One thing the boomer generation is not passing on is the experience of living in an intact family, what the younger generation yearns for.
Andrew Klaven visited a fourth grade class in a slum recently and was very pleased with himself with the 'riveted attention' of the students.
“Don’t take it personally,” the teacher told me brusquely. “It’s just that they’ve never seen anyone like you before. A man—obviously tough—who’s not a gangster.”
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I am: an unapologetic, because-I-said-so, head-of-household male. They used to call us “husbands” and “fathers” back in the day. That’s what these kids had never seen.
At Home in Splitsville, a young man laments
When I was born, my dad's mom was already remarried to a divorced man, who became my grandpa. And my dad's dad married a new woman - already divorced twice from the same man - who became my grandma; that pair are now divorced from each other. My mom's parents also re-coupled with other divorced people. My maternal grandma's new beau happened, through a previous marriage, to be the biological grandfather of three of my cousins. So he was both their paternal grandfather and maternal step-grandfather.
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as my wife and I look to start a family of our own. If my goal is to have a happy family - and it is - then surely ending my marriage and losing contact with my future children would be a tremendous failure. It seems the height of folly to declare "never, ever," especially in print. But that's what I want to do. I want to shout from the rooftops: "It won't happen to me! I've learned from their mistakes! I'm different!" And I think I am. I certainly hope so.
Dennis Prager has similiar thoughts and details what's been lost. When I Was a Boy, America Was a Better Place.
When I was boy, I was surrounded by adult men. Today, most American boys (and girls, of course) come into contact with no adult man all day every school day. Their teachers and school principals are all likely to be women. And if, as is often the case, there is no father at home (not solely because of divorce but because "family" courts have allowed many divorced mothers to remove fathers from their children's lives), boys almost never come into contact with the most important group of people in a boy's life -- adult men. The contemporary absence of men in boys' lives is not only unprecedented in American history; it is probably unprecedented in recorded history.