The Australian Family, July 2003, p. 30
The Importance of Fathers
Wade Horn is the founder of the National Fatherhood Initiative. This article is a chapter from Marriage: Just a Piece of Paper? (Anderson, et. al., eds., Eerdmans, 2002).
We know that when kids grow up without a dad involved, a committed and responsible father in their lives, they're at greater risk for a whole host of negative outcomes. We know they are more likely to fail at school, to have emotional behavioral problems, to drop out of school, and to get involved in drugs and alcohol abuse. If they are boys, they're more likely to engage in criminal activity as juveniles. If they are girls, they're more likely to engage in early and promiscuous sexual activity. For both boys and girls, as adolescents they're more likely to commit suicide. It seems that in almost any measure you can imagine, kids who grow up without a positive, actively involved father in their lives are at greater risk of poor outcomes.
Moms and dads do things differently. We think that moms and dads ought to be interchangeable. We know, for example, that fathers are much more likely to be physical with their kids. They're more likely to get on the floor and wrestle with them. Moms are more likely to verbally stimulate their kids, to spend more time talking with them. We also know that fathers are more likely to encourage risk-taking and moms are more likely to encourage caution. Just go to any playground in America and watch the way that moms and dads interact with their kids on the jungle bar. What you'll see is a dad who will say, "Keep going. Keep going. You're almost at the top" You'll see a mom saying, "Hey, be careful. Be careful"
Now, it's not that one is doing it right and the other one's doing it wrong. Kids need both. They need somebody to wrestle with them on the floor, because that helps teach self-control. They also need a mom who stimulates them with language, because that helps them with language development. We don't want a nation of foolish risk-takers. We want a nation of cautious risk-takers. So, lucky is the child who has both a mom and a dad, because of the complementary attributes that they bring to the parenting equation.
The news is not good when large numbers of children are growing up disconnected from their fathers. It's not that every child who grows up in a fatherless household is going to have these kinds of difficulties. But it is true that there's an increased risk of these negative outcomes when kids grow up without fathers.
When you only have a few fatherless children in the community, they have lots of other role models to understand what fatherhood is all about and what good manhood is all about. They also have good men around to teach them the kinds of skills that keep them out of trouble. The problem in today's world is that it's not just that a few kids are growing up fatherless. We have always had some kids who were fatherless. The problem today is that there are so many children in so many communities growing up without fathers. In some communities there are very, very few good role models of what a good father is and does. That's the problem today. That's why today's problem of fatherlessness is so much different than what we've seen before. The scope is so much greater than it has been in the past.
For a number of years, I was the director of outpatient psychological services in an inner-city children's hospital. Half of my clientele were in the inner city and half of my clientele were in the much more affluent suburbs. What I found was a lot of kids who are very rageful and depressed. And they were rageful and depressed about the same reason. They're rageful and depressed because they had no connection with their fathers. For kids in the inner city, it might have been because they were born out of wedlock and the father abandoned the family. For children in the more affluent suburbs, it might have been because of divorce or workaholism on the part of the father. But the effect on the child seemed to be the same. These children had a genuine hunger for a father. It was having a profound impact on them.
There is one category of absent father that doesn't seem to have those negative impacts. That's a dead father. If you think about it, we can hardly imagine a worse situation for a child than to have the parent die. And yet, what we find is that children whose fathers died do better than kids who fathers are not there because of abandonment or divorce or even workaholism. The reason is because when most fathers die, the moms keep the memory of the father alive in the home. Their pictures stay up on the wall. The memory of the father is often invoked in positive ways like, "If your dad were here today, he'd be so proud of you." Or, the mom might even invoke the father as a punishment, saying, "If your dad were here today, he'd be so disappointed"
The issue is that when a father dies, the idea of the father is not dead. The father idea in that household is still very rich. The problem with divorce and abandonment is that the idea of the father has died because the pictures are off the wall. The mom speaks very disparagingly, far too often, of the father. If the kid brings up the father's name, the mom might say, "Oh, don't bring up his name. He's a bum. We're better off without him. Don't bring him up anymore." It seems that children can survive the physical death of the father better than they can survive the death of the idea of the father.
Unfortunately, when men experience divorce, as fathers they tend to become disconnected both psychologically and financially from their children. Forty percent of all children who don't live with their fathers have not seen their fathers for even one second in over a year. Half of children who don't live with their fathers have never - not once in their life - stepped foot in their father's home.
Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't some divorced and unwed fathers who are terrific dads; but it is harder. We need to be honest about that. It is a more difficult experience to be a father if you do not live with your children. One of the reasons for that is because you are less accessible to your children. If you come around and you see your child once every other weekend, that's nice. You know that certainly is helpful.
The fact of the matter is that kids are not light switches that can be turned on when we want, when it's on our schedule to be with them. What children really need are parents who are accessible to them so that when they need us, we are there for them. That's the problem with not living with your children. It's just less possible for you to have that kind of accessibility. So when you're not with your kids, you're less accessible to them.
Fathers pay a price for this. We know, for example, that divorced fathers are much more likely to be depressed. They're more likely to have alcohol or drug problems. They're more likely to have difficulty on the job. It seems that fatherhood is good for children, but fatherhood is also good for men.
The National Fatherhood Initiative was founded in 1994 with a very clear mission: to improve the well-being of children by increasing the number of kids growing up with involved, committed, and responsible fathers in their lives. You see, fatherlessness is not a small problem. It's a big problem. Four out of ten kids today will go to sleep in a home without their father present - four out of ten. That's twenty-five million children. Big problems demand big solutions. We think the only way we're going to successfully turn this trend around is by helping to stimulate a social movement, a society-wide movement on behalf of the institution of fatherhood, not just for the benefit of fathers but for the benefit, primarily, of children.
Well, we've made a lot of progress since 1994. Before that, if you asked a lot of people, "Gee, do fathers matter?" their answer would have been, "Well, not necessarily" Today, increasingly, we understand the consequences of fatherlessness, particularly the cost to children. That's a very important advance.
We've made advances in terms of attitudes. We know from a recent Gallup Poll, for example, that 80 percent of Americans now say the absence of the father from the home is the single most important social problem facing America today - 80 percent. The bad news is four out of ten kids are still going to sleep in homes without their fathers. The even worse news is that Americans don't seem to accept the idea that somehow marriage is important to the institution of fatherhood. That seems to be the next big challenge for the fatherhood movement. Certainly there are a lot of married fathers who aren't so good, but we need to convince the American public that married fatherhood, as an ideal, is something we ought to be pursuing.
Historically, fatherhood and marriage were in fact tied together. But, even more than that, fatherhood and children were tied together in very intimate ways. Many people are surprised to hear that if you go back two hundred years, most of the parenting advice was actually directed toward fathers, not toward mothers. Fathers were the ones who were seen, after the child was weaned, as being primarily responsible for whether that child grew up to be a good person or a not so good person.
What changed all of that was industrialization. For the first time in human history, large numbers of men were going away from the home to work in a distant factory, often for eight to ten hours a day, often for six days a week. By default, child rearing had to fall to the one person who remained in the home, the mom. So the mother became the person primarily responsible for rearing the children.
This was very different from most of human history. As we proceed into the nineteenth century and particularly the latter part of the twentieth century, with the advent of birth control, we see a disconnect between sex and marriage. We also see increasing numbers of women entering the paid labor force, which meant that they were less dependent upon marriage. All of these social forces have combined to reduce fatherhood to a thin shell of what it once was.
I think that marriage and fatherhood go together like peanut butter and jelly. Marriage and fatherhood are important for us to understand. They are intertwined. That doesn't mean divorced fathers or unwed fathers can't be terrific dads. Of course they can. But we have to be honest: It's harder. It's more difficult precisely because that father cannot be as accessible to his children as the father who comes home every day and eats dinner with his kids or reads a bedtime story.
We need to be supportive and encourage divorced fathers and unwed fathers. But there are consequences for children dependent upon the different category of father - a married father, divorced father, or an unwed father. So, yes, be supportive of those other categories, but let's be clear, the ideal is married fatherhood.
There are some who are very queasy when the word marriage is brought up. So much so that some people refer to it as the "M" word, the word that shouldn't be spoken in polite company. I think that for some the concern comes from a concern about domestic violence. Certainly domestic vio lence is a terrible thing and we should have no tolerance for it. But the myth that has arisen around domestic violence is that the most dangerous person for a woman is her husband. It's not so. Research is very clear that the greatest risk of domestic violence occurs when a man is cohabiting with a woman, and particularly when that man is not the biological father of that woman's children.
What we need to do is to dispel some of the myths about marriage that it's a bad deal for women. It's not a bad deal for women. Both men and women are happier if they're married than if they're not married. Both men and women are wealthier if they're married than if they're not married. And they enjoy better sex. Men are more likely to advance in terms of the workplace and so are women. It seems that marriage is good for women as well as men, but some people find it difficult to promote the idea of marriage because of the domestic violence issue.