It Takes a Dad to Raise a Man

Written By: Patrice Lewis  |  Posted: Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

We have a friend who is a doctor. Bruce is a family practitioner who, because of the smallness of the town in which he works, has quite a number of maternity patients. One day he was tired but elated after having been up most of the night delivering a baby. "A beautiful boy, " he enthused, describing the birth.
Bruce's elation was unusual for a man who delivers a lot of kids. "Why are you so happy about this particular baby?" I asked him. "After all, you deliver a lot of them."
"Yes, but when I deliver a baby to an intact two-parent home, it's a double blessing, " he said. The circles under his eyes competed with his happy smile.

As a family-oriented Christian doctor, Bruce sometimes faces an ethical conflict in his practice. He also sees trends that others outside the medical profession might miss. One such trend was exemplified recently when a single working mother and a caretaking grandmother came to him as a last resort, asking for Ritalin to control a young boy's ADHD. Bruce described the boy in his office as a typical recipient for Ritalin: rowdy, defiant, cruel to animals, malicious, a bad student, impossible to reason with and wantonly destructive. In short, a monster.

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