Life Without Father:
(Page 2 of 9)
September/October 1996
David Popenoe, The Wilson Quarterly (wwics.si.edu/OUTREACH/WQ/QUARTERL.HTM)
Until the 1960s, the falling death rate and the rising divorce rate neutralized each other. In 1900 the percentage of American children living in single-parent families was 8.5 percent. By 1960 it had increased to just 9.1 percent. Virtually no one during those years was writing or thinking about family breakdown, disintegration, or decline.
RELATED CONTENT
Dune Lankard Founder, Eyak Preservation CouncilUtne Reader visionaryNovember December 2009by Staff,...
Communities pick up where science leaves off.......
One day last spring, Harvard University psychologist Jennifer Lerner found out that a student of he...
A sampling of bright ideas on how to revitalize education...
Machiavelli is wrong. A new science of power has revealed that power is wielded most effectively wh...
Indeed, what is most significant about the changing family demography of the first six decades of the 20th century is this: Because the death rate was dropping faster than the divorce rate was rising, more children were living with both of their natural parents by 1960 than at any other time in world history. The figure was close to 80 percent for the generation born in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But then the decline in the death rate slowed, and the divorce rate skyrocketed. 'The scale of marital breakdowns in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent that I know of,' says Lawrence Stone, a noted Princeton University family historian. 'There has been nothing like it for the last 2,000 years, and probably longer.'
Consider what has happened to children. Most estimates are that only about 50 percent of the children born during the 1970-84 'baby bust' period will still live with their natural parents by age 17--a staggering drop from nearly 80 percent.
In theory, divorce need not mean disconnection. In reality, it often does. A large survey conducted in the late 1980s found that about one in five divorced fathers had not seen his children in the past year and that fewer than half of divorced fathers saw their children more than several times a year. A 1981 survey of adolescents who were living apart from their fathers found that 52 percent hadn't seen them at all in more than a year; only 16 percent saw their fathers as often as once a week--and the fathers' contact with their children dropped off sharply over time.
The picture grows worse. Just as divorce has overtaken death as the leading cause of fatherlessness, out-of-wedlock births are expected to surpass divorce in the 1990s. They accounted for 30 percent of all births by 1991; by the turn of the century they may account for 40 percent (and 80 percent of minority births). And there is substantial evidence that having an unmarried father is even worse for a child than having a divorced father.
Across time and cultures, fathers have always been considered essential--and not just for their sperm. Indeed, no known society ever thought of fathers as potentially unnecessary. Marriage and the nuclear family--mother, father, and children--are the most universal social institutions in existence. In no society has the birth of children out of wedlock been the cultural norm. To the contrary, concern for the legitimacy of children is nearly universal.
In my many years as a sociologist, I have found few other bodies of evidence that lean so much in one direction as this one: On the whole, two parents--a father and a mother--are better for a child than one parent. There are, to be sure, many factors that complicate this simple proposition. We all know of a two-parent family that is truly dysfunctional--the proverbial family from hell. A child can certainly be raised to a fulfilling adulthood by one loving parent who is wholly devoted to the child's well-being. But such exceptions do not invalidate the rule any more than the fact that some three-pack-a-day smokers live to a ripe old age casts doubt on the dangers of cigarettes.
Page:
<< Previous 1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
Next >>