This Sunday is ‘Fathers’ Day’.  I hope all of us who are dads have a goal of being a better dad to our children than our own fathers were to us.  It is such a terrifyingly crucial role in our society.  Lots of people, other than biological fathers, choose or are invited to step into that role for countless young people.  Australian psychotherapist Steve Biddulph – author of the seminal 1997 book Raising Boys – has thought about these issues for almost 40 years, and he describes a sorrow for lost contact and love that boys and girls have for ‘absent fathers’ as, “father hunger”, a term first coined by Jungian writers.

“Role modelling is the way the human brain learns almost all complex behaviours, attitudes and skills, and so boys need to know good men close up. All of us are a bundle of the good people, male and female, we have known. But we have let that enrichment disappear on the male side, and many boys today have never seen what a good man looks like close up.”

“When I meet with groups of young dads,” Biddulph tells me, “I conduct a survey and the results are always the same. About 30 per cent of men report that they don’t even speak to their fathers. Their relationship is non-existent. Another 30 per cent have a somewhat prickly or difficult relationship. They do sometimes spend time with their father, but it’s a painful and awkward time. Around another 30 per cent fare somewhat better – they visit their father or phone him regularly, show up for family get-togethers, go through the motions of being a good son, and yet discuss nothing deeper than lawnmowers. Fewer than 10 per cent of men are friends with their father and see the relationship as deep and sustaining. Only about one man in 10 says, ‘My father is fantastic. He’s an emotional backstop in my world.’”

“A father’s absence from his daughter’s life has been found in research to increase her chances of risky sexual behaviour, experiencing teen pregnancy, doing poorly in school. For sons, it prevents them from seeing the fullness of what it means to be a man. There is no access to the interior world of male feeling,” he says. “There’s been a vast improvement in this over the past 20 years because of how much time fathers are now devoting to their children. But generations of men have carried the legacy of this gaping hole.”

All dads and those who step into that role for our daughters and sons need support and encouragement to deal with the day to day challenges and opportunities of the role.  Tickets are still available for our breakfast this Thursday 31 August with Darius Boyd at The Waves Sports Club.  All are welcome to come along and be encouraged on this journey.

Tickets: https://www.trybooking.com/CJXJY 

This Friday is a Student Free Day at Shalom.  Learner Conferences will take place for the Year 7 and 8 Core Studies classes. There will be no classes for all year levels.

Organ Donation will be highlighted with our Year 11 & 12 students during the next House Assembly with a specialist nurse from the Base Hospital coming to talk to them. The importance of this very worthy cause and the process to register to be an organ donor will be explained to the students.  For more information, follow the link via www.donatelife.gov.au or the Medicare app). You can join the register from 16 years of age – this is a vital conversation to have in your homes. It is no longer on our driver’s licence.  There are currently 1800 Australians waiting for a lifesaving transplant and 14,000 on dialysis who could benefit from a kidney transplant at some stage.  

Mr Dan McMahon
Principal
mcmahond@shalomcollege.com