A Strong Family Includes A Father
The crisis of father absence - a joke to the chattering class just three years ago when Vice President Dan Quayle first mentioned it - has been transformed into conventional wisdom so fast that it almost makes your head spin.
Exhibit A: A PBS “Frontline” program - the fine, but definitely left-of-center documentary series - recently chronicled the damage done to children by divorce. Approaching the subject with the wariness of a scientist handling nitroglycerine, “Frontline” let researcher Sarah McLanahan do most of the talking.
McLanahan is the scholar who set out a few years ago to prove that children raised by single parents were just as well off as those raised by two parents. The data stopped her cold. Instead, she found that children raised by only one parent were twice as likely to drop out of high school, get pregnant before marriage, have drinking problems and experience a host of other difficulties (including getting divorced themselves) than were children raised by two married parents.
“Frontline” captured an exchange between McLanahan (herself a single mom) and a room full of women’s studies specialists. They received her words with open hostility, betraying their ignorance of scientific method (“How can you possibly hold income constant?” demanded one outraged lady) and their implacable resistance to the traditional family. “If what you say is translated into policy,” another remarked, “couldn’t it lead to the loss of freedoms that were very hard won?”
To that, McLanahan gave a reply that was simple and elegant. She said yes. Freedom and family commitment are mutually exclusive. You do surrender some of your freedom when you undertake the care of children and promise fidelity to a spouse.
She might have added something more - that freedom is just one virtue, it is not the highest virtue.
“Frontline” is not the only new entrant into the father-crisis field. A consortium of major foundations - Ford, Anne E. Casey, and Danforth - is weighing into the father business with a series of grants to be called “New Expectations: A Framework for Responsible Fatherhood.”
At the very least, the appearance of these reports and initiatives from the leftward end of the political spectrum (American foundations are a strong redoubt of liberalism) is gratifying evidence that we seem, at least, to agree on the problem. That is progress over just a few years ago when the social science wisdom was that fathers were irrelevant or worse.
And if these new entrants are looking for ways to ensure that more American children are raised by two married adults (husband and wife), then they deserve every encouragement.
But there are whiffs of trouble in the materials the Ford and other foundations are releasing (the initiative will be formally announced on Father’s Day). The program is aimed at “affirming the importance of father involvement with children” and developing “strategies to re-engage fathers in the lives of their children.” However, there is no mention of marriage and no acknowledgment of the cultural change that must accompany any effort to re-engage fathers. Indeed, why call it “New Expectations” at all? Why not “Old Expectations”?
Because the liberal attachment to the new freedoms - that is, to the freedoms that led to the father crisis in the first place - is still at war with their appreciation of the problem. The draft policy statement the consortium developed is therefore chock-full of politically sensitive wording like “low-income non-custodial fathers,” “partners” and “co-parenting.” Big foundations may have discovered the disappearing father - but they cannot bring themselves to speak the language of husband, wife, commitment and abandonment.
No doubt they would find such talk overly judgmental. But the alternative they seem to be offering (and I would love to be proved wrong about this) - more social workers, more jobs programs for “non-custodial fathers,” more “establishment of paternity at birth” and so on - is like treating a cut to the jugular with Band-Aids. It can’t hurt, but it doesn’t begin to solve the problem.
The aim of strengthening fatherhood is laudatory. But unless all of those now getting interested in the problem recognize that fatherhood cannot be fortified without simultaneously fortifying the traditional family, they will be spinning their wheels.
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