Mourning the death of the father is a recurrent topic in Spanish literature, especially since Jorge Manrique's Coplas. This sample that the father figure is essential in the life and in the training of children, as he provides them with security, stability, character and sense of belonging. It is the father's role (although not exclusive to him) to exercise authority, which includes teaching children the limits of their behavior.

It is very worrying, therefore, that in today's society the father figure is in crisis. There is talk of an eclipse of the father related to his social exclusion. The aim is to do away with the traditional paternal role linked to authority. David Guttmann calls it "deculturalization of fatherhood".

The crisis has been possible because many parents listened to the siren songs of those who presented authority as authoritarianism and repression. In the attempt to avoid this danger, some fell into the trap of overprotection; they were not aware that to replace the child is to incapacitate him/her to fend for him/herself.

In a cartoon by Rudy Pali, a mother is doing her son's homework, which consists of writing on a blackboard 40 times the phrase "I must learn to do things on my own". When she reaches 39 the mom submission the chalk to the child while saying, "Here, you write the last one!"

For Professor María Calvo, the continuous discrediting of the father's role in the Education of children is a consequence of the process of women's emancipation. The latter provoked a collateral effect that no one had counted on: the obscuring of the masculine. She adds that nowadays the idea that the father is dispensable in the upbringing and Education of children is very widespread. The social model now exclusively exalts the typical sensitivity of the maternal code. (Parents dethroned, 2014) This explains why the currently preferred single-parent family formula is the mother-child (I am referring to the family in which the mother believes she does not need a father).

 It is being frivolously propagated that, with the progress of engineering Genetics, the father would be dispensable even in the procreation of children; also that the father and the mother would be interchangeable, since they would have the same biological possibilities. This ignores the fact that children deprived of paternal authority do not know the "red lines" of their behavior, which makes them less tolerant to frustration and more anxious and aggressive.

The boy who lives only with a self-sufficient mother runs the risk of being absorbed by her and of becoming rebellious, seeing her as an obstacle to his desires for self-affirmation and masculinity. On the other hand, the presence of the father helps to break the excessive fusion between mother and son, while at the same time financial aid helps the male child to model his masculine identity.

It is hard to understand the Withdrawal to the figure of the father at a time when poets continue to compose heartfelt elegies to their own father. Let us see, for example, a fragment of José Jacinto's:

"Those strong hands, those good hands/ that corrected us and that likewise filled/ our lives with joy and happiness,/ those wise hands, those good hands/ today are cold."

Access to the professional work by many mothers today is causing some fathers to begin to assume their share of responsibility in the upbringing and Education of their children and in the work of the home. Necessity is becoming a virtue.

Today there is an urgent need to recover the role of the father, but without merely reproducing that of the past. It is no longer enough for the father to be provider in material terms and the holder of authority; he is expected to share with the mother the commitment to educate. Therefore, a reinvention of the father figure is needed, linked to a new style of authority.

For J. L. Pinillos, this style of authority is one that "promotes autonomy manager and creative independence". Unlike the traditional one, it is not centered on the parents, but on the children, since it starts from their needs and encourages their participation; it also substitutes external demands for the appeal to self-demand.

It is necessary to transmit that the father's authority is positive and uplifting, an impulse to develop cooperative attitudes, reinforcement of good behaviors and resource to foster virtues such as strength, obedience and respect.

 Those who have been considering the father as dispensable, will hardly be able to neutralize with arguments a paternal style with such possibilities. And in the event that they succeed, we will always have the resource to declare ourselves a protected species.