‘I turned out fine’ – the most dangerous thing we say about fatherlessness

I went on radio recently to talk about fatherlessness and violence. I left thinking about something else entirely: how certain we are about a thing we barely understand.

Somewhere in the discussion, the familiar line arrived, the way it always does. The past is the past. I grew up without a father and I turned out fine. It was said with conviction. Not with cruelty, not with malice – with the easy confidence of common sense.

And that is exactly what worries me.

Because the most dangerous form of ignorance is not the kind that knows it is lost. It is the kind that is sure it has arrived. A man who knows he doesn’t understand something will go looking for answers. A man who is certain he already understands will not. He will repeat what he believes, pass it on to his sons, and never suspect there was anything to learn.

That, in a single studio, was the whole problem in miniature. We were not debating fatherlessness. We were demonstrating why it persists.

The confidence of ‘I turned out fine’

I understand the appeal of that sentence, because I could say it myself. I grew up without a present father. So did many men I admire – businessmen, professionals, pastors, teachers. We finished school. We built lives. By most measures, we turned out fine.

But “I turned out fine” answers the wrong question.

The question was never whether some boys survive the wound. Many do. The question is why the wound keeps reproducing itself, generation after generation, in a country where the evidence is impossible to miss.

About eight out of 10 people who die by suicide in SA are men. Roughly eight in 10 murder perpetrators are men. These are not opinions or political talking points. They are the conditions we are living in.

Somewhere tonight, a man will sit outside his gate long after the engine has stopped. He will rehearse answers to questions nobody has asked yet. He will tell his wife he is tired. He will tell his children he is fine. He will tell his friends nothing at all. By every outward measure, he will look strong.

The statistics are full of men who looked strong.

When the numbers are that stark, “I turned out fine” stops being reassuring and becomes a way of looking away. The survivors are real. So are the casualties. Building a whole worldview on the exceptions is how we keep missing the pattern.

Explanation is not excuse

The deepest confusion in that conversation – and in the country’s wider debate – is the collapse of two very different things into one.

We treat explanations and excuses as if they were the same. They are opposites.

An excuse justifies staying the same. An explanation helps us understand why things are the way they are, so we can respond wisely. When we say fatherlessness raises the likelihood of certain outcomes, we are explaining the impact of a father’s role. We are not handing any man a permission slip to abandon his children. I grew up knowing exactly how it feels to be a boy without a present father. That memory is not my alibi for absence. It is my reason to refuse it.

But refusing to understand the pattern, in the name of demanding responsibility, does not make us tougher. It makes us blind. Responsibility without understanding produces frustration. Understanding without responsibility produces excuses. We need both, held at the same time – and the moment a conversation insists you pick one, you are watching the ignorance at work.

Strong houses, silent alarms

Here is the picture I keep returning to. We have built our men like strong houses. We taught them to endure, to provide, to stay standing through any storm. There is nothing wrong with strength, discipline or resilience. They are necessary.

But alongside that, we did something far more dangerous. We taught them to rip out the fire detectors. Don’t cry. Don’t talk. Don’t admit you are afraid, or lonely, or ashamed. Don’t say you are not okay.

So now you have a structure that looks solid from the road. Inside, something is burning. Job loss arrives, and it is not only income that disappears – it is identity. Pressure builds, and there is no alarm, no language, no safe place to name it.

The fire did not stop because the alarm was removed. Sometimes it burns inward, into depression, addiction, suicide. Sometimes it burns outward, into anger, abuse, violence. Loud or quiet, it is the same fire. And our public conversation, more often than not, argues about whether the house should have been stronger – while the smoke pours out of the windows.

We do what we see

People do not become who they are because of what they are told. They become who they are because of what they repeatedly see. Every parent learns this the hard way. We say do as I say, not as I do, and our children quietly do exactly what we did. A boy can sit through a thousand lectures on how to be a man and still copy the one example in front of him.

That is what a father is, beyond a paycheque. He is a model – an interpreter of manhood. He teaches things that never appear in a textbook: how to fail and recover, how to disagree without dominating, how to carry weight without going emotionally absent.

When that modelling is missing, boys do not stop learning. They learn elsewhere – from peers, from the street, from screens, from other wounded men passing on wounds they never healed. The cycle does not travel through DNA. It travels through absence, through silence, through what gets modelled in the gap.

And in SA, that gap did not open by accident. Apartheid’s migrant labour system pulled fathers off the land and into hostels, mines and distant cities, sending them home for a few weeks a year while their children grew up in someone else’s care. Influx control, forced removals and exile did the rest.

Democracy ended the laws, but it could not instantly repair the habits, the wounds and the family structures that generations of enforced separation had hardened. So when someone says the past is the past, they are mistaking a law that was repealed for a pattern that was not. Today’s fatherlessness is not only a private failure. It is also a historical inheritance, still shaping how boys become men.

This is the part that confident certainty cannot see. It looks at a violent man and sees only a choice. It is right that there was a choice. But every violent man was once a small boy trying to work out what manhood meant, and somebody either taught him or failed to.

What it costs to be honest

There was a recent, painful case – I’ll leave the man unnamed – where someone did the very thing we keep telling men to do. He was vulnerable. He spoke honestly about his struggle. And his honesty was exposed and broadcast.

Watch what that teaches every other man who was paying attention. It teaches them that silence is safer. It teaches them to take it to the grave.

So we cannot, in the same breath, command men to open up and then build a society that punishes them when they do. Yes, men must take responsibility for speaking, growing and choosing well. And society must become a place that can actually receive an honest man without ridiculing him. Both are true. Insisting on only one is, again, the ignorance talking.

From certainty to curiosity

I am not asking anyone to feel sorry for men, or to swap “man up” for “blame society”. Both slogans are escape hatches from thinking. I am asking for something harder. I am asking us to notice how sure we are – and to be suspicious of that certainty. The casual confidence with which we dismiss fatherlessness is not wisdom. It is the precise mechanism by which the wound keeps being handed down.

And it is measurable. Heartlines, through its Fathers Matter campaign, found that only about one in five South Africans understand how decisive a father’s active presence is to a child’s development. Read that again. Four out of five of us do not.

That is not a marginal blind spot at the edges of the debate. It is the national default – the same confident not-knowing that filled the studio. Fathers Matter exists precisely to close that gap: to get men into rooms to talk honestly about the very thing we are all so certain we already understand, and to make the case that a father, or a father figure, is not optional furniture in a child’s life.

We will not fix this by punishing violence after it appears. We will fix it by interrupting the thing that produces it – and you cannot interrupt what you refuse to understand.

During that radio interview, the conversation moved on. Radio always does. The news cycle moved on too.

But I have not stopped thinking about that sentence: I turned out fine.

Perhaps. But a nation does not judge its health by the people who survived the wound. It judges its health by how many are still bleeding from it. And until we become curious enough to understand how the wound reproduces itself, we will keep mistaking survival for healing.

A strong house with no working alarm is still at risk. And just because we are sure the fire is out does not mean it has stopped burning. DM