Fatherless America:
Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem
by David Blankenhorn

The United States is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father. Today, an American child  can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.

This astonishing fact is reflected in many statistics, but here are the two most important. Tonight, about 40 percent of American children will go to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not  live. Before they reach the age of eighteen, more than half of our nation’s children are likely to spend at least a significant portion of their childhood living apart from their fathers. Never  before in this country have so many children been voluntarily abandoned by their fathers. Never before have so many children grown up without knowing what it means to have a father.

Fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation.

It is the leading cause of declining child well-being in our society. It is also the engine driving our most urgent social  problems, from crime to adolescent pregnancy to child sexual abuse to domestic violence against women. Yet, despite its scale and social consequences, fatherlessness is a problem that is  frequently ignored or denied. Especially within our elite discourse, it remains largely a problem with no name.

If this trend continues, fatherlessness is likely to change the shape of our society. Consider this prediction. After the year 2000, as people born after 1970 emerge as a large proportion of  our working-age adult population, the United States will be divided into two groups, separate and unequal. The two groups will work in the same economy, speak a common language, and  remember the same national history. But they will live fundamentally divergent lives. One group will receive basic benefits – psychological, social, economic, educational, and moral – that are  denied to the other group.

The primary fault line dividing the two groups will not be race, religion, class, education, or gender. It will be patrimony. One group will consist of those adults who grew up with the daily  presence and provision of fathers. The other group will consist of those who did not. By the early years of the next century, these two groups will be roughly the same size.

Surely a crisis of this scale merits a response. At a minimum, it requires a serious debate. Why is fatherhood declining? What can be done about it? Can our society find ways to invigorate  effective fatherhood as a norm of male behavior? Yet, to date, the public discussion on this topic has been remarkably weak and defeatist. There is a prevailing belief that not much can – or  even should – be done to reverse the trend.

When the crime rate jumps, politicians promise to do something about it. When the unemployment rate rises, task forces assemble to address the problem. As random shootings increase,  public health officials worry about the preponderance of guns. But when it comes to the mass defection of men from family life, not much happens.

There is debate, even alarm, about specific social problems. Divorce. Out-of-wedlock childbearing. Children growing up in poverty. Youth violence. Unsafe neighborhoods. Domestic  violence. The weakening of parental authority. But in these discussions, we seldom acknowledge the underlying phenomenon that binds together these otherwise disparate issues: the flight of  males from children’s lives. In fact, we seem to go out of our way to avoid the connection between our most pressing social problems and the trend of fatherlessness.

We avoid this connection because, as a society, we are changing our minds about the role of men in family life. As a cultural idea, our inherited understanding of fatherhood is under siege.  Men in general, and fathers in particular, are increasingly viewed as superfluous to family life: either expendable or as part of the problem. Masculinity itself, understood as anything other  than a rejection of what it has traditionally meant to be male, is typically treated with suspicion and even hostility in our cultural discourse. Consequently, our society is now manifestly unable  to sustain, or even find reason to believe in, fatherhood as a distinctive domain of male activity.

The core question is simple: Does every child need a father? Increasingly, our society’s answer is “no”, or at least, “not necessarily.” Few idea shifts in this century are as consequential as this  one. At stake is nothing less than what it means to be a man, who our children will be, and what kind of society we will become.

This book is a criticism not simply of fatherlessness but of a culture of fatherlessness. For, in addition to losing fathers, we are losing something larger: our idea of fatherhood. Unlike earlier  periods of father absence in our history, we now face more than a physical loss affecting some homes. We face a cultural loss affecting every home. For this reason, the most important  absence our society must confront is not the absence of fathers but the absence of our belief in fathers.

In a larger sense, this book is a cultural criticism because fatherhood, much more than motherhood, is a cultural invention. Its meaning for the individual man is shaped less by biology than  by a cultural script or story – a societal code that guides, and at times pressures, him into certain ways of acting and of understanding himself as a man.

Like motherhood, fatherhood is made up of both a biological and a social dimension. Yet in societies across the world, mothers are far more successful than fathers at fusing these two  dimensions into a coherent parental identity. Is the nursing mother playing a biological or a social role? Is she feeding or bonding? We can hardly separate the two, so seamlessly are they  woven together.

But fatherhood is a different matter. A father makes his sole biological contribution at the moment of conception — nine months before the infant enters the world. Because social paternity is  only indirectly like to biological paternity, the connection between the two cannot be assumed. The phrase “to father a child” usually refers only to the act of insemination, not to the  responsibility of raising a child. What fathers contribute to their offspring after conception is largely a matter of cultural devising.

Moreover, despite their other virtues, men are not ideally suited to responsible fatherhood. Although they certainly have the capacity for fathering, men are inclined to sexual promiscuity and  paternal waywardness. Anthropologically, human fatherhood constitutes what might be termed a necessary problem. It is necessary because, in all societies, child well-being and societal  success hinge largely upon a high level of paternal investment: the willingness of adult males to devote energy and resources to the care of their offspring. It is a problem because adult males  are frequently – indeed, increasingly – unwilling unable to make that vital investment.

Because fatherhood is universally problematic in human societies, cultures must mobilize to devise and enforce the father role for men, coaxing and guiding them into fatherhood through a set  of legal and extralegal pressures that require them to maintain a close alliance with their children’s mother and to invest in their children. Because men do not volunteer for fatherhood as  much as they are conscripted into it by the surrounding culture, only an authoritative cultural story of fatherhood can fuse biological and social paternity into a coherent male identity.

For exactly the same reason, Margaret Mead and others have observed that the supreme test of any civilization is whether it can socialize men by teaching them to be fathers — creating a  culture in which men acknowledge their paternity and willingly nurture their offspring. Indeed, if we equate the essence of the antisocial male with violence, we can equate the essence of the  socialized male with being a good father. Thus, at the center of our most important cultural imperative, we find the fatherhood script: the story that describes what it ought to mean for a man  to have a child.

Just as the fatherhood script advances the social goal of harnessing male behavior to collective needs, it also reflects an individual purpose, that purpose, in a word, is happiness.  Anthropologists have long understood that the genius of an effective culture is its capacity to reconcile individual happiness with collective well-being. By situating individual lives within a  social narrative, culture endows private behavior with larger meaning. By linking the self to moral purposes larger than the self, an effective culture tells us a story in which individual  fulfillment transcends selfishness, and personal satisfaction transcends narcissism.

In this respect, our cultural script is not simply a set of imported moralisms, exterior to the individual and designed only to compel self sacrifice. It is also a pathway – indeed, our only  pathway – to what the founders of the the American experiment called the pursuit of happiness.

The stakes on this issue could hardly be higher. Our society’s conspicuous failure to sustain or create compelling norms of fatherhood amounts to a social and personal disaster. Today’s  story of fatherhood features one-dimensional characters, and unbelievable plot, and an unhappy ending. It reveals in our society both a failure of collective memory and a collapse of moral  imagination. It undermines families, neglects children, causes or aggravates our worst social problems and make individual adult happiness – both male and female – harder to achieve.

Ultimately, this failure reflects nothing less than a culture gone awry: a culture increasingly unable to establish the boundaries, erect the sign posts and fashion the stories that can harmonize  individual happiness with collective well-being. In short, it reflects a culture that increasing fails to “enculture” individual men and women, mothers and fathers.

In personal terms, the end result of this process, the final residue from what David Gutmann calls the “deculturation” of paternity, is narcissism: a me-first egotism that is hostile not only to  any societal goal or larger moral purpose but also to any save the most puerile understanding of personal happiness. In social terms, the primary results of decultured paternity are a decline  in children’s well-being and a rise in male violence, especially against women. In a larger sense, the most significant result is our society’s steady fragmentation into atomized individuals,  isolated from one another and estranged from the aspirations and realities of common membership in a family, a community, a nation, bound by mutual commitment and shared memory.

The main character in this book is not a real person. As befits a book about shared narratives, he is a cultural model, or what Max Weber calls an ideal social type – an anthropomorphized  composite of cultural ideas about the meaning of paternity. I call him the Good Family Man. As described by one of the fathers interviewed for this book, a good family man “puts his family  first.”

If this book could be distilled into one sentence, it would be this: A good society celebrates the ideal of the man who puts his family first. Because our society is now lurching in the opposite  direction. I see the Good Family Man as the principal casualty of today’s weakening fatherhood scripts. And because I cannot imagine a good society without him, I offer him as the  protagonist in the stronger script that I believe is both necessary and possible.

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