There are no policy initiatives that will combat family breakdown, contrary to the fond hopes of conservative policy wonks everywhere. Removing the marriage penalty in the tax code or providing more tax credits for child-rearing would be the solution to single-parent childrearing only if the absence of those initiatives were the cause. They are not. There are a vanishing small number of biological parents who decide against a marriage that they would otherwise eagerly undertake because it would lower their combined income; if they are that careful with tax planning, they are likely to be careful about planning for their child’s future, as well.
“Community leaders and thought leaders must suck it up, risk feminist wrath, and state explicitly and often that children need their fathers and that males bring unique gifts to their children.”
The largest contributor to families that are fatherless ab initio is the belief that fathers are an optional appendage to raising a child. Feminism has taught generations of females (and many males) that strong women can do it all, including raising law-abiding, self-controlled children. The dominant media discourse portrays males as domestic violence perpetrators far more often than as essential components of a home with a child. Academic gender theory builds on feminism’s disregard for males with the view that gender is merely a construct, implying that there is nothing unique that a biological father brings to childrearing.
To the contrary, biology, common sense, and empirical observation tell us that on average, males and females are different and bring different capacities to childrearing. Children— both boys and girls—need their fathers. To be sure, many children have been raised without fathers, due to death or other catastrophic circumstances, and have turned out well, but social science data are almost unanimous regarding the fact that, on average, children raised by just their mother fare poorly. If a father is alive, he should be raising his child, absent clear proof of unfitness.
A prerequisite to reviving a marriage culture for childrearing, therefore, is to revalorize fathers. Community leaders and thought leaders must suck it up, risk feminist wrath, and state explicitly and often that children need their fathers and that males bring unique gifts to their children. The greatest advantage a mother can provide her child, they should say, is that child’s father raising him in their home together. No government check or parade of social service workers and nurse practitioners can replace the love, discipline, and oversight that a father provides—not to mention live-in help with the trauma, fatigue, and tribulation that raising a child inevitably brings.
Restoring the culture’s once self-evident understanding of the essential contribution of both biological parents to their children will also risk offending the proponents of gay childrearing. Gay marriage advocates like David Blankenhorn have assured supporters of the biological twoparent family that there is no fatal contradiction between support for gay childrearing and the biological family; humans are fully capable of maintaining two logically conflicting propositions, Blankenhorn and others have said. If so, it will be incumbent on those gay marriage advocates to affirm resolutely the normative ideal of the biological family unit, against the inevitable charge that doing so does not respect the diversity of all families.
This piece was originally published by the Center of the American Experiment
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in Center of the American Experiment