You can always tell who genuinely wants to make society better: The change agents search for the root cause while the chaos agents magnify the symptom.
We’re encouraged to cheer for the Band-Aid solution, but then we’re furious that our problems keep increasing to unimaginable levels.
As decades pass us by, we keep getting sicker. But our society’s most influential, who want us addicted to placebos because our failing health keeps them in business, dismiss the people curious enough to diagnose our downfall’s cause.
But what if a root cause of nearly every major issue we talk about has a common solution?
What if we don’t need government intervention to restore our social immune system?
The United States has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent homes, Pew Research finds, with nearly a quarter (23%) of American children under 18 living with just one parent. This generally means children living with their mother.
This absence of fathers from our kids’ daily lives has created children on the fringes who are in many ways lost. I know because I was one of them.
Our children wander aimlessly into a confusing and unforgiving world without guidance from their natural compass of purpose: their fathers.
They’re vulnerable to being preyed upon by malicious actors.
And unfortunately, the lost children who reside on the fringes grow up to become the destroyers of our society or bearers of the next generation of destroyers or self-medicate, leading to their own destruction.
Every major social issue we discuss today, especially drug addiction, homelessness and violent crime, has a significant and common root cause stemming from childhood trauma.
Drugs are often used as a self-medicating mechanism to mentally mask previous trauma because the pain people experienced earlier in life is too difficult to face head-on.
For some within this population, they were the lost children who were vulnerable and subsequently abused.
Children from single-parent homes are amongst the most vulnerable because it’s likely their parent will introduce an adult not biologically related into the home — increasing the odds of abuse 40 times compared with children who live in a two-parent home with their biological parents.
When our boys act out in a violent manner, it’s because they’ve never been taught to regulate their emotions appropriately, and the fire that burns inside them from being distant from their spitting image only multiplies the havoc they unleash onto the rest of us.
As our families have disintegrated, so has our children’s mental health, but we’ve placed our selfish desires ahead of their state of mind.
We’ve married the narrative that our children are “resilient” so we can divorce our partners.
We rationalize family separation because acknowledging we’ve sacrificed our children’s stability for self-serving motives would bruise our fragile egos.
I was once this lost child who wanted his father’s acknowledgment but received silence instead of embrace.
As he lived comfortably with his other family, I was being admitted into a mental-health facility at the age of 6 for expressing suicidality.
But I didn’t need doctors or medication: I needed my father.
If you can understand we’re all partly products of our environment, doesn’t it make sense that the most chaotic people grew up in dysfunction? They are the adult versions of the children we’ve long ignored but now get our attention when they set the world on fire.
This Father’s Day should not only be a day of recognition for the fathers who chose to stay and guide their children but a day for advocating reconciliation for the fathers of America who regrettably chose themselves over their children, but their shame keeps them away. It should be a day of encouragement by the mothers to try one more time to restore their child’s compass.
Our government can’t pass a law to make fathers get involved in their child’s life — but we as a society can stop accepting subpar standards of parental involvement by choosing our children over ourselves.
I chose to become the compass my son can always depend on for guidance and not repeat the mistakes of my father.
A reunified father a day will keep the doctor away.
Adam B. Coleman is the author of “Black Victim to Black Victor” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. Follow him on Substack: adambcoleman.substack.com.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
