Professional Documents
Culture Documents
2
In the 1970s, roughly 50,000 parents responded to a query by advice columnist Ann
Landers, who asked whether, if given the choice again, they would have children.
Seventy percent said no, that it wasn't worth it. Was this depressing feedback a function
of the times? biased in terms of who reads Ann Landers? or was it possibly the result of
only unhappy parents taking the time and energy to respond? Are the sociobiologists
correct in claiming that creatures must be tricked into assuming the incredible energies
required to raise the next generation?
RESPONSE
CUM %
STRONGLY AGREE
3.5%
3.5%
AGREE
15.8% 19.4%
NEITHER
27.6% 46.9%
DISAGREE
39.6% 86.5%
3
STRONGLY DISAGREE 13.5% 100%
TOTAL
1,353
Speaking of a variable that invites certain controls! What difference does actually being
a parent make? How did the sexes vary in their responses? How do answers vary across
the life-cycle? </P< B>
PERCENT DISAGREEING CHILDLESS PEOPLE LIVE EMPTY LIVES
PARENT NO KIDS TOTAL
MALES
46%
71%
48%
FEMALES 50%
78%
56%
TOTAL
71%
53%
46%
Click here for fertility rates of American women 1810Click here for inquiries into the relative marital satisfactions of childless couples and
parents.
4
Click here for childcare arrangements of working mothers, 1977-93.
Click here for further inquiries into the socialization process.
Click here for March 1997 Gallup Poll "America's relationship with their children:
Much remains the same
5
learned about what life was about through example. Some industrious historian decided
to track down the diary of Boswell's father to see how he reflected on that most
important day in the life of his famous son. The entry: "Went fishing today with my son.
A whole day wasted."
In many ways 1993 was the Year of the Father, evidenced by the massive media
attention to the role around Father's Day. The father role was featured as cover stories
of weekly news magazines. In October of 1993, Houston Oilers docked David Williams (a
five-year starter who made $2 million a year) $125,000 for failing to play in a game
against the New England Patriots because he stayed with his wife for the birth of their
first child. Two years later, President Clinton directed all Federal agencies to review their
programs with the goal of strengthening the father role. Click here to see the response
of the Department of Health and Human Services: "Fathering: The Man and the Family."
TIME IN DAYCARE
Belgium
30 minutes
6.8 hours
China
54 minutes
11 hours
Finland
48 minutes
6.8 hours
Germany
36 minutes
5 hours
Nigeria
42 minutes
7 hours
Portugal
24 minutes
8.8 hours
Spain
18 minutes
7 hours
Thailand
12 minutes
11 hours
United
States
42 minutes
5.6 hours
Elsewhere, we found that, when Americans were asked to rate the roles different adults
played in the lives of children, fathers came in a poor third--behind mothers and
grandparents--scoring roughly in the midpoint between the mean scores given to
mothers and to clergy, ministers, and rabbis.
How has dad become such a peripheral guy that the government now has to track down
his "deadbeat" contingent? Why do only three out of five American children live with
their biological fathers? Historians inform us that in colonial America it was the father
who was the primary socializer, particularly of young males. Carl Degler, for instance,
observes how, until the early 1800's, child-rearing manuals were not even addressed to
mothers. In these patriarchal times, the old man was, indeed, "king of his castle." His
children were his property (when they said that's "Joe's son," the statement was
referring to this property status and not a genetic connection). In the rare instances of
divorce, his custody of them was rarely challenged.
o
With industrialization and the bifurcation of public and private life, dads' primary
(and socially approved) activities were in the public realm of work while the
sphere of mothers' control was in the private realm of family life (referred to as
the "feminization of the domestic sphere"). Adequacy of one's performance of his
father role was largely judged on the basis of his "breadwinner" activities. In
1900, one observer noted how "the suburban husband and father" had become
"almost entirely a Sunday institution." To this day, corporate America advises the
new father not to take paternity leave if he is to be "taken seriously."
6
o
nowadays, more than 90 percent of fathers are present in the delivery room,
compared to almost none thirty years earlier.
according to a 1993 report issued by the Population Reference Bureau (authored
by Martin O'Connell of the Census Bureau), fathers are the primary care givers for
one in five preschoolers whose mothers work.
there is a growing market for fathering "self-help" books and websites, with such
titles as How to Father, Expectant Father, Pregnant Fathers, The Birth of a Father,
Fathers Almanac, Father Power, and How to Father a Successful Daughter>
Implications of Fatherlessness
A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken
families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male
authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future--that
community
asks
for
and
gets
chaos.
--Patrick Moynihan, 1965
What are the consequences of 37% of America's children sleeping in homes where their
natural fathers don't live? Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Louis
Sullivan observed in 1994 that "Children who do not live with a mother and father are
more likely to be high school dropouts, more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol and more
likely to be dependent on welfare than children who live with both biological parents."
By the mid-1990s, 46% of families with children headed by single mothers were living
below the poverty line, compared with 8% of children living with two parents.
Elsewhere we examined the overall effects of divorce on children, but what are the
direct consequences of not having a father? Mothers and fathers are complementary and
not interchangeable roles. Fathers are not substitute mothers. Among the speculations
and findings:
o
o
o
7
National Fatherhood Initiative
National Fathers Network
American Coalition for Fathers and Children
Fatherhood: The Parent Role (U. Akron School of Family & Consumer Sciences)
Yahoo! - Society and Culture:Holidays:Fathers Day
FatherWork:Stories & Ideas to Encourage Generative Fathering
Full-Time Dads Home Page
At-Home Dad-- a quarterly newsletter
8
During the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, the
federal government reported rising rates of teen-age
pregnancy. Two-thirds of these births are to
unmarried mothers (compared to 15% in 1960). And
over one-quarter of these teenage mothers become
pregnant again within two years. What will be the
fate of the half-million children born each year to
mothers 15 to 19 years of age? Observed Marian
Wright Edelman, Children's Defense Fund president,
"Teen-age childbearing too often launches both
mother and child into a lifetime cycle of poverty and
dependency."
The United States leads the developed nations in its
incidence of pregnancy among girls ages 15 through
19 (fertility rates were actually higher in 1957 than
today), even though American adolescents are no
more sexually active. Because teen mothers are more
likely to be poorly educated and less likely to receive
proper prenatal care and to eat properly during their pregnancies, they deliver twice the
rate of low-birth weight (less than 2,500 grams, which is the case for 7.1% of all U.S.
births--the highest rate among developed nations) babies.
According to a study sponsored by the Robin Hood Foundation, American taxpayers will
spend nearly $7 billion in 1996 to deal with the social problems resulting from recent
births by girls under the age of 18. Number of births per 1,000 women aged 15-19,19901995
Country
Fertility
rate
Country
Fertility
rate
Japan
Belarus
28
Switzerland 5
Poland
28
Netherlands 7
Iceland
29
France
Slovenia
30
Italy
Croatia
32
Belgium
10
Lithuania
32
Denmark
10
Bosnia/Herz.
33
Malta
12
United Kingdom 33
Spain
12
Estonia
34
Finland
13
Latvia
35
Germany
13
New Zealand
35
Luxembour
13
g
Russian Fed.
37
Sweden
13
Moldova
38
Albania
14
Hungary
41
Ireland
16
Romania
41
Norway
19
TFYR Macedonia 41
Israel
20
Ukraine
43
Australia
21
Yugoslavia
43
Greece
22
Slovakia
44
Austria
23
Czech Rep.
46
Portugal
25
Bulgaria
59
9
Canada
27
United States
64
SOURCE United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 1994
Revision, 1994.
Teenage Pregnancy (E. F. Jones et al., 1985)
SINGLE PARENTING
According to federal statistics, the birth rate of unwed mothers soared by more than 83
percent between 1983 and 1999. Unwed mothers now account for 33 percent of all
births in the United States. In 2000, 69% of American children lived with both parents,
22% only with their mothers, 4% only with their fathers, and 4% with neither parent
(about half of whom live with grandparents). Among blacks, only 38% of children were
living with both parents and 49% only with their mothers. Of all families with children,
single-parent families constitute 24 percent of all white families, 35 percent of all
Hispanic families, and 63 percent of all black families. Click here to see breakdown of
single parent groups by race, sex of householder, and marital status.
FACTOID
In 2001, according to the American Association for Single People
(Glendale, CA), thirteen states still refer to children born out of wedlock
"bastards."
Poverty rates are significantly related to the number of parents present. If in 1992 a
child lived within a two-parent household the family's median income was $43,578,
compared with $12,073 if within a mother-only family. Mother-headed households are
the fastest growing group of Americans living at or below the poverty level. Percent of
children living below the poverty line, 1990-1992
Country
Children
in Children
in
twosolo
parent family mother family
Sweden
2.2
5.2
Denmark
2.5
7.3
Finland
1.9
7.5
Belgium
3.2
10.0
10
Italy
9.5
13.9
Norway
1.9
18.4
Netherlands 3.1
39.5
Canada
7.4
50.2
Australia
7.7
56.2
United
States
11.1
59.5
SOURCE Luxembourg Income Study, Working Paper No. 127. The poverty line is defined
as 50% of national median income after taxes and transfers.
Single Parenting in the Nineties: Home Page
Brookings policy paper "An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Births in the U.S.
Single Mothers by Choice: Home Page
SURROGATE MOTHERS
1960
199
0
5%
28
%
7%
27
%
<
1%
50
%
11
Mothers returning to work before
53
17%
child 1
%
Living below poverty line
27%
21
%
only 17 percent said that they "weren't close at all" to their siblings;
84% said one or both of their parents had shown favoritism when they were
growing up;
when perceptions were that the respondents' mother had a favorite, two-thirds of
the men and slightly more than one-quarter of the women felt favored by her.
When respondents believed their father had a favorite, 62 percent of women and
49 percent of the men felt they were the favored one;
sister-sister relationships were closer to brother-brother and sister-brother
relations.
According to the NORC 1977-94 General Social Surveys, of those with a sibling the
following percentages of men and women responded at least once a month to the
question "How often do you spend a social evening with a brother or sister?"
PERCENT SPENDING A SOCIAL EVENING WITH A SIBLING AT LEAST ONCE A MONTH
AGE
18-29
MALES FEMALES
62.7%
68.1%
12
30-39
49.2%
52.2%
40-49
33.3%
46.0%
50-59
32.5%
39.8%
60-69
34.0%
43.2%
70-79
32.5%
40.4%
80+
18.3%
30.8%
TOTAL
42.2%
50.6%
Download site of Robert Mare and Robert Hauser's 1994 Study of American Families,
examining sibling similarities