Mother’s Day. Father’s Day. Child’s Month. Three separate observances with three varying degrees of relevancy in the minds of most people. Yet no “Family Month.” No shared celebration that honours mother, father, and child as one unit. Commendations to TBC Radio and Freedom Come Ministries for pushing to have June celebrated as Family Month. Sadly, the world’s culture has trained us to think of these roles as competing for credit rather than belonging to the same whole.
That training shows up in unexpected places; like the comment section of a simple video.
Recently I viewed an Instagram video of a young woman (@herchosenpath) who said she can’t hate men because she had a great father. The responses: “You should be thanking your mother. She’s the one who picked him.” But her reply says it best: “If this video was for my mother, no one would be telling me to thank them both.” That single sentence exposes the entire lopsidedness.
If a mother gets credit for “choosing” a good father, does she also get blamed for choosing a bad one? No. In today’s society, nobody applies it that way. A good father’s goodness becomes the mother’s achievement; a bad father’s failure remains entirely his own.
This is not a new Jamaican conversation. In 1957, anthropologist Edith Clarke published a book titled “My Mother Who Fathered Me“; a study of Jamaican families shaped by paternal absence going back to plantation slavery. Over 45 percent of Jamaica’s homes are female-headed. Unfortunately, the phrase became a badge of pride rather than a wound to be addressed. Even talk show host Dr. Kingsley ‘Ragashanti’ Stewart, who praises his mother endlessly and credits her for everything, still concluded plainly: “No woman can father a child.” A woman can assume fatherly roles. But she cannot be a father. Those are not the same thing.
This is a mindset that the enemy has planted into society. Making it easy to hate men and it has sadly become a reflex. A way of thinking that cannot let a man simply receive praise.
Vigilance Soured into Hatred
Many other commenters to the video agreed that being cautious of bad men is wise. Yes, healthy discernment of ‘bad men’ is wise. But somewhere along the way, the enemy soured that discernment into a trend where publicly declaring “not all men are bad” requires a disclaimer or an apology.
If we zoom out from this one online exchange to the broader cultural pool, the media portrays men as bad, weak, incompetent and bumbling. There is always the assumption of guilt. This single video became a small sample size and proves the theory: “Man bad – woman good”.
The Hidden Agenda of the Enemy
This pattern is not random, and it is not new. Scripture reminds us we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual wickedness in high places—and the family has always been one of his oldest targets. If he can make women afraid of men, and men defensive against women, he doesn’t need to destroy the house; he will settle for poisoning the way we see one another inside it; and the head of the family is his primary target.
We live in a culture where good fathers cannot be honoured without redirection, where hatred for men increases, where credit and blame are distributed by gender rather than character. Where women get treated to both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day gifts.
Today, only 5.2 percent of Jamaican households are headed by single fathers. And yet those men; raising children alone, against the odds; are barely celebrated. Meanwhile, mothers who “father” their children are rightly honoured. The good single fathers largely invisible. That invisibility is not accidental either.
That is not an accident of social media alone. It is consistent with an enemy whose oldest strategy is dividing what God designed to be united: father, mother, and child, each honoured for who they are. Ephesians 6:12 reminds us who we are fighting, and Malachi 4:6 shows us what we are fighting for: ‘turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers’ – reconciliation runs in both directions, not redirected from father to mother.
Honour Them Both
There is a high cost to be paid by the next generation if good fathers cannot be celebrated without redirection. Again, my focus is only on the good fathers. Consider the message this sends to boys: a grateful daughter cannot credit her own father without a disclaimer. What aspiration does that leave for the next generation of men? The cost is generational—each succeeding group of young men will have fewer models to follow, and aspiration quietly disappears. We cannot allow the enemy to win.
Exodus 20:12 says, ‘Honour your father and your mother.’ Both named, both distinct, but both commanded. The commandment doesn’t say, ‘Honour your mother for your father.’ It says honour them both, for who they are. This is not anti-woman. The woman in the video I watched loves her mother; she said so. It is a refusal to let gratitude be hijacked; whether by a reflex or by an enemy that cannot tolerate a man receiving honour.
If you had a good father, ‘big him up!’ Say so loudly, without caveat, without redirect. Stop the man-hate. If you’re raising sons, let them see that good men get thanked too. This is not about ignoring the bad; it is about refusing to let the bad steal the honour due to the good. Let’s stop feeding that reflex. This is one small way to push back against an evil agenda that has been working for a very long time.