A Generation Without Fathers – and What We Learned

I was born in the early 1960s. It was a time of change, a time when the word freedom was on everyone’s lips. Freedom for women, freedom for men, freedom for all. People spoke of equality, of rights, of a new society where old norms would be broken down. There was a strong sense that anything was possible.

But freedom always comes at a price, and often it is paid by those who never asked for it. For us children, the price was high. Marriages were entered into quickly, and just as quickly they fell apart. The big words spoken at the altar – “till death do us part” – became, for many, just empty phrases. In reality, relationships were short-lived, families broke apart, and children grew up in fractured homes.

We became a generation without fathers.

The Suburbs – and a Childhood Without Male Role Models

I grew up in a suburb. It wasn’t a unique place – it looked the same in many areas across the country. People lived close together, often in newly built housing estates, and everyone knew each other’s stories. Almost all the children I knew grew up with single mothers. Our fathers were elsewhere.

The male role models we got were temporary and sporadic. Maybe a teacher at school, sometimes a youth leader, perhaps a neighbor who cared. But at home there was rarely a father who stayed, who was there when everyday life got heavy. Mothers had men who came and went, but they never became lasting figures in our lives.

It was poor at home. Economically, yes – but also emotionally. Many women struggled to provide for their children. Some took whatever jobs they could find. Others turned to the most traditional – and most vulnerable – way of survival: selling their bodies. We children didn’t understand it then. But as the years went by, we came to see. Today we can look back and understand the desperation and the pain.

Becoming a Copy of Our Childhood

When you grow up in an environment, you don’t just learn from what you’re told – you learn from what you see. And that has become the greatest lesson for me: children don’t do as we say, they do as we do.

When it was our generation’s turn to build families, many of us fell back into the same patterns as our parents. We became copies of our own upbringing. We could promise ourselves that we would never do the same, but when life tested us, we had no other maps than the ones we inherited from home.

I am one example. I had three children with two different women. And I failed to keep the families together. It is heavy to admit, but it is the truth. I became a mirror of my own childhood. I didn’t do what I wanted, I did what I had been taught – without even realizing it.

The Broken Map

If you have never seen what a functioning family looks like, how can you create one yourself? If all you have learned is that love fades, promises break, and people disappear – how can you build something lasting?

Many of us stumbled forward with broken maps in our hands. We wanted so badly to find another way, but we had no real landmarks. And when we stumbled, when we failed, it became yet another link in the chain: children growing up without whole families.

That’s why I say we were not failures as human beings. We were children who never got the tools. We learned betrayal before we learned stability. We learned that men disappear before we learned what it means to stay.

Meeting Single Mothers

Later in life, I met several women who lived alone with their children, just like my mother did. I wanted to help, to bring order into their chaos. But every time I realized the same thing: a man, even with honest intentions and backbone, can never fix the chaos alone.

It is a chaos built over time – through broken relationships, financial struggles, emotional scars. It takes more than love to set it right. It takes two people who both want to, who both have the strength, and who both can build together.

And maybe that is where it often breaks down. When one is tired and worn down and the other tries to “rescue,” it rarely becomes equal. And without equality, there can be no real security.

The Downside of Freedom

When I look back on my childhood and my own life, I often think about the word freedom. Because in the 1960s, that was the slogan. Freedom for women to leave a bad marriage. Freedom for men to walk away from a responsibility they did not want to bear.

But what no one talked about was the freedom of the children. We had none. We just had to live with the consequences.

This is not a longing for the old days, when women were expected to stay at any cost and men always had the final say. But I think we must dare to talk about the fact that freedom also requires responsibility. When adults seek their freedom, it is often the children who pay the price.

The Greatest Lesson

For me, there will be no more children. That time is past. But I carry with me an important lesson: we must dare to talk about our failures. Dare to admit that we fell short. Dare to tell our children and grandchildren what we did wrong – and why.

Because if we stay silent, if we pretend everything was fine, then the next generation repeats the same mistakes. But if we tell our stories, with heart and honesty, perhaps they can choose differently. Perhaps they can create something we ourselves never managed to.

It’s not easy to talk about. It hurts to remember. But it is also the only way to break the circle.

Passing on a Map

We cannot rewrite our own history. But we can leave behind a map. A map that shows both the pitfalls and the paths that actually lead somewhere.

We can tell our children:

• Love is not just words, it is staying when the storm comes.

• Children need actions, not promises.

• Relationships are built on two people pulling in the same direction – never on one trying to save the other.

We cannot give them guarantees. But we can give them our experiences. And that may be the greatest gift we can give: that they get to start their adult lives a little wiser than we did.

The End – or the Beginning

When I look back on my life, I can feel sorrow for what I failed to do. But I can also feel a certain pride. Because I dare to talk about it. I dare to say: I failed. I became a mirror of my own childhood. But I learned something along the way.

And if one of my children, or some young person reading this, can take away just one insight – that you don’t have to repeat history – then my failure has still led to something good.

We are a generation that learned the hard way. But maybe the coming generation can learn in a softer way.

That is my hope.