A Message for Fathers

Around 22.9 million children are growing up in a fatherless condition, a state where a child grows without the complete presence of a father. That figure sounds large, but remains abstract. We easily consider it a collection of standalone household problems, a private matter resolved behind each family’s closed doors, and something outsiders should not interfere with. Yet the impact is not confined within the home.

The absence of a father in the context of fatherlessness does not always mean the child is an orphan. Fatherlessness is a condition where a child does not feel the companionship, closeness, presence, or guidance of a father, even though his figure exists within the same house. The latest data from the 2025 Family Data Collection by the Ministry of Population and Family Development (Kemendukbangga) shows that one in four Indonesian children is growing up without the presence of a father.

This position makes for a personal story for many children, but on a larger scale, it shapes social patterns. A generation is being raised with similar emotional experiences, then carrying that experience into schools, workplaces, marital relationships, and eventually into the way they raise their own children. In the long term, what appears as a private family problem today could transform into the face of a society shaped by children who grew up with that emptiness in the future.

Not all absent fathers leave the house. There are fathers who come home every night to the same address, living in the same house, but whose hearts have long been elsewhere. Some are submerged in never-ending work, chasing figures without realising their children are growing up without them. Others are lost in the exhaustion of life, too weary from work, and consider childcare solely the mother’s duty. There are also those who are physically present but so busy with screens, affairs, or their own world that they miss casual chats with their children, let alone conversations about how life should be lived.

The saddest part is that this often happens slowly, without anyone noticing. There is no big fight with doors slammed shut. Just a distance that grows a little each day in the father-child relationship, until the child becomes accustomed to living with a father figure who is in the house but feels very, very far away. Under the same roof, they grow up like strangers who know each other’s names but do not understand one another.

Such wounds rarely stop at one generation. Many fathers who fail to be present today were themselves raised in environments poor in emotional closeness. They knew responsibility as the duty to provide, but never learned how to show affection. They were taught to be strong, but never taught how to express love to a child. As a result, the same pattern moves from one generation to the next like an inheritance never recorded in family documents. Thus, fatherlessness transforms from merely a family issue into a civilisational problem.