Fathers Are Relevant

For one of my college courses I read “The State of Our Unions” – a joint publication of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values, which monitors the current health of marriage and family life in America.

Among the recommendations for both federal and state policies in the 2012 report, was a call to “End Anonymous Fatherhood in the U.S”.

“Today we have a fundamental contradiction in our policy on fatherhood. If a woman gets pregnant after a one-night stand, the father can be held accountable financially for that child for eighteen years. An elaborate, nationwide child support enforcement apparatus has been erected in support of this goal. But, if a woman buys anonymous sperm from a sperm bank, the anonymous man who provided his sperm walks away with no obligation. In the first case the state has decided that children have the right at the bare minimum to the financial support of two parents. In the second case, the state has decided that children have no such right. While only a small (but possibly growing) minority of would-be-parents use sperm donation or similar technologies to get pregnant, the cultural power of the idea that it’s acceptable deliberately to create a fatherless child and for biological fathers to walk away from their children is real” (Elizabeth Marquardt, David Blankenhorn, Robert I. Lerman, Linda Malone-Colón, and W. Bradford Wilcox, “The President’s Marriage Agenda for the Forgotten Sixty Percent,” The State of Our Unions (Charlottesville, VA: National Marriage Project and Institute for American Values, 2012).

This topic caught my eye because it goes along with a trend I have noted and one which I have gotten on my soap box about more than once.
Why are fathers viewed as dispensable?  

It seems that more and more women are intentionally choosing single parenthood. In fact, it has become fashionable among the rich and famous. We are also seeing a trend for this among career driven women who are financially and socially independent. In 1980 thirteen percent of births were to women out of marriage - By 2000, that number rose to forty percent. Today, fifty-three percent of births to women under thirty are outside of marriage. While many of those women are in cohabitation relationships, the chances that they will stay in a long-time commitment are not high. In the U.S., ten percent of women will have three or more husbands or live-in partners by age thirty-five. (Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today).

The break-up of parents or partners has historically created more households with a nonresident father. In Paul R. Amato’s publication, “The Impact of Family Formation Change on the Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Well-Being of the Next Generation” (The Future of Children, 2005, Vol. 15, No. 2, pg. 75-96), he states that “Interviews with children reveal that losing contact with fathers is one of the most painful outcomes of divorce” (Amato, pg.83).

Much could be said about the impact a father has on the life of a child, but I am not going to expound on that now. My goal is to bring attention to these trends and to those who are trying to combat them in the hopes that we will consider what we can do to champion the discourse, that fathers are relevant!