But then they get abandoned over and over and over." "They choose mates to try to fix them, to somehow heal the relationship with the father, thinking they could heal this person. "People without a father are kind of adrift and feel alone and abandoned," says Los Angeles-based psychiatrist Judith Orloff, author of six books including The Empath's Survival Guide. "She hates him because of whatever he did." "The horrible relationship that the mother and father had sometimes serves as the biggest variable," she says. Sometimes, mothers even impede efforts for reconciliation with a father, Barras says, because they don’t want the father of their children back in their lives. "We’re being very deliberate about teaching adults, 'How do you respond and react to behavior you don’t like?'"he said.Īlthough fatherless boys have gotten more attention over the years, lacking a father hits girls just as hard, says Barras, founder of the non-profit Esther Productions, which works to help girls and women, particularly those who grew up without a father. The teachers have been learning “the mechanics of relationship building” when dealing with young men who have faced the trauma of growing up fatherless, says Hardnett. The staff of North Star College Preparatory Academy for Boys will be nearly all male for a student body in which half of the students live with only one parent, most likely their mothers. "When the father’s not there, something gets broken that cannot be fixed," he said. His two brothers used crack cocaine and alcohol, he said, to dull their pain. So like his brothers, he made "all the wrong decisions 'wrong' people make." That included eating so much he ballooned to 325 pounds. Hardnett said he thought there "must be something wrong with me" because his father wasn't around. That person could be a coach, or teacher, or someone who is a very bad influence. Without an active father in their lives, boys’ identities become "locked into the oldest male who is in their space," said Hardnett. Overwhelmingly, these one-parent households are led by women.īut there is new momentum in cities including Washington to reconnect fathers with their children. Much of that push has come from the African American community, where black fathers are twice as likely to live separately from their children as white fathers, according to research in 2011 by The Pew Research Center. Fatherlessness during childhood has become a major part of American life due to divorce and the rise of having children outside marriage. Steptoe and Tobin are among the millions of children across the United States who are growing up in one-parent households without a father in their lives. "I don’t think of my dad as a father," Kaylynn Tobin said. But she doesn’t have a good relationship with her father. Her sister Aras, 10, has a different father and sometimes gets gifts from him. Kaylynn Tobin, 12, of Rockville, Maryland, met her father only once, years ago, and barely remembers him. "What do these days mean to children like me who had to grow up without one parent in their lives?" asks Louis Steptoe, 18, who just graduated from high school here. Instead, he celebrates what he calls "Father Figure Day" and honors his godfather, William Ford, who "was always present." – Father’s Day is different when there’s no father around.
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