Pay, papa, pay: where have all the fathers gone?

National Review, April 3, 1995 by David Blankenhorn

The Deadbeat dad is the reigning villain of our contemporary fatherhood script. His visage, framed by a ``Wanted'' poster, makes the cover of Newsweek: ``Deadbeat Dads: Wanted for Failure to Pay Child Support.'' At the Child Guidance Center in Akron, Ohio, a little girl writes this imaginary letter to her dad: ``Dear Dad, I wish you the worst Father's Day ever. And if you don't pay, you don't get love. Oh yeah, by the way, my mom makes less money than you. . . . I hate you.'' No other family behavior, and no other family-policy issue, has generated such an urgent social consensus on what is to be done. Extracting payments from deadbeat dads is now a regnant priority in our society, uniting liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, elite opinion and popular sentiment. In the 1992 presidential campaign, applause lines about deadbeat dads emerged in the stump speeches of both George Bush and Bill Clinton, reflecting perhaps the only issue in the campaign on which they publicly agreed. The deadbeat dad is also increasingly visible in popular culture. He is the subject of books, magazine features, and made-for-TV movies. Even the National Enquirer, ever alert to its social responsibilities, has launched a deadbeat-dad series -- ``Help find the cruel louse who deserted his four children'' -- which enlists the participation of readers in ``hunting down and capturing some of the most wanted deadbeat dads in America.'' We demonize the deadbeat dad in part because he reminds us of our fatherlessness. He represents loss. He forces us to reduce our expectations. We vilify him, we threaten him, we demand that he pay, largely because he so clearly embodies the contemporary collapse of fatherhood. Yet the content of our demand illustrates the depth of our pessimism. We do not ask this guy to be a father. That would be utopian, impossible. We ask him to send a check. Instead of demanding what is owed, we demand money.The main social imperative, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) succinctly puts it, is to ``make the daddies pay.'' In July 1993, the Census Bureau reported a 60 per cent increase in out-of- wedlock childbearing since 1982. To the New York Times editorial board, the deeper meaning of this trend was clear: ``As the number of unwed mothers grows, so does the number of deadbeat dads.'' Accordingly, our society's principal response to unwed childbearing must be ``a more vigorous effort to track down fathers who refuse to pay support.'' If we cannot enforce good fatherhood, the argument goes, we ought to enforce child-support payments. Besides, for children, money is the bottom line. Testifying before the House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families, Andrew J. Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University concludes that ``the major problem the children have in a single-parent family is not the lack of a male image, but rather the lack of a male income.''This way of thinking muddles the issue. First, Cherlin imagines that, in the home, ``a male income'' and ``a male image'' are two separate things. Fundamentally, they are not. Consequently, his preference for the former over the latter is all but meaningless. But let us imagine, with Cherlin, that the two could be separated. He still gets the issue backward. The ``major problem'' in fatherless homes is not ``the lack of a male income'' (though that certainly is a problem). The major problem is ``the lack of a male image'' -- that is, the lack of a father. To pretend otherwise is simply to pretend that money is important, but fathers are not.Ultimately, the solution to the growing problem of deadbeat dads is not jail cells, ``Most Wanted'' posters, job-training programs, interstate computer networks, or IRS agents. At best, these are Band-Aids on an infected wound. At worst, they are a form of denial -- a self- defeating strategy intended to excuse our drift toward fatherlessness. The only solution to the problem of deadbeat dads is fatherhood.

How Child Support Was Federalized

PRIOR to the 1970s, requiring and enforcing child-support payments from absent fathers was almost exclusively a local matter.

Caseloads were much smaller than they are today, and most of the instances involved divorce or paternal abandonment. Operating under broad guidelines set by state law, local judges typically exercised considerable authority in awarding payments and monitoring compliance. By the early 1970s, however, an emerging demographic trend was beginning to command the attention of federal policy- makers. The initial sign was the rapid growth of federal welfare expenditures, especially under Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the Federal Government's major assistance program for poor mothers and their children. AFDC was enacted in 1935 primarily to aid widows and orphans, but by the 1970s mothers receiving welfare were much less likely to be widows and much more likely to be divorced, and more likely still never to have been married.

With remarkable speed and little debate, the government's basic social contract had been redefined by the new demographics of fatherlessness. The Federal Government was no longer primarily aiding the mothers of children whose fathers had died. Now the government was primarily aiding the mothers of children whose fathers had left them. Moreover, what was true of the AFDC caseload was also true of the larger society. These fathers were not dead.