PERSPECTIVES ON PARENTING : Properly Honoring Our Fathers : Drug abuse, gang participation, academic failure and promiscuity all can be traced to the absence of dad.
As sure as the sun rises on the third Sunday of June, television news will contain one “cute” Father’s Day feature on ugly ties and one serious feature on a politician scoring points by rounding up “deadbeat dads.” Telephone companies will suffer through the year’s highest volume of collect calls, (Mother’s Day has a higher total volume) as children spend dad’s money to thank dad for his money. And millions of fathers will try not to get too depressed about their second-class status as parents.
Meanwhile, both the left and the right are starting to notice that the social issue of our time is inadequate fathering. The best indicator of drug abuse, gang participation, promiscuity and academic failure is neither race nor income; it is fatherlessness.
Politicians like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), administrators like former Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan and social scientists like David Blankenhorn all tout the same message. Even the Atlantic magazine admitted that “Dan Quayle was right” when he criticized the promotion of fatherless childhood as just one more family option.
Family options are not all equal. Fathers give a unique and valuable contribution to the healthy development of children. While feminists persuaded some of us that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, it turns out that a child needs a father like a fish needs water.
We can no longer afford the cost of squandering our fathering resources. The toll it takes in crime and welfare alone--not to mention the non-monetary costs of emotionally scarred children and a crumbling social structure--is bankrupting us. It is time to stop whining about male irresponsibility, myopically equating inadequate fathering with inadequate child support. It is time to stop complaining about “what’s wrong with fathers” and start asking “what’s wrong with how we treat fathers.”
Had we intended to undermine fathering, we could not have done a better job than to devise our current policies. The Census Bureau reports that non-custodial mothers are far more “deadbeat” than noncustodial fathers, proving that the problem is not with fathers but rather with what the system does to noncustodial parents: It strips them of the rewards of parenthood while coldly enforcing the responsibilities.
People do not choose to become parents in order to shoulder 18 to 21 years of responsibilities. They become parents for the warmth of a family environment, for the joy of watching and helping a child to develop, for the immortality of passing along personal values. It is only in return for these rewards that parents are willing to pay the price of responsibility. Nevertheless, thanks to skyrocketing rates of children born out of wedlock and the routine discrimination against divorced fathers, at least half of all American fathers will be deprived of those rewards and will be reduced to being visiting wallets.
To be truly effective at undermining fatherhood, we would not just sabotage the legal relationship, contact and sense of parenthood as we already do, but we would also undermine the dignity and respect of fatherhood--as we also do. Although the silly images of fathers in “The Life of Riley” and “Bringing Up Father” were once balanced with more positive images like “Father Knows Best” and “Ozzie and Harriet,” fathers today are generally portrayed as bumbling at best and abusive at worst.
A survey of 10,000 random television commercials--1,000 a year from 1984 to 1993--found that whenever mothers and fathers were shown and one parent was designated as less competent, 100% of the less competent ones were fathers!
Bill Cosby, who used almost every episode of his top-rated show to pat himself on the back for enlightened attitudes, consistently showed himself and other fathers as buffoons. Indeed, despite his own character being a physician, his television wife was identified as the indisputable authority even on health matters within his own family.
Just as we cheated ourselves by depriving government and business of the full use of female talent, we cheat ourselves by depriving our children of the full use of male parental talent. If we are willing to take affirmative action to increase the flow of women into careers, we should at least stop taking affirmative opposition to the flow of men into the day-to-day lives of their children. Equal parental opportunity for men--joint physical custody--is the equivalent to equal employment opportunity for women. It should be legislated and enforced as such.