Families without Fathers

Fatherhood, Marriage and Children in American Society

David Popenoe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351520560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The American family is changing. Divorce, single parents, and stepfamilies are redefi ning the ways we live together and raise our children. Many "experts" feel these seemingly inevitable changes should be celebrated; they claim that the "new" families, which often lack a strong father, are actually healthier than traditional two-parent families—or, at the very least, do children no harm. But as David Popenoe shows in Families Without Fathers this optimistic view is severely misguided.

Examining evidence from social and behavioral science, history, and evolutionary biology, Popenoe shows why fathers today are deserting their families in record numbers. The disintegration of the child-centered, two parent family—especially in the inner cities, where as many as two in three children are growing up without their fathers—and the weakening commitment of fathers to their children that more and more follows divorce, are central causes of many of our worst individual and social problems. Juvenile delinquency, drug and alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancy, welfare dependency, and child poverty can be directly traced to fathers' lack of involvement in their children's lives.

Our situation will only get worse, Popenoe warns, unless men are willing to renew their commitment to their marriages and to their children. Yet he is not just an alarmist. He suggests concrete policies, and new ways of thinking and acting that will help all fathers improve their marriages and family lives, and tells us what we as individuals and as a society can do to support and strengthen the most important thing a man can do.

Part One

Fatherlessness

1. The Remarkable Decline of Fatherhood and Marriage

It’s very easy for a man to father a child. “To father a child,” unlike “to mother a child,” typically refers to a biological act, and men today do not seem to have much of a problem in that regard. But it is difficult for a man to be a father. To be a father, rather than merely to father, means to give a child guidance, instruction, encouragement, care, and love. Fatherhood—the state of being a father—is declining to a remarkable degree because so many fathers no longer live with their biological children.

Fathers in America today are living apart from their biological children more than ever before in our history. Close to 40 percent of all children do not live with their biological fathers, a percentage that is steadily climbing.¹ Of children born in the past decade, the chances that by age seventeen they will not be living with both biological parents stand at over 50 percent.² Many studies have shown that the typical nonresident father neither supports nor even sees his children on a regular basis. And, to make matters worse, many men who do live with their children are often removed from the day-to-day upbringing of those children. The new, nurturing fathers certainly exist, but in overall numbers they remain in short supply.

The widespread separation of fathers from their children in the late twentieth century is in many respects a surprising occurrence, something that no one anticipated. Thanks especially to the rise of modern contraceptives, men now have far fewer children needing their care; the average family size in America has dropped over the centuries from more than seven children to around two. Many fathers today, in fact, have only a single child, and that child has an excellent chance of living to adulthood. One would think that, with so few children, the responsibilities of fatherhood would be more readily accepted and more easily assumed.

At the same time, men are healthier, better educated, and better endowed materially than they have ever been. America is the wealthiest society in the history of the world in terms of material consumption, and much of that wealth is held by men. Most men not only have the means to invest heavily in their offspring, but they must know, given the recent advances in psychological awareness, how important parenting is for child well-being. Yet male investments in children are dropping.

So what has gone wrong? There are two proximate reasons for the contemporary outbreak of fatherlessness. The first is a very high rate of divorce: More than 50 percent of all first marriages today are expected to end in divorce. In the great majority of divorces, the children involved end up residing with their mothers and apart from their fathers.

The second is a very high rate of out-of-wedlock births, now more than 30 percent of all births. For most nonmarital births, unlike cases of divorce, the father is absent from the very beginning of the child’s life. In only about a quarter of American nonmarital births is the father living with the mother, and in those cases the likelihood that the father will still be living with the mother when the child reaches adolescence is very low, considerably lower than for married-couple families.

Unfortunately, the statistical measures that indicate fatherlessness show little sign of diminishing. Divorce has leveled off from its peak in the early 1980s. But most of the leveling is due to an increase in nonmarital cohabitation. The marriage-wary and divorce-prone are now more likely to cohabit out of wedlock, and of course, those who don’t marry can’t divorce. The national nonmarital cohabitation rate is growing by leaps and bounds, and lamentably, cohabitation is a considerably less stable and committed relationship than marriage.³ The estimated combined breakup rate of both married and unmarried unions, therefore, continues to escalate.

The increase of nonmarital births also continues at an alarming pace. Some predict that it could reach 40 percent of all births by the end of this century. Indeed, if present trends continue, nonmarital births will soon outpace divorce as a cause of fatherlessness.

Other father-absenting factors with potentially great impact loom on the horizon. Take the emergence of sperm-donor fathers, whose numbers are still small but rapidly growing. The sperm giving rise to their existence is the sole access most sperm-donor children will have to their fathers.

In each of these cases—divorce, nonmarital births, and sperm donations—the fatherlessness is voluntary. It could have been prevented if the adults in a child’s life had made different decisions. There assuredly was a time in the past when the total amount of fatherlessness in society was higher than today, but it was involuntary father absence stemming from a high paternal death rate. In the early seventeenth century in colonial Virginia, for example, only an estimated 31 percent of white children reached age eighteen with both parents still alive.⁴

Yet rapidly lowering death rates have been one of the great achievements of the modern world, and that percentage climbed to 50 percent by the early eighteenth century and to 72 percent by the turn of the twentieth century. By 1940 most of the modern decline in parental death rate had occurred; about 88 percent of children born at that time still had two living parents when they finished childhood.⁵ In recent decades, although the decline has slowed, the percentage of children who reach age eighteen with their parents still alive is well over 90 percent.

Contemporary fatherlessness is thus not only unexpected and mostly voluntary but also tragically ironic. It has taken thousands of human generations for the conditions to prevail whereby children could have confidence that their fathers would remain alive throughout their childhood and thus be able to help them through this critical stage of life. Almost all of today’s fatherless children have fathers who are alive, well, and perfectly capable of shouldering the responsibilities of fatherhood. Who would ever have thought that, when such conditions finally were achieved, so many fathers would relinquish those responsibilities?⁶

We also could not have known what the evidence now suggests: that it is a decided disadvantage for a child to lose a father the modern, voluntary way rather than through death. It used to be said by many, including social scientists: What’s the problem—children are merely losing their parents in a different way than they used to. You don’t hear that so much anymore. A surprising finding of recent social science research is that the children of divorced and never-married mothers are less successful in life by almost every measure than the children of widowed mothers. In other words, the modem child is worse of£ for reasons we shall explore in a later chapter, having a divorced father than a dead father! The replacement of death by divorce as the prime cause of fatherlessness, then, is a monumental setback in the history of childhood.

DIVORCE OVERTAKES DEATH

The year was 1974. That is when, as captured by official statistics, for the first time more marriages ended in divorce than in death.⁷ But the date merely signifies the end of a long transition. The replacement of death by divorce had been quietly proceeding for more than a century.

Of children born in the first decade of the twentieth century (1901-1910), nearly 23 percent were in families disrupted during their childhood through a parental death versus only about 5 percent in families broken through divorce. Thus, the great majority of all single-parent children in 1900 lived with a widowed parent; only 2 percent lived with a divorced parent and 3.4 percent with a never-married parent. By 1960 death and divorce had already reached a parity among families with children. The percentage of children losing a parent through death had dropped from 23 percent to below 9 percent, while the percentage of children in families broken by divorce doubled, from 5 percent to over 10 percent.⁸

Up until the 1960s the lowering death rate and the increasing divorce rate neutralized each other as generators of single-parent families. In fact, the growth of single-parent families from 1900 to 1960 was so slight that few public concerns about it were raised. In 1900 the percentage of all American children living in single-parent families was 8.5 percent. By 1960 it had increased to just 9.1 percent.⁹ Virtually no one at that time was writing or thinking about family breakdown, disintegration, or decline.

Indeed, what is most significant about the changing family demography of the first six decades of the twentieth century is this: Because the death rate was dropping faster than the divorce rate was rising, by I960 more children were living with both of their natural parents than at any other time in world history.¹⁰ Whereas at the turn of the century fewer than three quarters of all children were still living with their natural parents by age seventeen, this percentage went up to an all-time high of close to 80 percent for the generation born in the late 1940s and early 1950s.¹¹

But then the death rate decline slowed, the divorce rate skyrocketed, and family structure went into a free fall. The nuclear family cracked. “The scale of marital breakdowns in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent that I know of, and seems unique,” says Princeton University family historian Lawrence Stone. “There has been nothing like it for the last 2,000 years, and probably longer.”¹²

Consider what happened to children. For the generation born during the 1970-1984 “baby bust” period, most estimates put the projected percentage of these children still living with their natural parents by age seventeen at only about 50 percent. This is a staggering drop from the nearly 80 percent figure of just three decades earlier.¹³

One estimate paints the current scene in even starker terms and also points up the enormous difference that exists between whites and blacks. By age seventeen, 19 percent of white children and 48 percent of black children born between 1950 and 1954 had lived part of their lives with only one parent. But for those born in 1980, 70 percent of white children and 94 percent of black children are projected to have lived with only one parent before they reach age eighteen.¹⁴ These are mostly fatherless children. In 86 percent of single-parent families today, the custodial parent is the mother.¹⁵

If one looks at the proportion of their childhoods children today will spend living with just one parent, the change is equally startling. White children born in the 1950-1954 period spent only 8 percent of their childhood with just one parent; black children spent 22 percent. Of those born in 1980, by one estimate, white children can be expected to spend 31 percent of their childhood years with one parent, and black children 59 percent.¹⁶

The picture grows worse. In addition to the rapid increase of divorce, what helped generate the family free fall is something new that came on the scene—nonmarital births. As late as 1965 only one out of every thirteen births took place out of wedlock. Today, nearly one out of every three does. And just as divorce has overtaken death, nonmarital births are expected to surpass divorce as the leading cause of single-parenthood and father absence later in the 1990s. Already today the proportions of single-parent children living with a divorced parent and with a never-married parent are almost identical.¹⁷ And there is now substantial evidence that having an unmarried father is even worse for a child than having a divorced father!

The overtaking of death by divorce has had a remarkable impact on the family status of the male population.¹⁸ At the beginning of the century, among those aged fifty-five to sixty-four, widowed men outnumbered divorced men by more than twenty to one. But when the divorced surpassed the widowed in the 1970s, the ratio reversed. By the year 2000, it is projected that there will be 3.7 divorced men for every widowed man in America.¹⁹ The projections have yet to be made about the future numbers of never-married men.

MARRIAGE DECLINE

While the enormous increase in fatherlessness over the past three decades stems mainly from the two factors of divorce and nonmarital births, a single phenomenon underlies them both: a decline in the institution of marriage.²⁰ “At no time in history, with the possible exception of Imperial Rome,” the eminent demographer Kingsley Davis has said, “has the institution of marriage been more problematic than it is today.”²¹ In addition to marital breakup, marriage rates have been dropping and marriages have become less satisfying.

Not so long ago, at mid-century, the United States was probably the most marrying society in the world. The effects of that era can still be seen in the older generation. In 1990 an almost unbelievable 94 percent of men (and 95 percent of women) aged forty-five to fifty-four either were or had been married.²² But the marriage rate in recent decades has been steadily declining (despite the fact that in recent years the number of marriages has been at a record high because of large population cohorts at the most marriageable ages). In a little more than two decades, from 1970 to 1993, the percentage of never-married young men aged thirty to thirty-four increased from 9 percent to a staggering 30 percent.²³ To be sure, some of this new male singledom merely represents the delay of marriage, but a sizable portion of it almost certainly will become permanent.

A decline in the marriage rate might be good news if it meant that fewer couples would have to endure a bad marriage and go through a painful divorce. But this has not happened. While the marriage rate has declined, the divorce rate has climbed to an historically high level and stayed there. In raw terms, the divorce rate has merely doubled over the past three decades. Yet the probability that a marriage will end in divorce has gone through the roof. Only 14 percent of white women who married in the early 1940s eventually divorced, whereas almost half of white women who married in the late 1960s and early 1970s have already been divorced! For blacks the figures are 18 percent and nearly 60 percent.²⁴

Apart from the high rate of marital dissolution, there is growing evidence that the quality of married life in America has taken a turn for the worse. Being married and being relatively happy in life have always been strongly associated statistically. But an analysis of survey data between 1972 and 1989 indicates that this association is weakening. An increasing proportion of never-married men and younger never-married women report that they are happy, along with a decreasing proportion of married women.²⁵

Marriage has been losing its social purpose. In place of commitment and obligation to others, especially children, marriage has become mainly a vehicle for the emotional ...