Baby mamas of the world rejoice! Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family thinks you are a hero!
They are largely single moms, I mean very few kids are being raised in dad only homes. It’s typically mom doing that heroic work of raising the kids by herself.
…single moms know that, they know that “my kids are facing a tougher time”, that they themselves are facing a tougher time as a single parent because for some reason dad is not around.
On the odd chance that Mr. Stanton notices this post while searching on his own name (or notices a spike in traffic from my readers clicking on the link to his blog above), I’d like to unravel the mystery for him. Our culture has created an epidemic of fatherless children by paying cash incentives to unwed mothers and lionizing them as heroes instead of shaming them. Furthermore, Christians have a hair trigger for wife initiated divorce and are looking for any excuse to blame the husband/father the wife kicks out. I hope this clears that otherwise murky matter up for him.
He goes on to suggest that single mothers can teach their sons and daughters about the difference between good and bad men by watching TV and movies with them and telling them what qualities about men she likes and dislikes:
Use it as a time to have conversations about what are those qualities about men that she as a woman yearns for, looks for, appreciates, and what are those qualities that she doesn’t like as much. In those conversations she can teach her kids really in wonderful ways, ok this is what a good man looks like, this is what a good guy looks like. And so the boy starts to learn, “mom seems to like that kind of guy, I want to be that kind of guy. Mom doesn’t like that kind of guy with that kind of attitude, you know what I don’t want to be that”. The little girl learns that by saying “thats the kind of man I should be looking for”.
The absolute foolishness of Christian leaders is breathtaking. He closes with a call to action. Not a call for women to stop having children out of wedlock or stop kicking the husband/father out of the house. No, that would be absurd. He closes with a call to action to men to fill in the gap in the child’s life caused almost universally by the poor choices of the mother:
I would encourage men out there that as you look around within your community, your church body, and you see young boys being raised and dad gone because of his death or because of his desertion or because of a divorce or maybe he just never was on the scene, you’ve got to be considerate to the mother, but try to be a good example to those boys and try to encourage them….
Mothers can do that, women can do that, but there is nobody like a man telling a young boy “You know what, I was really proud of how you did that”…
Note how fatherless children are either nobody’s fault or the father’s fault, but never the mother’s fault. Start at 50 seconds in to skip past the book plug and the number to call in for the radio show:
The only thing I’ve read from Glenn Stanton in the past is how proud he is that devout Christians divorce 38% of the time. I was curious if this show was an anomaly, and maybe he has held unwed mothers accountable in the past. I did some searching on this, and while I couldn’t find any instances of him holding them accountable for their choices I did find this strange passage from his book Secure Daughters, Confident Sons:
Jackie and I try to watch the movie As Good as It Gets once a year.
I’ve never seen the chick flick in question, so I looked up the plot on wikipedia. According to wiki, it is a movie about how the wisdom of a gay man and the love of a single mother redeem a man.
