Sociologists, economists and child-welfare advocates agree: Too many children don’t have fathers in the home, and too many single-parent households live in poverty.
The phenomenon comes as no surprise to many, recognizing the high rate of divorces in the U.S. — more than 50 percent last year alone. For those children left with one parent following a divorce, approximately 50 percent of mothers “see no value in the father’s continued contact with his children after a divorce,” writes researcher Joan Berlin Kelly in her book Surviving the Break-Up. This finding was echoed in American Journal of Orthopsychiatry report Frequency of Visitation by Divorced Fathers: “40 percent of mothers reported that they had interfered with the non-custodial father’s visitation on at least one occasion, to punish their ex-spouse”
A 1996 Gallup Poll showed that 79.1 percent of Americans believe “the most significant family or social problem facing America is the physical absence of the father from the home.” In fact, numerous studies have shown that children who grow up without a father face more troubles than their peers who live with both parents do:
90 percent of all homeless and runaway children did not have a father in the home;
70 percent of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes;
85 percent of all incarcerated youths grew up without a father;
63 percent of youths that commit suicide had absent fathers.
These children’s woes do not play out exclusively in their homes and schools, but in their communities as well. Businesses suffer from decreased productivity and economic losses when families divorce. The Ohio Psychological Association states that there is a greater loss of productivity in the workplace as a result of child support and custody issues than in issues concerning drugs and alcohol combined.
More than 1.1 million couples divorce each year, and most of those couples have children. At the same time, our country faces a record number of births to unwed mothers, 1.3 million babies in 1999 alone, accounting for one-third of the births in the U.S. The decades of “disposable fatherhood policies” have left hundreds of thousands of women and children poorer, and at greater risk than ever before.
More than 30 years after the beginning of the sexual revolution, we now witness the destruction of families, in removing parents from the lives of their children, and in the disintegration of our nation’s family values.
The greatest evidence of this breakdown in family values can be found in our nation’s family courts. A year 2000 U.S. Census Bureau report found that mothers gain sole custody in more than 80 percent of custody battles, stripping millions of fathers who have done nothing wrong of their constitutional right to the care, custody, and nurturing of their own children.
This reality has spawned social stereotyping of divorced fathers as deadbeat dads, Disneyland dads and others.
Clearly, we don’t have a lack of mother participation in this country. What we do have is a crises of dads who are being deadbolted out of their children’s lives, both through state policies that routinely deny fathers shared visitation and by welfare programs which require child support checks flow through state agency coffers. All too often, there is little left after state agencies take their reimbursement for food stamps and welfare payments, leaving a minuscule check for the divorced mother. In such cases, mothers get the mistaken impression that the fathers of their children do not care because they do not financially contribute to their children’s lives.
A year 2000 study by economists Margaret Brinig and Douglas Allen analyzed 46,000 child custody cases to find out why women file a majority of divorce petitions. What they found is that women filed in the expectation of obtaining sole custody. “Children are the most important asset in a marriage, and the partner who expects to get sole custody is by far the most likely to file for divorce,” Brinig stated. Brinig and Allen’s research points to a need to shift away from a “winner takes all” presumption in child custody statutes.
When non-custodial parents have equal visitation, compliance with child support orders increases to 73 percent, according to the an October 2000 report by the U.S. Census Bureau. While sometimes geographically difficult, shared parenting allows children greater access to both parents while also ensuring a greater financial and emotional support than would exist in a single-parent household.
Despite any court-ordered solution to obtain parity in parenting, the best solution remains to stay married, if not for the sake of marriage vows, then for the children. Even so, we must recognize that divorce will certainly remain a widespread social ill, and we must seek family-friendly legislation that favors shared parenting. In the end, our greatest challenge remains not what we can legislate to affect the lives of others, but in our own efforts as individuals to keep our own families together.
Originally appeared on CNSNews.com and in Smart Marriages March 23, 2002
