The most terrifying and fulfilling part of my life is being a father. The terror is that, somehow, I am failing my children (aged 6, 9 and 11) in ways that will become clear only in retrospect. The joys defy words. Sociologist David Popenoe of Rutgers University knows all this, but to him the real problem of modern fatherhood is that too many men are missing it. In his important new book, “Life Without Father,” Popenoe now extends the debate about “family breakdown” beyond the familiar lament that children and women are its chief victims. Men, he argues, also suffer.
The erosion of marriage and fathering, Popenoe says, helps cause low incomes, unhappiness and even crime among men. Usually, the argument runs just the other way. Men’s low incomes, selfishness and crime are cited as causes of family breakdown and single parenthood. Some men are less attractive as husbands, being poor earners and unreliable partners.
Qualifying popular wisdom, Popenoe writes, “Marriage encourages the regular work habits and sacrifice required to meet the family’s material needs.” Without that pressure, many men slide.
All this was once folk wisdom, but it dissolved in the contemporary obsession with self-gratification, as if individual well-being could be achieved as easily outside the family as inside. We now know that this is usually not true. In a recent article in Demography, an academic journal, demographer Linda Waite of the University of Chicago summarized much of the research:
– Children of single-parent families (after adjusting for parents’ education, race and place of residence) are twice as likely to drop out of school and two to three times as likely to live in poverty as children from two-parent families.
– Married men and women (again adjusting for education, race and place of residence) are healthier and live longer than the unmarried. Among married 48-year-old men, about 85 percent will live to 65; among singles, the proportion is only about 62 percent. The experience for women is similar.
– Married couples report themselves happier and, specifically, more content with their sex lives than singles.
Grant all the obvious qualifications. A lot of marriages stink. Many couples are better off divorced. Many single parents excel at raising children; many married couples don’t. Still, we are talking about averages, and the averages decisively favor marriage.
The hard question is whether such comparisons fail because so many people who might have been in bad marriages are single or divorced. But both Popenoe and Waite argue that marriage and parenthood independently alter behavior.
They surely did for me. Fatherhood is a powerful antidote to self-centeredness. It educates about responsibility. It made me do new things–for example, coaching a soccer team.
The decline of marriage and fatherhood stem from the breakdown of traditional roles in the nuclear family–the man as sole breadwinner, the woman as mother and homemaker. Women can pursue careers and can more easily survive independently. Men feel less essential; they can more easily rationalize indifference or sexual browsing. Within marriages, conflicts multiply. Almost everyone has too much to do and too little time to do it, because almost everyone juggles the demands of family and jobs. In 1994, nearly 70 percent of married women with children were in the labor force.
Popenoe doesn’t think the old nuclear family can be or should be restored. But he hopes that we can adapt better to its transformation. For a culture too obsessed with individual satisfaction loosens the collective bonds that often bring precisely that.