ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, Jan. 14 2010

An inconvenient truth about absent fathers
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Back in the heady days of the sexual revolution, when the free-love craze was
cresting and no-fault divorce laws were beginning their sweep across America,
experts counseled troubled married couples to drop their old-fashioned ideas
about staying together for the sake of the kids. Children are happier when
their parents are happier, the argument went, so spouses who felt unfulfilled
should split without guilt. Mom could take the kids, dad could take off, and as
long as he made timely child-support payments and frequent visits, the kids
would be fine.

Today, 40 years after California became the first state to legalize unilateral
divorce and inaugurate America's divorce revolution, we know better. Decades of
social science research now tell us that a father's sustained, committed
involvement with his children and presence in the home matter more than we ever
imagined. On nearly every measure available — from health and financial
stability to rates of graduation, substance abuse and teen pregnancy — children
raised by their married mothers and fathers fare better than those raised in
other types of families.

Unfortunately, fewer and fewer American children today experience that ideal.
Four in 10 are born to unmarried parents and more than a third live without
their biological fathers, being raised mostly by single mothers and, in many
cases, a revolving panel of their mothers' live-in partners. Half of all
children, and 80 percent of African-American children, can expect to spend at
least part of their childhood living apart from their fathers.

The result is a father-absence crisis increasingly acknowledged by Americans
across the political spectrum. According to "Mama Says," a new survey from the
non-profit, non-partisan National Fatherhood Initiative, 93 percent of mothers
believe America suffers from such a crisis. An earlier survey from the same
organization found that 91 percent of fathers agree. And solid majorities of
both fathers and mothers say that a man performs best as a father if he is
married to his child's mother.

Yet the "Mama Says" survey revealed a curious contradiction amid all that
concern about absentee and unmarried dads: A majority of mothers, like a
majority of fathers surveyed before them, believe that a mother or another man
can be an adequate substitute for an absent or uninvolved father. In the eyes
of most moms and dads, it seems, fathers are fungible after all.

What accounts for this disconnect between our concern about fatherlessness and
our resigned acceptance of it? The answer may lie in our desperation to believe
the happy fiction of the sexual revolution that child welfare and adult desires
need never conflict. In a nation where so many families deviate from the
married-mother-and-father model and a powerful gay-rights movement seeks to
redefine marriage as an institution with no intrinsic connection to the bearing
or raising of children, it's easier to ignore or stay mum on the link between
the fatherhood crisis and the marriage crisis that spawned it.

That's true for political leaders as well as ordinary folks. In 2008, then-Sen.
Barack Obama gave a laudable Father's Day speech about the importance of men
taking responsibility for the children they beget. But he dodged direct
discussion of the reason so many fathers are missing from their children's
lives: the epidemic of out-of-wedlock childbearing that has made married
parents the exception rather than the rule in many communities.

For all we have learned in recent decades about how a child benefits from
having his biological father in the home for the long haul, many of us still
prefer to tell ourselves that any caring adult can fill a father's shoes, and a
live-in, married-to-mom dad is simply a bonus. Such happy talk may comfort
adults, but it does little to ease the pain of the millions of children living
with a hole in their hearts that only a father can fill.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St.
Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.