Father Fact’s
Fourth Edition
Wade F. Horn, Ph.D., a clinical child psychologist, currently serves as the Assistant Secretary for the Administration on Children and Families within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) has been quoted, cited, or appeared in literally thousands of print and broadcast reports about the important and unique role of fathers.
Our ads have generated hundreds of dollars in donated advertising time, and such well-known spokesmen as James Earl Jones, Tom Selleck, Tiger Woods, and Tim McGraw have lent their talents to this campaign.
NFI now convenes national fatherhood summits annually.
President George W. Bush delivered the keynote address at the 2001 National Summit on Fatherhood.
A 1999 Gallup Organization poll reported that 72% of those polled in a national survey agreed that “the physical absence of the father from the home is the most significant problem facing America”.
Twenty-four million children live in homes without their biological fathers. That means that tonight, one out of every three children will go to bed in a home in which his or her father does not live.
Father absence directly contributes to our most pressing social ill.
Compared to children raised in intact, two-parent homes, children who grow up without their fathers have significantly worse outcomes, on average, on almost every measure of child well-being. Children who grow up in father-absent homes are more likely to suffer from child abuse, poverty, low academic achievement, drug use, emotional and behavioral problems, and suicide. Simply put, father absence is the most consequential social problem we confront.
Fathers make unique and irreplaceable contributions to the lives of their kids. Unique means that they provide something different from mothers; they are not just part-time mommy substitutes. Irreplaceable means that when they are absent, children suffer. The contributions of fathers to child well-being cannot be replaced simply by ensuring better child support enforcement, by designing better income transfer programs, or even by providing well-intentioned mentoring programs. The fact is children need their fathers.
All of the available evidence suggest that the future of fatherhood is highly dependent upon the future of marriage.
The future of fatherhood depends on all sectors of society–including business, religion, philanthropy, government, social service providers, and the civic community–each doing its part to promote responsible, involved fatherhood.
Cohabitation:
A study in Great Britain found that compared to children living with married biological parents, children living with their single, biological mother were 14 times more likely to be the victim of child abuse, children living with cohabiting but unmarried biological parents were 20 times more likely to be the victims of child abuse, and those living with a mother and a cohabiting boyfriend who is not the father were 33 times more likely to be the victim of child abuse.
Child Abuse:
In the movies and on television, as well as in much of the print media, the portrayal of the sexual abuse of children follows a strict formula. It is never the butler. Always, the father did it…But the weight of the evidence is clear. What magnifies the risk of sexual abuse for children is not the presence of a married father but his absence.
A British study found that the incidence of child abuse is 6 times higher for children living in stepfamilies and 14 times higher for children living with their single mothers compared to children living with their two continuously-married parents.
Crime:
Boys need same-sex role models to define themselves as male. When fathers are absent, young males are more likely to exaggerate their purported masculinity.
Every society must be wary of the unattached male, for he is universally the cause of numerous social ills. The good society is heavily dependent on men being attached to a strong moral order centered on families, both to discipline their sexual behavior and to reduce their competitive aggression.
From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern Seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future–that community asks for and get chaos.
The research is absolutely clear… the one human being most capable of curbing the antisocial aggression of a boy is his biological father.
The likelihood that a young male will engage in criminal activity doubles if he is raised without a father and triples if he lives in a neighborhood with a high concentration of single-parent families.
Drug and Alcohol Abuse:
Using a sample of 22,237 adolescents ages 12-17 from 3 years of data from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, it was found that after controlling for the effects of sex, age, race-ethnicity, family income, and residential mobility, teens in mother-stepfather and mother-only households evidenced 1.5 to 2 times the risk of illegal drug use and teens in father-only and father-stepmother families evidenced over 2.5 times the risk of illegal drug use, compared to teens in mother-father families.
Education:
In studies involving over 25,000 children using nationally representative data set, children who lived with only one parent had lower grade point averages, lower college aspirations, poorer attendance records, and higher drop out rates than students who lived with both parents.
Nationally, 29.7 percent of children living with a never-married mother and 21.5 percent of children living with a divorced mother have repeated a grade in school, compared to only 11.6 percent of children living with both biological parents.
Fatherless children are twice as likely to drop out of school.
Using data collected from three generations from a large sample of largely working-class and middle-class families from Southern California, it was found that 56 percent of males and 41 percent of females whose parents remained married had college degrees or advanced degrees, compared to only 23 percent of males, and 25 percent of females whose parents divorced before they were 18 years old.
Health:
A child health study of 17,110 children indicated that children who live with their single, divorced mothers had risks of injury that were 20% to 30% higher than children who live with both biological parents. These children also had higher risks of asthma, speech defects, and frequent headaches.
Children whose parents divorced before they are 21 years old have shorter average life spans than children whose parents do not divorce.
Poverty:
A longitudinal study of 17,000 households indicated that marriage almost doubles the chances of moving from a poor to a non-poor neighborhood. Conversely, divorce more than doubles the chances of moving from a non-poor to a poor neighborhood.
More than 75 percent of all unmarried teen mothers go on welfare within 5 years of the birth of their first child.
In an analysis of data collected from 26,023 adolescents ages 13 to 18, the teens living in single-parent households were more likely to engage in premarital sex than those living in two-parent households.