Descriptions:
Video Description
The most common form of child maltreatment today is not what we usually imagine — it is the absent father. This lecture from Academy of Ideas confronts a problem whose scale is enormous but whose name has become taboo. Drawing on sociologist David Popenoe, it shows how a father’s physical, economic, and emotional absence shapes a child’s whole future. It traces the decline of marriage, the sexual revolution, and a culture that traded commitment for self-fulfillment. The warning closes the loop: what a society does to its children, its children will one day do to society.
Full Video Transcript
Join the Academy of Ideas supporting member program and access 75 additional videos, including a three-part series on addiction, a four-part series on the power of the unconscious, and a three-part series covering Carl Jung’s insights on the problem of the man-child.
Visit academyofideas.com slash members and become a member today.
problems. Yet, despite its scale and social consequences, fatherlessness is a problem
that is frequently ignored or denied. Families are microcosms of society. Strong
and stable families contribute to social flourishing, while dysfunctional families push society
in the direction of breakdown. More than at any point in history, the family
unit is broken, as a significant number of children are growing up without a father.
In this video, drawing from the research of the American sociologist David Popenoe, we
explore how absent fathers are harming children and destroying society, and how this problem
can be solved.
Based on the evidence, a strong case can be made that paternal deprivation, in the form
of the physical, economic, and emotional unavailability of fathers to their children, has become the
most prevalent form of child maltreatment today, writes David Popenoe.
are vanishing from family life and only mothers are left to care about their children. And
mothers are not enough. Approximately 40% of children are born to unmarried mothers.
Over 50% of marriages end in divorce, with the mother, more often than not, being granted
custody of the children. Even in families where the father is physically present, many
are not emotionally present in the lives of the children. Many fathers are addicted to
their smartphones or to drugs or alcohol. Others are forced to work long hours or multiple
jobs to provide for their family in the face of the ever-declining purchasing power of
money. But whether emotionally or physically absent, the problem of absent fathers has
reached endemic proportions. And a mother cannot fill a fatherless void.
For men and women possess innate biological differences that translate into different
yet complementary parenting styles. Women are more compassionate and relationship-oriented,
while men are more competitive, aggressive, and oriented towards risk-taking and self-reliance.
Mothers provide children with a nurturing, safe, and emotionally secure environment,
while fathers challenge their children, push their boundaries, and help them cultivate
autonomy, as psychological health is contingent on adequately satisfying the need for both
independence and relatedness, challenge and emotional security, risk-taking and safety,
a developing child needs to be exposed to both the paternal and maternal worlds. Or
as Popenoe explains, The significance of gender-differentiated
parenting undoubtedly is related to something fundamental in the human condition. Parental
androgyny is not what children need. Males and females bring different qualities to children.
The burden of social science evidence supports the idea that gender-differentiated parenting
is important for human development, and that the contribution of fathers to child-rearing
is unique and irreplaceable.
Unfortunately, stepfathers are not a reliable solution to the problem of fatherlessness,
as stepchildren are often worse off than children of single mothers.
The lack of genetic ties can make a stepfather reluctant to invest time, energy, and resources
into the child’s development, and some stepfathers are prone to seeing their stepchildren as
competition for the mother’s attention.
One of the surprising findings of family-related research in recent years is that the presence
of stepfathers may actually aggravate child-rearing problems and thereby increase the level of
negative child outcomes, explains Popenoe.
In two of his books, Families Without Fathers and the War Over the Family, David Popenoe
summarizes the abundance of studies which demonstrate that children who grow up without
a physically present and emotionally committed biological father are at a greater risk of
suffering from emotional, behavioral, and physical health problems. They are less likely
to succeed educationally, more likely to be socially impaired, and as adults more prone
to dysfunctional relationships. Girls of absent fathers are more likely to become single teen
others, boys are more likely to become criminals and moral deviants.
This list only scratches the surface of the known negative outcomes of growing up absent
a father.
Indeed, almost anything bad that can happen to a child occurs with much greater frequency
to the children of divorce and those who live in single-parent families, explains Popineau.
Following divorce, the quality and quantity of the time that children spend with their
fathers sharply declines.
In the book Divided Families, Frank Furstenberg and Andrew Cherlin explain that after a few
years of a divorce, only one in ten children have weekly contact with their fathers, while
two-thirds have no contact at all.
Yet even with divorced fathers who maintain contact, most often it is a sporadic and superficial
contact that is of little to no benefit to the child.
In other words, while the mother-child bond is a primal bond that is rarely if ever broken,
A man’s bond to his children is heavily dependent on whether he is still in a relationship
with the mother.
Men tend to view marriage and child-rearing as a single package, writes Popineau.
If their marriage deteriorates, their fathering deteriorates.
If they are not married or are divorced, their interest in and sense of responsibility toward
children greatly diminish.
It is because men tend to view marriage and fatherhood as a single package that virtually
every society in history has placed great emphasis on the institution of marriage, the
primary function of which is to create socially binding ties which hold a man to his wife
for the benefit of the children. Or as Popenoe writes,
Men have the capacity to father, but also the capacity to stray. So all successful societies
have imposed social sanctions on men to encourage their fathering behavior. By far the most
important of these sanctions is the institution of marriage, the most universally found social
institution of all. Up until the mid-20th century, marriage was held to be a sacred contract between
a man and woman that was only broken in the most extreme of situations. Since then, the institution
of marriage has rapidly deteriorated. Today many people avoid marriage, and of those who do marry,
divorce is the statistical norm. If one were specifically to design a culture and a social
system for the express purpose of undercutting marriage and fatherhood and men’s contribution
to family life, our current society would be close to what would result,” observes Popeno.
The sexual revolution, which commenced in the 1960s, was a major factor in the decline of
marriage. Under the guise of sexual liberation, promiscuity was normalized, and with more females
willing to engage in low-commitment sexual relations, more men renounced monogamy and
marriage in favor of sleeping around. The damage that the sexual revolution inflicted on marriage,
fatherhood, and the family was one of its intended outcomes. In summarizing the ideas of Wilhelm
Reich and Herbert Marcuse, two of the intellectual drivers of the sexual revolution, Carl Truman
explains sex focused on procreation and family life is the repressive weapon of bourgeois
capitalist society and free love and untrammeled sexual experimentation are a central part of the
revolutionary liberation of society to transform society politically one must transform society
sexually the sexual mores of late capitalism focused as they are in the maintenance of
monogamy and the patriarchal family are actually no longer as necessary as they once were
a societal-wide deterioration in values has also weakened the institution of marriage.
Responsibility and commitment to others have fallen by the wayside and been replaced by a
narcissistic obsession with ego fulfillment. While in the past the main function of marriage
was to create an economic and reproductive partnership for the sake of raising healthy
children, today marriage is seen almost exclusively as a vehicle for satisfying
one’s needs and desires, and the myth that romantic love can solve one’s problems remains
pervasive. When feelings of infatuation or love wane, therefore, or when a partner feels
unfulfilled or incomplete, then divorce, even when children are involved, has become the
socially approved solution. Or as Pompano writes,
It was not so long ago that the divorce revolution was given a strangely positive cast in popular
culture. If breaking up is better for parents, it was thought, it cannot be all that bad
for children. What keeps parents happy should also keep children happy. How can an idea
so wrong-headed have been so pervasive? In part, of course, it was a convenient, guilt-retarding
rationalization for parents who were breaking up. Clearly, an abusive or highly dysfunctional
marriage should end for the sake of all involved. However, for the problem of the absent father
to be solved there needs to be a revitalization in the institution of marriage, and a re-emphasis
on the fact that the main reason marriage developed in the first place was to benefit
children, not to fulfill or complete the adult partners.
Society, in its wisdom, has recognized that in order to hold the father to the mother
and child, a cultural tie had to be developed where a biological tie was weak.
Marriage is society’s way of signaling to would-be parents of children that their long-term
relationship together is socially important.
While marriage benefits children, committed fatherhood promotes the well-being and fulfillment
of men.
Family life motivates men to positively channel their aggressive energy, become socially productive,
and cultivate the virtues of honesty, trust, self-sacrifice, and discipline that are necessary
to support and become a role model for their children.
In his book A Sense of Well-being, the psychologist Angus Campbell notes that in terms of overall
life satisfaction, the most well-off males are fathers of grown children who are still
married to their wives.
The unhappiest, on the other hand, are divorced men and unattached men who have no wife or
children.
As men have more difficulty forming social relationships than women, a man without a
wife and children is often a man without any close relationships at all.
It is not just that particularly healthy and competent and morally upright persons are
more likely to marry, but that marriage actually promotes health, competence, virtue, and personal
well-being.
There is a civilizing effect for men in merely being in the company of women and children,
an environment which typically promotes life-enhancing values.
With the continued growth of fatherlessness, we can expect to see a nation of men who are,
worst morally out of control and at best unhappy unhealthy and unfulfilled but it is ultimately
children who suffer the most from an absent father and as children are the future of society
society suffers by extension absent fathers translate into broken children and broken
children are at risk of growing up to be broken men and women who perpetuate societal dysfunction
What society does to its children, so will its children do to society,”
the Roman statesman Cicero observed. And as Popenoe concludes,
Strong families with involved fathers in lifelong marriages are irreplaceable for a strong and
stable moral order, for adult well-being, and ultimately for the well-being and success in
life of their children. If we continue down the path of fatherlessness, we are headed for social
disaster. In the final analysis, every father counts. Learn more about our membership,
access transcripts and the art we use in the videos by visiting academyofideas.com
Source: Academy of Ideas