Published in the June/July 2014 issue

1. THE CRISIS OF FATHERHOOD IS REAL

The brute facts: The number of American families without fathers has grown from 10.3 percent in 1970 to 24.6 percent in 2013;* that percentage has more or less been stable over the past few years, at about a quarter of all families, with 17.5 million children currently fatherless in the United States. At the same time, those who are fathers, those who stay with their children, have taken on the role with an unprecedented intensity. American fatherlessness is a national disaster and, according to the latest research into its effects, more of a disaster than anybody could have imagined.

2. FATHERHOOD MEANS MORE THAN ANYBODY THINKS

The new fatherhood, and the new fatherlessness, are reshaping contemporary life, from its most intimate aspects to its most public, a mostly hidden force as powerful as it is unacknowledged. In a 2014 study of more than forty million children and their parents, researchers at Harvard and UC Berkeley examined the relationship between economic mobility and racial segregation, income inequality, school quality, social capital, and family structure. Family structure showed the strongest connection. The crisis of income inequality and the decline of social capital are the subjects of wide-ranging, furious debates. The quality of schools is the main subject of almost all local politics. Family structure matters more. From the report: "Family structure correlates with upward mobility not just at the individual level but also at the community level, perhaps because the stability of the social environment affects children's outcomes more broadly."

Fatherlessness significantly affects suicide, incarceration risk, and mental health. The new fatherhood is not merely a lifestyle question. Fathers spending time with their children results in a better, healthier, more educated, more stable, less criminal world. Exposure to fathers is a public good.

3. THE ATTENTION OF FATHERS IS IRREPLACEABLE

A single small but vital fact distinguishes men of the past fifty years from all other men in history: Most of us see our children being born. It's one of those changes to everyday life that we take for granted but that have the most radical consequences. Up until the mid-1960s, the mysteries of birth were mainly the preserve of women. Then, suddenly, they weren't. Men insisted on being with their wives as they gave birth, and with their children as they came into the world. Of all the grand upheavals between men and women over the past two generations—the sexual revolution, the rise of women in the workplace, and the rest—the new fatherhood has been, in a way, the easiest. Despite no historical examples of male nurturers, no literature of the macho caretaker, men have taken to the new fatherhood in all its fleshiness and complication without much struggle, indeed with relish. Today the overcaring father has morphed into a mockable cliché—you've seen them comparing stroller models at the playgrounds, or giving baby a bottle in a bar during the Final Four, or discussing the latest studies on the merits of early music education for "executive function." The new father is an engaged father by instinct. Witnessing birth was the beginning of a widening intimacy. The new father holds his babies. He bathes them. He reads to them. The new father knows that the role of the father is not merely to provide food and shelter. The role of the father is to be there, physically and mentally.

This intimacy is instinctive, and research into the development of children has shown how powerful a force it is. The National Scientific Council on the Developing Child puts the strength of early impressions on a biological level: "We have long known that interactions with parents, caregivers, and other adults are important in a child's life, but new evidence shows that these relationships actually shape brain circuits and lay the foundation for later developmental outcomes, from academic performance to mental health and interpersonal skills." The presence of a father affects a kid on the level of brain chemistry.

Working fathers are reckoning with the consequences of these new insights. A 2013 study from Pew Research found that men and women found nearly identical levels of meaning in childcare. The problem of work-life balance isn't just for women anymore, and the father who works eighty-hour weeks because his job is so important is no longer seen as something to aspire to. He's pitiable. The fact that women are increasingly breadwinners has opened up new options for some—the stay-at-home dad has changed from sitcom-worthy freak into the subject of endless lazy trend pieces—but even men who have power are finding new strategies. Sigmar Gabriel, the vice-chancellor largely responsible for dismantling the nuclear-power industry of Germany—a big job—has decided to take Wednesday afternoons off to spend with his young daughter. "The only luxury is time, the time you spend with your family." This is not the quote of a family-values Republican senator. That's Kanye West talking.

4. FAMILY POLICY MUST BECOME ACTUAL FAMILY POLICY

The majority of two-parent American families have men and women who work, and men and women are increasingly sharing the childcare load.13 That reality—basic domestic egalitarianism—is for the most part treated as a surprising novelty, as news. And not just by op-ed writers. By tax law. By the courts. (Men pay 97 percent of alimony3 although women earn the majority of the income in 40 percent of families.12) The major institutions in American life are playing catch-up with a fifty-year-old development in home life—women are earning more money in more families all the time, and fathers are vital to the well-being of the children involved.

Fatherhood is taking on a political imperative: Every American man deserves a chance to spend time with his children without being fired. Every American child deserves a chance to spend time with his or her father without being impoverished.

5. THE NEW FATHERHOOD BELONGS TO NEITHER PARTY

The Republicans smell an opportunity in the new research on the family but don't quite know what to do with it. This January, in a marquee speech on poverty, Florida senator Marco Rubio put the family at the center of his economic policy: "The truth is the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty is one that decreases the probability of child poverty by 82 percent. But it isn't a government spending program. It's called marriage." The Republicans are right this time. But they have so far used their new appreciation of fatherlessness to do little more than launch broadsides against various something-nothings of culture and to reject the idea that public policy can have any effect on the family whatsoever. For them, the new fatherhood is mostly an excuse for inaction.

If Republicans looked more closely at the consequences of fatherlessness, it might offer them new insight into a host of policies: Immigration reform is vital because the current policies destroy families. At the current rate of deportation, about a thousand undocumented immigrants are deported on average each day.5 By one estimate, the current U. S. immigration policy will separate more than 150,000 children from one of their parents.9 Now that we know how deeply family structure matters, that number can only be regarded as a social and economic catastrophe. The drug war, by punishing African-Americans at nearly four times the rate of whites for marijuana-possession offenses,1 amounts to cultural genocide. A few Republicans who actually deal with the fallout of government policies on families' lives, like governors Rick Perry and Chris Christie, have recognized the cost of these disastrous policies. Both have spoken about ending the drug war. It's a start.

Democrats, too, are making a tentative start. In February, the president announced a private-public partnership, the My Brother's Keeper initiative, a first step toward addressing the problem of minority boys through mentoring programs. At the announcement, President Obama said: "Nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son's life." It's typical "American families" boilerplate, of course. But the data show that it's actually true as a matter of policy, and not just for minority boys but for all boys. The Brother's Keeper initiative is a gesture, an important one—possibly a trial balloon?—but a small one.

For the president, a family-based approach to inequality clearly smells rotten. It has the aura of a host of outmoded prejudices many on the Left have spent their entire careers fighting against. Democrats prefer to focus on the traditional approaches of grievance politics, with the emphasis on class structures and race. But the most powerful way to alter those inequities is through family structure.

6. FATHERS ARE PARTICULARLY IMPORTANT FOR BOYS

It has now been more than a decade since Christina Hoff Sommers wrote her landmark book, The War Against Boys. Boys have not lacked for articulate defenders since—dozens of titles have followed—but the fate of boys has not improved. Every stage of their lives is fraught. The diagnosis rate for ADHD is as high as 15.1 percent for American boys, a percentage more than two times the rate for girls.10 Boys are expelled from preschool nearly five times as often as girls.15 In elementary and secondary school, boys get D's and F's at more than three times the rate of girls. On twelfth-grade standardized tests, 28 percent of boys score below basic levels in writing (it's 14 percent for girls), and 31 percent of boys are below basic levels in reading (it's 20 percent for girls).11 The gap in the high-school-dropout rate persists even as the general rate of dropouts declines.3 Across grades four, eight, and twelve, boys write at lower levels than girls.11 Boys' juvenile-arrest rate is more than two times what it is for girls. Boys are 71 percent of juvenile offenders.6 Boys are twice as likely to be threatened with a weapon in high school.2

Maturity and despair go together for boys. Between ages ten and fourteen, boys are about twice as likely to kill themselves. Between fifteen and nineteen, they are almost four times as likely. From twenty to twenty-four, almost five times.2 Women account for 56.5 percent of all undergrad enrollments. And women account for nearly 60 percent of bachelor's and master's degrees.11 So what happens in the future? What happens when the category of "man" is synonymous with the category of "uneducated," which is synonymous with the category of "failure"?

Fear is the first response to the crisis, rife even among boys' defenders, and after the fear comes the blame, two brands of it, right wing and left wing. The War Against Boys was explicitly a critique of feminism. "Boys" were the new "girls," limited and despised by a generalized misandry, a politically correct fury that in its zeal to tear down the patriarchy simply forgot that men are people. On the other side, Michael Kimmel, in books like 2008's Guyland and last year's Angry White Men, has argued that the residue of patriarchy drives young men to despair and self-destruction. The old codes, the macho, the defensive response to a changing world, "the ideology of traditional masculinity that keeps boys from wanting to succeed," in his phrase, are the primary culprits.

The boy is now an alien among us, brittle but also violent. But you don't have to look far back to find other responses. Not so long ago, boys and boyishness were the ideals of society. On the walls of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan are written the hopes Teddy Roosevelt had for the boys of his era: "I want to see you game, boys, I want to see you brave and manly, and I also want to see you gentle and tender." Boys were strong but also sentimental—the way the war office convinced them to go to war in the early twentieth century was through their attachment to their sisters and mothers. The boy, for most of the history of the twentieth century, represented the best of humanity.

Sommers and Kimmel are both right: The men lost without a patriarchy and the men lost in guyland are the same men. The bridge to manhood has two spans: Give boys and men a way to be proud to be boys and men, in order that they can then understand that being a man is an ongoing, difficult, complicated undertaking. It's not just that the boys' crisis requires a complex response. Complexity is the response. And the best way to give that complexity, to demonstrate that masculinity requires strength and vulnerability, is by the presence of a father or a father figure. Children raised by single parents are at a greater risk for drug and alcohol abuse.4 Boys are more than twice as likely to be arrested,6 more likely to drop out of high school,3 at least twice as likely to commit suicide.2

7. THE CRUCIAL INSTITUTIONS ARE IN RUINS

The father figures have, one by one, been torn down. They have torn themselves down. Male authority figures, for generations, were given a free pass, an unexamined prerogative. They abused it. Some of them still abuse it. The past fifty years have been consumed with the destruction of various patriarchies. But the crisis of today is not the handful of monsters who infect the institutions. The crisis is the 17.5 million fatherless children3 with an absence in their souls. There is no cure for fatherlessness. There are only salves. The fatherless world needs substitute fathers, men who are willing to care about the lives of children who aren't their own. The problem isn't bullying coaches. The problem is all the men who aren't coaching. The problem isn't the various inevitable failures of the men who show up. The problem is the men who don't show up.

The evils of a few have overshadowed the good of many. The coaches and priests and teachers are not the enemies of civil society but its creators.

8. THE NEW FATHERHOOD ISN'T THE OLD PATRIARCHY

The old fatherhood was a series of unexpressed assumptions. The new fatherhood requires intelligence. It requires judgment. The new fatherhood is messy. It will have to be. In the face of this messiness, there are men, and not just a few, either, who retreat into fantasies of lost idylls, worlds where men were men, whatever that might have meant. Kimmel's work is full of them, guys who wallow in an "aggrieved entitlement." The new father is not so shallow nor so old-fashioned. Only the truly lost man would want to return to his grandfather's way of life. Who would want to go back to the bad food, the boring sex, the isolation? Who would want to be financially responsible for a family and then never see them? The new fatherhood is a huge gain for men, the chance for a deeper intimacy, a whole new range of pleasures and agonies, a fuller version of our humanity.

9. THE AMERICAN FATHER IS A PRECIOUS RESOURCE

At the heart of the new fatherhood is a somewhat surprising insight: Men, as fathers, are more crucial than anybody realized. The changing American father is transforming the country at all levels, from the most fundamental to the most ethereal, economically, socially, politically. The epidemic of fatherlessness and the new significance men place on fatherhood point to the same clandestine truth: The world, it turns out, does need fathers.

SOURCES

1. ACLU, "The War on Marijuana in Black and White," 2013.

2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

3. Census Bureau.

4. Dept. of Health and Human Services.

5. Dept. of Homeland Security.

6. Dept. of Justice.

7. Dept. of Labor.

8. Harvard/UC Berkeley, "Where Is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States," 2014.

9. Human Impact Partners, "Family Unity, Family Health: How Family-Focused Immigration Reform Will Mean Better Health for Children and Families," 2013.

10. Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, "Trends in the Parent-Report of Health Care Provider-Diagnosed and Medicated Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: United States, 2003–2011," 2013.

11. National Center for Education Statistics.

12. Pew, "Breadwinner Moms," 2013.

13. Pew, "Modern Parenthood," 2013.

14. Pew, "Parents' Time with Kids More Rewarding Than Paid Work—and More Exhausting," 2013.

15. Yale, "Implementing Policies to Reduce the Like- lihood of Preschool Ex- pulsion," 2008.

Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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