The video below is a bit over the top, but it still communicates a basic point that is too often absent today: a father ought to protect his daughter’s honor. I was a teen in the late 1970s, and though it was towards the end of an era, most of us young men still knew that any young lady we dated had a father to whom we were answerable for our actions. We knew that we were expected to return her to her home at a reasonable hour and that we were going to be held accountable for any transgressions, sexual or otherwise.
Frankly, it helped to remember that this young lady was someone’s daughter. And while the system wasn’t perfect, it was helpful. Accountability is always helpful.
Much has changed today. Fathers are often absent, or if not absent, at least more passive than in the past. Further, young people today marry later in life, when the influence of a father may well have decreased.
I offer simply this observation: parents (and other adults) no longer do so well by their teens and twenty-somethings. We used to offer dances so that they could meet. We used chaperone the younger ones so that imprudence did not destroy them. Yes, we used to act like parents/adults. Too often today there is little involvement either in helping young people to meet good candidates for marriage or in protecting them from their all-too-new passions, over which they need to develop mastery.
It’s time to recover the pivotal role of parents, to which this video points, even if in a comical way.
May the Judge of the living and the dead have mercy on us parents who fell short of our responsibilities. Mea culpa!
Nothing short of sharia law will check the behavior of adolescence in the western culture today because civil liberties, civil rights,judicial socialist activism, multiculturalism, political correctness and gender obscurity has run amuck. You can teach a child to fish but the government funded and controlled public education system is promising a happy meal short a few french fries. You can’t even go to the bathroom without the government butting in. Pun intended.
I found this commercial very funny and very refreshing. I remember those bygone days too – young men were VERY AWARE of the dad in the background, behind the daughter as she walked out of the door. Being a girl, I never saw the look that my escort probably saw as I walked out the door toward him. Thanks for the smile today.