If you had asked me, say five years ago, if I thought there
was anything detrimental to the American family on network television I would
have responded “Probably not.”
Unfortunately I had, at that time, the luxury of ignorance. Now, as a husband and a father, I can tell
you first-hand that there is a lot wrong with the way both groups are
portrayed, and it has a direct effect on our culture.
You don’t have to wander far down the channel listings to
find the problem. Just tune into
regularly aired reruns of “Married with Children”, “Everybody Loves Raymond”, “Home
Improvement”, “King of Queens”, “Family Guy”, “South Park”, and a slew of
commercials depicting the same thing: The stupid, doofus man-child father and
the smart, savvy, always practical wife waiting to clean up the mess.
Few and far between do we see the smart man, the dad actively
participating in his children’s lives, and the attentive husbands. Even the best of shows like “Blackish” always
draw the husband back into the “man child” role making him learn a moral lesson
by the end of the episode.
If we’re lucky they learn a moral by the end of the episode.
So why are these problems?
Isn’t it just an entertaining story trope, the funny man to the wife’s “straight
guy.” The problem is that this flies in
the face of God’s plan for the family, and delivers a gift wrapped message of irresponsibility
to generations of young men.
If you polled a group of teenagers to determine who among
them baby sat non family children, you’d find by an overwhelming margin that
girls are the baby sitters. Young men
are expected to be out mowing lawns, doing yard work, and helping out with
heavy duty projects. Girls are
instructed to stay inside and watch the children or learn to cook. You’d like to believe that since we are far
away from the nuclear family of the fifties that we’d have pushed aside these tropes,
but all we really did was dumb down the men.
Statistically speaking fewer and fewer young men know basic
domestic skills like laundry, cooking, and home upkeep. This places those men at a social
disadvantage because when they get married they depend on their spouse to take
on these roles, which places an unfair burden on her making her a servant in
her own home, and placing an unnecessary strain on the marriage in general. Television, such as the shows I listed above,
tells us this is ok.
Husbands and especially fathers need to have these skills,
and not just use them, but teach them to their families. They need to have the savvy to lead their
families in all manners of life. If the
husband doesn’t know something that the wife does, it behooves him to learn
that skill or that ability so that she is not the sole person responsible for
this task.
As it was designed in marriage and in the book of Genesis,
and is brilliantly illustrated in “God’s Umbrella of Protection”, seen below.
As you can see, God protects and cares for the family with
direct instruction to the husband to protect and care for the family starting
with the wife. The wife protects and
cares for the children. When we upset
this dynamic we upset the foundation of the family. When you place the wife in a leadership role
over the husband, you have made him weak.
When the husband places the wife between him and God, he has placed the burden
of leadership onto her.
The husband and wife share the responsibility for the
household, but the leadership, per the church, rests on the husband’s head and
altering this dynamic can lead to laziness on the husband’s part, an
unjustified sense of entitlement, and indirect instruction to the children that
the husband is subordinate to the wife.
This is
the dynamic that is intended, however it still also has to be maintained and
sometimes earned. If you look at the
dynamic on the diagram, the husband is over the wife, the wife over the
children, and God over all. Any basic
business class will tell you that whoever is in charge needs to be able to do
the functions of all those they oversee.
God, obviously can do anything.
He’s God. But the husband cannot
rely entirely on the wife for the care and upkeep of the household; he needs to
be able to perform these functions as well.
It’s called “Leading from the front”, and it goes along with “lead by
example.” I used this example a few
posts back but it bears repeating: the dirty kitchen. If the husband wants the kitchen cleaned, he
shouldn’t demand his wife do it, he should do it himself. It’s not the husband’s job to sit on a throne
and order the family around, he needs to be in the “trenches” as it were, with
them, performing the same tasks as they are, no matter how menial.
Sons will follow the paths blazed by their fathers,
sometimes to the same detrimental results.
Working in law enforcement I witnessed a father and his son come into
jail at the same time. The father was
subdued, ready to receive the outcome of his choices. The son, on the other hand, was boisterous,
verbally combative and disrespectful of the staff. As I was fingerprinting the father, I
recalled the report and asked if that was his son. With a great deal of regret he said “yes.” Too late the father realized that his son had
followed his path.
Fathers, both current and hopeful, what path do you want to
blaze for your children? This is where
we lead by example, by taking on the chores and responsibilities as they need
taking on, and in doing so leading. Then
as your children come to an age appropriate to handle these task, you teach
them how to do it so they can then carry on that life skill and that mindset
that fathers are the first, and sometimes most important, teachers their
children will ever have.
Yes you will be tired.
Yes it will be a long process. But
that is where prayer for patience and strength come in, and pray those prayers
with your children, not in spite of them, because as you are struggling to
teach, they are struggling to learn.
Going back around to television, again what we see on the
screen in many American sit coms is not what God intended, and while it’s
played for laughs it actually shows the beginning of relationships that will
tear themselves apart. Our benchmarks
should not be “Well at least I’m better than Peter Griffin.” They should be “At
least I’m better than I was, and with God’s grace I’ll be better than that
tomorrow.”
Thank you for reading.
