Calling home fathers

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 27, 1995 | by Gayle M.B. Hanson

They call him "Tommy," and around the inner-city Minneapolis neighborhood in which he lives his reputation is legendary. Not yet out of his teens, the high-school senior already has left a legacy -- the 23 children he has fathered out of wedlock.

"I am sure that he is not taking care of any of them," says Ken Canfield, president of the National Center for Fathering. "His is an extreme case of the absent father, but if you look around the social landscape he is certainly not alone."

The breakdown of the American family, characterized by the rise of illegitimacy and the absence of fathers in the home, has created a problem that some say far outweighs the national debt, the health care crisis and budget deficits.

"I think there is a growing recognition that there is an elephant in the room," says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values and author of the recent book Fatherless America. "For about 20 years we were thinking that there wasn't an elephant in the room, or that maybe the elephant was a mouse. But we are now beginning to realize that the mass defection of men from the lives of their children and the related social problems have become obvious and omnipresent. We are truly at a crisis point."

Thirty years ago, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a Democrat who at the time was an assistant secretary of labor, ignited a cultural conflagration with a study titled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." The Moynihan report sought to "define a problem, rather than propose solutions" -- and that problem was the breakdown of the African-American family.

Moynihan was alarmed that in 1965, one-quarter of African-American babies were born out of wedlock and more than half of them would reach age 18 in a single-parent home. Moreover, Moynihan warned, some 14 percent of all black children were on welfare.

In the political climate of the time, not only was the report roundly criticized for its focus on illegitimacy, but it was also seen by many as an attempt to foist white middle-class values on an emerging black community only recently vested in the full range of civil rights. "Just because Moynihan believes in the middle-class values doesn't mean they are the best for everyone in America, wrote Floyd McKissick, then-national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality.

But the statistics that worried Moynihan three decades ago might be welcomed today. Illegitimacy, poverty and fatherlessness are all on the rise in the African-American community. A minuscule 6 percent of black children born in 1980 will grow up in families with both parents present; more than 70 percent of all black children will at some point in their childhood be supported by welfare. The social catastrophe predicted by Moynihan is evident in the violence, gangs and bleak fortunes of a generation of African-American youth who have grown up in a climate in which the notion of the father is nonexistent.

At the time of the report, there was little concern for the future of the white, middle-class family -- which was, in fact, held up as the model for the development of a black middle class. But now illegitimacy and fatherlessness are growing in American families across the racial spectrum. Some 22 percent of white children are born to unmarried women (as opposed to fewer than 6 percent at the time of the Moynihan report) and some 29 percent of white children live in families without their biological fathers.

In fact, more than one-third of all American children go to sleep each night in homes in which their father is not present; half of America children will, before they reach age 18, live in a home without a father. And the numbers are getting worse as the rate of illegitimacy in the United States continues to soar.

Somehow, since the social tumult of the 1960s, the role of the father has deteriorated. If father once knew best, for a growing number of families today father is nothing more than a figure from the past who barely affects daily life. Once the keystone of the family, the father has been reduced in many cases to little more than a child-support payment.

"We have changed our mind on a lot of things," says Don Eberly, head of the Commonwealth Foundation and founder of the National Fatherhood Initiative, a grassroots movement aimed at revitalizing the role of the father. "We have become a society that has withdrawn its disapproval from illegitimacy, so we have relativized the entire notion of the family. And now we are on the verge of a national disaster."

The calls for welfare reform echo more loudly than at any time during the 60 years since the United States first introduced a public-assistance system. However, an increasing number of critics say that the root of the crisis lies in large part with the diminished role of the father -- which in its extreme manifestation results in men such as Tommy, whose notion of fatherhood extends no further than the act of conception. As welfare reformers again look at overhauling the nation's subsidy state, there is increasing recognition that the status quo does nothing to reinforce the role of the family.