Fathers Needed: Addressing America's Fatherhood Crisis | 6.16.24

In Poverty, by America, social scientist Matthew Desmond writes that the United States, despite its vast wealth and prosperity, suffers from poverty and inequality unseen anywhere else in the developed world.

According to him, poverty in America persists because it benefits many Americans to keep a share of their fellow Americans in a state of want—and he issues a call to arms to readers to examine their role in benefiting from and perpetuating the cycle of poverty.

In this guide, we’ll explore the key points raised by Desmond, including:

• The experience of poverty in America and its devastating social consequences
• The false explanations for why people are poor—and stay poor
• How non-poor Americans benefit from the poverty of their fellow Americans
• The choices we can make—both at a policy and individual level—to empower the poor and eradicate poverty

Throughout the guide, we’ll supplement Desmond’s findings with arguments from other poverty scholars, journalists, and economists—both to provide additional support and context for Desmond’s ideas, and to challenge his conclusions.

The US fertility rate reached a record low in 2023, with economic pressures, delayed adulthood, and the Covid-19 pandemic contributing to the decline. Falling fertility rates could have significant consequences: shrinking the American workforce, increasing pressure on the social security system, and forcing states to cut services or raise taxes.

What’s wrong with modern Western men? In Hard Times Create Strong Men, award-winning Canadian real estate investor Stefan Aarnio argues that modern Western men are weak—and this weakness will lead to the decline of Western civilization. To avoid this, men must grow strong again by embracing ownership of every aspect of their lives so that they can defend the practices and ideologies that make America great.

In this guide, we’ll first describe how Aarnio’s life experiences led him to write this book. Then, we’ll share Aarnio’s explanation of why Western men have grown weak and why this weakness is a problem. Finally, we’ll lay out Aarnio’s definition of a strong man and Aarnio’s ideas on how to be a strong man at work and in relationships. Along the way, we’ll compare Aarnio’s ideas to other experts’, provide some historical context for his arguments, and share practical tips for putting his recommendations into practice.

We need to talk about racism. But, for white people and people of color alike, talking about it can feel like navigating through a minefield. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo offers a handbook on how to have intelligent, productive, empathetic conversations about race.

Our guide discusses and extends Oluo’s ideas for how to tackle these conversations, comparing and contrasting her ideas on race with those of her contemporaries. We also examine the research underlying Oluo’s arguments. You’ll learn about the school-to-prison pipeline, why touching someone’s hair can be a racist act, and what you can do to fight racial injustice through both conversations and practical actions.

In Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, psychologist Lindsey Gibson dispels the myth that “parents know best,” revealing the damage that emotionally neglectful parents can do to their children. Gibson explores key features of emotionally underdeveloped parents and how their behavior impacts their children. She also provides strategies to help adults who suffered childhood emotional neglect turn their relationship with their parent from toxic to tolerable, and develop healthier emotional connections with others.

Gibson is an adult psychotherapy and personal growth counseling specialist. She wrote Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents to help survivors of emotional neglect free themselves from dysfunctional relationships with their parents and find emotional fulfillment.

In this guide we’ll look at traits of emotionally underdeveloped parents, coping mechanisms children employ to survive emotional neglect, challenges that those children face in adulthood, and strategies they can use to heal and move forward. We’ll also provide additional viewpoints on living through and moving beyond childhood emotional neglect.

Trauma can stem from abuse to a severe car accident to wartime combat—and cause a lifetime of flashbacks, nightmares, isolation, insomnia, hypervigilance, and rage. In The Body Keeps the Score, the author explores how diagnosing and treating trauma has evolved as new technologies, research, and fields of science emerged.

Trauma’s impact is not only mental, emotional, and neurological, but also physiological: Trauma rewires the brain to put people in a constant state of stress or numbness, leading to a host of physical problems.

In this summary, you’ll learn:

• Why trauma survivors feel like their trauma is never-ending
• How flashbacks make parts of the brain shut down and others to go into overdrive
• Why some trauma survivors can’t recognize themselves in the mirror
• How activities like choral singing, yoga, and theater can be therapeutic