The following is an excerpt from The Black Man’s Guide Out of Poverty: For Black Men Who Demand Better, by Aaron Clarey, better known as Captain Capitalism.
No matter what the media tells you,
No matter what politicians say
And no matter what Oprah says,Families need fathers.
This “heroic single mother” bullshit is precisely that – bullshit.
Because of a myriad of reasons (beyond the scope of this book) there is a social, political, and economic push to marginalize fathers in today’s society, belittling the role they play in both society and the family. In return, they exalt single motherhood, single parenthood, and pretty much any other form of the family as long as it isn’t the normal, nuclear family, and as long as it doesn’t have a father.
Unfortunately, this skewed approach has had the disastrous consequences you’d expect it to have when you more or less dismiss or kick out an entire sex from society. Divorce, broken families, broken children, crime, psychological problems, recession, lower economic growth, increased bankruptcies, drug addiction, alcoholism, you name it, nearly every problem we have today in the US is (at least in-part) due to the lack of strong, manly fathers in today’s families.
Thankfully, however, just because society is trending this way, doesn’t mean you have to. And like all other decisions in life, if you make the right ones, your personal life will benefit from it. So when it comes to raising your children you have to ignore what society says and KNOW that children NEED their fathers and they need tough fatherly love.
Of course, children can’t just get by on “tough, fatherly love.” They need both the nourishing, forgiving, kind, sweet love from their mother and the disciplinarian, patriarchical love from their father. But right now society is so skewed towards the motherly “bribe you with cake” method of rearing that children are being ill-reared. This not only gives you the right to mete out the tough, fatherly love, but a mandate.
What this tough, fatherly love is though, is simple. It’s the love that is more concerned with your children 30 years from now, than you are about them today. So while the mother is tending to all the immediate needs of her children today (food, injuries, care, emotions, etc.), as a father it is your responsibility to train them, prepare them, and equip them to survive as adults into tomorrow.
Sadly, this is not the “cookies and cake” sort of love the mother gets to deal out, but it is no less important. It is telling your child no, disciplining and punishing them if they display aberrant behavior that will get them hurt and killed in the future, and ensuring they do not get too full of themselves so they might function well with other adults. But the real value of fatherly love is the wisdom, guidance, and context they will need to navigate and be successful in life.
For example, my insistence on humans being the most important thing in life, and your wife/children being the most important human beings, is the context necessary for every human to go forth and get the most out of life. That context, however, is just not provided by mothers.
Another example was a female friend of mine whose dad would not pay her way through college unless she majored in a STEM field. At the time she hated him for it. He was “not letting her be herself.” But in the end this WISDOM paid off greatly. She is now a doctor, does not live at home, and does not worry about poverty or strife.
And a third, lifting weights. When I was a teenage boy I was told by my mother that girls don’t like jocks or big strong guys. They liked sensitive caring men. Men who listened to their problems. And all the other typical female bullshit women say. Of course, pursuing that strategy was a SPECTACULAR failure and led to absolutely NO success with women. It wasn’t until I listened to one of my fatherly male elders did he provide me the guidance that women do not want sensitive, caring men, but strong, aloof, and indifferent men, no matter what they say. In the end I hit the gym (among other things) and improved my success with women dramatically.
The point is that your sons and daughters need strong, disciplined, and strategic long-term love. Because while motherly love is kind, forgiving, and absolutely necessary it does NOTHING to prepare your children for the harsh realities of life that they are going to face in the future. And if you don’t deliver this necessary love to them, they WILL suffer a life of confusion, failure, ineptitude, and strife because they were always pampered, never trained, hardened, or disciplined.
In short, it is the mother’s love that ensures the child doesn’t run away.
It is the father’s love that ensures your child wants to come back home to visit you as an adult.
Excerpt from Black Man’s Guide Out of Poverty
