At the cellular level, a child’s loss of a father is associated with increased stress

I know that sometimes divorce is the only answer but as this and many other studies have concluded, fathers matter! We must as a culture, most especially as Christians start taking marriage and the selection of spouses, more seriously. When we deny children access to their fathers we are hurting them, we may actually be shortening their lives. It has been proven time and time again, that children with both birth parents in the house usually do better than kids who are missing one.

The absence of a father—due to incarceration, death, separation or divorce—has adverse physical and behavioral consequences for a growing child. But little is known about the biological processes that underlie this link between father loss and child well-being.In a study published July 18 in the journal Pediatrics, a team of researchers, including those from Princeton University, report that the loss of a father has a significant adverse effect on telomeres, the protective nucleoprotein end caps of chromosomes. At 9 years of age, children who had lost their father had significantly shorter telomeres—14 percent shorter on average—than children who had not. Death had the largest association, and the effects were greater for boys than girls.

Source: At the cellular level, a child’s loss of a father is associated with increased stress