#BrokenFamilies: Our South African Society needs healthy families and families need fathers.
In South Africa, only about a third of children have daily contact with their biological fathers.
This is an important contributing factor to the state of our society and all the social challenges we face in South Africa today.
At Action Society we care about families and believe that families need fathers, because children need the care and love of both their parents. We believe that healthy families are the building blocks of healthy societies and that it is of great importance that emphasis is placed on the crucial role of fathers in the lives of their children. Present and involved fathers provide a sense of security and stability and the way they are with their children has an enormous impact in the way children will value and respect themselves later in their lives.
But the general picture of positive fatherhood in South Africa is quite grim and we are all too acutely aware also of the alarmingly high rates of child abuse and neglect by men in South Africa.
In 2018, only 36% of children in South Africa lived with their biological fathers in the same household and even then involvement and quality caregiving is not guaranteed.
The rationale behind this #BrokenFamilies page, is to bring awareness about the state of families in South Africa. Awareness and a sincere attempt to understand the phenomenon are the first steps we need to take if we as a society are to address it.
Join us as we bring this phenomenon into the spotlight, delve deeper into the possible causes of fractured families, explore possible causes of absent and/or uninvolved fathers, investigate what the scope of impact of this phenomenon is on our society and eventually hopefully generate interventions and ideas to support families so that they can flourish.
The importance of involved, responsible and caregiving fathers are too often underscored and underappreciated. Therefore, we want to see fathers being healed to take up their responsibility as fathers and men, to bring healing to fractured families, to eventually bring healing to our very broken South African society.
