Fathers needed

Fatherless America:  Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem
David Blankenhorn
Basic Books (Available from Focus on the Family, PO Box 5210, Clayton 3168 for $30 plus $3.50 postage).

Thirty years ago American Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report called The Negro Family:  The Case for National Action.  In it he wrote these words:  "The break-up of the black family is the single most important social fact of the United States today".  The central insight of his report was that family stability should be the basis of social legislation.  Said Moynihan, "A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos".

Unfortunately his words went largely unheeded, and today the disintegration of the black family is nearly complete.  Less than a third of all black children in America are born into a family where a father is present and, according to some projections, only six per cent of black children will live with both parents through age 18.

Social scientist Charles Murray has warned that white families are heading in the same direction, and we will soon see the emergence of a white underclass.  "Illegitimacy", he warns, "is the single most important social problem of our time -- more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness because it drives everything else" ("The Coming White Underclass", The Wall Street Journal, 29 October, 1993).

While Moynihan's words went unheeded 30 years ago, today most people accept his conclusions.  Even President Clinton is now talking about the importance of marriage and the right of children to be born into a home with two parents.

But is it too late?

WELL-BEING AT STAKE

The disappearance of marriage and the collapse of fatherhood are admirably examined by David Blankenhorn in Fatherless America.  The book is based on a wealth of statistical information, including the fact that "tonight, about 40 per cent of American children will go to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not live".  (In Australia, the number of children who live in one-parent families totals over a million or 15 per cent of all children).  "Fatherlessness", argues Blankenhorn, "is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation".  The primary results of this trend are "a decline in children's well-being and a rise in male violence, especially against women".

The problem is not just the absence of fathers, but "the absence of our belief in fathers".  Recalling the findings of Margaret Mead and others that the supreme test of any civilisation is whether it can socialise men by teaching them to be fathers, Blankenhorn traces the disappearance of the idea of fatherhood in contemporary culture, and the effects this has on our children and our society.

While he acknowledges that the so-called traditional family was not without problems, he sees the move to a fatherless society as a far greater dilemma.  As fatherhood becomes devalued, decultured and deinstitutionalised, the problems associated with inner-city America will only compound themselves.  We now know without question that the overwhelming generator of violence among young men is the fatherless family.  There are now a multitude of studies available which make it perfectly clear that fatherlessness is the major factor in crime, more than race, poverty or any other social variable.

This affects every aspect of life.  For example, a woman is more likely to be abused by a boyfriend, a de facto or a live-in than by a husband.  The same is true of child sexual abuse.  "What magnifies the risk of sexual abuse in children is not the presence of a married father but his absence".  Again, a host of studies have clearly established this point.  Here in Australia former Human Rights Commissioner Brian Burdekin recently stated that there is a 600 per cent greater risk of child sexual abuse from an unmarried, non-biological father, than from a married, biological one.

With all these studies confirming the importance of marriage and the presence of fathers, one would hope that our political leaders would reaffirm our national commitment to marriage.  The opposite is the case unfortunately.  Australian society, like American society, is not intent on making sure marriage works, nor is it intent on making divorce less easy to obtain.  Instead, it is in the process of deinstitutionalising marriage and fatherhood.  Instead of trying to reduce divorce, it seeks to make the process more co-operative and amicable.  Divorce reform here and overseas means simply trying to involve fewer lawyers and more mediators.  This may be better than conflict and litigation, but it does not deal with the real problem.

"Divorce is the problem.  Pretending that better divorce is the solution amounts to little more than a way of easing our conscience as we lower our standards", says Blankenhorn.  "As fatherhood fragments, children's well-being declines.  But children need some ephemeral hope called better divorce about as much as they need some lifeless reminder of their father called child support.  Both, for children, are only slightly better than nothing.  What children need is a father".

When anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski said that "the father is indispensable for the full sociological status of the child as well as of its mother", he was stating a truth that is both simple and profound.  Yet we live in a day when simplicity is spurned and profundity is not grasped.  With no less than the Governor-General calling for same-sex-marriage and adoption rights, the need to restate the obvious is all the more urgent.  As C.S. Lewis once said, "The process of living seems to consist in coming to realise truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes".

RE-CREATING FATHERHOOD

Blankenhorn concludes:

"The most urgent domestic challenge facing the United States at the close of the 20th century is the re-creation of fatherhood as a vital role for men.  At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment.  For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments -- not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools -- will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence.  To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued societal recession".

In the Australian context we can find this no better expressed than by Simon Leys of the University of Sydney who has recently written:  "In the history of the civilised world, no substitute has ever been found for the family.  Any society that allows it to disintegrate, or endeavours actively to destroy it (as we are now doing here) does it at its own horrific risks and costs".