raised in fatherless homes and see that such children do not have the same self-discipline that a father would provide end up paying for it with lives of greater drug use, incarceration, and suicide. One can get a bit of a look inside the character of Satan as he has used considerable of his media resources to denigrate the role of fatherhood. One can understand his desire to collectivize the whole world so he can leverage his influence in an attempt to control the world. However, his desire to reduce people to the state where their undisciplined lives will inflict constant pain on themselves goes beyond what he needs to achieve his objectives and reveals some of the hatred he has for us.

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