Kids in Crisis 95
Fatherless children. What alarms modern social scientists is that
in the latter part of the 20th century the father was sidelined in
a new, more disturbing way. Today he’s often just plain absent.
Rising divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births meant that more
than 40 percent of all children born between 1970 and 1984 were
likely to spend much of their childhood living in single-parent
homes. In 1990, 25 percent were living with only their mothers.
This compares with 5 percent in 1960. Says David Blankenhorn,
the founder of the Institute for American Values in New York
City: “This trend of fatherlessness is the most socially consequen-
tial family trend of our generation.”
Anthropologists have actually tried to figure out why even
some primates are better fathers than their human kin. A June 2007
Time magazine article pointed out a classic example: Titi monkey
babies spend 90 percent of the daylight hours in their father’s arms.
Meanwhile, fathers in intact human families spend a lot less time
focused on their kids than they think: in the United States, fathers
currently average just under an hour a day. The good news, if you
can call it that, is that this represents 153 percent improvement
from 1965 when it was only about twenty minutes.
Worldwide, 10 percent to 40 percent of children grow up in
households with no father at all. More disturbing is the statistic
that in the United States alone, more than half of divorced fathers
lose contact with their kids within a few years. Even uglier still,
by the end of ten years, as many as two-thirds of fathers have
drifted out of their children’s lives completely.
The need for dads and discipline. Researchers argue that fathers
should be more than just substitute mothers. They point out that
men’s parenting styles are quite different than women’s, and in
ways that matter enormously. They say a mother’s love is uncon-
ditional, whereas a father’s is more qualified, more tied to perfor-
mance. Mothers worry about their infant’s survival, fathers go a
step further and worry about future success. Social scientists stress
the fact that fathers produce not just children, but “socially via-
ble” children. Fathers, more than mothers, appear to be haunted
by the fear that their children may turn out to be failures—per-
haps because a father understands that his child’s character is, in
some sense, a measure of his own character as well.