Life Without Father
"Young men who did not grow up with their father in the home are about twice as likely to have spent time in jail by around age 30."
Lots of our institutions are under attack. The church. Law enforcement. Schools. Free and fair elections. Our judiciary and the rule of law. But none more so than the two-parent family. Strong families are the bedrock of good schools, safe and prosperous communities, and a healthy and vibrant society.
As Father’s Day approaches Sunday, perhaps we should do more than celebrate the fathers we know. We should rescue the institution of fatherhood.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 18.4 million children, 1 in 4, live without a biological, step, or adoptive father in the home. A Pew Research study of living arrangements in 130 countries showed that the United States has the highest rate of children living in single-parent households. A study of 15-17-year-old children between 2008 and 2012 showed that most - 52 percent - grew up without both biological always-married parents. In 2020, over 40 percent of births were to unmarried women. In four states - Nevada, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Mississippi - the number is over 50 percent.
Before I go further, let me stress that most single parents are heroic. They deserve support. Most don’t volunteer to be single parents. This is not an attack, critique of them, or increasing family diversity. But the facts don’t lie. Children are better off with two parents at home.
For too long, dads have been mocked and ridiculed in television marketing and Hollywood programming. Just a few years ago, during the height of the #metoo movement, Procter and Gamble used their Gillette marketing to promote stereotypes of men and excoriate all of them to “do better.” P&G wasn’t alone.
This is not a new issue, nor is the increasing absence of fathers in the home. In 2005, then-US Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) wrote and published “It Takes a Family,” prompted by Hillary Clinton’s prior tome, “It Takes a Village.” National Review dedicated an entire issue to Santorum’s landmark book. “It's an open-and-shut case: why the best place for kids to grow up is with a happily-married mom and dad -- and why the more such families there are in a community, the better life is there for everyone.” It remains true.
While Santorum’s 2006 Senate reelection campaign was not successful, he based the policies that undergirded his 2012 presidential campaign on intact families. They included eliminating bias against families in the tax code, including the marriage penalty, increasing per-child tax credits, and growth in high-wage manufacturing jobs by eliminating income taxes on manufacturing. Santorum won 11 state GOP primaries and caucuses, but not enough to overtake now-US Senator Mitt Romney. He continued his work after the Senate with the Early Childhood Development Program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, along with former US Rep. George Miller (D-CA), and in many other ways.
Some government assistance programs penalize marriage, especially in lower-income households. Robert Rector, writing for the Heritage Foundation in 2014, said that the “means-tested welfare system actively penalizes low-income parents who marry. All means-tested welfare programs are designed so that a family’s benefits are reduced as earnings rise. In practice, this means that, if a low-income single mother marries an employed father, her welfare benefits will generally be substantially reduced. The mother can maximize welfare by remaining unmarried and keeping the father’s income ‘off the books.’”
On Friday, Dr. Brad Wilcox, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, authored an important and authoritative blog post and study entitled “Life Without Father.” The blog post is worth your time, but there’s the conclusion:
Our results are consistent with their observations about the nexus between fatherlessness, family structure, and the problems the nation is now seeing among our young men. Too many young men are floundering and falling behind in one way or another—ignoring the imperative to get an education, failing to launch into adulthood, and succumbing to the lure of the street and becoming a threat to the community. This IFS brief reveals that America’s young man problem is disproportionately concentrated among the millions of males who grew up without the benefit of a present biological father. The bottom line: both these men and the nation are paying a heavy price for the breakdown of the family.
Thank you for such a timely thought piece. There are solutions out there. However, it takes time to discuss, agree, implement to get it done, and measures the in a non-biased manner to ensure the desired outcome is achieved.