PAULINE SHRIEKED
with delight when her father threw
her into the air, and she clutched
him at night with ferocious strength
when terrified by a nightmare. But
after her parents divorced and her
mother moved with her back to Michigan,
she rarely saw her father, and anger
gradually replaced love. As a young
adult, she has mostly negative things
to say about men. She isn't quite
sure of her father's address, and
she doesn't call or send a card
on Father's Day.
We may be the only society in history
that has voluntarily chosen mass
fatherlessness. Only about half
of our children make it to adulthood
living in the same home as their
fathers, due to the breakdown of
the nuclear family.
We have become adept at fooling
ourselves about the causes of family
destruction. The language we use,
from Oprah to wonky policy journals,
often treats family breakdown as
beyond our control, while obscuring
the fact that it is the result of
individual and societal choices.
In the lexicon of family dissolution,
we usually hear something like ''Our
marriage struggled and ultimately
failed," as if the marriage
were an independent creature over
which the parties had no control.
Or we read that ''One-third of all
births occur out of wedlock,"
as if this were an act of God.
Instead, as a society, we have made
policy choices that have produced
legions of anguished kids, overworked
single mothers, and angry noncustodial fathers.
First, we enacted no-fault divorce,
creating lower legal barriers for
leaving a spouse than for firing
an employee or evicting a tenant.
This coincided with the explosive
growth in the 1960s of the philosophy
of personal liberation, including
the acceptance of divorce and of
bearing children out of wedlock.
Moreover, welfare policy rewarded
mothers financially for having children
without fathers-- the more children,
the more money. Both the divorce
rate and the out-of-wedlock birth
rate immediately skyrocketed. (Out-of-wedlock
births among the poor have plummeted
since welfare reform.)
It might still have been OK for
our children, except that simultaneously
the courts refused to order shared
physical custody of children, and
instead ordered only meager ''visitation"
for noncustodial parents, typically
three or four days per month. The
courts declined to enforce even
that minimal contact when the mother
interfered with it (in about half
of cases, according to surveys of
single mothers), and routinely allowed
distant moveaways with the children.
As a result, almost every classroom,
athletic team, and school band has
several children who have not seen
their dads in months. Since this has
been going on now for two generations,
the verdict is in: It hasn't worked.
Despite the valiant efforts of millions
of single mothers, the rates of all
the seriously negative outcomes for
children are increased two- to threefold
among fatherless kids, including grief,
loneliness, substance abuse, failure
in school, gang involvement, teenage
pregnancy, suicide, and even mortality.
We have cooked up all sorts of programs
to counteract the symptoms of fatherlessness,
but their effectiveness has been marginal
because they do not attack the root
problem. For drug problems, we have
DARE programs. For gang involvement,
we offer midnight basketball, and
for teenage pregnancy, we distribute
condoms in schools. We celebrate male
role models, mentors, coaches, and
''Big Brothers," while the children
pine for their fathers.
Liberals consider efforts to strengthen
marriage a right-wing obsession. And
efforts to achieve gender equality
in divorce are considered antifeminist,
even though voters in Massachusetts
and poll respondents in Detroit both
favored joint physical custody by
a margin of 86 percent. Conservatives
see a handful of gays and lesbians
getting married and decry the death
of marriage, while largely ignoring
the elephant in the room of divorce
and out-of-wedlock childbearing among
heterosexuals. The alpha-males among
the conservatives denounce the ''irresponsible
fathers" they would never be,
ignoring the fact that maternal choice
far outweighs paternal choice both
in divorce and in the decision to
have children outside of marriage.
Fortunately, fathers and mothers alike
are taking matters into their own
hands. They are uniting to form so-called
fathers' rights organizations, although
they might better be known as children's
rights organizations, since surveys
of adult children of divorce consistently
show that what they most grieved was
the loss of their fathers. The central
demand of these organizations is for
joint physical custody of children
if the parents are both fit. But as
with any complex social problem, there
are related issues of concern, from
child support inanities to false charges
of abuse.
This may be the first time in history
that men have had to wrest some power
from women for the good of children
and society. They will surely succeed,
if only because gender roles are converging
and the rank and file of both sexes
see shared parenting after divorce
as natural and fair. And because it
is clearly best for the children.
Dr. Ned Holstein is president of Fathers
and Families in Boston.
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