Dads, Don't Go

Joe Carter
June 25, 2010

“Are fathers necessary?” asks Pamela Paul in the latest issue of The Atlantic. That she considers the question worth asking is a clue to how the article will conclude: “there’s nothing objectively essential about his contribution.”

Published just before Father’s Day, it would be easy to dismiss such cheap contrarianism as an attention-getting stunt. (The empirical claims presented in Paul’s article—and the research it was based on—have been adequately rebutted. W. Bradford Wilcox and others have already pointed out that most of the studies relied upon small, unrepresentative samples of same-sex and heterosexual couples.) But the fact remains that in America we act as if fathers are unnecessary. We enjoy a fit of pique when Heather has two full-time mommies, yet only respond with a sad shrug when Heather has one part-time daddy. But if fathers are necessary, they have to be completely involved in the lives of their children—and living at home with their children’s mothers.

As David Blankenhorn notes in Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, “The evidence shows that the great majority of visiting fathers are not—indeed, cannot be—good-enough fathers to their children. The deck is stacked against them. Too much has changed, too fast; too much will continue to change.” In theory, he continues, it may be possible to restructure everything else about a family while maintaining fatherhood as a constant. In practice, it is hardly ever possible. Visiting fathers have lost the bases of fatherhood. As Bronislaw Malinowski put it in his classic cross-cultural analysis of parenthood, “the child is linked to both its parents by the unity of the household and by the intimacy of daily contacts.” But for the Visiting Father, both aspects of this linkage are irrevocably shattered.
I first read that passage in 1995, the year I myself became a “weekend dad.” In February my wife told me she was gay. In March she left our home and took my daughter with her.

At the time I was on recruiting duty for the Marine Corps, on an unforgiving assignment that required working fourteen-hour days, six days a week. I could only see my little girl on Sundays after making the ninety-mile trek from Olympia to Everett, where my soon-to-be-ex-wife had moved.

I’d pick up my two-year-old daughter, strap her into the car seat, and we’d set out on our weekend routine: to the park, if it was sunny and warm; to the play-land at McDonalds if it was rainy and cold. (In Everett, it is always rainy and always cold.)

Over the next several years, I was the one who moved—to Japan, San Diego, Dallas, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. I went from being “weekend dad” to being “summer-and-holiday dad.” Through it all I tried my best to be a “good-enough father.”

A few years ago I met Blakenhorn and talked to him about his book. I wanted to tell him that he was wrong. I wanted to tell him the base isn’t always lost and that the linkage is not always shattered. I wanted to tell him that it was indeed possible—because I was one—to be a “good-enough father.”

But it isn’t true. As much as I wanted to believe otherwise, Fatherless America was devastatingly prescient about my own experience as a “visiting father.” My experience was one more data point in the reams of empirical studies that show what millions of part-time dads before me have learned: Our children always need more than we can give them in a few weekend hours.

Of course, visiting fathers aren’t the only ones aware of the damage being done to our country’s children. Almost everyone acknowledge the harm in treating dad as if there is “nothing objectively essential about his contribution.”

Yet if we’re too specific, too personal, we may offend some poor hapless father who is doing the best he can. And who are we to judge any individual’s family situation? America’s true religion—unfettered individualism—requires that we find some way to justify everyone’s choice and ignore or play down the damage that results from such choices.

Although it is tempting to join in bending a knee to the cult of individualism (I’m an American, after all), I want to take a different approach. I want to directly address the specific, narrow audience who can do more than anyone else to change this destructive cycle. I want to make a policy proposal to the fathers who are on the verge of leaving their families.

As with all policy proposals, certain assumptions must be shared before agreement can be reached. My proposal is based on a simple argument: When your first child is born, your life stops being about what you want and starts being about what they need. If you disagree, you can stop reading now.

Here is the only way to fix the problem of fatherlessness: You must find a way to stay with your children. You may be having a tough time in your marriage. You may be thinking that you no longer love or can live with your spouse. You may believe that divorce is the only remaining option.

I don’t know your situation. I don’t know what you are going through. I only know that your children need you at home. Your sons and your daughters need your presence. They need you around, all the time, and not just for regularly scheduled visits. If you want to be a good father, don’t leave your children.

I’m fully aware that such a suggestion will be unpopular and that it will be deemed impractical. Our society tells us that you shouldn’t “stay together just for the kids.” Some social scientists will tell us that staying in an unhappy marriage will hurt the kids. Our culture tells us that progress has made fatherhood a vestigial artifact. Our hearts tell us that we deserve to pursue our own bliss. Even our churches can tell us that marriage is about being happy and that we deserve to be happy no matter what.

But again: When your first child is born, your life stops being about what you want and starts being about what they need. They need you at home. If you’re a good man and aspire to be a good father, that is all you need to know.

If your wife is physically abusive to you and the children, you need to get out—and take your kids with you. Otherwise you stick it out, and try to love your wife in every way possible. Maybe the marriage will heal (they sometimes do). Maybe it won’t. It doesn’t matter. If you have to stay in your marriage for one year or for eighteen, you stick it out until your children are grown.

What do you do, though, if you’re wife wants a divorce? You beg her to stay. You change what you have to change. You use guilt if necessary, and try to get her to “think about what is best for the kids.”

If nothing else works, then you ask her to commit to six months of marital counseling before she files for divorce. If at the end of the six months she’s still resolved to end the marriage you ask for another six months. You keep asking for as long as it takes. You may lose the fight eventually, but if you’re a man you will not give up on your family until you are bloodied and broken.

Don’t kid yourself that your divorce will be different because you have a good relationship with your children’s mother. My ex-wife has become a dear friend and a superb partner in parenting. Despite the peculiar circumstance that ended our marriage, I couldn’t ask for a more thoughtful, accommodating woman to be my former spouse.

But as hard as we work to make it easier on our daughter, everything we can do is not enough. Even though my daughter has lived with me for the past couple of years, her being with me hasn’t changed the fact that our child lives in a house where one of her parents is missing. Divorce doesn’t just end a marriage—it ends a family.

By now I’ve lost almost everyone who has followed me this far. Most people will pity my naivete or denounce my blanket recommendation as insensitive and idiotic. So be it. It may not even be the type of argument that we can comprehend in our individualistic culture. We’ve become so accustomed to politically-oriented solutions for societal problems that we’ve forgotten that sometimes the only way to fix what we’ve broken is by individuals making tough choices. In this situation, there is no other way.

I can’t convince everyone, of course, but my hope is that there is at least one father left—even just one—who will seriously consider what I’m saying. I hope that he will go into his child’s room tonight and watch them while they sleep. I hope that he will think about what it means to his babies that he is there for them when they go to bed and that he is there for them when they wake up.

Finally, I hope he’ll realize he has the power to retain a precious gift that we visiting fathers have lost and that we can never get back. He still has the opportunity to be a good father.

Joe Carter is web editor of First Things.
Retrieved June 24, 2010 from http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/06/dads-donrsquot-go


More about fatherhood:

Pamela Paul (2010). Are fathers necessary? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/are-fathers-necessary/8136/

W. Bradford Wilcox (2010). Are fathers really fungible? http://familyscholars.org/2010/06/14/are-fathers-really-fungible/

Andersson, Gunnar, 1962-
Noack, Turid.
Seierstad, Ane.
Weedon-Fekjaer, Harald.
The Demographics of Same-Sex Marriages in Norway and Sweden
Demography - Volume 43, Number 1, February 2006, pp. 79-98
Abstract at:

The present study investigates the demographics of same-sex marriages—that is, registered partnerships—in Norway and Sweden. We give an overview of the demographic characteristics of the spouses of these partnerships, study patterns of their divorce risks, and compare the dynamics of same-sex couples with those of heterosexual marriages. We use longitudinal information from the population registers of the two countries that cover all persons in partnerships. Our demographic analyses include information on characteristics such as age, sex, geographic background, experience of previous opposite-sex marriage, parenthood, and educational attainment of the partners involved. The results show that in many respects, the distributions of married populations on these characteristics differ by the sex composition of the couples. Patterns in divorce risks are rather similar in same-sex and opposite-sex marriages, but divorce-risk levels are considerably higher in same-sex marriages. The divorce risk for female partnerships is double that for male partnerships.

W. Bradford Wilcox (2009, April 13). To Have, to Hold, For a While
Amid divorce, remarriage and co-habitation, children do not do well.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123958524728412435.html

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/parenting/pa0140.htm
http://center.americanvalues.org/?p=78
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/06/on-the-demise-of-fatherhood
Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem

What About the Children?

In a society that subordinates children's needs to adult freedoms, Mary Eberstadt's Home Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes should give anyone pause. It offers a compelling case that the large-scale absence of parents from their children's lives via day care, video games,empty homes for schoolkids to return to (and have sex in), and so forth have a devastating impact on children and young people. The adult response of pathologizing and medicating the kids, or interning them in prison-like private boarding schools, only compounds the problem. It reflects and reinforces adult denial of children's needs and suffering.

As Eberstadt points out, the kinds of critique she offers break a taboo and call down a ton of ideological abuse on the heads of those few who dare to make them--in academia these do not include scholars without secure employment! They are points and evidence that get brushed off as reactionary or sexist or unhelpfully guilt-inducing. Contrary to some reviews, this is not an attack on working mothers. Those many women who have no choice but to work full-time have no reason to feel guilt. But those parents--mothers and fathers both--who do have choice have reason to feel guilt and need to face the truth about the costs of their choices for their children.

Any one of the studies Eberstadt cites, could be questioned for its methodological flaws, and some links between adult behavior and child suffering are not as strong as others. But the cumulative effect of the arguments and evidence the author presents is powerful. It merits serious and open discussion instead of the usual dismissal and denunciation from most feminists and liberals.

The case is not just a matter of personal choices. Such cultural shifts are reflected and amplified in social policies. The normalizing of out-of-wedlock teen sex as reflected in much sex education; the assumption that mothers should (re)join the workforce as early as possible reflected in welfare reform; the assumption that women should adopt and adapt to the male model of subordinating family to work as reflected in so-called family-friendly policies that promote increased labor force participation of mothers (see Gilbert's excellent analysis,[[ASIN:0300164610 A Mother's Work: How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life]]--all these and related policies are redefining parenthood at the expense of children.

This book focuses on the toll on children of these cultural and policy shifts of the past half century. For a recent critique of the misguided project of treating both sexes as if they were essentially identical except for anatomical details and the social construction of gender--and of squeezing women into male norms of work and family, see Susan Pinker's excellent study, [[ASIN:0743284712 The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Real Gender Gap]]. But this book is about children. It is a bold challenge to the taboo on discussing the extent and nature of children's needs for their parents.

As Eberstadt indicates, we need not a quick policy fix here and there, but a fundamental and honest re-assessment of our priorities in relation to children and young people--both personally and in the policy choices we make.

Sowell, Sandel, and Neil Gilbert: A Mother's Work

Paul Adams

Sowell, Sandel, and A Mother’s Work
In A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life, Neil Gilbert (2008) examines how capitalism, feminism, and the state influence lifestyle choices and the changing role of motherhood. They do so, he argues, by generating norms, values, and hence social pressures that subordinate motherhood to the market. Gilbert, the social policy professor for whom I worked as a graduate student at the School of Social Welfare, U.C. Berkeley, thirty-six years ago, argues that the main policy approaches to harmonizing work and family—“family-friendly” and gender-neutralizing policies—both subordinate family to work. They assume and support the male model in which paid work starts early and is continuous. The traditional model of a father who provides and protects and a woman who manages the home and nurtures the children has given way to one in which both parents give priority of time and effort to the labor market. Periods in which the mother absents herself from work in order to have children are seen as “interruptions” and the aim of policymakers and feminist pundits—is to get mothers, whether they are on welfare or pursuing high-powered careers—back into the labor market as early as possible.

Gilbert shares the general view that “something must be done” to harmonize work and family life. But what? There are, he says, two common policy approaches to this challenge:
1) So-called family-friendly policies; and
2) Gender-neutralizing policies.

1) “Family-friendly” measures to allow mothers with young children to work include, for example,
a. Early child care
b. Paid parental leave
c. Part-time work
d. Such voluntary measures as flexible hours, special family leave, telephone access.

Gilbert illustrates this approach with the example of the University of California system, which provides its tenure-track faculty with day care for toddlers; two years’ leave from the tenure track; a part-time option; paid maternity leave; and paid relief from teaching for two semesters (p.161).

2) Gender-neutralizing policies aim at modifying traditional gender roles in relation to both work and family life by such measures as:
a. Parental leave reform (so that the full benefit requires fathers to take some of the leave).

This second approach is a remarkable case of what Sowell calls the unconstrained vision. Here “surrogates”--policy-makers and “gender feminists”--differ markedly from the mass of the population—in Sweden, the pioneer of such policies, as in the U.S. In both countries less than half of parents think that men and women should participate equally in paid employment and child care. Swedish men take a small percentage of the leave they are entitled to and the men who take such parental leave are concentrated among highly educated men in the public sector. There is a common notion that such fathers as do take the leaves, time them to coincide with major sporting events like the Winter Olympics. But the truth seems to be that they are taken in the summer and around Christmas as a way to extend vacation time.

The views of those who developed and passed such policies into law are in stark contrast to the views of most married parents now as in the past. Women as well as men find substantial benefits for the family in a degree of specialization and division of labor. That, as Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher (2000) argue, is an important advantage of marriage in the first place (The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially). In Sowell’s terms Waite and Gallagher respect the collective, historical wisdom implicit in the ways millions of people over many generations have shaped the institution of marriage through living out their lives and passing on to their children what they have learned from experience and the experience of earlier generations. The policy elites see the masses as lagging behind the views of the enlightened. Their policies are based, not on what women actually want, but on what enlightened elites think they should want. This divergence does not seem explicable in terms of the masses of women lagging behind their more advanced leaders but all moving in the same direction. “From 1997 to 2007,” according to a Pew Research Center study that Gilbert cites, “the percentage of both employed and at-home mothers who considered full-time work to be their ideal situation declined by one-third” (p.170).

Most important from Gilbert’s perspective, both the “family-friendly” and gender-neutralizing approaches to harmonizing work and family life do so by subordinating the latter to the former. The aim is to increase and maintain female labor force participation by moving mothers with young children into paid employment on the male model. (Hence the quotes around “family-friendly” since these policies seek to increase women’s paid work by easing the competing demands and “interruptions” of children. Thus gender feminists, in particular, favor for women an early start on their careers and continuous work to retirement with minimal or no interruption for raising even young children.

In contrast to these work-oriented policies that promote mother-child separation in order to promote lifelong paid work on the male model, Gilbert proposes an alternative. He does not seek to scrap these separationist policies (Eberstadt’s term) that ease female labor force participation, but proposes increasing the options for women in ways that allow for them to choose to give higher priority to their children.

This alternative to the male model Gilbert calls the sequential pattern of labor force participation and parenting at home. In line with the constrained vision, he does not offer either a comprehensive list of policy options or a blueprint for any particular initiative. Rather, he says, “My purpose is to broaden public perceptions of the choices and help reframe the debate...” (p.165).

Possibilities for policy that supports the sequential pattern and widens the lifestyle options for mothers of young children are:

3) Sequential pattern
a. Home care allowance (but for families without a breadwinner, this would require alternatives to employment-based health insurance)
b. Credit-sharing—e.g., community property laws and credit splitting for Social Security and pension benefits, dividing equally the rights to such assets acquired since marriage.

Here I do not plan to describe or critique Gilbert’s evidence and arguments, though I find them persuasive. (Gilbert has braved much controversy and hostility in the politically correct world of social work and social welfare to follow the evidence and the logic of his argument.) Rather, I want to look at his position through the lenses of Sowell’s and Sandel’s dichotomies as discussed in earlier posts here.

Two aspects of Sandel’s argument are especially pertinent. The first is the voluntarist conception of the unencumbered self implicit in current liberal theory. The other is the notion of a procedural republic that is neutral about matters of morals and religion, values and the good life. In this conception of the procedural republic, citizens are not formed, as a matter of policy or practice, with the capacity to deliberate well on such things, but are expected to bracket them off and treat them as irrelevant and inadmissible to political debate in the public square.

The unencumbered self
In the republican theory of Aristotle and the Founding Fathers, as well as modern communitarians like Sandel, liberty depends on sharing in self-governance, which in turn “means deliberating with fellow citizens about the common good and helping to shape the destiny of the political community.” The habits of the heart required for and developed by self-governing members of a particular family, community, and nation are those of a situated, encumbered self. In this narrative conception of personhood, we develop in “reciprocal indebtedness” (MacIntyre, 1999), from total dependence to a degree of autonomy through ties to family and community, culture and tradition.

In contrast, the liberalism of recent years “conceives persons as free and independent selves, unencumbered by moral or civic ties they have not chosen.” This conception of rights and individual autonomy “assumes that freedom consists in the capacity of persons to choose their values and ends.” One key practical expression of this shift in liberalism is the subordination of the rights and needs of children to the freedoms of adults. (On the extensiveness and significance of this shift, see Elizabeth Marquardt’s The Revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Global Clash between Adult Rights and Children’s Needs.)

In her book Home Alone America, Mary Eberstadt argues that children have been the major victims of the absence of adults from their own families—fathers, mothers, and extended family. The adoption of the male model of work life—early entry and continuous employment—by mothers has been in part a result of the rise in divorce and illegitimacy. With the absence of a father to provide for his family and share the work of parenting and domestic life, many women have had no alternative but to enter the workforce full-time. But for others it has been a freer choice, an expression of the new increased options for meaningful careers outside the home and the arguments of feminists for women with higher education to Get to Work, as Linda Hirshman’s polemic puts it. In her view, women should not waste their educations raising kids. As Eberstadt observes, a large literature about this unprecedented social experiment in parent-child separation, whether enthusiastic or critical, has been focused on “grown women and what they want and need.”

Gilbert’s book, unlike Eberstadt’s, does not seek as its primary purpose to address this imbalance by illuminating the impact of absent mothers and fathers on children, young people, and society. Rather, it seeks to show how feminism, the market, and social policy shape family life. In different ways, these material and ideological pressures all work together to push women into the male career model, prioritizing work over family life from the earliest years of motherhood. Eberstadt notes that the adverse consequences of millions of individual decisions were unintended by the individuals making those choices. While Sowell emphasizes the aggregate wisdom of millions of choices made for self-interested reasons--as compared with the comprehensive-rational planning of enlightened officials--Eberstadt asks whether in this case the multiplication of millions of individual decisions results in an outcome that no-one intended. Among the outcomes, “Time in front of the screen is up; exercise and outdoor play of any kind is down; and kids, in the United States and almost all comparable countries, are fatter than ever.”

Gilbert examines the forces that shape those millions of individual decisions—feminism, capitalism, and policy. All, he argues, seek to harmonize work and family at the expense of family. They are not neutral about the matter, seeking only to expand women’s options. Like Hirshman, they all prioritize mothers’ labor force participation on the male model—work early and work continuously.

Gilbert’s book implicitly casts doubt on the notion that the market is a process whereby millions of individual choices are aggregated in such a way as to result in the common good. This in two ways. First the individual choices are shaped not only by the market, but also by ideology and policy in interaction with the knowledge and wisdom that arise from relations of reciprocal indebtedness within networks of family, community, and culture.

Second, the aggregate of such individual choices, even if made for millions of individually defensible reasons, may result in aggregate results that no-one wants. For example, the March 4, 2010 Economist article on “Gendercide: The War on Baby Girls” points to three main causes of the 100 million missing baby girls as the ancient preference for boys, the modern preference for smaller families, and the modern technology of ultrasound and abortion. Even without a government one-child policy, millions of individual decisions to abort baby girls, impelled in part by the subordination of family to work on the male model as driven by market and ideological (feminist) forces, results in an unbalanced sex ratio, with the prospect of millions of “surplus” young men roaming a country untamed by the traditional lifescript of settling down, marriage, and family.

The millions of individual choices are thus 1) not the acts of autonomous unencumbered selves, and 2) result in the aggregate in a situation that no rational person could consider an expression of the collective wisdom or common good.

With admirable restraint, Gilbert does not respond to this “market failure” with the unconstrained vision of the enlightened policy analyst who proposes a comprehensive policy to provide mothers and women in general what he thinks they should want. Instead, he modestly suggests ways to widen our thinking about policy options that would widen the range of choice for women who want to have both motherhood and careers, if not all at the same time. He offers modest suggestions for bringing policy more closely into line with the preferences of the large majority of women who want to spend time with their children and who are not in any case on the fast track to brilliant and fulfilling careers, as well as the wants and needs of their children (see, e.g., Eberstadt, 2004).

Do Fathers Matter?

Another one for Fathers Day!

http://center.americanvalues.org/?p=78

(or right click on the title below)

Do Fathers Matter Uniquely for Adolescent Well-Being?

David Eggebeen

Research Brief No. 14, October 2008