Uncomfortable Reflections Growing Up
BY BRODEN MOCK | MAY 22ND, 2025
It’s hard to remember a time when I didn’t refer to my father in the past tense with friends and family. Yet with strangers, I often still speak of him in the present. It was not until a few years after my father’s death in the early months of 2020 that it hit me how important a father is in someone’s life, and the sense of embarrassment I had telling people I did not have a father. My father passed away during some of the most important years in a young man’s life. The ages between twelve and seventeen are a crucial time for physical, cognitive, and social development, and during this time of development, doing it without a father will have negative consequences. After I left secondary school and entered my undergraduate years, I noticed the same negative consequences that I had experienced after losing my father in others, as well as in the media, which downplayed the true importance of having a father in life, especially during childhood. There is a sense of survivor’s bias in the way fatherlessness is portrayed, and the more I saw of its effects on other individuals I knew, the more uncomfortable reflections I saw.
There is an incubation period for grief and its symptoms, and often, for most people dealing with it, it takes a significant amount of time for these feelings to become prevalent. A cascade of emotions swept over me as they began to materialize: a profound magnitude of sadness, anger, shame, guilt, and even anxiety. People say it’s normal to feel these emotions, sure, but they don’t make me feel normal. They are among the worst feelings in the world, and overcoming them is even more challenging. Although this series of unfortunate events had its place, people stepped in to help. Both of my grandfathers truly stepped up and became father figures in my life, supporting me even though they were not meant to be. I will always thank them and never forget what they did during that terrible period. But even then, despite their support, it’s impossible to fill the void left by my father.
I found myself watching from a distance as others had their fathers—having them accompany them, participating in activities together, or celebrating achievements like graduating from secondary school. There was a feeling that I had grown up too fast; watching from afar, I felt shame for not having someone to share my own achievements with. It wasn’t until I looked back that I realized what I had missed by not having my father during this time, and as I came to terms with this and moved forward, I noticed the effects it had on me reflected in others who faced similar struggles.
It is easy to generalize when it comes to seeing their effects from a bird’s-eye view, so I will try my best not to do so here. As much as I was lucky to have grandfathers to step in have them teach me the things father usually does to their sons, other young men I have met have not. Among many others being taught, it was values, ethics, and integrity that meant the most, and practical skills such as riding a bike or tying a tie. Some more prevalent than others, they represented the love and appreciation a father and or father figure has in raising their own, and it has great importance whether we notice it or not. There is an identity and authority issue that permeates in those as well, seeing how individuals who had been dealt similar father issues assumed the same tropes and pitfalls.
These are from the non-confident type who avoided confrontation, who seemingly just took the cards they were dealt without putting up a fight to get better ones. Or seemingly the exact opposite, who tried their hardest to assert themselves and take control of what they have, seemingly to not let the fact they do not have a father stop them from getting the most from their life, which I respect, we only have one, right? But through all these individuals, I saw that with some of the same issues I had been through, their outlooks drastically differ; it was not absolute, but rather tentative about their future. It was like wiping the steam from the mirror, to open the window to the clear painted view of survivor bias being clearly portrayed, on how often it is those who went through the adversity of fatherlessness we focus on, ignoring the fuller picture at large.
In the simplest terms, I can explain survivor’s bias as this: it is a selection bias typically within collected data where you only focus on the things that made it through a selection process, ignoring the things that did not make it. A big cause for this is simply because it is easy; we tend to overlook the “losers” or those that didn’t make it, like businesses that went bankrupt, individuals who didn’t achieve success, or objects that broke down. Society loves a success story. But when we celebrate those who ‘made it’ without a father, we ignore the thousands who didn’t. That’s survivor bias. In reality, it can be applied to any subject in our own lives. It is easy for one to be praised for their resilience against the odds of fatherlessness, for those who are successful, to focus on getting the most out of life, without having fatherlessness weigh them down, almost describing the assertive archetype I did earlier.
These are the people we focus on, while not considering all of those who failed, who also dealt with fatherlessness, ignoring the millions who silently struggle. Society often celebrates the rare stories of fatherless individuals who “succeeded”. It is easy to look at countless lists of successful individuals who grew up without or lost their fathers; the main ones that come to mind are Jay-Z, Steve Jobs, and Malcolm X. With this comes a pressing question: Have you felt pressure to be a “success story” simply to prove something? To not fall victim to fatherlessness? The hard truth is that while fatherlessness can be something we as individuals can overcome to continue onwards to pursue a successful life, many others who deal with fatherlessness won’t have the same luck. Many others will face higher rates of depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. As well as lower educational achievements, higher likelihood of substance abuse, and even higher rates of teen pregnancy. I’ve seen it everywhere I go all throughout my life, from my hometown to major metropolitan areas; these traits follow fatherlessness.
This is not about blame. It’s about clarity on our lens on fatherless homes and what comes out of them, to look on focus on the true nature and negative consequences that not having a father has, and how detrimental it can be on a young child’s process of growing up. Absence can leave a deep wound that seems impossible to heal or cover up. I bring this up to all my friends and colleagues, the process of forensic analysis, to ask why people do the things they do, and why we are the way we are, and for fatherlessness, it is critical to forensically look at the issue not only as a personal wound, but as a greater social issue. This is not about scapegoating or seemingly trying to have mothers fit both mother and father roles, this is about recognizing that children need active, emotionally available fathers or father figures to thrive. Suppose we want stronger communicators and healthier generations. In that case, we need to start by valuing fatherhood for what it truly is: a vital, irreplaceable force in creating successful, confident, and loving human beings.
