As Father's Day approaches (20 June), the state of fatherhood is in crisis all over the world. In the United States, only 63% of all households with children contain two parents. For most children, this means having either no father-figure or a part-time father through court-mandated visitation rights..
Millions of single mothers rise early everyday to wake their children, dress them, make their lunches, drop them at school, work a full-time job, leave early to attend their children's club and sporting events, pick them up from school, make dinner, review their homework and put them to bed with all the love and hope in the world.
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As truly awe-inspiring as these mothers can be, they cannot take the place of a loving, mentoring father. Consider the following statement by President Woodrow Wilson as a man in his 50s in remarks made to the Princeton Alumni Association on 29 May 1914:
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'As I look back on my boyhood, it seems to me that all the sense I got, I got by association with my father. He was good fun; he was a good comrade; and the experience he had had put a lot of sense in him that I had not been endowed with by birth. By constant association with him, I saw the world and the tasks of the world through his eyes, and because I believed in him I aspired to do and be the thing that he believed in.'
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If you are fortunate enough to have a loving and caring father - or be married to one or know one in your family - Kleostoday recommends that whatever you plan to do to celebrate their success in fatherhood on Sunday, double it.
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Good fathers, one of the rarest and most precious elements of human existence, do not last forever. Their love, however, always lives on in their children.
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J Roquen