Father Abandonment Issues Continued
Teen Pregnancy
Father abandonment affects females in one area where it simply cannot affect males. When dealing with reproduction, daughters who have absent fathers tend to repeat this cycle of family practice and create circumstances where the father is unlikely to remain part of the family unit. This practice manifests itself in teen pregnancies and daughters who have been abandoned by their father, emotionally, spiritually and physically, must try to make amends for this devastating loss, and the procreation of a baby seems like a useful solution to regain this love that was not present from the father.
Teen pregnancy is a problem that is affects society at a very deep level. It creates families prematurely and leaves the children or offspring in those families at a disadvantage in negotiating life. Ellis et al. (2003) provided in depth research on this correlation in their work and demonstrated certain statistical relationships that exist between father absence and their daughters being placed in a high risk situation for teenage pregnancy. They wrote "in modern Western societies, adolescent girls face a biosocial dilemma. On the one hand, the biological capacity to reproduce ordinarily develops in early adolescence; on the other hand, girls who realize this capacity before adulthood often experience a variety of negative life outcomes. Specifically, adolescent childbearing is associated with lower educational and occupational attainment, more mental and physical health problems, inadequate social support networks for parenting, and increased risk of abuse and neglect for children born to teen mothers."
A Social Cycle of Problems
A viscous cycle is started in this scenario and it becomes very difficult for the daughter to break free...
When young daughters of absent fathers seek such support they are often met with predatory agents who seek such vulnerable targets and look to exploit their weakness for various reasons. The role of the father to protect and uplift the daughter to help avoid these situations is not there and society itself is left to raise the daughter.
In many circumstances the mother will be the lone parent for daughters without a present father. The mother, living as a single woman, is exposed to the dating and courtship world when in a strong family the maternal role model is providing for her children and not herself. Daughters in this situation are forced to view dating and the attention of men as something more important than their own individual development and growth. The distortion in this problem is what leads to the pattern repeating itself. These daughters do not view their behavior as wrong, impractical or unacceptable. For many, this pattern repeats itself generation after generation and the results suggest that the destruction of the family unit is not very helpful to society in general and the ability to get along with one another at a large societal level.
To determine the determent of this problem, is difficult and complex because families and traditions can be shared in a number of ways. Draper & Harpending (1982) wrote " a sort of father absence is found in many societies of the world where father-absent upbringing is the usual or normative arrangement. Women in these societies have husbands and their children recognize particular men as their fathers; however, prevailing customs regarding the division of labor and relations between the sexes are such that men and women,…
