It is largely father absence which creates ghettos and gangs and messed-up kids

It was John Fiske, the nineteenth century American historian and philosopher, who pointed out what made human beings special—and more successful than other mammals: not only the prolongation of infancy, but the creation of a whole additional era of life, childhood, something unknown in any other species, so that human children can enjoy an enormously long period during which they are protected, cherished, educable, playful, exploratory, sensitive and aware, a period during which they can reach out and learn about and come to love the world they live in. The male kinship system, or patriarchy, is still a part of nature, but in a new sense: it depends not on biological heredity but on social heredity. It is a human creation, like a hydroelectric dam placed over a river to harness its power and use it to run factories and light streets. It was the great achievement of patriarchy to raise reproduction above recreation and put it to work. Man was taking charge of part of his heredity. 

It is largely fatherhood which makes childhood possible. Mothers make infants but when the infants become children they are likely to be less well socialized if they have no fathers.1 It is largely father absence which creates ghettos and gangs and messed-up kids—boys trying to find their identity through violence, girls trying to find their identity through sexual promiscuity which generates the male violence of the next generation. They need real fathers, sociological fathers, not mere biological studs interested in a one-night stand or a brief or superficial relationship. Sociological fatherhood is real fatherhood. It is also what Margaret Mead called “a social invention.” In the ghettos biological fathers seldom become sociological fathers, seldom amount to much, because Mom’s sexual promiscuity or disloyalty—her belief in what feminists call a woman’s right to control her own sexuality—denies them the role of sociological fatherhood. Lawmakers and judges fail to understand that fatherhood is a social invention, that it must be created and maintained by society. This is the main reason patriarchal society— the father kinship system—exists. They do not grasp that social heredity has become part of biology and that fathers are the primary means of transmitting social heredity. They suppose that humans can live like cattle, without fathers, with only the meager social heredity found in female kinship systems such as ghettos and Indian reservations. Until lawmakers and judges see that they must support the father’s role because it is the weak biological link in the family we will have more matriarchy—along with its accompaniments: educational failure, illegitimacy, teen suicide, gangs and the rest.

From The Case for Father Custody

by Stephen Baskerville