Furthering fatherhood Working to connect men to the children they
bring into the world By Matt Daniels
This Father’s Day, Americans may want to consider the words
of the late Democratic senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
who once said, “The principal objective of American government
at every level should be to see that children are born into intact
families and that they remain so.”
Moynihan understood that there is an integral connection between the
institution of marriage and the well-being of children in the United
States. After all, marriage is what makes fatherhood more than a biological
event — by connecting men to the children they bring into the
world.
Sadly, over 25 million American children (more than one in three)
are being raised in families with no fathers present in the homes.
And an overwhelming body of social-science research has confirmed
Moynihan’s prediction (first made in the early 1960s) that many
of the social problems commonly thought to be rooted in race would
eventually move from the inner cities to the suburbs since these problems
are ultimately attributable to family breakdown.
For example, research now shows that the percentage of fatherless
families in a community more reliably predicts that community’s
rate of violent crime than any other factor, including race. The same
can be said for rates of child poverty. White children in fatherless
families are significantly more likely to live in poverty than African-American
children who have a father in the home.
As compelling as this empirical evidence is, I do not need social
science research findings to convince me that I paid a heavy price
for growing up without a father.
My own personal experience offers something of a miniature portrait
of the tremendous human and social costs of fatherlessness in America.
After my parents married, my mother followed my father to New York
City in the early 1960s. When I was 2 years old, my father abandoned
my family. Divorce became the easiest way for my father to escape
the responsibility of having to support a wife and child. Although
my mother never expected that she would need to provide for a family,
she obtained a position as a secretary and worked for several years
to keep us in our apartment in a deteriorating part of Spanish Harlem.
A few years later, my mother was the victim of a serious violent crime.
While coming home late from work one night, she got off at the wrong
bus stop and was mugged by four men. She suffered injuries that left
her disabled, depressed and dependent on welfare for most of the rest
of her life.
If my father had not abandoned my family, many of the most difficult
aspects of my childhood could have been avoided. In this regard, my
story is very much like that of many children growing up today without
both a father and a mother in the home.
To help such children — and to help restore a culture of married
fatherhood in this country — the Alliance for Marriage supports
a wide range of public-policy and civil-society reforms. For example,
we believe that:
• Businesses should voluntarily do more to make it easier for
their employees to be both good workers and good spouses by offering
more flex time, job sharing and home-based work options.
• Educational institutions should offer curricula and textbooks
that accurately
reflect the benefit of marriage for children, adults and society.
• Religious communities should provide more teaching and counseling
to help couples form, and maintain, lasting marriages.
• The entertainment industry should do more to portray the positive
influence that marriage has on both children and adults.
In addition, the government should:
• Lighten the tax burden on families with children in order
to stop taxing many parents out of the lives of their kids.
• Make adoption more affordable and easier for more married
couples in order to increase the number of adoptable children placed
in two-parent families.
• Require counseling directed at marital reconciliation for
families with children before granting a divorce decree.
• Eliminate all state and federal welfare policies that penalize
welfare recipients for getting, or staying, married.
The good news is that fatherlessness is a completely curable social
disease. America is the greatest and most prosperous nation in the
world. We can do better than accept historically unprecedented levels
of youth crime and child poverty that result from high levels of fatherlessness.
We can — and must —rebuild a culture of marriage and intact
families in this country.
Daniels, an attorney and political scientist, is founder and president
of the Alliance for Marriage, a nonpartisan, multicultural organization
dedicated to ensuring that more children grow up in a home with a
mother and father.
