Faith leaders warned that the rise in fatherless households and family breakdowns across the region is being driven by shifting social attitudes, independence among women, and the erosion of traditional values that once held families together.
Speaking at a press conference on Thursday at the First Baptist Church, hosted by faith-based organisation Family Faith Freedom Barbados (FFFB), the religious figures said that while social progress has empowered women, it has also contributed to changes in family dynamics that have weakened the role of fathers and created long-term consequences for children and society.
Advocacy officer with the Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society, Philipa Davies, said the region’s family structure has deep historical roots. “Perhaps we could say that family life and family practice in the Caribbean is complex and multi-layered,” she said. “Many would say that our social history coming out of colonial plantation slavery set certain negative trends where marriage and committed family life were demeaned. But in the post-emancipation period, there were marriages and there was encouragement of marriage and there was strong church attendance in that period.”
However, she said those traditions began to erode in the 1960s and 1970s with what she described as the “sexual revolution” that sought to separate sex, marriage, and childbearing. “They freed up relationships. You could have pregnancy-free relationships,” she said. “But the reality is that by design, human beings were made for commitment, were made for needing each other, were made for supporting one another. And you cannot engage in sexual relationships and walk away unscarred. Not women, not men, not children.”
Davies said the modern belief that women could “do it all” without men had caused emotional harm and instability in homes. “Part of the lie of the sexual revolution is that women have been told that they could go ahead and be superwomen and do it by themselves, but they get burnt and children suffer even more,” she said.
Executive Director of FFFB, Hutson Inniss, said the problem of fatherless families reflected a wider societal evolution in which education and economic empowerment have led women to assume greater independence, reshaping traditional family roles. “It’s a good thing that women today are far more educated than their grandparents would have been,” he said. “But because of the success that the country has reaped in educating women, we now have women taking an independent position where it’s their destiny and they are perfectly happy to bring their children, to look after the educational needs of their children as well as the financial needs because they are working.”
He warned, however, that this independence had also encouraged the belief that fathers were no longer necessary to family life. “Women no longer look at the family structure as something that you have a father, you have a mother and you have the children because the modern trend has been to believe and to continue as if it is quite possible for families to exist with only one parent. It’s not necessary to have a man anymore,” Inniss said. “It is necessary to have a man, it is necessary to have the men.”
He added that growing independence on both sides had made separation easier, while some women blocked fathers from maintaining relationships with their children after disagreements. “Very often, the women refuse to allow the children to have access to the fathers,” he said. “They put up blockages so that the fathers cannot play a meaningful part in the lives of the children.”
Pastor Carl Barker of Shalem Evangelical Church also criticised the trend of intentional single motherhood, saying it deprived children of paternal guidance. “I understand that there are situations which will happen that you become a single mother,” he said. “But for a young person to aspire to be a single mother, you have taken a decision that you are going to deprive your offspring of any paternal guide. That is what you have done out of selfishness.”
He continued: “Let me use the man for what he has to offer and then out you go. And the child grows up and he gets to a point where he realises that something is missing.”
Pastor Paul of the First Baptist Church added that the dominance of women in childrearing had significant effects on how young men perceive relationships and gender roles. “Since we have the preponderance of women raising men, we have to look at how that is an impact on those men,” he said. “What are they learning? How are they perceiving a woman? What pattern of mind do they grow into?”
(SZB)
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