It’s All About Me: Adding to the Crisis of Fatherhood in the U.S.

I rely on Hiérothée for a lot of blog topic ideas so I was happy to see him send me an article on an area related to my recently completed dissertation. It appears that MSNBC ran an article last week about a new movement among some professional women. It seems that they are coming to recognize late, with respect to their “biological clocks,” their innate “need” to have a baby. However, for various reasons they find that the best option is to conceive through anonymous sperm donation. The MSNBC article focuses on the need for support groups and child care for these mothers but there is no mention of the impacts of the missing father on the children.

David Blankenhorn, in his book Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, draws together a mound of statistics to illustrate the problems associated with fatherless households. He begins by showing that the problem of fatherless households has grown significantly since 1960. By 1995 about 40% of all children in the U.S. were living without their biological fathers. This number is expected to reach 50% in this decade. While divorce and remarriage accounts for the majority, 40% of these children live only with their mothers. Blankenhorn cites study after study which links male youth crime, emotional and behavioral problems and social maladjustment to fatherless households. In fact, the most significant indicator of crime in a neighborhood is the percentage of households without the biological father present. While violence and crime are the main results of boys being raised without a father, for girls juvenile and single motherhood become the problems. For example, girls in single parent homes (87% of which are fatherless) are 53% more likely to marry as teenagers, 111% more likely to have children as teenagers, 164% more likely to have a child out of wedlock, and 92% more likely to divorce. These facts help to perpetuate further societal problems since women living with a man who is not their husband are four times more likely to experience abuse than a wife by her husband. In addition, children in fatherless households are at a significantly higher risk of sexual abuse. Finally, children are six times more likely to live in poverty if they live only with their mother.

I studied John Paul the Great’s theology of fatherhood and found that from his anthropology, these problems are predictable in a home where the father is not present. You see, God created man, male and female. We, men and women, are made to complement one another. We need each other’s complementary gifts to become who we are called to be (in a word . . . saints) and to subdue and have dominion over the earth (i.e. fruitfully steward families, society, technology, the environment, etc.). In a nutshell, women and men are given different ways of giving themselves as gifts to others. Children, who learn to trust from their parents' love, need to experience both of these complementary ways of loving in order to be well nurtured and to develop into healthy and well adjusted adults. The problems listed above are by and large, a response of destroyed trust.

By the way, the sociological data indicates that there is a big difference between children of divorced parents and children of a parent who has died; the latter not experiencing the extent of the problems generally seen among other fatherless households. Depriving children of this stable family life cannot be made up for later in life. Interestingly, the studies which ostensibly show that there is no difference between children of heterosexual parents and children of gay or lesbian parents actually does support the need for both parents. It seems that the authors of gay studies always take as their point of comparison single mother households, which as shown above, leads to very troubled children.

So, it turns out that you cannot fool Mother Nature. When we think that we can, with impunity, alter living in the way for which God has created us we are playing with fire. In the end, the piper will get his pay. Unfortunately, in this case it will likely be at the price of the emotional wellbeing of the innocent children.