“ Not seeing your father when you are small, never being with him, having a remote father, a workaholic father, is an injury. ”

The male lineage is passed on from father and grandfather to the son, and is largely non-verbal. This communication is stored like gold in every boy’s soul. Without this gold, this inner stability, boys remain lost, feeling isolated from the man’s world, infantile and riddled with self-hatred.

Our sons´ lack of involvement with actual three-dimensional men on a day-to-day basis means that they grow up to distrust and disrespect adult men and male authority. In the men’s movement, we call this lack “father hunger”.

In the West, most boys grow up with their beliefs of what it means to be a man shaped daily by the opinions of their school peers, the two-dimensional characters they witness via the media, and their mothers.

Most boys carry wounds from their fathers, and other men in positions of authority. Wounds come from sexual, physical, verbal, psychological and/or spiritual abuse. However, we could say that for children, the most damaging wound is parental emotional and/or physical abandonment.

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, this wound will eventually explode into violence against others, should it remain untreated. It is the ticking time bomb within.

• Some estimates state that 30% of men don´t speak to their father, 30% have a prickly or hostile relationship with him, 30% go through the motions of being a good son and discuss nothing deeper than football; only 10% are friends with their fathers, and see them as a source of emotional support (Steve Biddulph).
• With a high level of marriage breakdown, perhaps a third of all children grow up with an absent dad. One study found that after one year of divorce, over 30% of fathers had no further contact with their children (Steve Biddulph).
• According to the Office of National Statistics, the number of men who have decided to become full-time fathers and give up their careers, “househusbands”, has increased by 83% since 1993 (Daily Mail 10.7.07).
• When a marriage breaks down, the courts usually favour that mothers get full-time custody of the children, regardless of how long the husband has looked after them. After separation and divorce, the father is expected to pay maintenance, or face prison (Daily Mail, 10.7.07).
• “Children need to be protected from the harm of losing contact with one parent” (Families Need Fathers www.fnf.org.uk).
• Many men do not know how to be nurturing because they have never met a man who is nurturing.