For me to convey the meaning of a good father, I feel it’s necessary to first bring up some alarmingly ugly facts that should not only get your attention, but also give you a sense of what we’re up against. To that end it is that I will unveil the negative trends and portrayals of fathers we’ve seen through the years.

Parenting Style
One could argue that the alarmists have focused blame on what’s wrong with our youth and pointed to the parental figures in the home as the culprits, in many cases. Yes, this no doubt, has been done throughout time and is not necessarily always spot on, but the parental duty of a father leaves a powerful shadow on their child.

If you were to randomly survey people off the street to ask them to define a good father, you may be very surprised by what you hear, unless you focused your efforts on a group of people who see the need for a strong family leader. They might tell us that the father is the one who usually tried to get the sympathy of the other family members and especially the attention of his wife. He may go about this by playing vicitim. This I imagine has been drilled into our population by the one-eyed monster, we call television, that graces most all our homes.

Of course, everything cannot be blamed on television. Through the years, our society has become liberal to the degree where strong leadership is feared by many, and at the best, avoided by the vast majority. Rarely is a genuine person of character with positive leadership skills elected to be our public officials. This goes for the father image as well. The off-base implication is that if strong-charactered, God-fearing heads of households appear in real life or on the big screen, we will come to the conclusion that he is going to damage his childrens’ psyche with his powerful personality and not allow them to have individualistic and expressive qualities the rest of their lives.

I say this is not so! Leadership can only be passed along through example. To my dismay, nearly all the examples of paternal leadership is concerned, have disappeared, so we are left without much to perpetuate this image. No young man with a weak father figure can identify with the strong paternal image, and so he doen’t truly know what a real man is. He may see his mother taking on an overwhelming amount of responsibility, as his father grossly neglects both his family and his responsibilities.

Christian Youth Home
So you’re probably wondering when I’m going to get around to tell you what I thing a good father is. No doubt, by describing the deficiencies of a bad father, I am telling you what a good father is. The good father is the antithesis of the weak and poor father. I would much rather see a strong-character, righteous man walk by his children, and in doing so, observe them somewhat flinching as they became fearful that he might just swat them, then see the reaction of most children to their father today. Maybe I’m a bit old fashioned, but I really feel children of all ages should have a type of fearful respect for their fathers: not because he is going to harm them physically, but because they have been brought up to the point that they dread him giving them even a glance of disdain.

Protecting your child in a seductive world
A good father does the things we traditionally picture a father doing with their child. This includes teaching his kids to ride a bike, playing ball or taking them fishing; cultivating the bond between himself and his daughters, and being a strong, yet also a sympathetic figure. He should do all these things, yes, but he must first and foremost be the family leader. He has to take the helm of leadership and guide the household through the storms it is going to face as the years go by.