Deconstruction of the Godly Family by Television, or Time to Step Up Dads!

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.