Men Working More at Being Good Dads

From offering bedside support in hospital delivery rooms to assuming a greater share of household chores to reading books on how to be a better father, American men are more active now than ever before in the daily lives of their offspring.

“There appears to be a distinct trend of men wanting to be more involved with their children,” said Wade Horn, president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, a suburban Washington-based group that promotes responsible male parenting. The number of support groups for fathers has grown tenfold since 1994, to more than 2,000 nationwide, Horn’s organization has found. “It’s a real grass-roots movement now.”

But for all the success in changing attitudes--and, in some cases, reversing widely held notions that many men are irresponsible fathers--Horn and other advocates are dismayed that the number of children living in fatherless homes continues to soar.

“There’s good news and bad news concerning the state of fatherhood,” Horn said. “If there is a father in the home, he’s doing more daily child care than at any other time in history. But unfortunately for a growing number of children, there is no father in their lives.”

Activists to Meet to Address Problems

According to the group’s figures, compiled from government reports, 8% of the nation’s children lived without a father in 1960. That figure has steadily grown, reaching 11% in 1970, 18% in 1980 and 22% in 1990, the last year for which figures are available.

Horn and an estimated 500 community-based activists are gathering in Washington this weekend for their third National Summit on Fatherhood, seeking to develop strategies that local groups from across the country can implement to stem the tide of missing fathers.

“This national event is designed to equip community-based organizations with the tools they need to help bring dads back to their children,” Horn said. The two-day meeting reflects “the maturation of the fatherhood movement in America” from a loose confederation of activists sounding alarms to a network of social service agencies agreeing on a course of action, he said.

Michael Kharfen, a spokesman for Children and Family Programs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said that federal officials are aware of local programs experimenting with innovative ideas to assist fathers. But he noted that few of them have produced results that could be documented or measured to show a decline in fatherless families.

“We’re still in the early stages,” he said. “But unlike in the past, when the perception of father was provider, not nurturer, there’s an appreciation that all fathers have a role in the care and emotional support of their children.”

Kharfen said that many of the community-based programs are targeted toward at-risk fathers, who tend to be young, poor and minority. However, many of the more innovative programs are seeking to help affluent or middle-class fathers reshape their lives to include child care. “The biggest hurdle seems to be challenging the basic notion of being a father. For some men, job and ambition and career demands prevent them from being effective fathers in just the same ways that being poor or never having had a father inhibits other men.”

Often, it is necessary to change institutions and bureaucracies that are not accustomed to seeing men as child care providers, said Neil Tift, director of the National Fatherhood Initiative’s resource center, which works with community-based groups. Tift said that television images tend to reinforce the perception of fathers as Homer Simpson-like buffoons who are incapable of caring for their children.

He said that it is common in some communities for people never to see men in the role of father and to become suspicious when a man is trying to be responsible. “Some people see men, but they don’t see fathers. That creates a perception for many people that fatherhood isn’t important.”

He cited a personal example of his own teenage, unmarried son who initially was rebuffed when he sought medical assistance at a hospital emergency room for his 4-year-old daughter. “He had to have written documentation that he was the father of his own child,” Tift said. Finally, the son called Tift, who went to the hospital to vouch for his granddaughter. “They wouldn’t have treated an 18-year-old mother like that.”

Perhaps the best indication of the shift in attitudes toward fathers can be found in the marketplace, where consumer tastes and potential profits are creating opportunities for entrepreneurs.

“There are 38 million men with kids in their homes,” said Eric Garland, whose New York-based magazine, Dads, is scheduled to appear next week on newsstands across the nation. “If we can sell to 1 in 40 of them, we’ll be very successful.”

Garland said that now is the perfect time for a publication targeted toward high-income, well-educated and professional men with children. “This wouldn’t have worked 10 years ago because the culture wasn’t there to support it. So much has changed in the lives of men, such as women work outside of the home increasingly, and men have to do more at home. Until recently, there wasn’t a big enough audience for a men’s magazine to deal with our roles as fathers and husbands. Now there is.”

Fatherless Homes Seen as Large Social Threat

Anecdotal accounts and survey data gathered by Horn of the National Fatherhood Institute suggest that Americans are alarmed at the high rate of homes without fathers in our society. He points to a Gallup poll that found in 1992 that 69% of Americans ranked fatherlessness as the “most significant” social threat in the nation. That figure rose to 79% in a similar 1996 Gallup poll, he said.

“For children born in the 1990s, another study predicts up to 60% of them will spend some time in a fatherless household,” Horn said, pointing to divorce and unwed fathers as the two most prevalent reasons for children living without a man in their home.

The key to keeping men active with their children is to strengthen marriage, Horn believes.

“While we are winning the public opinion battle to show the merit of having a father in the home, we have not yet convinced people that marriage has anything to do with it,” he said. “There is still a fantasy out there that you can have a family without marriage. But that fantasy speaks to the desires of adults rather than to the needs of children.”