The Masculinity Crisis Has One Root Cause: Absent Fathers | Dr. Pat Fagan

What is masculinity? What makes a man be a good husband and father? And why do children need their fathers—not just as providers, but as a daily presence in their lives?

Dr. Pat Fagan joins us to explore fatherhood, masculinity, marriage, and the role of fathers in raising healthy, confident children. He explains why a father’s presence is essential to a child’s development, how fathers help boys grow into men, and how a father’s love and attention shapes a daughter’s understanding of what a good man looks like.

Dr. Fagan also discusses the importance of the husband-wife relationship and why the love between a child’s mother and father provides the foundation children need to thrive. From playing with your children to teaching sons about responsibility, self-mastery, purity, and manhood, he offers practical insight into what strong fatherhood looks like.

This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation on the masculinity crisis and fatherhood. Discover why present fathers are essential to healthy families—and why the absence of fathers is having profound consequences for the next generation.

Article by Dr. Pat Fagan: Raising boys to be great husbands: A Christian perspective for fathers. — The Centre for Male Psychology

Other HLI articles on fatherhood: Learning to Be Men: Why Young Men Need Present Fathers | Human Life International

Episode Transcript

Colleen: Hello, and welcome to Living a Culture of Life, a podcast by Human Life International. I’m your host, Colleen Haupt, and I’m joined today by Dr. Pat Fagan. Welcome!

We’re going to be talking today about fatherhood, and this is going to be a two-part episode. This is the first part, and then we’ll film a second part after this. For the first one, I’d like to talk basically about the positive: Why do kids need dads? What are the positive aspects of fatherhood? Then, in our second episode, we can move into how fatherhood is under attack, because I feel like we can’t really discuss why it’s under attack and what the dangers of that are if we don’t understand why it’s important in the first place and why kids really need their dads around.

So thank you so much for joining us today. And before we get started on the fatherhood thing, can you just talk a little bit about the value of your background for our listeners—how you started looking at fatherhood and what your background is?

Dr. Pat Fagan: Well, actually, I ended up with fatherhood. I grew up in Ireland, a grade-school teacher, and went back to college to become a clinical psychologist. Then, in Ireland, clinical psychology was a relatively new profession, so I went abroad to get more training and experience—to Canada first and then down to Washington to do a doctorate. Then I stayed here. I met my wife and gradually shifted fields.

From clinical, where I dealt essentially with children, family, and marriage—normally triggered by kids, though I did work a lot also with adults. But if a kid was referred, that led to the whole family, and that led to the marriage.

In any case, while I was here doing the doctorate, I had worked clinically for about five years before starting the doctorate. I realized government was undermining—government programs, sex ed, and school sex clinics. You know, there was really an undermining of sexuality within the school, the traditional moral norms, and I saw that as highly dysfunctional.

I said, “Wait, though. I’m in the craziness business. If you’re a clinical psychologist, and this is the biggest craziness out there…” So I gradually switched. It wasn’t overnight; it was over about two years. I switched into public policy and then learned how to do that, but it was all on marriage, family, religion, and, of course, sexuality is right at the core of it.

Family is the Core of Society

If you take care of family and you take care of religion, a society—not seeing legislators—most of your social problems disappear. Most of our problems across the West are caused by the breakdown of marriage and the gradual going away from religious worship. And the data shows this overwhelmingly. It’s so strong. It’s a real crime that social scientists, academic social scientists, don’t make this available to kids in college.

Colleen: It makes sense that if kids are growing up in a stable unit, then they’re going to be able to be stable citizens. And then if you have—like, a father needs to be able to provide, so he needs to be working, so there needs to be some kind of economy. And it makes sense that if you have a strong family, you’re going to have a strong culture surrounding that and a strong society, and you need worship for that.

Dr. Pat Fagan: Okay, yeah, yeah. But after worship, things get a lot worse. And that ought to be a major concern because worship is decreasing. We were the most worshiping modern society in the Western world, and we probably still are, but it’s dropping steadily.

Colleen: Is that only Christian worship, or just religious things across the board?

Dr. Pat Fagan: It’s across the board. You know, we have many religions in this country—Catholics, Protestants, Jews, but then you have Muslims. And actually, when you look at a number of things—for instance, fertility across the globe—the single biggest contributor to higher fertility is weekly worship by women.

Colleen: Interesting.

Dr. Pat Fagan: Oh, yeah. Actually, women who worship weekly across the globe, regardless of culture and religion, [have] 3.2 children. It used to be 3.6 about ten years ago. It’s now 3.2. Women who don’t worship at all: 1.2. There’s a huge difference. They’re going out of existence, and these are growing and replenishing.

Colleen: That’s really fascinating. I’ve never thought about the connection between worship directly on someone and their fertility. It makes sense in the general idea of, like, “Well…”

Dr. Pat Fagan: Let me give you the first one that I came across when I was doing a dissertation. I was in sociology while I was at Heritage and using the Add Health survey, which is one of our biggest [surveys] and all the rest. And I was doing it on these topics of intact married family, all the different family structures, and frequency of religious worship, and looking at their influence on all sorts of things.

The kids who do best in high school—combined scores, if you take math and English as good representatives—kids who worship weekly are the ones who are doing best in the country. And it goes like this: weekly worship, a couple of times a month, a couple of times a year, never. Straight linear down. It’s a dose effect.

And so it goes on—on every single measure measured in the U.S. federal data system, adults, kids, and families—those who worship weekly do best as a group on everything measured.

Colleen: That’s pretty cool.

Dr. Pat Fagan: That’s blooming phenomenal. That’s off the charts.

A Father’s Impact on his Children’s Religion

Colleen: Okay, so now I have a question. This is actually a great segue into fatherhood, because I heard of a study one time that was showing that kids whose fathers go to church are more likely to stay in the religion. Do you know if that’s true or not?

Dr. Pat Fagan: Pretty true. And so, across the globe, women tend to be the ones who do religion more, are more religious. You go to church—Catholics say it’s true in every religion. But the men are the ones who have the real transmission power. When a father worships, his kids are drawn to worship. Mother, not at all to the same degree.

Colleen: Why is that? Why is it that the father would have that kind of transmission power?

Dr. Pat Fagan: Well, here we will go outside of social science for this. I think there’s a big existential thing there. And ultimately, I think, you know, you get into the social science, you get into the hypotheses, you get into the philosophy, and then ultimately what you’re dealing with here is a religious question. Well, if you want to go to the core of religion, everything leads back to God the Father.

Colleen: Everything. Yeah. So God the Son leads you back to God the Father all the time. Our Lady leads you to God the Son, who leads you to God the Father.

Dr. Pat Fagan: Yeah, yeah. And just keep going from there. So fatherhood—you see, human nature has created human beings as God’s children. He’s created us, you know, because he wants a huge family. That’s for certain. Some of us please Him; some of us don’t. But, you know, He’s got to have them, and He’s got to give them free will, so He’s going to have that fallout.

But it is all about having family and being relational, and all of it leads back to Him because that’s where it all started.

And in the end, actually, if you think about it, before time began, and after the world collapses and all the universes or whatever—they all become black holes or whatever—whether it’s the end tomorrow or a billion or ten million years from now, regardless, ultimately, at the end, from Adam through the Old Testament, you know, Abraham and all the rest, David, up to Our Lord, from Our Lord through the Church and on into things, and then eventually there’s going to be an end and it’s all over.

Why did God do all that? For us to have a large family with Him in heaven forever.

Colleen: Yeah. For Himself, with us.

Dr. Pat Fagan: He did it for Himself. He did it for us. That’s His great love, but He’s the one who did it. And anything He does is always to His own good. It can’t but be otherwise.

Colleen: But He also didn’t need us, but He—

Dr. Pat Fagan: Still did it.

Colleen: Yeah.

Dr. Pat Fagan: Oh, I’d forget about “He didn’t need us.” That’s a theoretical thing. We’re here. He is. He doesn’t want it any other way, and He wants us. I don’t care whether He needs us. He wants us.

Colleen: Yeah. That’s kind of more the distinction. I agree with the theology, but it’s an abstract, “angels on the point of a needle” sort of thing. So, if we’re going to go off with God the Father, then, on a human level, why do kids need their dads?

Dr. Pat Fagan: Well, first of all, they need them to come into existence.

Colleen: Well, yeah.

Dr. Pat Fagan: No, no, that’s huge. That’s the beginning of it all, and one of the massive violations of human rights in this country—like, women forget that.

Colleen: Yeah. I think it’s easy to take for granted.

Dr. Pat Fagan: Take it for granted? God help you. If you take the mother being necessary for the kid for granted, that’s true—you will be rightfully drummed out of, you know—

Colleen: Yeah.

The Love Between a Father & Mother is Critical

Dr. Pat Fagan: But the same is true for the father. Now, his contribution—people say about this contribution, yeah, it’s one ten-thousandth the size. The sperm is one ten-thousandth the size of the egg. The egg is ten thousand times bigger. That’s huge.

But it massively transforms everything and begins life.

And actually, then, what is also very clear from all the data—you look at all the family-structure data and the outcomes—in order to become the adult the child, the boy or the girl, is meant to be, they have the potential. In order for that to happen, they need the marriage of their mother and father.

Actually, they need the love between the mother and father more than they need the love directed at them.

Colleen: Interesting. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Dr. Pat Fagan: Yeah. It was one of the first big insights I got before I came to the doctorate, while I was in Canada. My practice was with severe psychiatric patients, and that was really doing tests and getting the diagnosis. But where my interests today was on the other side, and that started with children.

Typically, I’d get referrals from pediatricians and family practitioners, and the typical referral was, “Pat, would you have a look at this kid? This is a mid-child, from four to, we say, eight or nine. Have a look at this kid. I don’t think there’s anything—there’s nothing medically wrong. I think it’s psychological.”

Well, by the third year, cutting to the quick, I wouldn’t see the kid. I could see the whole family. And once—and if I had a three-year-old—then I could very quickly, or much more quickly, figure out what was going on in the family because three-year-olds say everything. Four-year-olds have learned to keep their mouth shut, but three-year-olds say it all. No filter at all.

And then I would peel the parents off because I’d see where the conflicts were. And in 28 out of 30 cases—the 30 cases from the time I started doing this—I never had to do a thing with 28, because the symptoms disappeared once the order and the amity between Mom and Dad was established.

Colleen: Wow. Like, I guess I know in theory that the relationship between the parents is important, but it’s interesting to think that it’s that fundamental. The parents—their love for each other—is so important, because you would just naturally assume that the amount of love that a child is getting from a parent is going to be more influential in their life. But that’s really fascinating, that it’s the love between the mother and the father that leads to that.

Dr. Pat Fagan: And it makes sense within the family. Once it’s there, that is by far the strongest thing. The way I would sum up the research for married couples is, look, you can benefit the kids if you take phenomenal care of each other. So if the father is constantly wooing his wife and the wife is constantly wooing him, well, the way they did before they were married—yeah, now, not doing exactly the same thing because they’re not married, but putting thought into it and all the rest.

I would think a good norm, even for those who have large families and lots of kids, is a date once a week. Now, that doesn’t mean going out, because if you’ve got lots of kids, you may not have the money to go out. But you can still have a date.

And the kids can get to know, like, Wednesday night, eight o’clock: Mom and Dad’s date time starts. And they put thought into it, and mother puts two candles or one candle at the table. She gets dressed and made up and all the rest of it, the way she would have done when she was hoping to win this fine young man as her husband.

Colleen: Not taking him for granted, in a sense.

Dr. Pat Fagan: Oh, the very opposite. That’s wooing her husband.

Colleen: Yeah, like the very opposite. I guess I could be—I don’t know, I have the image in my mind right now with, like, an overflowing teacup. Like, if they’re both pouring into their relationship, it’s going to overflow for the kids. The kids are going to benefit from it, and it’s actually—they see it, they sense it, they absorb it. It’s almost like osmosis.

Does it help them have, I guess, better relationships later on, too, if they’ve seen what a healthy relationship looks like?

Dr. Pat Fagan: The biggest education—the biggest, longest premarital course—is what happens, what the kids experience of their parents’ marriage. That is the most powerful pre-Cana there is.

Colleen: That makes sense.

Dr. Pat Fagan: For good or for ill. Like, if there are things in the marriage the parents are not taking care of, that’s going to damage the kids and likely damage their marriage, and even their grandkids’ marriage.

Colleen: How do you get out of that?

Dr. Pat Fagan: Thought, prayer, friends, therapy—you know, all sorts of ways to get out of that, to break those cycles once you realize it.

Colleen: But you have to recognize it first. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Pat Fagan: Oh, well, you or your spouse will recognize it.

Why Children Need Their Father—Developmentally

Colleen: That’s true. So, going back to the fatherhood thing, then, how do—obviously, fathers are important for the existence of the child. How do they help the child, like, growing up developmentally? Are there any—oh, look, I mean, I know that that’s a really broad topic. But are there anything specific that stands out to you of, like, why young children need a father present?

I guess I’ve heard—I know of men who have said that they thought being a good dad is just being a good provider. Like, you go to work and you bring the money home. So it seems like the father’s actual presence in the home is also going to be important for the kids, that it’s not just—

Dr. Pat Fagan: Actually, the father who sees his job as just a provider has it all wrong. I mean, it’s good that he’s a provider. But his conception of family and of marriage is wrong, okay, and dysfunctional, and it’s going to hurt these kids.

That’s putting a lot on the line. Because he’s actually staying distant from his kids. So what the kids need is the very opposite. They need a dad. Actually, here’s a shortcut—a shortcut for being a good father is plenty—spending plenty of time playing with your kids from the beginning.

Colleen: Okay. Can you expand on that? I’m curious, like, what—

Dr. Pat Fagan: Well, because the dad is the big vehicle for the kids getting confidence in themselves. Look, you think of this in your own—for a child to see the delight in their father’s eyes when the father comes to them, that’s the single biggest gift a dad can give. You know, it just comes alive: “My son, my little son, my daughter,” and they run to him.

Colleen: Yeah.

Dr. Pat Fagan: Kids who run to their father run to them because they see that in his eyes. It’s the same between husband and wife, you know. And the kids—this is what the kids would see when Dad comes home: Does Mom’s eyes all light up? If they don’t, there’s something wrong in the marriage. Or there’s something dying in the marriage, or there’s something stale in the marriage. They need—

Well, why is Dad necessary for the kids? When they know Dad delights in them, and the only way they know that is that he gives them time and plays with them and all the rest. If he keeps distant, they’re doubtful: “Does my dad love me?”

You know, that’d be a very natural question. You know, people say he does, but I don’t—I don’t believe it deep down. Whereas the kid whose dad plays with them all the time and tumbles and all of us—there’s all sorts of variants on the play—but that’s the big thing. Dad gives them confidence that they themselves are lovable human beings.

Colleen: Why is that different than mothers? Why is fatherhood specific there? Because I feel like a mother also is going to make a child—and I’m not trying to downplay motherhood. I’m just trying to figure out—is it—it seems like it would be different than just parental love in general. So what makes fatherhood in that case different than maternal love?

Dr. Pat Fagan: Well, first of all, he’s a man. He’s totally different.

Colleen: Okay.

Dr. Pat Fagan: And they’re likely going to marry, be they boy or girl. They’re going to be married in the opposite sex. So the experience of Dad is massive in shaping their conception of what it means to be a man with a woman or a woman with a man. That’s molded by that.

And the marriage relationship is the foundation relationship of every society. That’s why we’re in deep trouble. That’s why the West is in trouble. The whole purpose of marriage and children are integral. You can’t disconnect them. Once you disconnect them—and that’s what contraception began to do—yeah, everything, you know, the sex begins to go wrong, loads and loads.

But let’s come back and leave that contraception topic to the side. The child exists because of Mom and Dad. The child thrives when Mom and Dad’s love thrives. I told you that anecdotally, but that plays out in all sorts of ways.

Dad without Dad—now, the single mother can do lots of things, but she can’t give what only Dad can give. And they don’t get the triangle here.

Colleen: Like, if you have a single mom, you don’t get the triangle?

Dr. Pat Fagan: You know, you can’t, because Dad is out there. And she actually—the love and the functionality of the single-mother family holds quite strong, actually, because single mothers tend to be very devoted to their kids.

And that works fine up to about eight, nine, ten, somewhere there. And then it begins to get difficult for them because the kids are getting towards the teens, and this is where, you know, the male-female difference and aspects of pre-puberty and then puberty—it’s a totally different game.

And the single mother can’t pull off what a married couple can. And the kids, you know, by and large, are damaged by it—are weakened by it. “Damaged” is the wrong word. Weakened. Don’t develop capacities that they could and would if they had the devoted dad there.

Colleen: Okay. I’m trying to figure out how to phrase this question. So, I’ve studied a little bit of the Montessori theory of how basically what happens to a child between zero and six—a lot of those problems can kind of go under the radar. They don’t really come to the surface until they’re a teenager.

Dr. Pat Fagan: That’s right.

Colleen: So you were saying that it’s really, really important to have the father around. The single mother can’t do it alone once they’re teens. Does that mean that the father’s presence is also super critical when the child’s, like, zero to six, in order to develop that?

Dr. Pat Fagan: It’s critical all the way along. The zero to six are the foundational years. That’s also when it’s the easiest time for Dad to bond with his kids, to play with the kids, to get close to the kids. If he leaves later, he can’t pull it off.

Colleen: Interesting.

Dr. Pat Fagan: And won’t pull it off. He’s got the habit of not being close, and they’ve developed a habit of a distant Dad. On everything in growth, across all forms, all parts of creation—animal growth, plant growth, all the rest—the earliest times are the most critical. They set the rest in motion. So how you set it in motion is huge.

Like, one of the greatest discoveries in my book in the social sciences happened in Taiwan in 2017. In a teaching hospital—a maternity teaching hospital in northern Taiwan—they experimented. And what came out of it was fathers who held their newborn babies skin-to-skin for 15 minutes for three days. That was the experiment. And compared them to the normal dads who didn’t, because that’s an unusual thing.

The bonding between the father and the child, three months, six months, and a year later, between the two is just huge. Huge difference. The easiest of things to do. Massive effect.

The great news is, actually, and there’s been follow-up: the brain changes in both, and they change much the same. The baby’s brain is changing almost in response to Dad’s. The hormones between the two of them change massively.

Now, if you add the mother now watching this taking place, she is absolutely delighted to see her husband, the father of the child, take their child to himself. And what’s happening in her brain and her hormones—there’s a whole—it’s like a little Trinity on Earth. There’s a whole cascading going on around there.

Boys Need Their Father to Introduce Them to Masculinity

Dr. Pat Fagan: So the father—and then when you get to the teen years, the post-puberty, Dad is the one who inducts his son into manhood.

Now, he’ll have laid the basis through the thing, but he’s the one who can talk to his boy like nobody else on Earth can talk and say, “Look, son, you’re going to pre-puberty.” He gets him ready for the changes that are going to take place—the pleasure he’s going to wake up one night [experiencing], that strange new pleasure, wet dreams.

Girls go through menarche, and that’s a real rite of passage. Every girl knows when she becomes an adult woman. Boys it’s subtler, but with Dad, the dad can induct his boy and prepare him for that.

And then imagine this: for the whole struggles—the hard work a boy has to do to become a competent man. He’s got a couple of areas he’s got to take care of, and he’s got to start in his teen years because that’s when you start becoming responsible for yourself.

And if Dad is tutoring you and inducting you in—not pushing you, because if you push, the boys go to push back. He’s coming into his independence. If you don’t respect his independence, forget it. He ain’t going to listen. So it takes—that’s where the love of the dad and the boy’s confidence in his dad, that’s all laid down pre-puberty.

You know, it starts way back. If Dad and the boy are close, the boy is going to listen to his dad because he loves him and he has confidence in him, and he knows his dad is out for his good.

So, particularly, the whole struggle to be pure and to put the ideal of purity of heart—I want you to marry the most beautiful, drop-dead-gorgeous, virtuous woman you can find. Okay, now, if you ever see her, will you be able to woo her? Would she be interested in you if she’s that great? Are you going to be great enough to attract a great woman? A great woman’s not going to be attracted by a wimp, you know, or whatever. You substitute all sorts of faults.

So the dad who sort of puts the ideal and then talks to his son about his own—how does he handle his sexuality? How does he stay faithful to the boy’s mother when he’s away on trips? You know, when there’s porn or whatever, how did he struggle in all these things?

So there, the dad is essentially leading his boy into manhood, early manhood—the necessity of prayer, you know, how to treat girls, how to grow in that. But a lot of it is how you master yourself interiorly, how you study, because the study is in preparation of work. And that great girl ain’t going to marry a guy who can’t support her or their kids.

It’s amazing. Women don’t—guys don’t realize this. I overheard this one of these things where there was a whole chat going on. These were girls in their young twenties when I was at graduate school myself, and a bunch of guys—we were out walking, and with girls. But the girls got into a group and dropped behind, and we were in a group up ahead.

My sneakers became untied, so I was tying them, and the girls’ group came up. And I realized these—all wonderful young women—were assessing the income potential of me and my buddies up in front. Now, I’m sure that was a conversation that women often have but never let men know. It’s like one of these secret conversations women have.

Dr. Pat Fagan: So actually, to tell us—to tell your son, look, women assess you. And that’s true across the whole animal kingdom. You know, where you have male and female birds, it doesn’t matter—cows, whatever—the ones they’re interested in are the guys who could—

That’s not the only thing for a girl, but it is a significant thing. You know, “If I’m going to marry him, will he—can he take care of me and the children, particularly when we’re very vulnerable?” And a lot of those other things. That’s how a woman will assess a great guy.

Now you can see the role of Dad there. Now, take the boy who doesn’t have a close dad. What happens? How is his sexuality formed today? God help him—with the internet, with porn. Just those two things for a start.

Colleen: And they’re going to hit a point where they don’t want their mom to be telling them—no way. How to do that. Like, even if a mother’s like, “Don’t get into that,” then they’re still not learning it from a man. They’re more likely to listen to some man on the internet talking about women than—

Dr. Pat Fagan: Yeah. Okay. Today, just given the state of the world, dads are needed even more. And as a result, actually, one of the things that came out of my consideration of these things—and it occurred to me decades ago when I was assessing the impact of different UN treaties that we have taken, and lots of the world have taken, on essentially marriage and family stuff—there are a few things I didn’t like, but every single one of them would have been cured if a particular right was in there.

And that’s the right of every child to the marriage of his biological parents. I think that is—well, I don’t want to start weighing one against the other, but I rank it right up there with the right to life.

And as a matter of fact, if we teach that to our teenagers, they begin to see—we not only just make them delve into it—why is this? And it’s an innate element, right? It just comes like the baby—the fetus didn’t ask to come into existence. It was you, Dad, and you Mom, brought me into existence. Now you owe me your marriage, because without it I can’t become the adult I’m meant to be.

Colleen: Yeah, yeah. It sounds like a whole other podcast episode right there, because—

Dr. Pat Fagan: Well, I’d love to delve into that and get that.

Colleen: Let’s do it.

Dr. Pat Fagan: Yeah, because that’s—there’s so much to unpack there.

Colleen: And there is. There’s a huge amount.

Dr. Pat Fagan: But without Dad, and without the marriage, they won’t become—And that’s what happened all around. We can see we have a crisis of all sorts, and the male and female are dropping behind because you get this huge disparity between males and females, increasingly in high school, college, all the rest.

And none of the experts—I have not heard one point this out—the girls, by and large, stay with their mother when the family breaks up. And she’s a pretty strong woman to take care of the kids, go out to work, and that’s there. So you’ve got a full life. The girls are getting the modeling of a strong woman. Dad is absent.

Colleen: Yeah, for a huge amount.

Dr. Pat Fagan: Okay, he has no model. And what’s more—you know, what we’d get into in the second podcast—but in any case, it’s the difference that’s making the huge difference. The absence of Dad at home is causing this male-female—and there’s a lot of other things pushing it, but they’re all pushing in the same direction, causing this massive disparity between males and females.

Colleen: Now, what you look to is, like, if a girl is looking at a single mom being like, “That’s what it takes to be a good woman. That’s what it takes to be a strong woman,” and you just assume that men aren’t going to be in the picture, that’s going to mess with that.

Dr. Pat Fagan: A woman cannot deliver for her sons what a married—her marriage to a good man would deliver.

A Father’s Impact on His Daughters

Colleen: I don’t even think she can deliver for her daughters without having—speaking as the daughter, and having seen, like, friends and all that, seeing girls who go through puberty and deal with, like, anxiety or depression or whatever—girls who had strong father figures were able to work through that a lot easier than girls who didn’t have a father or didn’t have a good, strong father figure in their life.

I think that they get hit harder with that—just being able to feel like you’re worth being loved for who you are, and all the insecurities that come with middle school and high school. If you have a good relationship with your father, you’re able to kind of stand your ground better going through that than girls who don’t have that.

So even, like—obviously they’re important. I mean—they’re important for both children, but, like, obviously they’re important for helping their sons reach maturity.

Dr. Pat Fagan: Yeah, they’re all emphasizing the masculine side, but there’s the feminine side as well.

Colleen: I can just speak to the daughter’s side better.

Dr. Pat Fagan: Yeah, but you—you know, the daughter who sees that she’s the apple of her father’s eye, that he delights in her presence—that’s the obvious ideal of every girl.

Colleen: Yeah. And being Daddy’s girl sets her up for what kind of—what she’s looking for in relationships with men and what she’s going to expect from—not like she’s expecting her husband to be a father to her, but that’s what sets her up for, like, what makes a good man and what makes a good—

Dr. Pat Fagan: I’ll show you the data, by the way. The closer a girl is to her father, the less likely she is to get involved sexually with boys.

Colleen: That makes sense.

Dr. Pat Fagan: And when father is absent or distant, as she hits, you know, puberty, post-puberty, and now she’s a young woman and she’s fertile, and all the hormones and all the rest—she’s seeking a male. If Dad is not the one filling that, then she seeks him out there. And, of course, the male she’s going to pick up is not likely to be the best.

Colleen: Well, that’s been a really interesting conversation on fatherhood. So I’m going to wrap up this episode, and then we can film the next one, which will be on how fatherhood is under attack in today’s world and what we can kind of do about that.

And so, to all of our listeners, tune in next week for the next part of this series. Thank you so much for listening with us today.

Keep on living the culture of life. Thank you, and God bless.