All the evidence points to men being special and fathers being vastly influential, even essential.

This Father’s Day week, please do something to honor a father you know. They need your affirmation, especially when the media, culture, and bad government policies tear them down.

Below is proof on the importance of fathers. Skim it to excite you about the great good that fathers can bestow upon their children. And if you’re a feminist skeptic, who thinks a woman can do everything a man can do, get ready to think anew!

“The Significance of a Father’s Influence,” Focus on the Family, 2011
Dr. David Popenoe, Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University and Co-Director of the National Marriage Project, has provided us with a good summary and overview of the subject. Here’s what he has to say:

Fathers are far more than just “second adults” in the home. Involved fathers – especially biological fathers – bring positive benefits to their children that no other person is as likely to bring. They provide protection and economic support and male role models. They have a parenting style that is significantly different from that of a mother and that difference is important in healthy child development. David Popenoe, Life Without Father, (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p. 163.

One of the most vital aspects of a dad’s contribution to the lives of his kids lies precisely in what Dr. Popenoe calls his “significantly different parenting style.” Men and women are different. As a result mothers and fathers parent their children differently.

Dads, for instance, love their children “more dangerously.” That’s because they play “rougher” and are more likely to encourage risk-taking. They provide kids with a broader diversity of social experiences. They also introduce them to a wider variety of methods of dealing with life. They tend to stress rules, justice, fairness, and duty in discipline. In this way, they teach children the objectivity and consequences of right and wrong. They give kids insight into the world of men. They prepare them for the challenges of life and demonstrate by example the meaning of respect between the sexes. In connection with this last point, research indicates that a married father is substantially less likely to abuse his wife or children than men in any other category.

Fathers encourage competition, engendering independence. Mothers promote equity, creating a sense of security. Dads emphasize conceptual communication, which helps kids expand their vocabulary and intellectual capacities. Moms major in sympathy, care, and help, thus demonstrating the importance of relationships. Dads tend to see their child in relation to the rest of the world. Moms tend to see the rest of the world in relation to their child. Neither style of parenting is adequate in and of itself. Taken together, they balance each other out and equip the up-and-coming generation with a healthy, well-rounded approach to life.

More research:

The Extent of Fatherlessness
The Consequences of Fatherlessness
The Causes of Fatherlessness
The Benefits of the “Father Effect”

“Why Fathers Are Important in a Child’s Life: 16 Key Reasons,” Callen Winslow

“Why Fathers Matter,” The Fathering Project (Australia)

“The Importance of Fathers,” A Father’s Place (South Carolina)

And here’s my personal encouragement for professing Christian fathers and their wives:

When fathers are strong, practical hope for our nation increases.

If you want a good culture and good government again, strengthen your own home with fathers being the center of it.

For when a man reads the Word of God and grows in God’s purposes, he needs and deserves his wife’s support, not her distrustful opposition.

Bottom line, we need real men to love King Jesus, and real women to intrinsically respect the man as the family’s loving leader. As a result, good wives receive more security, love, purpose, and peace.

This Father’s Day, let’s intrinsically value fathers and husbands – let’s strengthen men to be the men that God designed them to be!

My son, do not despise the chastening of the Lord,
Nor detest His correction;
For whom the Lord loves He corrects,
Just as a father the son in whom he delights.
Proverbs 3:11-12

Endure your suffering as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is there that a father does not discipline?
Hebrews 12:7

Put him into the garden – to dress it, and to keep it. — Horticulture, or gardening, is the first kind of employment on record, and that in which man was engaged while in a state of perfection and innocence. Though the garden may be supposed to produce all things spontaneously, as the whole vegetable surface of the earth certainly did at the creation, yet dressing and tilling were afterwards necessary to maintain the different kinds of plants and vegetables in their perfection, and to repress luxuriance. Even in a state of innocence we cannot conceive it possible that man could have been happy if inactive. God gave him work to do, and his employment contributed to his happiness; for the structure of his body, as well as of his mind, plainly proves that he was never intended for a merely contemplative life.
Adam Clarke commentary on Genesis 2:15