BAXTER, BRIANA | History of Black Women | June 16, 2016
BAXTER, BRIANA | History of Black Women | June 16, 2016
CHILDREN WITH NO LIGHT a Fatherless Society
CHILDREN WITH NO LIGHT a Fatherless Society

For years Fathers have been the back bone of society. Fathers are gods, they not only carry the seed of life they also have the power to create a mini God in his image. An offspring of himself that can make the world a better place. For the past two decades their role is being stripped from them, society not only says but also states that the father role is no longer needed or necessary, because he is the reason why there is complete discord and mayhem running rampant in the world. But society is wrong. Fathers are not to blame. Only society is to blame for the decline of the gods. In fact, I could argue that fatherless girls have a more profound and long-term impact on society than fatherless boys. You see, boys without dads often act out in spectacularly violent and disruptive fashions, whether it’s flash mobs or gang membership or rapes or robberies. When a fatherless boy is acting out his pain, we know it.
However fatherless girls are seldom this dramatic. Instead, they act out their pain and suffering in different ways. Fatherless girls are far more likely to drop out of school, suffer from depression or other emotional disorders and mask their pain through increased promiscuity. In short, fatherless girls have babies. Without fathers. Since the 1960s, women have been sold a bill of goods when they were told they could have it all. And for too many women, “having it all” includes having children without the financial support of a husband.
For most men, marriage instills a sense of maturity and responsibility. They will work hard at whatever job they can find in order to provide for their wives and children. This is the fundamental nature of a needed male. But when men aren’t needed, when the federal government takes their place as financial provider too, many men throw up their hands and say, “I’m outta here.” That’s when the tragedy of fatherlessness comes full circle. There are few things more painful to a child than to be raised without a dad.

For too many fatherless girls, the need for a male role model in their lives is fulfilled by seeking the attention of boys and men, sleeping around until they finally get pregnant in order to having something to love, someone who will love them back. So fatherless girls give birth to more fatherless children. And this can happen shockingly and quickly. I know a woman who was a mother at 15, a grandmother at 30 and a great-grandmother at 45. In none of these cases was a man involved except at the moment of procreation.
Poverty follows. According to a study from the Brookings Institute, young adults who finish high school, get a full-time job, and wait until age 21 and get married before having children “had a 2 percent chance of winding up in poverty and a 74 percent chance of winding up in the middle class (defined as earning roughly $50,000 or more). By contrast, young adults who violated all three norms had a 76 percent chance of winding up in poverty and a 7 percent chance of winding up in the middle class.”
Fatherlessness is endemic in our culture today. According to Larry Elder polictian, 72 percent of black children are now born out of wedlock, 36 percent of white children are without fathers, and 53 percent of Hispanic children are born outside the bonds of marriage. Fathers provide so much more than mere financial support. They are a mirror to their daughters, reflecting a girl’s self-esteem back on her. Girls raised with their fathers know that their worth comes from what’s between their ears, not what’s between their legs.
It’s ironic that 40 years after feminists told women they should be valued for their intelligence and that men were useless, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”, we now have more and more fatherless girls who seek self-esteem through promiscuity rather than education, marriage and motherhood. This has destroyed the natural web of society.
A father teaches his girls what to expect from men. If a bad father slaps around their mother, drinks himself into a stupor every night and has numerous affairs, then that’s what girls will permit when they’re older. But if a good father treats his wife with respect, works hard to provide for his family and is faithful, then that’s what his daughters will expect in their future. A good dad teaches his girls how men should behave. He guides them and, more importantly, he protects them. Do you think teenage daughters would bring a loser of a boyfriend home to meet Dad? No. Dad would take one look and run the loser off. So our girls aren’t even inclined to look at the loser in the first place.
Nevertheless too many people deny the importance of dads. After all, children are adaptable, right? They’ll get over it. Wrong! Just because children are forced to adapt to life without dad doesn’t mean they’re not masking intense pain. When adolescence hits, boys often act out their pain in accordance with their growing size and strength. They indulge in their testosterone-fueled drive for sex by violence, unchecked or unrestrained by the guidance of an older father figure.
Girls, deprived of a father’s love during childhood, spend much of their lives lurching around and looking for love in all the wrong places. To be blunt, far too many fatherless girls sleep around with endless numbers of men, desperately seeking male approval, the approval they lacked while growing up. And of course, this results in many babies. Fatherless babies. Babies that grow up into boys and girls who won’t have dads. And so the cycle continues, widens and worsens.
That’s why fatherless girls have a more profound and long-term impact upon society than the violence or sexual proclivities of fatherless boys. Fatherless girls are usually the ones producing the next generation of fatherless children, which perpetuates the cycle of pain, violence and poverty. In a heart-tugging article that appeared in the May 2008 issue of Touchstone Magazine, he wrote, “When Dad is not there ‘there,’ as in living there in the home something deep in a child’s psyche perceives a critical deficit, a desperate and frightening imbalance that preys on the child’s particular vulnerabilities, causing him to careen off into unhealthy extremes.”
While there are situations in which men change their spots and abandon their families after marriage, in most cases the tragedy of fatherlessness can be laid at the feet of women through bad choices. It’s not enough to say that men should “man up” and father their offspring, though of course they should. Women also need to “man up” and show men that intimacy won’t happen outside of the proper conditions. Reducing fatherlessness is the only true preventative for violence in our society. We don’t need to disarm America; we need to restore fathers.
Historically, fatherlessness in America was caused by paternal death. For example, by the time they had reach fifteen, about 15 percent of all American children born in 1870 had experienced the death of their fathers. Incidentally, the death of mothers was more common then. Divorce was far less common. In 1900 middle-aged, widowed men outnumbered middle-aged divorced men twenty to one.
Today, the principle cause of fatherlessness is paternal choice. In 1900 only 8.5 percent of children were born outside of marriage in America. Sixty years later, that number had only barely changed to 9% of children born out of wedlock. Today, according to the Heritage Foundation, 41% of all births occur outside of marriage. In 1960, 23% of births to blacks were outside of marriage. Today that number is a staggering 72.8%. It is 53.2% among Hispanics and 29% among whites.
The numbers and trends are interesting, but what does it all mean? The answer is quite a shocker, particularly for the most vulnerable among US children. Out of wedlock birth and fatherless households have a huge impact upon society that is far more significant than most realize. Here is a brief collection of items and research findings upon which entire articles, lengthy policy papers and books have been written.
For the child, the result of being born outside of marriage is that they learn that love is a thing of failure both between adults and between adults and children. In the Abolition of Marriage, one of the best books ever written on marriage, Gallagher notes that, "In sharp contrast to children in intact families, children of divorce or non-marriage repeatedly undergo the experience of seeing family-like members enter and drop out of the picture. The initial experience of love's failure and the abandonment most children experience in the immediate aftermath of divorce is confirmed again and again in the years ahead. Adults in these post-divorce, and non-marital romances seldom accurately assess the effects these relationships may have on their children."
For the first year or so, many unwed fathers tend to make a special effort to see their children. As life goes on, they may move, or they may acquire new emotional obligations to new girlfriends. Overall only one-third of children living apart from their fathers see their dad as often as once a week. For the children of a failed marriage, the numbers are hardly better. Ten years down the road, two thirds of all children of divorce have virtually no contact with their fathers.
On the average, a child born outside of marriage spends just six months of his childhood living with his father. Three-fifths of unwed fathers whose children are aged two or younger see their children regularly. But by the time the children reach the age of seven and a half, less than one quarter of all unwed fathers still see their children frequently.
When a father is not in the, home the paternal relationship deteriorates rapidly. Sixty-nine percent of children who live with their fathers report a good relationship with them, but only 36% of children with an absent father say they have a good relationship with their dads. In fact, only half of absent fathers were even viewed as "family" by their children.
There is more to this absence than just "father hunger," damaged relationships or lost hopes and ideals. Although society often portrays men, male gender roles and masculinity as unnecessary, a danger to society, or even evil itself, the role of husbands and fathers as the family protector is significant. Women and children are much safer from crime when there is a married father in the home. Various studies have found that children born outside of marriage are far more at risk of child abuse. Married men also protect their wives. The most often cited relationship between the batterer and the female victim of domestic violence is a boyfriend. The least cited is a husband. Married women also have the lowest rates of mental illness, depression or suicide compared to women in any other relationship. A comprehensive study of child abuse reported by Robert Whalen of the Heritage Foundation found that children living with their biological married parents are much safer than in other family configurations. More specifically, the rate of child abuse is 14 times higher than a traditional married two-parent family if the child lives alone with his biological mother. Child abuse is 33 times higher if a single mother is cohabiting with a boyfriend.
Historically, poverty has stemmed primarily from fathers being unemployed or underpaid. Today, fatherlessness has become the single largest determinant of child poverty. Today, 92% of children on welfare are from either single parent or divorced homes, whereas the vast majority of children raised in a married home will not be poor. Children born out of wedlock are 700% more likely to be poor than children from their married counterparts. In fact, welfare dependency is 1700 percent more likely for children born out of wedlock than for those born to their married parents.
The increase in fatherlessness has coincided with the massive growth in government. By 2000, America was spending ten and a half times the amount on total welfare spending than when the Great Society, "war on poverty" programs of LBJ began in 1965. The federal government has increased spending on welfare nearly every year since 1965. Last year, we spent $890 Billion on welfare, compared to $400 Billion as recently as 1990.
Fatherlessness and the breakdown of marriage and the family have an enormous impact upon the size of government. In June 2008, the National Fatherhood Initiative released "The One Hundred Billion Dollar Man," a ground-breaking study that showed that the federal government now spends at least $100 billion each year supporting father-absent homes. This is a very conservative estimate. The NFI study did not include related costs for the criminal justice system, which is flooded with men who grew up in father-absent homes.
Fatherlessness is also a major contributor to crime. A state-by-state analysis in 1995 found that in general an increase of 10% in the percentage of children living in single-parent homes accounted for a 17% increase in juvenile crime. A study by Indiana Policy Review found that 80% of the boys sent to the Indiana Boy's School came from divorced or single-parent homes.
Fatherlessness also has a drain on our educational system. The National Fatherhood Initiative reports that fatherless children are twice as likely to drop out of high school. Students who don't live with their fathers are twice as likely to repeat a grade in school. The National Association for Elementary School Principals found that children from single parent or divorced homes are more likely to be expelled, drop out of school or have disciplinary action taken against them.
Contrary to what TV might suggest, dads are not bumbling buffoons who are unnecessary to a strong family unit. They are not mere income providers as the court system seems to imply. Neither are they humorous couch potatoes who drink lots of beer and hog the remote as searching through the rack, attempting to buy dad a Father’s Day card often implies. Fathers, present and active in the homes and lives of their children and when possible lovingly committed and married to their moms, are the backbone of a healthy society.
Obviously, there are many dads out there who are not living in their child's home against their own wishes. Two-thirds of divorces are filed by women. Under no-fault divorce, a marriage can be ended without recourse by the unilateral decision of one spouse, unlike virtually all other legal agreements or contracts. Yet, fatherhood should still be far more important, valued and expected than it is today in America. With the increasing number of premarital births and a continuing high divorce rate, the proportion of children living with just one parent rose from 9.1% in 1960 to 20.7% in 2012. Currently, 55.1% of all black children, 31.1% of all Hispanic children, and 20.7% of all white children are living in single parent homes. White children born in the 1950-1954 period spent only 8% of their childhood with just one parent; black children spent 22%. Of those born in 1980, by one estimate, white children can be expected to spend 31% of their childhood years with one parent, and black children 59%. I do not agree with President Barack Obama on most matters. I am pretty certain that he does not understand the vital role that marriage plays in our social structure. He seems to think that two women are the equivalent of a married mom and dad. Whatever else they might be, two moms are not a dad. I am also certain that he does not understand how mothers and fathers together, bound by marriage, play an enormous role in educational and cultural stability and in limited government. Apparently, he also does not understand how his worldview has destroyed the family in one year. Many liberals have a problem effectively transferring liberal public policies to their daily private lives, because of conflicts with reality. It is often seen most shockingly when you hear of a Hollywood actor who makes millions off R-rated movies admit that he does not allow his children to watch his movies or any TV, or when a critic of the 2nd Amendment defends his home and property with a handgun, or when a big government type goes to extremes to shelter his income from U.S. tax law, or when politicians praise public education, yet send their children to private schools. However, President Obama does seem to understand the vital role a dad plays on the individual level between father and his children.
"In many ways, I came to understand the importance of fatherhood through its absence-both in my life and in the lives of others. I came to understand that the hole a man leaves when he abandons his responsibility to his children is one that no government can fill. We can do everything possible to provide good jobs and good schools and safe streets for our kids, but it will never be enough to fully make up the difference. That is why we need fathers to step up, to realize that their job does not end at conception; that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one."
Our nation is in very deep, grave trouble by almost every measure available. Many, perhaps most, people now realize this fact. Yet, few see how the breakdown of the traditional family is such a major root cause of our national crisis. Source: Census Bureau. “Living Arrangements of Children Under 18 Years Old: 1960 to Present.” U.S. Census Bureau, July 1, 2012

Source: US Census Bureau, “Living Arrangements of Children Under 18”: Tables –CH-2, CH-3, CH-4. 1960 – Present. U.S. Census Bureau July 1, 2012.

Reference
1. Blankhorn David (1995), Fatherless America. New York, Harper page 26-48 2. www.census.gov/population
3. “Living Arrangements of Children Under 18 Years Old: 1960 to Present.” U.S. Census Bureau, July 1, 2012.
4. Popenoe, David. Life without Father (1996) New York: Simon and Schuster, 23.