For more than a decade, Ron Hauenstein has been teaching young men how to be better fathers. Hauenstein is the founder and executive director of the Spokane Fatherhood Initiative, which recently marked its 10th anniversary.
This article has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Ron Hauenstein: I grew up in a little farming town of Reardan, 20 miles west of Spokane. Graduated high school there in 1970. Reardan was like Mayberry RFD, a town very committed to its youth. And in the 1960s, it was very isolated from a lot of things going on in the world, including teen pregnancy and divorce. Growing up, everybody, in my experience, had a mom and a dad. Families all stayed together. And if a guy got a girl pregnant, he married her, sometimes the next day. It was a code of honor among men. And sadly, it seems to have been lost…