Why are so many young men in trouble today?
Maybe the answer is to be found by looking at what’s happening in fatherless homes.
63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes.
~ 5 times the national average
90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes.
~ 32 times the national average
85% of all children with behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes.
~ 20 times the average
71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes.
~ 9 times the average
75% of adolescents in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes.
~10 times the average
85% of all youths in prison come from fatherless homes.
~ 20 times the average
I have heard it said that all children need mature older men in their lives because wisdom is not inherited — it is handed down.
An older man’s scars are the lessons a young person hasn’t lived long enough to have learned, and yet for so many of our young a connection to a mature man is nonexistent.
This fact has been particularly damaging to young boys.
How will boys learn to be good men without ever knowing a good man?
Sit with that question for a moment.
For those of you who had mature older men in your lives during your growing up years, think how it would have been if you hadn’t.
- Who would you have become?
- Where would you be?
- How would you have been different?
For the many boys who’ve never known a mature man, the consequences have been devastating.
A fact brought home to me when I volunteered at the Snohomish County Jail.
So many incarcerated men never experienced the influence of a mature man.
As a consequence they spent their lives in a perpetual state of adolescence — and had the rap sheets to prove it.
A boy needs a mature man to help them map out which roads lead somewhere and which ones don’t.
I know this terrain well. At 14, when my own father died, I was swept away into the wrong crowd.
My mother had to bail me out of jail just so I could attend my first day of high school.
She saw clearly I’d be lost without the influence of mature males my life.
Luckily, at Seattle Prep High School I found a place populated with mature men and classmates more mature than I was.
Prep saved my bacon.
It would seem the Creator built an irreplaceable role for adult males in the life of a boy.
A profound lesson in this truth comes to us from a rather unexpected place:
The elephant kingdoms of South Africa.
In the 1990s, rangers at Pilanesberg National Park were baffled. Someone or something was systematically killing the endangered white rhinos.
The attacks were brutal, the rhinos deeply lacerated by what appeared to be tusks.
The culprits, as surveillance finally revealed, were not poachers. They were roving gangs of adolescent male elephants.
This behavior was unheard of.
As experts dug into the records, they found the key: a decade earlier, the park had introduced a herd of young male elephants — without a single adult bull.
For ten years, these juveniles grew up in a vacuum, devoid of a mature, countervailing influence. The result was chaos.
All at once, the young males entered a state of aggressive, hormonal frenzy known as “musth” and it was happening a full decade early.
What was supposed to occur at age 28 was erupting at 14.
Their unchecked, misdirected energy was being vented on the innocent rhinos and, as it turns out, unsuspecting visitors.
The solution was as elegant as it was decisive.
The rangers introduced several large, older bull elephants into the park.
The effect was immediate.
The largest bull, Amarula, didn’t need a committee or a program. When a musth-stricken younger elephant tried to provoke him, Amarula responded with a swift, definitive lesson: a single, powerful blow that sent the upstart flying.
It was a warning that resonated through the entire herd. The reign of terror was over.
Natural order was restored.
The point is searingly clear: bull elephants have their own way of guiding their young into maturity.
We humans have ours.
Our adolescent boys need the daily presence of mature men to
- channel their strength,
- temper their impulses, and to
- show them what they are capable of becoming.
If we fail them, we shouldn’t be surprised when they break or when they break others.
Boys need men for one very simple, irreplaceable reason:
A mature man can see the man inside the boy, long before the boy can see it himself.
Just a thought…
Pat