Children with Absent Fathers are More Likely to Offend

The general nature of this blog is to highlight the wonderful experiences created by amazing dads. However, it would be useful to remind ourselves of some of the consequences of NOT being an amazing dad.

Two weeks ago, I delivered a workshop to a group of 22 teenagers. 10 of the participants were considered as disruptive. 9 out of these 10 teenagers are from single parent families and have little contact with their fathers. The 10th one is from a home where he hardly sees his father. That got me thinking about how much of an impact dads have on children - the future of our society.

Here's a few stark facts about children without their dads.

- Children aged 11 to 16 years were 25% more likely to have offended in the last year if they lived in lone-parent families.61

- Young men from lone-parent families were 1.6 times as likely to be persistent offenders as those from two-natural-parent families. The effects of living in lone-parent families seem to operate indirectly, through reduced levels of parental supervision.

In focus group discussions, young people in prisons spoke frequently about disruption in their family lives and about their fathers’ absence. One discussion went as follows:

Interviewer: ‘I’ve just realised we’ve spent the whole time and nobody’s talked about dads.
’Teenager 1: ‘That’s because there’s no dads to talk about!
’Teenager 2: ‘We don’t need dads, at the end of the day a child needs its mum.’

Another young woman said: ‘…where I used to live…it’s like a rough, nasty area and you just see mums with six children, three kids, their boyfriend, not a dad. Kids grow up and they grudge other families…

These are just some of the raw facts about children with absent biological dads. This can apply to dads who are married but are never around. So, if you're a married father, you may just wish to think twice about the role you play as a dad.

Harun Rabbani