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[Navigation Bar] [Philanthropy, Culture & Society]
July, 1995
Bringing Daddy Home: The Fatherhood Movement
By Patrick and Gwen Purtill
For thirty years social analysts have attempted
to persuade Americans against common sense, and
increasingly against common experience, that
family disruption does not seriously harm
children. That effort is rapidly losing ground.
There is a large and growing body of empirical
evidence showing that widespread fatherlessness
is wreaking physical, emotional and spiritual
havoc on children.
During these years, advocates of "alternative
families" justified family breakup by arguing
that traditional families were a widespread
source of real pathology. The argument simply
does not hold water. For example, traditional
families are less prone to domestic violence
than stepfamilies, single-parent families, or
co-habitating couples. The argument against the
traditional family has been dominated by the
false comparison of fictional models to real
families. Traditional families are condemned as
"dysfunctional" when they fail to live up to the
beau ideal styled by a popular therapist. But
the true comparison is between the traditional
family and its real world counterparts:
single-parent families, stepfamilies, and
co-habitating couples. Judged by that standard,
the married, biological family emerges as the
best environment for children.
Certainly many traditional families have
problems, which range in gravity from everyday
mutual annoyance to serious physical abuse. And
of course, there are examples of wonderful
stepfamilies and even single-parent families.
But an adequate understanding of the issue
demands that we know the rule before we begin to
take account of the exceptions. And if we are
serious about doing what is best for our
children, we will promote the institutions that
are likeliest to secure their happiness and
well-being.
In virtually every case, "family disruption" or
"alternative families" means growing up without
a father. Children deprived of their fathers
find it harder to develop normally into happy
adults. Young boys first learn how to treat
women by watching their fathers. Likewise, young
girls learn what is, and what is not, acceptable
treatment by men. Children who grow up without
their fathers are much less likely to enjoy
successful marriages themselves later in life.
Additionally, they tend to suffer a variety of
problems, including "higher than average levels
of youth suicide, low intellectual and
educational performance, and higher than average
rates of mental illness, violence and drug
use."1
Moreover, the family is the means by which
children learn to interact with others. Through
the mutual bonds of affection and responsibility
in the family, children learn to extend their
sense of affection and duty to members of the
larger community. "Authority, stability, and a
life of relationships within the family
constitute the foundations for freedom,
security, and fraternity within society," says
the catechism of the Catholic church. "The
family is the community in which, from
childhood, one can learn moral values, begin to
honor God, and make good use of freedom. Family
life is an initiation into life in society."2
Perhaps the most alarming consequence of father
absence is that, according to the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services,
"children from disrupted families are at a much
higher risk for physical or sexual abuse."3 But,
as many researchers now point out, the three
social problems most on the minds of
Americanseducation, poverty, and crimeall find a
common taproot in father absence.
Numerous studies show that children who live
with both biological parents have a great
advantage. They tend to perform better in class
and on standardized tests. And they have fewer
problems with their peers. According to one
study, for example, children living apart from
their biological fathers are 40 percent more
likely to repeat a grade in school and 70
percent more likely to be expelled.5 Children
from disrupted families also are less likely to
graduate from high school or to attend college
than are their peers from intact families.
Changes in family structure have had an even
more dramatic impact on poverty. Since 1970 the
number of American children living in poverty
has been rising steadily. Nearly three quarters
of the children living in single-parent families
will spend part of their childhoods in poverty,
an experience shared by just 20 percent of
children in two-parent families.6 Moreover, for
children living only with their mothers, poverty
is not necessarily a short term drop in an
otherwise reasonably comfortable childhood. For
22 percent of these children, it lasts for a
period of seven years or longer.7
The last 35 years have seen violent crime in
America increase more than 500 percent.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice,
juveniles make up "the fastest growing segment
of the criminal population in the United
States." According to the Journal of Research in
Crime and Delinquency, "the best predictor of
violent crime in a neighborhood is the
proportion of households without fathers."8
Nationally, more than 70 percent of all
juveniles in state reform institutions come from
fatherless homes.9 Moreover, most violent
criminals are males who grew up without fathers,
including 60 percent of rapists10 and 72 percent
of adolescent murderers.11
Indeed, there is growing bipartisan agreement
that father absence is not merely one among many
factors indicating risk for criminality. Rather,
it is the single most important factor. In a
paper published by the Progressive Policy
Institute, Elaine Kamarck and William Galston
assert, "The relationship [between family
structure and crime] is so strong that
controlling for family configuration erases the
relationship between race and crime and between
low income and crime. This conclusion shows up
time and again in the literature."12
Illegitimacy: The Norm in America's Inner Cities
Each year in America nearly one million children
are born to unmarried women. That is one child
out of every three, a 400 percent increase since
1960 when only 5 percent of all births were to
unmarried women.13 Many single mothers never
marry or remarry. Even those who eventually
marry usually spend about six years as a
single-parent. For black women, it usually is
much longer.14 Between working and the
responsibilities of rearing a child alone, these
women have little time to devote to romance.
Despite tabloid stories featuring the births of
love children to fabulously wealthy Hollywood
superstars, the overwhelming majority of unwed
mothers are poor women with a high school
education at best.
In the inner city, where single-parent families
are the norm, education is elusive, poverty
sprawls across generations, and crime is
omnipresent. According to social scientist
Charles Murray, the black illegitimacy rate in
inner citiescurrently at over 80 percent has
created a "Lord of the Flies" culture with "the
values of unsocialized male adolescents made
norms physical violence, immediate gratification
and predatory sex."15
The disintegration of urban black families has
created living conditions previously
unimaginable in the United States. In some
communities, the ideal of responsible fatherhood
is reduced to a teenaged boy buying diapers for
the mother of his children. The question is no
longer whether current welfare policies are bad
for America's poorest families, but how to
control the damage they already have dome.
Institute For Responsible Fatherhood
AFDC created an economic incentive for
widespread illegitimacy. But The Institute for
Responsible Fatherhood and Family Revitalization
is working to reverse this one family and one
father at a time. Reuniting fathers with their
families is the most promising solution to the
misery and turmoil in the inner city and the
Institute is working at the front lines of that
battle. According to its founder and president,
Charles A. Ballard, apart from looking to a
father for a child support check, much of our
society "looks right through him."
Charles Ballard does not need statistics to know
what can happen to a boy growing up without a
father. He is one of the statistics. Ballard
describes himself as an angry young man who
dropped out of school, fathered a child with a
woman he had no intention of marrying, and,
finally, landed in prison. But in prison, of all
places, the familiar pattern broke. He became a
Christian and committed himself to becoming a
real father to the son he then hardly knew.
Upon release from prison, Ballard took jobs
wherever he found them. Finally he persuaded his
son's mother, who had since married, to let him
adopt their child. "There were times," he says,
"when I had no idea what to do. Many times, my
only refuge was the knowledge that for all my
faults as a father, I was better than
nothing."16 It took six years of hard work, but
he went to college and got his degree. Since
1982 Ballard has worked with men in the Hough
neighborhood in the heart of Cleveland, teaching
them to be good fathers to their children. In
the neighborhood around his center, two out of
three children are born out of wedlock.
What Ballard's Institute does there is far from
standard issue social work. "If we believe that
every individual has the potential to control
his life, then we must treat each person with
respect,"17 he insists. Among other things, that
means not doing for anyone what he can do for
himself. The Institute does not spoon-feed a
father through the bureaucracy or schedule
classes for him. A man who is going to be a good
father to his children needs to develop the
initiative and confidence to take responsibility
for himself and his family. By the time a man
leaves the program, he already has accomplished
formidable goals by himself.
Ballard believes that if you really listen, you
will discover that these young fathers already
want to take care of their children, and they
even have some idea of how to turn their lives
around. But they need guidance and moral
support. More than anything else, however, they
need role models. Consequently, Ballard has
trained what he calls Outreach Specialists who
work from a mentor/protege model of
nontraditional, intensive, one-on-one guidance.
They ask a father for a commitment to four
goals:
* Legally acknowledge paternity of his
children.
* Decrease at-risk behavior.
* Stay in school, or return for a GED.
* Obtain a job and begin to contribute to the
care of his children.
Separate group sessions for fathers and mothers
are held weekly, and combined group sessions for
both parents are held monthly. But the outreach
specialists spend the majority of their time
working in the homes of their proteges. Meetings
are held there to deal with problems at the
source. During the early phase of the program,
it is not uncommon for the outreach specialist
to see the father three times per week. Outreach
specialists are available to their proteges by
pager 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Mentors
discuss long term (5-to-10 year) goals with
these fathers, then work backwards to develop
specific 90 day plans.
One of the primary functions of the outreach
specialist is to serve as a role model to his
proteges. Each must adopt what Ballard calls a
"risk-free life-style." Those who challenge
young fathers to walk the straight and narrow
must live according to the same rulesfree of
"tobacco, alcohol, other drugs, abusive
behavior, sex outside of marriage, obesity or
other high risk behaviors."
At the outset, the father and mother often are
not on friendly terms. Therefore, the outreach
specialist always contacts the children's mother
and anyone else, such as a grandparent, who is
deeply involved in rearing the children. Even if
a father does not seek custody of his children,
one of the program's central goals is to develop
a respectful, cooperative relationship between
mother and father. A fringe benefit of Ballard's
method is that, after learning to work together
for the good of their children, many parents in
the program eventually marry. But at minimum,
children will see their parents treating one
another with respect.
With funding from the Ford Foundation, The
Institute for Responsible Fatherhood and Family
Revitalization is embarking upon a tremendous
expansion this year. Ballard is working to
replicate his Cleveland operation in Nashville,
Yonkers, San Diego, Milwaukee, and the District
of Columbia. Each of these cities has shown an
interest in the program as well as a base of
support within the community. Mr. Ballard and
his family currently are relocating to
Washington, D.C. to manage all of these programs
from a central office. It is difficult to
predict how well the Institute will succeed at
maintaining the integrity of Ballard's intensive
one-on-one approach and at requiring hard
virtues of outreach specialists in distant
cities.
Divorce: Life Without Father Hits the Middle
Class
But escalating rates of illegitimacy tell only
half of the story. There is more than one way to
grow up without a father. An estimated one
million children each year go through the
divorce or separation of their parents. Although
the rate has fallen somewhat since its peak in
the early 1980s, the last three decades have
seen the divorce rate in America triple.
Divorce has a profound impact on child
well-being. Children of divorce, along with
their mothers, almost always suffer
economically. Fathers typically see their
financial position improve somewhat after
divorce. But even if child support arrangements
were perfectly equitable, women and children
would still suffer economically from a family
breakup. The crucial fact is that very few men
have the financial wherewithal to support two
households, particularly if they later remarry
and father more children. In the overwhelming
majority of cases, single mothers will always
have to work full time while struggling to care
for their children alone.
More surprising, however, is the extent and
duration of emotional damage suffered by these
children. Only in cases involving physical
violence do children show signs of relief over
family breakupeven when the parents'
relationship was an unhappy one.18 The
California Children of Divorce Study has
documented elevated levels of depression,
underachievement, and difficulty maintaining
stable love relationships into adulthood.
Mary and the Legacy of Divorce
This weekend Mary is helping her stepmother with
a birthday party for her nine-year-old
stepsister. Mary, a white, 28-year-old woman,
lives in a Washington, D.C. surrounded by close
friends. She holds a master's degree from a
private university. She is passionate about her
faith and her social work. And she has a
tendency to take in strays.
She sees her father and stepmother regularly,
but having a relationship of any kind with her
father came with difficulty. Her younger brother
Mark remains bitter. They both were too young to
remember their parents' divorce. But they
remember what came afterward: isolation,
poverty, humiliation, even physical danger. They
knew that everyone else in their family was
middle class and upper middle class but they
were poor.
After the divorce, Mary and Mark moved to the
West Coast with their mother, Linda, to be
closer to her family. They moved into a
townhouse after a short stay with Mary's
godparents. A neighbor took care of the kids
during the day while Linda finished Montessori
training. Even with Papa, Linda's father, paying
rent, "we ate peanut butter and jelly every
day," remembers Mary. "But at least there we
knew people. We had friends."
Because Linda desperately needed a better paying
job, the threesome moved when an offer came from
a small town in the southwest. That is when
things really fell apart. They had no money, no
friends, and the local Methodist church made it
clear that they were not welcome. Linda was
shocked. After all, she hadn't wanted the
divorce. She had been abandoned with two small
children.
Destitute in a town far from anyone they knew,
Linda worked two jobs, and sometimes three, to
make ends meet. During that time, both Mary and
her little brother were abused by strangers.
There was simply no one to protect them.
For all this, Mary and Mark can still be
considered fortunate. They lived in a relatively
stable single-parent home. There was no
revolving door ushering new members into their
"family," and old ones out. Nevertheless, they
moved every year until Mary was seven. Like most
divorced mothers, Linda was constantly forced to
move for better jobs or cheaper housing. New
friendships that might have grown into a
valuable support system for Linda and the
children were continually severed. "Dad was not
in the picture at all then," says Mary. He had
remarried and moved East. They met him for the
first time at the instigation of their new
stepmother, Joan, when Mary was seven. After
that, they went to visit on an annual vacation.
"Joan really tried hard. But it was always stiff
and awkward."
Then Linda got a job in a large city nearby.
Because she would be teaching in a public
school, she would be drawing a larger paycheck.
Both Linda and the children were happy to be
leaving after two years. It had seemed an
eternity. As they moved into their new
apartment, things looked up for the first time.
But soon, the school board realized that Linda
had not completed a course in state history. She
kept her jobbut lost half her salary. Their car
was repossessed. And again they were forced to
move, this time into a smaller apartment shared
with someone who delivered newspapers with Linda
in the early morning. "Nothing had prepared Mom
to be poor, and she didn't know how to do it,"
Mary says. "On payday she would go out and spend
all of the money on food. By the third week of
the month, the food would run out and there was
just nothing to be done about it."
Finally Linda completed the state history course
and her full salary was reinstated. Most
importantly, they found a church that wanted and
welcomed them. It was a large, affluent
Methodist church. From that day on, they were
never truly hungry again. Groceries arrived when
they were needed. No name, no notejust food.
Anyone could see that they were poor. But now
someone was paying enough attention to know when
they were desperate.
The youth ministers took Mary and Mark under
their wings. They frequently called the children
at home and they discretely provided money to
include them in youth activities. Likewise, the
adults of the church went out of their way to
give time and attention to the kids and to
Linda. According to Mary, "Mom needed men to
talk to. Mark was growing up, and she just
didn't know what to do with him." He had never
known adult men and it was beginning to show.
There were constant school and discipline
problems.
Despite Linda's efforts, and the church's
support, both kids were falling in with bad
crowds. When Mary finished junior high, she
asked to go to a private school. "I didn't like
what my friends were doing, but they were my
friends. I needed to break away." So Mary worked
during the summer and with Linda's help saved
enough money to attend a Catholic girls school.
Mary suspects that her grandparents helped.
Still, the high tuition returned the family to
hardship. So Mary wrote her father, who came
through. "He was always more willing to help
with me than with Mark."
Mary and Mark were fortunate in several ways.
Unlike most children in a single-parent
household, Mary and Mark both attended good
schools and completed college, even if they were
not eating well. And both have managed to avoid
the most disturbing social ill traceable to
father absence: crime. But Mary is the first to
admit: "I don't trust men. I can't do it." Last
year, she left a job she liked in part because
she was unable to communicate with her male
boss. "I should have stood up for myself. And I
know I wasn't playing the role he wanted me to
play in the firm. But I just couldn't confront
him."
Mark has not begun to recover. Mary says, "He
simply cannot form friendships with normal men.
And he dates mean, manipulative girls who
completely envelop him. If they don't mistreat
him, he leaves. He is in his mid-twenties now. I
don't know what will happen to him." Moreover,
neither Mark nor his father have attempted to
form a relationship. Since graduating from
college Mark has drifted aimlessly. Although he
is not lazy, he works only sporadically. Unable
to form stable relationships, he treats even his
job as just another transitory experience.
Mary and Mark exemplify the catch-22 of divorce.
Mark clearly needed his father, and perhaps he
would have benefited from a stepfather in the
house. But children, especially girls, often
find themselves in an adversarial relationship
with their stepfathers, competing for the time
and affection of their mothers. As Barbara Dafoe
Whitehead reports, "In general the evidence
suggests that remarriage neither reproduces nor
restores the intact family structure.... Indeed,
children living with stepparents appear to be
even more disadvantaged than children living in
a stable single-parent family."19 Too often, the
additional time and income available to adults
who remarry is not invested in the children.
National Fatherhood Initiative
The National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) hopes
to take a comprehensive look at the issue of
fatherlessness. As Mary's experience indicates,
the problems of growing up fatherless are not
limited to urban, black neighborhoods. They are
not even limited to the poverty most divorced
women and their children suffer. There are
unforeseeable consequences for children who know
that their father chose not to live with their
mother even though it meant he would not live
with them. The drama, scope, and gravity of
fatherlessness in the inner city make it a
social problem of greater urgency. But surely we
should not expect poor minorities to live by
standards set, but not lived, by policymakers in
the suburbs.
As Commissioner on Children, Youth and Families
in the Bush Administration, Dr. Wade F. Horn
began speaking in 1991 on the importance of
fathers and of the two-parent family for child
development. At first he says, "People would
stand up and leave the room." They aren't
leaving anymore. Last year, Don Eberly,
president of the newly-formed National
Fatherhood Initiative (NFI), asked Dr. Horn to
serve as the group's director. Conceived as a
research and education organization, NFI
recently began to accept individual memberships.
"We were constantly getting phone calls from men
who had seen us speak or read an article. They
wanted to know how to join, and we just got
tired of telling them they couldn't."
The message that played so badly four years ago
but is drawing crowds today is a simple one.
According to Dr. Horn, "The two-parent family is
not just different, which is what everyone used
to say. The two parent family is better. Even if
everyone can't have that, we need the ideal. I
never make this a moral argument. There is
plenty of empirical evidence." NFI has worked to
see that the evidence is given a public hearing.
"We have to get rid of the myth of the
superfluous father," says Horn. "A man's worth
as a father is independent of his economic
status. Fathers should not be judged by the size
of their wallets. And we should not be trying to
make men into assistant mothers. Fathers play a
unique and irreplaceable role in the lives of
their children."
The masculine role in nurturing children is not
widely appreciated because it does not fit into
the modern definition of paternal love. Fathers
and mothers relate differently to their
children. Fathers tend to encourage their
children to strive for excellence. They push
their children to be successful. And they are
quick to offer guidance and support. Because
fathers demand the best from their children,
they are pivotal in character formation.
Fathers also tend to spend more time playing
with their children. Because their play is more
physical than mothers', from team sports to
horseplay around the house, it becomes an
important factor in teaching children when and
how to take risks. According to NFI literature,
"This is a perfect example of how fathers and
mothers together form a terrific parenting team.
Father encourages risk taking. Mother encourages
caution. Together, they give the child a perfect
message: try new things; use judgement; if you
get hurt or fail, we are here to comfort you."
According to Horn, it is very important that
Americans realize that "men are very unlikely to
be committed and responsible fathers in the long
term outside of marriage." If a child's parents
are not married, even men who try hard to be
good fathers tend to disappear from their
children's lives after the first
two-and-a-half-years. But children need the love
and support of their fathers for more than just
a couple of years. Moreover, fathers who develop
visiting relationships with their children
cannot replace full-time parents.
Early in his career as a clinical psychologist,
Horn observed that it was not unusual for child
psychologists to believe that they were more
important to the children they treated than
parents. "I remember thinking that I must have
been absent on the day they handed out the magic
wands. There was no way that I, with all of my
expertise, could do for a child in a couple of
hours a week what the commitment of the parents
could do. In my experience, most parents were
genuinely trying to do what was best for their
children."
"The experts tend to get very caught up in the
minutia of what parents must do with their
children at six months, eight months, two years.
And they predict terrible consequences if their
plan isn't followed to the letter. Actually, in
nearly every case, fathers just need a few
general principles. They can work out the
application for themselves."
The three principles Dr. Horn tries to convey to
fathers can be summed up as time, commitment and
responsibility. Love covers a multitude of sins.
And Dr. Horn believes that if fathers are true
to these three principles, everything else can
be worked out.
Time: For the last two decades, experts have
said that parents could get away with spending
very little time with their children, as long as
it was "quality time." Dr. Horn says, "This was
a wonderful salve for parental guilt, but a
lousy way to rear children." Fathers should
spend plenty of time with their children. What
families do together is less important than
their spending time together.
Commitment: A man must be committed to his
marriage; and he must keep his commitments to
his children. Commitment shows up in little ways
every day. If you tell your child that you are
going to do something, stick to that commitment.
More than anything, you show commitment by
spending time with your children. Fathers should
be willing to work as hard at their families as
they do at their careers.
Responsibility: A father's primary
responsibilities include insuring that his
children are well fed, safely housed, and
clothed. In addition, he should teach them good
manners and self-discipline. How these matters
are handled is best determined by each couple
according to its circumstances. But a father
should not blame someone else if his children
are unsupervised, ill-mannered, or not eating
properly.
NFI works to persuade Americans that Washington
policy formulas cannot solve the problems their
own families and communities face. NFI President
Don Eberly is quick to point out that government
policies alone, however worthy, will not rebuild
America's families. Consequently, the National
Fatherhood Initiative focuses primarily on
challenging, from the ground up, the idea that
fathers are dispensable.
In October of 1994, the Initiative convened the
first National Summit on Fatherhood, which is
planned as a bi-annual event. The Summit, held
in Dallas, Texas, featured board members David
Blankenhorn, actor James Earl Jones, Dr. Louis
Sullivan, former U.S. Secretary of Health and
Human Services, and congressman and former pro
football star Steve Largent. Vice President Al
Gore delivered one of the keynote addresses.
After the success of the Summit, NFI launched
the National Fatherhood Tour, featuring NFI
board chairman David Blankenhorn. The goal of
these tours is to promote grassroots efforts
dedicated to fostering fatherhood in local
communities.
Most recently, NFI has been accepted as a client
of the Ad Council and hopes to air its first
public service announcements in early 1996. This
year NFI published Father Facts, a monograph by
Dr. Horn which compiles the most compelling data
on fatherhood in a usable format.
NFI's actions at the community level will be
complemented by its most ambitious goal.
Although still on the drawing board, NFI hopes
to work in five pilot cities bringing local
leaders together to create a "father friendly
community." Two cities have already asked for
NFI's help.
Community leaders will be asked to sign a
statement supporting the importance of fathers,
and back up their commitment with three to five
specific actions supporting fatherhood in their
communities. The owner of a local radio station,
for example, might commit to airing public
service announcements. A business leader might
commit to respecting an employee's family
responsibilities and to encourage other
community businessmen to do likewise. The goal
is to have community members encourage one
another to meet family responsibilities and to
dispel the "myth of the superfluous father."
Vive La Difference
For 2,500 years, the Western philosophical
tradition has spoken on gender with one voice:
women and men share in all that is essential to
human nature. Differences, in this respect, are
less significant than similarities.
Nevertheless, those differences are immutable
and important for it is the differences between
women and men that form the basis of the family.
Rail against them, we may. Diminish their
importance, we certainly have tried; but
eliminate them, we cannot. Even the most savage,
totalitarian, Marxist regimes were reluctantly
forced to concede to human nature on this issue.
Through brutal repression families could be
distorted, but they could not be eliminated.
Failing to respect the differences and
complimentary nature of the sexes breaks down
the bonds of affection in the family. The
competitive rather than cooperative spirit it
sows has resulted in widespread mistrust within
an institution designed, among other reasons, to
promote the happiness of its members.
Those who see marriage as merely a contractual
agreement between consenting adults tend to view
with suspicion its restrictions upon individual
liberty. Even some who wish to defend the family
as necessary find themselves in the awkward
position of arguing that while a stable society
needs stable families, and stable families need
fathers, men may be happier outside of the
family.
However, the evidence suggests that the
bachelor's life is anything but carefree. As
George Gilder writes, "In general, compared to
others in the population, the single man is poor
and neurotic... disposed to criminality, drugs,
and violence. He is irresponsible about his
debts, alcoholic, accident prone, and
susceptible to disease."20 These qualities tend
to slough off quickly upon marriage, only to
reappear after the loss of a wife through death
or divorce.
In short, while men may be quite capable of
taking care of themselves, they tend to do so
only when they have families who need them.
Single men have almost twice the mortality rates
as married men.21
At the outset of the sexual revolution,
progressive pundits liked to say that the
institution of marriage, having outlived its
usefulness, was dying a natural death. But the
facts of life have not changed. Married men
still earn some 70 percent more than singles of
either sex.22 And, far from being a liberating
experience, single motherhood is the surest
route to poverty. In fact, 94 percent of the
AFDC (welfare) caseload is single-parent
families.23 Economically and socially, marriage
subsidizes a life support system for
"alternative families" because they have proven
too weak to survive on their own.
Nevertheless, a handful of radical feminists
argue that bringing men home will only make
matters worse for some women and children. This
undoubtedly is true but deceptive. It is like
banning penicillin because some people
experience a serious allergic reaction to it. It
makes the perfect the enemy of the good.
Unfortunately, it also is an indication of how
divorced some elements of the feminist movement
are from the actual experience of the large
majority of Americans. Finally, it demonstrates
the ability of a small, but well-organized
coalition to perpetuate a distorted view of
family life through its influence within the
academic community.
Responsible fatherhood may not be easy. But it
is natural. No twelve-step legislative program
is necessary for its recovery. The government
needs only to cease penalizing and discouraging
traditional families. Our cultural institutions,
with the help of human nature, can do the rest.
Half of anything is a lot. Half of all marriages
end in divorce. Half of all divorces involve
children. Half of America's children are growing
up with only half of their parents.24 Half of
the children who do not live with their fathers
have never even darkened his doorway. It is
increasingly clear that children who grow up
without their fathers don't stand half a chance.
-------------------------------------------------
PROMISE KEEPERS
Another group with a message for men is Promise
Keepers, and it has been packing football
stadiums all across the country. In May more
than 50,000 men paid $55 each to attend a
conference at RFK stadium in Washington, D.C.
Judging by the crowd, Promise Keepers appeals to
men of all races, professions, income levels,
and political inclinations. The message they
come to hear is that a "real man" worships God,
loves and respects his wife, and supports his
children. Eight more conferences are scheduled
through October 1995, and five of them are
already sold out. All are in major sports arenas
capable of holding large crowds.
Only the National Organization of Women could
possibly feel threatened by a group of men as
wholesome and diverse as the one gathered at
RFK. But, right on cue, NOW vice president
Rosemary Dempsey told the Washington Post that
Promise Keepers was promoting "a
not-very-well-cloaked misogynistic message."
Former University of Colorado football coach
Bill McCartney founded Promise Keepers in 1990.
In the past year, its staff and budget have
grown more than five-fold. McCartney's goal is
to reconnect men with religion and a moral life
by persuading them that men can and should be
masculine even as they worship God. Although the
organization requires no dues and is not
membership-driven, its program asks men to make
seven promises: to honor Jesus Christ; to have
close male friends; to practice spiritual,
moral, and sexual purity; to be faithful to wife
and children; to support the church; to defy
racial and denominational barriers; and to go
out and encourage the world to do the same.
-------------------------------------------------
For additional information please contact:
National Institute for Responsible Fatherhood
and Family Development
8555 Hough Avenue,
Cleveland, OH 44106
216/791-8336
Promise Keepers
P.O. Box 18376
Boulder, CO 80308-1376
National Fatherhood Initiative
600 Eden Road, Building E
Lancaster, PA 17601
717/581-8860
-------------------------------------------------
Notes
1.William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, "A
Progressive Family Policy for the 1990s," in
Mandate for Change (Berkeley Books, 1993).
2.Catechism of the Catholic Church, copyright:
U.S. Catholic Conference, Inc. (Vatican City,
Libreria Editerice Vaticana, 1994).
3. National Health Interview Survey, U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services
(Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health
Statistics, 1988).
4.William J. Bennett, The Index of Leading
Cultural Indicators (Washington, DC: published
jointly by Empower America, The Heritage
Foundation, and Free Congress Foundation; Vol.
I, March 1993).
5.State of Virginia, Final Report of the
Governor's Commission on Citizen Empowerment,
December, 1994.
6."Just the Facts: A Summary of Recent
Information on America's Children and their
Families" (Washington, DC: National Commission
on Children, 1993).
7.Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, "Dan Quayle Was
Right" (The Atlantic Monthly, April, 1993), p.
47.
8.State of Virginia, page 8.
9.Allen Beck, Susan Kline, and Lawrence
Greenfield, "Survey of Youth in Custody, 1987"
(U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice
Statistics, September, 1988).
10.Nicholas Davidson, "Life Without Father,"
Policy Review, Winter, 1990.
11.Dewey Cornell, et al., "Characteristics of
Adolescents Charged with Homocide," Behavioral
Sciences and The Law, No. 5, (1987), pp. 11-23.
12.Elaine Kamarck and William Galston, Putting
Children First: A Progressive Policy for the
1990s (Washington, D.C.: Progressive Policy
Institute, September 1990).
13.U.S. Department of Health, Vital Statistics
of the U.S. 1991 Volume 1: Natality (Washington
D.C: Government Printing Office, 1993).
14.Whitehead, p. 62.
15. Charles Murray, "The Coming White
Underclass," Wall Street Journal, October 29,
1993.
16.Charles A. Ballard, "Prodigal Dads: How We
Bring Fathers Home to their Children," Policy
Review, Winter 1995.
17.Ibid.
18.J. Wallerstein and J. Kelly, "Surviving the
Breakup: How Children and Parents Cope with
Divorce," (1980) p. 53.
19.Whitehead, p. 71.
20.George Gilder, Men and Marriage (Gretna, LA:
Pelican Publishing Co., 1986). pp. 61-62.
21.Gilder, p. 65.
22.Gilder, p. 63.
23.Wade F. Horn's "Statement before a Joint
Hearing of the Ways and Means Committee,
Subcommittee on Human Resources, and the
Education and Economic Opportunities Committee,
Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Youth and
Families," (U.S. House of Representatives,
February 3, 1995.
24. Blankenhorn, p. 80. In postwar America,
fully 80 percent of America's children lived
with both of their married, biological parents.
Today, the figure is just 57.7 percent who live
with both biological parents, regardless of
marital status. Projections forecast that
children born in the 1990s will have only about
a 40 percent chance of reaching age 18 living
with both of their parents.
Gwen Purtill is managing editor of Crisis
Magazine; Patrick Purtill is a fundraising
consultant. They live in Arlington, Virginia.
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