Posted on 10/04/2006 11:07:34 AM PDT by PercivalWalks
Call it the backlash against the backlash. Over the past decade, Americans have increasingly understood that the divorce revolution, fatherlessness and single parent households are harming our children. Now those who view the traditional family as disadvantageous to women are firing back, defending women who choose single motherhood and depicting fathers as superfluous.
Last fall Stanford University Gender Scholar Peggy Drexler penned the highly-publicized book Raising Boys Without Men: How Maverick Moms Are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men. This month Oxford Press released Wellesley College Women's Studies Professor Rosanna Hertz’s Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women Are Choosing Parenthood Without Marriage and Creating the New American Family.
Certainly one can sympathize with those single mothers whose husbands or lovers abandoned or mistreated them, and who soldiered on in the raising of their children without the father those children should have had. However, Drexler and Hertz go well beyond this, openly advocating single motherhood as a lifestyle choice.
Drexler portrays father-absent homes—particularly “single mother by choice” and lesbian homes—as being the best environments for raising boys. Hertz interviewed 65 single mothers and concluded that “intimacy between husbands and wives [is] obsolete as the critical familial bond." Whereas a family was once defined as two parents and their children, Hertz asserts that today the “core of family life is the mother and her children.” Fathers aren’t necessary--"only the availability of both sets of gametes [egg and sperm] is essential.” In fact, Hertz explains, "what men offer today is obsolete."
Our children would beg to differ. Studies of children of divorce confirm their powerful desire to retain strong connections to their fathers. For example, an Arizona State University study of college-age children of divorce found that the overwhelming majority believed that after a divorce "living equal amounts of time with each parent is the best arrangement for children."
Objective measures of child well-being belie Hertz’s and Drexler’s rose-colored image of fatherless families. The rates of the four major youth pathologies--teen pregnancy, teen drug abuse, school dropouts and juvenile crime--are tightly correlated with fatherlessness, often more so than with any other socioeconomic factor.
For example, a long-term study of teen pregnancy rates was conducted in the United States and in New Zealand and published in the Society for Research in Child Development’s journal Child Development. The study concluded that a father’s absence greatly increases the risk of teen pregnancy. The researchers found that it mattered little whether the child was rich or poor, black or white, born to a teen mother or an adult mother, or raised by parents with functional or dysfunctional marriages. What mattered was dad.
Part of the problem is that Hertz and Drexler have reached their conclusions through flawed methodology. Both studied families who volunteered to have their lives intimately examined over a multi-year period—a self-selected sample hardly representative of the average fatherless family. Moreover, Hertz’s and Drexler’s research is largely subjective and suffers from confirmatory bias. Both are passionate advocates for single mothers. They personally conducted interviews of single mothers to examine their family lives and—no surprise—found them to their liking.
To Hertz’s credit, she does concede that the “wish among heterosexual women for a dad for their children remains strong." Perhaps the single mothers she interviewed understand the value of male parenting? Or as these women's children grow the mothers see the positive impact male influence could have in their lives? Not according to Hertz. She explains, "it is not that they believe men provide a critical difference in perspective that women cannot supply." Instead, Hertz asserts that the single mothers she studied included some men in their children's lives as a way to "connect their children to male privilege." In fact, those who include men in their daughters' lives do so because they want "their daughters to know male privilege when they encounter it and to be prepared to combat it."
Both Hertz and Drexler assert that there are plenty of replacements for fathers and a married, two-parent family. Hertz says single mothers happily substitute “social nesting” for fathers. She explains:
“The women I studied celebrated motherhood by including their close friends and families in the early milestones of parenthood. They were not mother and child against the world but part of a broader group of people chosen--and willing--to support them."
Drexler holds up a wide collection of males—“grandfathers, godfathers, uncles, family friends, coaches”—who can stand in as fathers for the boys of single mother households. Yet while those serving in social nests or as father figures can be positives for children, they usually have little real stake in a child’s life, and are a poor substitute for a father’s love and devotion to his children.
One of Hertz's interviewees, Melissa, had kids via a sperm donor. She says that when her kids ask where their father is, she’ll “just tell them the basics, which is 'your father is in California.’” Another interviewee, Joy, wanted a known donor to be the "father" of her fatherless baby, but was reminded that this could create legal complications. "I could not imagine having a known donor who was not also a dad to my child," she told Hertz. So Joy decided to find a husband and have children within the marriage? Nope--Joy had another solution in mind. "I decided to use an anonymous donor," she explains.
Hertz, Drexler and mothers like Melissa and Joy fail to understand how powerfully children hunger for their fathers. For example, famed athlete Bo Jackson devoted the first chapter of his autobiography Bo Knows Bo not to his many achievements, but instead to the father he didn’t have. Jackson’s angry, unhappy childhood was defined by his father hunger. He explained that when he wanted something, “I could beat on other kids and steal…[but] I couldn't steal a father. I couldn't steal a father's hug when I needed one." Jackson saw his older brother go to a penal institution, feared he would end up there as well, and longed for the discipline and strong hand a father provides.
In Whatever Happened to Daddy's Little Girl?, award-winning journalist Jonetta Rose Barras describes her fatherless childhood as “one long, empty night.” After her parents broke up, she explains:
“I missed him desperately...he made me feel loved; he made me feel wanted… sometimes I sat on a bench or on the curb, like a lost, homeless child. I waited for [dad] to drive through, recognize me, and take me with him. On the bus, I searched each man's features; I did not want mistakenly to pass him.”
Hertz, Drexler and the mothers they interviewed are equally in the dark as to the immense benefits reaped by the children who do have fathers in their lives. MSNBC anchor Tim Russert wrote the book Big Russ and Me about his father in 2004, and says he soon received an “avalanche” of letters from men and women who wanted to tell him about their own dads. Russert’s current bestseller Wisdom of Our Fathers: Lessons and Letters from Daughters and Sons was drawn from those 60,000 letters. The letter writers remembered their fathers as strong, devoted, honorable--and central to their lives. What particularly struck Russert was the overwhelming outpouring of love from women towards their fathers.
These sentiments wouldn’t surprise Nobel-Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison. When asked how she became a great writer--what books she had read and what methods she had used--she replied:
“That is not why I am a great writer. I am a great writer because when I was a little girl and walked into the room where my father was sitting, his eyes would light up. That is why I am a great writer. That is why. There isn't any other reason."
Men are often stereotyped as fearing commitment, and it is they who are usually blamed for the divorce revolution. However, it is mothers, not fathers, who initiate most divorces involving children. In some cases, these mothers have ample justification. In others, however, they simply don’t want to make the compromises and do the hard work required in any relationship, and can’t or won’t recognize that their children need their fathers. In fact, according to research conducted by Joan Berlin Kelly, author of Surviving the Break-up, 50 percent of divorced mothers claim to "see no value in the father's continued contact with his children after a divorce."
These attitudes are very destructive. At the core of Hertz’s and Drexler’s work is a “you go girl” belief that mothers can do it alone and always know best. Unfortunately, many women are choosing the lifestyle Hertz and Drexler extol. It’s our children who are suffering for it.
This is an extended version of a column which first appeared in World Net Daily (9/28/06). To read the column as published, click here.
Jeffery M. Leving is the author of the book Fathers' Rights: Hard-hitting and Fair Advice for Every Father Involved in a Custody Dispute. His website is www.dadsrights.com.
Glenn Sacks' columns on men's and fathers' issues have appeared in dozens of America's largest newspapers. Glenn can be reached via his website at www.GlennSacks.com or via email at Glenn@GlennSacks.com.
Great. Another screeching chorus from the "you must call our abnormal lives 'normal'!" crowd.
Fatherless families -- an American tragedy.
Is this what the feminists wanted?
I've always maintained that a single mother worth more then ten million dollars can successfully provide for her child...
No, feminists want all men dead. But this is a key step on the way, making men out to be obsolete.
The last I checked, 80% of the single moms in the USA were on some sort of public assistance. That's a far higher rate that the "success" rate in the screed that was reviewed.
Nothing good happens when you've got a poor unwed mother who has few job skills and fewer job prospects.
I wouldn't want to trade lives with her for all the whisky in Ireland.
How terribly sad.
Reading that made me feel like moms don't serve any purpose in the kid's lives.
This is so sad. I don't understand these women not valuing a good father in their children's lives.
Does she not realize that by advocating "fatherless families," that there won't be any grandfathers, fathers, god-fathers, etc. in a few generations. Brothers and uncles won't cut it--not unless they themselves are fathers.
My parents divorced when I was 8. I could tell you that it sucks big time, but that just doesn't really say it.
Sadly, single mom are probably going to be the huge majority. Not that single necessarily implies "alone". Too many single moms are so darn man-hungry that they let anything in pants into their lives and their children's lives.
From my observations, females tend to raise children in the chaos of emotion. Without the male counterinfluence, it is not unreasonable to see the increasing numbers of male children of such homes be little more than narcissists and peter pans.
Whither society?
parsy, the glum.
I've noticed that quite a few people-including many, maybe most , media figures-seem to think single/never married moms are more worthy of respect, if not just plain more worthy, than are married moms, widowed moms, or divorced moms. There seems to be some implication that the never-marrieds have more "courage" than those who "had a man to 'fall back on'" . Or something like that. Anyone else notice this ?
I am a single mom, NOT by choice. My husband walked out after fifteen years together. I then found a wonderful man whom I was engaged to, but he died unexpectedly.
Although my children see their father quite often (I share custody), I realize that they also need a good father here at my home. Any man that I bring into their lives will need to be a strong, conservative man with strong morals and a bit of patience. So, when I am ready to date again, not only will I be looking for a man who is compatible with me, but also with my children.
I am lonely, but not desperate, and will be thinking of the impact this man will have on my children. He will be an essential member of our family, with all the rights to teach and discipline that a father should have.
Peggy Drexler and her husband have been married 36 years. Together they have two children ages thirteen and twenty-seven and currently live with their teenage daughter and two yellow Labrador Retrievers in New York.
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