Fathers are not optional, and the culture that says they are is wrong

Here is the plot of roughly ten thousand television comedies. The father cannot operate a toaster. The mother, who is wise, patient and slightly weary, rescues him from the consequences of his own incompetence while the children look on with the expression of people watching a hostage video. The audience laughs. The father is a lovable idiot, the family is held together by everyone else, and the lesson, repeated over decades at thirty minutes a time, is that a dad is a household appliance with a pulse: nice to have, easy to replace.

Folks, I like a joke as much as anybody. But when a culture tells the same joke for fifty years, somebody ought to ask whether it started to believe it.

What is being claimed, and what is not

Let me say plainly what I am arguing, because the other side loves to hear a bigger claim than the one that was made.

I am not saying that a child raised by a single mother is doomed. Millions of those children grow up to be fine adults, and many are raised by women whose courage would humble the rest of us. I am not saying that a bad father beats no father. A father who abuses or abandons his children in spirit while sitting on the couch is not an asset. I am not blaming widows, or military families separated by deployment, or parents who left a dangerous marriage.

Here is the claim. One: children, on average and across the evidence, do better when their father is present, engaged and committed to their mother. Two: for a long time American law and American entertainment treated fathers as optional or as a hazard. Three: that was a mistake, and it carried costs that fall mostly on the children and the neighbourhoods least able to bear them. Four: the remedy is not a new program. It is men showing up, and a culture and a legal system that stop discouraging them from doing it.

Where to look at the record

The place to start is the federal government's own count. The Census Bureau publishes tables on America's families and living arrangements, which report how many children live with two parents, with one parent, or with neither, broken down by the parent's marital status, race and income. I am not going to quote the latest percentages, because they update and because you should see the current table for yourself. Go to the Census Bureau's website, find the "Families and Living Arrangements" tables, and read the children's table from the most recent release. Look at the share of children living with a mother only. Look at how it has moved since the 1960s. Then look at it by family income.

What you will find is what researchers of every political stripe have found. The share of children raised in a household with their father has fallen sharply across the last half century, and the fall is not evenly distributed. It is steepest in the lowest-income neighbourhoods, which is precisely where a second adult's income, supervision and example are hardest to replace.

Beyond the counts lies a large body of research on outcomes. I will not cite figures I cannot check from memory, so here is the shape of it and where to read more. Children raised without their fathers are, on average, more likely to be poor, to leave school early, and to face difficulty in work and family life as adults. Researchers argue, and should argue, about how much of this is the father's absence itself and how much is everything that travels with it: lower income, moving house, a parent's stress. But the association is large, it appears in study after study, and no serious scholar says that it is imaginary.

How the welfare rules pushed fathers out

Here is a piece of history that ought to embarrass anybody who thinks the state is a neutral bystander.

For decades, the program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which began as Aid to Dependent Children in the Social Security Act of 1935, helped poor mothers raise their children. Many states wrote eligibility rules that denied aid if there was a man in the house. The reasoning, such as it was, held that a mother with a male companion had a source of support, so the state could withhold its own. These were called "man-in-the-house" or "substitute father" rules. Officials had to decide whether a man counted as present. Think about what that does to the incentives of a household: the mother loses the check if the father is in the home, so the father has a financial reason to leave, or to pretend he has.

The Supreme Court heard a challenge in King v. Smith, decided in 1968. Alabama's rule treated a man as a "substitute father", and denied aid to the mother's children, if he lived in the home or visited it frequently for the purpose of cohabiting with her, or cohabited with her elsewhere, whether or not he was the children's father or had any duty to support them. The Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Warren, held that the Alabama rule conflicted with the federal Social Security Act and could not stand. The Court's holding was statutory, not a ruling on the wisdom of the policy: it said that a state could not use the "substitute father" definition to cut off aid to children, because under the federal Act a "parent" meant a person with a legal duty of support, and the man the rule counted had no such duty. The ruling ended the man-in-the-house rules, and it made the point only by reading the federal statute.

Read that history again. The government set up a system of aid for single mothers, wrote rules in which a father in the home cost the family money, and then, decades later, wondered why so many fathers were missing. The point of this episode is not to blame the women who took the aid. It is to say that the rules treated a husband and father as a liability on a spreadsheet, and the incentive was real. We have a modern echo of the same mechanism in the marriage penalty buried in welfare programs, with the math shown, where the arithmetic of the Earned Income Tax Credit and other programs charges a low-income couple for marrying.

The culture did its part

The law was not alone. Popular culture spent decades telling men that the job was optional.

In the 1950s, a show called Father Knows Best put a wise, present father at the centre of the family, and the title itself became a joke. The decades that followed turned the joke into a formula. The father is the one who needs supervision. The children are smarter than he is. The mother, in the same shows, is capable, funny and underrated, and she is right. Nothing in that is a crime. But when it is the only story on offer, it teaches boys what they are for, and it is not much.

In 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle gave a speech in San Francisco about the Los Angeles riots and the breakdown of family structure, and he criticised a television character, Murphy Brown, a fictional news anchor who chose to have a child on her own. The coverage mocked him for it. The Atlantic then published a cover story in April 1993 titled "Dan Quayle Was Right," by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, arguing that the family-structure point behind his speech deserved a serious hearing. The episode is a fair example of what I mean when I say that the coverage tends to treat the observation as the offence. The messenger was tarred. The data went on being the data.

Here is the thing about a lovable idiot: you cannot admire him, you cannot learn from him, and you cannot ask him to be better. A culture that tells men they are comic relief should not be surprised when some of them accept the part.

The strongest objection, stated fairly

Now for the best case on the other side, which I owe you.

The objection says that devoted single mothers raise their children well, and the empirical claim about fathers confuses correlation with cause. The children of single parents differ from the children of married parents in many ways: income, education, neighbourhood, stress. When researchers try to hold those things constant, the gap narrows. Meanwhile, what children need is a loving, stable, resourced caregiver, and that can be one person, two people of any sex, or a grandmother. To insist that a father specifically is required is to insult every mother who has done the job alone, and to ignore the many fathers who are in the home and do harm.

Part of that is right, and I will say so. A great many single mothers are heroic. The research does show that some of the gap is explained by income and other circumstances. A father who is present and abusive is worse than a father who is absent. A grandmother can be the pillar of a child's life, as can an uncle, a coach or a pastor.

Now the answer, in three points.

One: The claim is about averages and does not deny any individual's success. When I say children do better with an engaged father, I am no more insulting single mothers than I would be insulting a smoker's family by saying that smoking raises the risk of disease. A statement about the odds is not a verdict on a particular household.

Two: The argument that the gap is "just income" proves less than it seems. Income is part of what a father provides. A second earner, a second adult to drive to practice and check on homework, and a second set of eyes are not incidental to the benefit; they are the benefit. When you control for the income a father brings, you are statistically removing one of the ways he helps, then pointing to the smaller remainder and saying he does not matter.

Three: The claim that "any caregiver will do" runs against the way the great majority of parents actually choose. People who say that two married parents and one parent are interchangeable seldom organise their own lives that way. Where a mother has a husband who shares the work, she does not usually say she would be just as well off without him.

So the fair verdict is this: the objection is correct that no household is hopeless and that many single mothers do wonders, and it is wrong to conclude that fathers can be treated as a luxury.

The Founding angle: why the family comes first

Does the Constitution have anything to say about fathers? Not a word, and that is the point. The Founders did not write a clause on the family because they assumed the family was prior to the state and the state's job was to leave it intact. The Declaration of Independence grounds government in the consent of the governed and the equal rights of persons, and it presupposes a society of households that raise citizens. John Adams wrote in 1798 that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. The habits that make self-government possible are formed at home, by parents, before a child ever meets a ballot or a court. A republic that undermines the household that forms its citizens is borrowing against a capital it cannot replace, and the debt comes due in each generation. That is the thread behind the family came before the state, so why does the state act like a parent?, and it is why a policy that treats the father as an obstacle is more than a mistake in the budget. It is a mistake about what a free people is built from.

What men and communities can do

None of this is a job for Congress. Here is what actually works, and none of it needs a vote.

1. Show up. The research on fathers keeps returning to presence: the dad who comes to the game, reads the school report and sits at the table. It is not glamorous, and it is the whole thing.
2. Marry the mother of your children, if you can and should. I do not say that as a lecture. The pattern described in 'The success sequence is just correlation,' answered point by point shows why the order of the steps matters to a child.
3. Mentor a boy who has no father at home. Churches, schools, scout troops and coaches do this every week. A man who gives two hours a week to a fatherless boy is doing something that no program can buy. why a church charity knows things a federal program never will explains why such local, personal help works where a formula cannot.
4. Change the jokes. If you write, direct, produce or simply laugh at things, stop treating the competent father as a punchline. Give a boy a man worth growing into.
5. Change the rules. Ask your legislators whether the programs in your state still penalise a two-parent household, and ask for the answer in writing. The tax and benefit options are laid out in baby bonuses, tax credits or cheaper houses, comparing pro-family policies.

What we should say to fathers

Let me end where a host ought to end, which is talking to the man in the room.

You are not optional. You are not comic relief. You are not an income stream, although you are often that too. A child learns what a man is by watching one, and learns what is worth trusting by whether you came home. The law got this wrong for decades, the entertainment industry got it wrong for longer, and plenty of men took the hint. You do not have to. The oldest institution we have is waiting for you to do your part, and the people who benefit most will be too young to thank you for it.

The case in brief

1. Children do better, on average, when their father is present and committed to their mother, and the evidence runs across studies from every part of the political spectrum.
2. American policy and entertainment treated fathers as optional: welfare rules penalised a man in the house until King v. Smith (1968) struck down Alabama's rule, and sitcoms made the competent father a rarity.
3. The strongest objection, that devoted single mothers raise fine children, is true of many families and shows only that no household is hopeless, not that fathers are dispensable.
4. A republic depends on habits formed in the household, which is why Founders such as Adams tied self-government to a moral people.
5. The remedy is mostly personal: men showing up, mentors for fatherless boys, and a legal system that stops charging families for staying together.

What you can do: open the Census Bureau's families and living arrangements tables, read the children's table for yourself, and commit two hours a week to mentoring a boy through a church, school or scout troop.