The Father Fixation
Let's get real about family life
September/October 1996
Judith Stacey, Utne Reader
As the electoral season hits full throttle, more and more voices are intoning the mantra of 'family values.' The Institute for American Values and its offshoot, the Council on Families in America, and other groups crusade on behalf of the supposed superiority of married-couple nuclear families, branding all other kinds of families second-rate--or worse. They are using the apparently objective language of social science to preach a sermon that we used to hear mainly in the fire-and-brimstone tones of the religious right. This quieted-down approach is having a major effect on Democratic Party and media rhetoric on family issues.
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These groups pretend to speak for an overwhelming consensus of social scientists when they blame family 'breakdown'--by which they mean primarily the rise of divorce and unwed parenting--for just about every social problem in the nation. David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, for example, calls fatherlessness 'the most harmful demographic trend of this generation. He writes that 'it is the leading cause of declining child well-being in our society. It is also the engine driving our most urgent social problems, from crime to adolescent pregnancy to child sexual abuse to domestic violence against women.' The somewhat more temperate David Popenoe concedes that there are many sources of social decay but insists that 'the evidence is now strong that the absence of fathers from the lives of children is one of the most important causes.'
However well intentioned and appealing, most of the claims made by family values crusaders are blatantly false as well as destructive. As a sociologist, I can attest that there is absolutely no consensus among social scientists on family values, on the superiority of the heterosexual nuclear family, or on the supposed evil effects of fatherlessness. In fact, the best research and the most careful, best-regarded researchers, among them Andrew Cherlin at Johns Hopkins University, confirm that the quality of our family relationships and resources is far more important than gender or structure. The claim that intact two-parent families are inherently superior rests exclusively on the misuse of statistics and on the most elementary social science sins--portraying correlations as though they were causes, ignoring mediating factors, and treating small, overlapping differences as gross and absolute.
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