Everyone gets "fatherlessness" wrong
Kids who live apart from their dads have fathers. Spinning the numbers hurts all families.
Adapted from The 50/50 Solution (Sourcebooks).
I just googled “number of children without father in home” and the top results included these titles:
“View Heartbreaking Statistics”
“Number of Kids Living Only with Mothers”
“The Fatherless Generation”
What I was actually looking for was just this stat: 22 million children, or one in three kids in the United States.
Now, depending on who is citing these U.S. Census figures, the numbers may be spun in a few different ways:
22 million children have no contact with their father.
Fathers of 22 million kids abandoned their children.
The courts and malicious mothers have alienated 22 million children from their loving dads.
The actual truth is that we have no broad way of measuring how many U.S. kids live part-time with their dads and moms, because the Census Bureau only tracks these categories:
Children living with married parents
Children living with unmarried parents
Children living with a mother
Children living with a father
Children living with grandparents or other relatives
Whether children live with biological, adoptive, or stepparents
Just because those 22 million children live primarily with their mom does not mean that they are not also cared for by their dad. Increasingly, those parents split parenting responsibilities and time 50/50. Yet just one parent is counted as the caregiver for national and state records.
Thankfully, there is a wonderfully booming field of studying fathers of all kinds, which has been gathering speed for more than thirty years. Science’s findings? Dads are just as important as moms and most fathers are compelled to parent — including when they live separately from the kids’ mom. Systematic sexism, racism and poverty stand in the way of families benefiting from maximum equal father-mother involvement.
Best of all? Single dads are more involved than ever before and fatherless figures are misleading at best — often bastardized for political gain. In the equal parenting movement, this figure is tossed around in an effort to highlight how a lack of family court reform hurts families. But the lack of accurate reporting about how involved dads actually are, how moms really do want equal parenting and more father involvement (and less child support) only holds us back.
While it was true that back in the 1950s and 1960s, about half of divorced dads did slip out, moved away, and often started new families, many of today’s so-called fatherless kids do have a relationship with their dads — even when the men are incarcerated. A study that used data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth database found than about a quarter of dads dropped out of their kids’ lives when they lived separately, while three-quarters either had significant or moderate interaction with their kids.1 But the census only counts kids as living in one home, so even kids who live with their dads half the time are likely to be counted as living with their mothers only.
Why inaccurate fatherless figures are harmful
Failure to document dads is more than just symbolic evidence that our society doesn’t value fatherhood. The hard fact that when only one parent is counted as a caregiver, separated dads are largely erased from our data, and without data, it is hard to understand and serve them.