Previous generations of theorists would often complain about the mother’s role, but This is from the work of John Bradshaw and Guy Corneau [see bibliography page] and is about the importance of fatherhood in the lives of children of both genders, and the transmission of male emotional and physical abandonment from one generation to another. The industrial revolution took fathers off the farm, out of the home, away from their children, and placed them in factories and offices. Once fathers would work the family farm with their sons, and now sons rarely see their fathers. Fathers arrive home after working one or two jobs, and often have little energy for their children, preferring to relax with a beer, the newspaper and television. Both girls and boys, generally, get much more exposure to the mother. Girls have a more available role model to imitate, identify with, and rebel against. Mother teaches her daughter the ways of women, and often has more time and investment to do so. The process is conveyed through the emotional bond that the child feels. A boy often has less of a model for gender identification. A father is often not present, or father can be present but too often indifferent, overly busy. Bradshaw says, “What you love is what you give time to…”, A child can sense that he/she isn’t ‘’worth’’ giving time to as an unworded conclusion about the father's apparent emotional absence. The girl child will have mother to identify with, but the boy's role model is too often indifferent or absent by work, divorce, stress, exhaustion, addictions, or other interests. No matter how loving mother is, she cannot teach her sons how to be men. She doesn’t have the right equipment. The essential bond with fathering is how a boy is attracted away from the attachment to, and domination by, mother into the world of men. It happens in stages, from a 5 yr old carrying daddy’s hammer, to an older boy doing projects with dad. Still older boys having exclusive plans with his father. There’s the mouthy adolescent corrected by dad, the teenager taught to drive, and the young man who makes dad proud with his college grades. Throughout, the father ideally wants to have a relationship with his son, has an investment in teaching his son, making the son feel worthy of his father’s time.

Without a father figure to teach and attract the son, the boy can be engulfed by mother, feel responsible for yet resentful of for mother’s unmet emotional needs, and remain in the guilty tug of war with mom, hating her for his bondage yet needing her constant attention and guarantee of her love. He might choose a spouse eventually, but he will bond with her like ‘’mother’’, transferring the same maternal expectations onto the next woman, acting like a boy and expecting to be mothered. The expected roles of ''the man of the house'' as leader, protector, provider, teacher, etc. are compromised since the wife is more like a parent to her husband. Many wives roll their eyes and refer to their husband and two children as her "three children".

Without an involved father, it is furthermore difficult for mother to demonstrate the standard for the future men in her daughter’s life. It is the father who teaches his daughter that she is lovable to men, that she is worth his protection, time and concern. When he is absent, a daughter senses that she is not worth caring about. The standard is now set for her likely poor future choices in men, who would also not be expected to care about her. "After all, if your own father can't be bothered...".

If the father takes an interest in what is important to his son, he makes his son's activity important by his attention. The son will learn to take an interest in his own activities, feeling worth and value. "If it matters to Dad, it matters to me. If it doesn't matter to Dad, it doesn't matter to me." In the younger years of a future husband and father, the emotional and/or physical absence of one’s own father is like the absence of an important vitamin from the diet. There may be plenty of food, but an important nutrient is missing. It's hard to identify. There's no feeling of wholeness or completeness. There's an unnamed but severe emptiness there. Emotionally, it is hard to measure ‘’nothing’’, sensed only by an absence. The absence may show up as a naive like quality, acting in life but with a lack of information, support, and/or an inner sense of self or ‘’manliness’’. John Bradshaw, in his lecture on toxic shame, asks, “How can you love yourself as a man if you’ve never been loved by a man, and how can you love a woman as a man if you don’t love yourself as a man?”.

There are the day to day interactions and "visiting" that might happen with a father in the home. A father's work week influence is conveyed by his participation in the routine from evening to morning, how his disposition expresses itself becomes part of the fabric of the world each child takes in. What happens when there's no father there?

Imagine the ten most crucial times in life when, above all else, a child needs the father to show up, to be the hero, to save the day, by being physically present original trauma is often less of the unresolved problem than the perceived failures of the life mentors obliged to protect us and to help us pick up the pieces afterwards.

With a 57% divorce rate, there is an abundance of children growing up without a father in the home, and an even greater number whose fathers are emotionally, as well as physically, uninvolved.