Mom is fixing dinner while simultaneously running a bath for 4-year-old Bobby and trying to help Sharon with her sixth-grade math assignment.
Brian and two friends from across the street are kicking a soccer ball through mom's newly-planted garden - again.Alexis, 14 going on 20, is telling mom that she won't be eating dinner because she's going out with her new boyfriend Bill, a junior in high school, and has no clue when she's going to be home.
What's wrong with this picture?
There's no father in the home.
As the nation officially honors fathers Sunday, it does so under ominous circumstances.
The family structure that existed 50 years ago has been ripped apart.
Today, half the children in America go to bed at night in a home where their father doesn't live. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, the number of children growing up without a father in the home increased 56 percent, from 10.9 million to 17 million, from 1976 to 1997. And if only 50 percent of the children have a father in the home now, what will that figure be in 10 years? 20 years?
The consequences are staggering, not only for individual families but for the nation, for a country can only be as strong as the families that comprise it.
Here's what happens when there's no father in the home: Children from single-parent families are six times as likely to be poor; two to three times as likely to have emotional and behavioral problems; more likely to drop out of high school, get pregnant as teenagers, abuse drugs, and get in trouble with the law; and much more likely to be physically and sexually abused. More than 70 percent of all juveniles in state reform institutions come from fatherless homes.
"Fatherlessness," writes David Blankenthorn, author of "Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem" is "the engine driving our most urgent social problems, from crime to adolescent pregnancy to child abuse to domestic violence among women."
Fathers are not only dads, they are role models. And if they're not around to be role models, somebody else takes their place. Too many times the moral standards of those substitute role models, whether real or characters from television programs, are so sparse they would fit in a thimble.
Father's Day is a time to think of these things. To those fathers in the home we say this - stay there and continue to provide the leadership and support your wife and children deserve. As you already know, being a good husband and a good father is the key to true happiness.
To those contemplating fatherhood we admonish you to do so only within the bonds of marriage and to be prepared to make a lifelong commitment to your family once you become a father.
The only thing at stake is the future of the country.