Father’s Day was first organised in 1910 but did not become an official holiday until 1972, sixty-two years later. One might consider this delay a minor bureaucratic footnote, but it tells us something significant about how men were once viewed; as fixtures, not figures; as necessary but not notable.
The holiday arrived late because the acknowledgement of fathers arrived late. There was a widely held, unspoken assumption that men did not need a day dedicated to them. They were seen as not fragile, not sentimental, and, in popular imagination, immune to the sting of neglect.
We now know this perception is not true. Men are not immune; they are not naturally stoic but have been conditioned to be.
They feel pain, they fracture, they fail. They can also flourish, but often only when someone is watching, when someone affirms that their contributions matter. What I wonder is whether we have moved past neglect into something more alarming.
Have fathers, like whales and pangolins, become a species in need of active preservation?
Consider the numbers. In Uganda, roughly one in three children lives in a home without a biological father; 36 percent, according to Unicef. Divorce rates have climbed globally.
Unemployment among men, particularly young men, has become a structural crisis. Substance use disorders disproportionately affect men, leading them to die from drug overdoses at roughly twice the rate of women. These figures represent coordinates on a map of collapse.
We tend to talk about crime, unemployment, addiction, and family breakdown as if they are isolated issues. They are not.
They converge in the home and in the absence of a father. If 30 percent of households lack a father today, we can reasonably expect that figure to rise in the next generation. Fatherlessness is not a static condition; it replicates.
Children who grow up without a father do not simply miss a parent; they miss a vital template. They have no guide for how to navigate parenthood themselves.
The model was once clear: the father was a guide, provider, counsellor, and protector. This role was not always heroic; sometimes, it was merely functional. But it was present and visible, and what is not visible cannot be learned.
In the Bible, John 5:19 states, ‘Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does, the Son also does.’
This reflects the idea of imitation and the transmission of behaviour, assuming a father is present to imitate. What happens when he is absent? What occurs when the only role models are abstract, remote, or completely missing? The answer is not speculative; we are living it.
Daughters are not exempt from this issue. They learn their first grammar of relationships from the man who raises them. If that grammar is incomplete, they may spend years trying to write in fragments. Often, if a father did not stay, they may question why anyone else should. If love was conditional, why should trust be absolute?
I had two years with my father before he left one afternoon to buy groceries and did not return. He disappeared most ordinarily, with the simplest of errands. I do not remember the groceries, but I remember the silence that followed. I also remember his generosity; he gave freely to anyone, without calculation.
That instinct travelled with me. Everywhere I went, people helped me because he had helped them. His currency was goodwill, which retained its value long after he was gone. From him, I learnt that giving is not a loss; it is a deposit.
What we need now is not sentimentalism. We need fathers who stay. We need fathers who are present not because they are perfect, but because they are persistent. We need men who understand that their role is crucial, not optional or transferable.
It is not something that can be outsourced to a paycheck or a weekend. The crisis we face is not about masculinity in the abstract; it is about children who will never know what it means to have a father who shows up. And if they never know, they will never show up for their own children.