A Father's Voice: Introduction

This post is the first in what I hope will continue to be my Thursday series: A Father's Voice. The focus of the Thursday posts will be to address the challenges, triumphs and practicalities of being a Christian father in 21st century America.

I continue to see a need to reinvigorate fatherhood in America. Deadbeat dad should never be a household term, nor should we allow fathers to abdicate their responsibility or authority over their children. Parenting is ideally a team project, the mother's voice and father's voice speaking in unison, raising and training up a child. The deficit in fatherhood comes, I think, first from the fact that so many children are raised without a father (or perhaps a father partially there with shared custody.) Those of us blessed enough to have fathers learned fatherhood primarily by example, sometimes good, sometimes not. Somewhere, it seems, we lost fatherhood 101 - what does it mean to be a father and how do you do it? I'm not advocating a one-size-fits-all checklist, but it would be good to at least have some good overarching guidelines.

This series is my attempt to put some form to my nebulous thoughts, to help them solidify into something concrete and to make whatever intelligence I may gather "actionable." To that end, I start with a very practical piece of advice: kill your television.