How Did We Become an Underfathered Society?
How Did We Become an Underfathered Society?
How did we get here, into a world where so many men and women are underfathered?
Where boys grow up without strong models of mature masculinity… And girls grow up without ever being guided, protected, or validated by noble, loving fathers?
Where families feel fractured, and where the deep, intergenerational wisdom of parenthood, once passed down through both mothers and fathers, has all but vanished?
How did we lose that powerful cohesion that united families for thousands of years? How did it all unravel so quickly? In just a few generations?
It wasn’t a fluke. And it wasn’t just “progress.” It was a systematic dismantling of the very structures that made human flourishing possible.
Here’s how it happened.
🔧 The Quiet Displacement of Fathers
The Industrial Revolution changed everything.
For most of human history, fathers were a constant presence. They worked the land near the homestead, ran small shops, crafted goods, and trained their sons and daughters by example. Each day, children saw how their father treated their mother. How he solved problems. How he stood firm day after day. How he passed on wisdom, faith, and discipline.
But with industrialization, men were pulled out of the home and into distant factories and offices. The household was no longer the center of life, it became a base camp. Fathers became providers but not present guides. The spiritual, emotional, and intellectual influence of the father began to wither.
Fatherhood didn’t disappear overnight, but it was displaced, quietly, steadily, and with little resistance.
🏚️ The Collapse of the Extended Family and the Tribe
But it wasn’t just fathers we lost.
We used to have access to an entire network of fathering figures, our grandfathers, uncles, older cousins, elder brothers, and even our neighbors. In families with 8 or 10 children, a single child might grow up surrounded by dozens of mature men, each of whom had a stake in that child’s future. They were family. Tribe. Blood.
If your own father was absent, immature, sick, or even dead, someone else stepped in.
You were never alone. You were never without guidance.
This extended parenting network was a safeguard. It allowed children to be raised in a rich environment of layered wisdom, discipline, protection, and love. It helped boys become men, and girls become strong, virtuous women, by immersing them in generations of living examples of adulthood.
Today, that tribe is gone. What remains of families are small and nuclear. Dispersed. Disconnected. We no longer live in communities of shared values. Children grow up isolated, surrounded by strangers and screens, not kin.
And when that network collapsed, fathering collapsed with it.
📺📚 Mass Media and Public Schools: The Infiltration of Outsiders into the Family
Into that void stepped two powerful forces: mass media and public education.
Instead of children’s minds and hearts being formed by their family, they were now being programmed by outsiders, teachers, celebrities, social engineers, and bureaucrats.
Worse, the messages they received were often in direct contradiction to their parents’ values. Rather than hearing a unified voice from mother and father, children began receiving fractured, dissonant messaging. And more often than not, the loudest voices were pushing anti-family, anti-tradition, anti-reality ideologies.
And with each generation, the confusion deepened. Children grew up mistrusting their parents. Parents lost confidence in their authority. And the system reinforced this division, calling it progress.
⚠️ The Erosion of Tradition
A major part of this societal rot has been the deliberate rebellion against tradition.
Modern culture tells us tradition is a cage. But tradition is a trellis. A support. It’s the guiding structure that helps us grow straight, strong, and upward to something better.
Tradition gives us the accumulated wisdom of those who lived, loved, and raised families before us. It gives us tested paths, moral frameworks, skills, and meaningful roles. And, ironically, tradition gives us more choices, not fewer, because it gives us solid foundations to build on.
Without it, we are lost in chaos. No map. No compass. Just noise.
And yet, for over a century, tradition has been ridiculed, rejected, and replaced, with vague utopian promises of progress that improve our material wealth at the cost of our cultural, genetic, spiritual, physical, mental and emotional health.
Children were told to rebel. Women were told to resent their roles. Men were told they were the problem. And marriage, family, and faith were portrayed as obsolete.
Is it any wonder so few want to have children?
⛪ The Collapse of the Church and the Moral Institutions
Even the institutions that once preserved tradition have crumbled, or worse, turned against it.
The Church once taught men how to be husbands and fathers, and women how to be wives and mothers. It offered community, accountability, and a framework for lifelong growth and duty. It trained the conscience. It protected the family from the corrosive forces of the world.
But today, many churches are either silent… or complicit.
They’ve abandoned moral clarity for cultural popularity. They don’t help members form families, they apologize for them. They don’t raise standards, they water them down. And worst of all, they often undermine parental authority in favor of state or social agendas.
Alongside the Church, we also used to have strong, informal institutions, extended families, local communities, guilds, clubs, militias, and shared moral cultures. These allowed us to judge each other more accurately, make better marriages, and create stable homes. Today, we swipe, guess, and hope.
The result? Poor matches, broken homes, underfathered children. Generation after generation.
☠️ The Century-Long Cultural War on the Family
And behind all of this, beneath the surface, there’s been a long, sustained cultural war.
For over a hundred years, Marxists, communists, and their ideological heirs have targeted the family. Not because it was failing, but because it was resilient. Because it was the last institution they couldn’t control.
Their goal was simple: Break the family so they could control the individual.
And they’ve done it through subversion, not tanks. They infiltrated academia, media, churches, and schools. They changed the meanings of words. They mocked virtue and normalized vice. They encouraged individualism, hypersexuality, and rebellion against all forms of rightful authority, especially fathers.
They told men they were unnecessary. They told women they didn’t need men. They told children they belonged to the state.
And we let it happen. Because we were asleep on the battlefield.
🎯 But It’s Not Over. We Can Still Fight.
We may be underfathered, but we are not without hope.
We can rebuild the tribe. We can restore tradition. We can reclaim our roles, as men, as women, as families.
But to do that, we must first understand what we’re fighting, and how we got here.
� I break this down in more detail in one of my recent presentations: � What is the War Against the West
It’s time to wake up. To remember who we are. To step back into the roles we were made for.
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We just need to restore what worked, for generations.
And it begins with fatherhood. With family. With us.
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